African Intervention Politics

The vision of the African Union (AU) – “An integrated, prosperous and peace­ful Africa, driven by its own citizens [...]” – and the mission state­ment of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) – “From an ECOWAS of States to an ECOWAS of Peoples” – suggest in­clusive develop­ment processes and goals of the two organi­zations. This is interpreted as an inten­tion to align their policies with the norm of “people-centric gover­nance.” As central actors in the African Peace and Security Archi­tecture (APSA), both organi­zations can intervene for purposes of crisis prevention, conflict mana­gement, and post-conflict recon­struction and develop­ment. Scholarly engage­ments with military compo­nents of African conflict inter­ventions have dominated the generation of know­ledge about African inter­vention politics to date. Besides, through the “local turn”, a strand of research has emerged that critically examines liberal peace­building and fore­grounds the actions of local peace­building. The dissertation project addresses the inter­twining of the local and the inter­national in African non-military interventions by elaborating how and why civil society actors are included or excluded as colla­borators in AU and ECOWAS conflict inter­ventions. Using practice-theoretical approaches, the study recon­structs the practices of inclusion and exclusion of civil society actors on the basis of the two case studies Mali and Guinea and contri­butes to further opening the “black box” of African non-military inter­vention politics.

This will first be realized through guide­line-based interviews with relevant AU and ECOWAS actors through field research visits to Addis Ababa and Abuja, and illus­trated through the case studies. In the latter, guided inter­views with civilian non-state actors and parti­cipatory approaches with focus groups will be con­ducted. In addition to expe­riential know­ledge on inclusion and exclusion mecha­nisms in AU and ECOWAS interv­entions, information to reconstruct the actor land­scape will be obtained through social network analyses and “commu­nities of practice”, which form the concep­tual frame­work of the project, will be iden­tified in the field of African regional conflict inter­ventions.

In the past twenty years, the African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have demonstrated considerable agency in providing peace and security on the continent thus shaping political orders and life worlds. The literature on intervention pictures those African interventions as less or even non-coercive, hence attest them being more legitimate compared to more contested ‘Western’ interventions.

This PhD project challenges this assumption by arguing that interventions are inherently coercive as they react to a normative crisis in an attempt of order-making. Preliminary field work suggests that coercion is much more ambiguous than its usual negative connotation and that perceptions of coercion do fall apart along parameters of space, positionality and time. In this, there is a flipping point between legitimate and illegitimate coercion that, in effect, shapes the legitimacy of the intervention and the attempt of regional order-making. Based on these assumptions, this PhD project asks: how coercive are African interventions? What constitutes coercion for whom? Why do perceptions fall apart and how does this impact regional order-making?

Drawing on ethnographic elements, such as observation, immersion, (non-)elite interview and focus group research in The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, this PhD project (1) explores perceptions of coercion within those two case studies as a way to demonstrate how those affected by interventions perceive the interventions’ coercive nature and what constitutes coercion for them. In a most similar case design, this project (2) identifies causal factors why those perceptions fall apart and (3) how this shapes the attempt and legitimacy of regional order-making.