Increasingly, peace-making missions of the African Union and African regional organizations rely on the deployment of special envoys. Special envoys are intended to promote peace processes in conflict-ridden regions and strengthen African and local solutions instead of international interventions. However, diplomatic interventions with African special envoys have so far been insufficiently investigated. Both their field activities as well as the necessary social, institutional and contextual background conditions for their success remain underexplored.
Dimpho Deleglise's report aims to close this gap. In doing so, she systematizes existing research and identifies existing gaps based on a comprehensive reconstruction of previous activities of African Special Envoys. Against this background, she highlights the need for a practice-oriented research approach that takes into account the complexity of perspectives in the deployment of African special envoys.
Dr. Dimpho Deleglise is a Senior Researcher at PRIF’s “Glocal Junctions” research department as well as in PRIF’s Research Group “African Intervention Politics”. Her research focuses on the African peace and security architecture and the deployment of special envoys by the African Union and regional organizations in the Horn of Africa region. Her research is part of the competence network “African Non-military Conflict Intervention Practices (ANCIP)”, funded by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the funding line “Strengthening and further development of peace and conflict research”.