Abstract
The establishment of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) marked a fundamental reassessment of the African Union’s (AU) approach to security management. Many studies, however, view APSA through the lens of Eurocentric theories that neglect the agency of African actors. In contrast, this article examines how APSA’s design was influenced by collectively-held emotions – defined as moral judgements, based on present expectations and past experiences – amongst African policymakers. Emotional expressions can stabilise security communities by emphasising enmity towards outsiders and amity between insiders, while demanding remorse from individual or sub-groups of members that commit moral trespasses. However, this article theorises that inward-facing shame, when collectively felt by a community as a whole, can fundamentally alter its norms, valued behaviours and identity. This is illustrated by the APSA case study, which highlights the influence of inward-directed shame amongst African leaders over their reactions to humanitarian catastrophes in the 1990s, as well as outward-directed exasperation at the apathy of the international community. In addition to improving understanding of APSA’s establishment and design, this facilitates theory-building based upon African realities, thus making a valuable contribution to the growing field of International Relations scholarship concerned with emotions.
This article offers an original perspective on the establishment and design of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) of the African Union (AU). In turn, this facilitates a contribution to the fields of international relations (IR) theory that deal with emotions and the design of international institutions. APSA’s establishment marked a fundamental reassessment of the security role the AU would play by comparison to its predecessor the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), sometimes described as a shift from non-interference to non-indifference (Williams, 2007). Significant research has been conducted on the Architecture’s emergence, though it often rests on Eurocentric foundations that portray the AU reproducing the norms and institutional designs of the Global North (Söderbaum, 2007, Oksamytna and Wilén, 2022, Jetschke, 2017).
By contrast, this article advances a theoretical framework that privileges the agency of Global South actors engaged in the design of international institutions. Instead of assuming power differentials make African actors design replicators, it draws focus to circumstances in which they become design innovators, based upon assessment of their present expectations and past experience. The theory is developed from an analysis of APSA’s creation that centres intra-organisational norms guiding the expression of emotions in the OAU/AU. As such, it fills a considerable gap in the growing field of scholarship that theorises emotions in IR, which has paid scant attention to international institutions in the Global South and none at all to the AU (Terzi, 2021, Grossi, 2015).
The article treats the AU as an emotional security community, a concept proposed by Koschut (2014, 534), in which members “adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions.” This draws focus to a number of salient but under-explored factors in the Architecture’s creation, most prominently feelings of shame and exasperation amongst policymakers that influenced their design choices. However, the APSA case also allows for theoretical innovation of emotional security communities. For Koschut, the norms guiding emotional expressions stabilise communities, on one hand, by determining that stability-fostering behaviours are responded to positively. Stability-threatening behaviours, on the other hand, are treated with hostility when committed by an outsider, and as a moral trespass that requires expressions of remorse when the transgressor is an insider. Absent from this picture, however, is theorisation of what occurs during periods of communal ‘soul-searching’, in which a community reflects with remorse on its past actions as a group. The theoretical argument of the article, developed from the case study, is that such scenarios can prompt fundamental re-appraisal of the community’s emotion norms, valued behaviours and identities.
From 1963 to 2002, African leaders rigidly agreed to keep the OAU and each other out of members’ domestic affairs. The AU today, although restricted by meagre resources and varying political will, has assumed a much-broadened set of competencies, which include democracy and human rights protection, peacekeeping and a right of intervention in states’ territories under circumstances, such as genocide or war crimes (Organisation of African Unity, 2000a). At the core of APSA is the African Peace and Security Council (PSC), a 15-member organ with powers that include deployment of peace missions, issuing of sanctions, and the ability to recommend territorial interventions to the AU Assembly. In contrast to the UN Security Council (UNSC), the PSC has no formal permanent members or veto-holders, and the AU Commission, rather than member states, are the ‘pen-holders’ for resolutions.
A decade before the AU’s first summit, OAU Secretary General Salim Ahmed Salim attempted to introduce more moderate, though still ambitious, reforms than were realised in APSA. Salim proposed a re-interpretation of the norm of non-interference that would open the door to OAU peace-making and peacekeeping (Salim, 1992). His proposals, however, were rejected by members. Salim later said that “minister after minister bashed the idea and the Secretariat, claiming that peacekeeping was not Africa’s business. They said it was the UN’s mandate and business,” (Lulie and Cilliers, 2015).
Given this hostility towards OAU conflict management and sovereignty incursion, what prompted leaders to approve a peacekeeping mandate that incorporated a much-broadened understanding of security and unprecedented powers of intervention? Furthermore, what explains the choice – particularly for states that would shoulder the largest peacekeeping burden – to create an empowered PSC on which no member enjoys special privileges and AU bureaucrats write resolutions? For some, the answer lies in changes in the international normative environment (Williams, 2007, Makinda and Okumu, 2008). For others, APSA is largely epiphenomenal and powerful non-African actors continue to “define and drive African security” (Franke and Gänzle, 2012, 88). Though such explanations may be epistemologically distinguished from one another, they rest upon a foundational narrative of models from the Global North being adopted by Africa.
A different perspective is presented here, in which APSA is viewed as a case of institutional divergence, rather than diffusion, driven by a fundamental re-appraisal of the emotion norms that guided the community’s interactions for decades. This account provides the basis for theory-building, based upon African realities, thereby contributing to a growing field of scholarship engaged in the same endeavour (Tieku, 2022, Coffie and Tiky, 2021, Shilliam, 2021). While sharing such studies’ emphasis on African agency, the article is distinguished by its focus on emotions and the AU as an emotional security community. As such, it not only enrichens the empirical record of the Architecture’s evolution, but makes a valuable contribution to non-Eurocentric IR theory that ventures outside the strictures of structuralism, materialism and so-called rational choice.
The next section provides a brief summary of such theories, as they relate to institutional design, highlighting the challenge that APSA’s emergence presents to them. Next, the field of IR theory that privileges emotions is introduced, along with the theoretical proposition that intra-communal shame can fundamentally change a community’s norms, valued behaviours and identity. This is then demonstrated through a thematic analysis of data related to the establishment and design of APSA, including speeches from policymakers, OAU and AU reports, declarations and treaties, and interviews conducted by the author with member state and AU officials. The article concludes with some reflections on its empirical and theoretical contributions.
1 Existing Theories of Institutional Design
A number of categorical divisions are applied to existing research on the factors that drive institutional design of regional organisations (ROs). For some, the most significant divide is between accounts that privilege factors that are endogenous to the region, such as economic interdependence or commonly-held values between member states (Moravcsik, 1998, Acharya, 2009), or exogenous drivers, such as the rise of China (Beeson, 2016) or Russia’s attempts to counter a Western-led global order (Forsberg and Herd, 2015). Others distinguish between studies that explain change by reference to calculated self-interest and information availability (Koremenos et al., 2001), shared ideas and norms (Hay, 2016), or critical junctures and path dependence (Hanrieder, 2014), representing rational, sociological and historical institutionalism respectively.
Thankfully, much of the more recent research on institutional design has pushed beyond tiresome ‘rationalist versus constructivist’ debates, with scholars more accepting in the past decade or so of the stance that different types of factors, spanning the materialist and ideational spectrum, can bear variable influence in different circumstances (Beckert, 2010). However, regardless of where on the spectrum existing studies are situated, many share a perspective of institutional design as a product of replication, particularly when the replicator is a newer and comparatively less well-resourced institution like the AU. A number of labels, including ‘isomorphism’ (Radaelli, 2000), ‘convergence’ (Rutkowski, 2007) or ‘diffusion’ (Agostinis, 2019), are applied to capture the phenomenon, though for the sake of simplicity I will stick with the latter term.
For rational choice scholars, diffusion can occur as a result of more powerful actors exerting pressure on institutional designers – for example, by restricting access to desired resources – resulting in what Beckert labels “coercive isomorphism” (2010, 152). It may also be a ‘rational’ move to replicate policies and structures that have endured, when new institutions are being designed by actors in an uncertain world with little experience in such endeavours (Alter, 2012). Those closer to the constructivist end of the spectrum explain diffusion as a result of particular norms being successfully promoted and embraced in world politics, and thereafter being incorporated into institutional designs (Park, 2006). Whether institutional architects are ‘true believers’ or not is beside the point, since replicating the forms of well-established institutions allows them the opportunity to enhance their own role and status (Baciu and Kotzé, 2022, 710).
Of course, diffusion is often portrayed as a result of a blend of the above types of factors. Nizhnikau (2015, 495–496), for example, highlights how the EU transfers its institutions to post-soviet countries, through a combination of conditionality and socialisation. More recently, studies have allowed greater room for agency on the part of institutional architects in newer organisations, by characterising diffusion as a process than can occur in selective and complex ways (Risse, 2017, 473–474). Nonetheless, diffusion is the “characteristic mode of change” within the new institutionalist literature and, as a result, tends to neglect “more radical forms of institutional innovation as well as the demise of once-dominant institutional forms” (Thelen and Conran, 2016, 56).
One of the more obvious forms of radical innovation that may be neglected by diffusion-focused theory is its counter-process, divergence, wherein institutional designs break from established patterns. A risk that comes with a disproportionate emphasis on theoretical diffusion is a blind spot in relation to the agency of institutional entrepreneurs whose designs entail more innovation than replication. Yet another related risk is that theories may reproduce Eurocentric understandings of institutional design, since international organisations most commonly argued to inspire replication are based in, or led by, Western states.
Unsurprisingly, given the extent to which international relations scholarship has traditionally centred the Western experience, studies on the emergence of the AU provide several illustrative examples that take such a risk. They include research on the adoption of UN peacekeeping practices by the AU (Oksamytna and Wilén, 2022), on the Union’s “localization” of the responsibility to protect norm (Dembinski and Schott, 2014), and on the ways in which the AU’s complex institutional framework is modelled on the EU (Söderbaum, 2007). A further example that is particularly relevant, given the focus of this article, is provided by Jetschke. In addition to claiming the AU “established an economic community modelled after the EU,” she argues that it also “established a security architecture that is a virtual copy of the UN Security Council” (2017, 181). Of course, to question such accounts is not to dismiss diffusion-based theoretical frameworks entirely or to argue against the idea that the AU drew inspiration from other regional and international organisations. However, not providing the theoretical foundations on which to afford greater recognition to institutional divergence can result in research that misses important nuances of policy formulation and is much better at explaining continuity than change (Schmidt, 2010).
In recent years, a number of efforts to counter the diffusion narrative have been made by studies that emphasise the agency of policy entrepreneurs in the Global South, including within the African Union. Acharya (2018), for example, states that IR scholars need to broaden their view of who makes and manages the global order, highlighting the role of non-Western actors that contest and redefine Western ideas and norms, while also establishing new ones of their own. Haastrup (2013, 797) argues that dynamics, specific to Africa’s history and circumstances, mean “the AU does not constitute a model of the EU in the sense understood by EU integration scholars.” Staeger (2016, 981–982) claims the narrative of Normative Power Europe “is not the post-imperial, non-colonial normative discourse it pretends to be” but rather a mechanism that overdetermines “EU–AU institutional similarities to reinforce European normativity.” It is within this latter, more critical field that the argument of this article is located. Like Haastrup and Staeger, it critiques the claim that the AU is a work of mimicry, while heeding Acharya’s call to propose new theoretical foundations on which to recognise the agency of Global South actors.
2 Emotions, Emotion Norms and Emotional Communities
The past decade or so has seen significant growth in scholarship that cites emotions as a significant factor in institutional processes as diverse as EU enlargement (Terzi, 2021), NATO’s intervention in Libya (Koschut, 2014), and Brexit (Manners, 2018). Though there is some variation in this literature on how to define emotions, a very commonly shared assumption is the idea that emotions are necessary to understand the significance of the type of factors highlighted in the previous section, such as power capabilities, vital interests or norms. Rather than invoking emotion merely as an aid to explain deviations from rationality or normatively appropriate behaviour, such studies argue emotions are key to understanding what is perceived as rational, beneficial or ethical (Grossi, 2015, Mercer, 2010). Therefore, explanations of international politics, including processes of institutional creation and design, are incomplete without consideration of emotions.
Though there is some variation in how emotions are defined and what lessons can be learned from studying them, Koschut’s work on emotional security communities provides a particularly beneficial start-point for the theoretical innovation later in this article. His definition of emotions as “moral judgments that reflect an intellectual appraisal of present expectations and past experience, rather than energetic impulses and passions” ties in nicely with the article’s intent to treat AU actors as policymakers with agency rather than policy-replicators. He describes emotional communities as “groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions” (Koschut, 2014, 534–535).
Again, the focus on dynamics within the group, rather than outside forces that are exerted on the group, befit a theoretical argument seeking to recover agency for Global South actors in international politics. Emotion norms, the affective glue of the community, are “intersubjectively shared emotional guidelines and conventions that can be learnt and expressed according to a given social situation.” These guidelines for the expression of appropriate emotions facilitate the development of bonds in a group, as actors recognise the positive moral character of others. In turn, this lead to the mutual identification, trust and sense of ‘we-feeling’ that is crucial to the stability of a security community (Koschut, 2014, 536–538).
Emotional security communities are built upon three foundations; rituals and symbols, knowledge and power, and collective identification and trust. Establishing and maintaining a sense of ‘we-feeling’ in a security community occurs through rituals and symbols, which “synchronise individual emotional states … define social role and status, commit members to future actions and sharpen the boundaries between insiders and outsiders” (Koschut, 2014, 539). In the context of the AU, for example, such rituals include adopting treaties and declarations in which the Union’s core principles are reiterated, or conducting peace missions, each of which serve to institutionalise the shared pan-African identity upon which it was founded (Murithi, 2007).
Power naturally also plays a role in how communities evolve, in particular the power to create common meanings, given the importance that shared understandings of the world play in the forming of international communities (Adler, 2005). The ability to create shared meanings hinges on emotional knowledge, “an agent’s ability to cognitively and morally categorise emotional expressions and to emotionally connect these affective categories to Others’ identities based on experience over time” (Koschut, 2014, 541). For example, the establishment of the OAU was a partial product of Kwame Nkrumah’s ability to leverage anti-colonial resentment and pan-African solidarity amongst his fellow leaders, despite their different visions for the organisation (Nzongola- Ntalaja, 2014).
Trust is another key ingredient of a security community and can be distinguished into two variants, trust of the strategic kind and trust based upon emotional bonds shared between actors (Rathbun, 2011, Booth and Wheeler, 2008). The former, which is typical of the kind of trust privileged by rational-materialist studies of international institutions (Keohane, 1984), comes after cooperation, as impressions of reliability are gradually formed through collaboration over time. The emotive form of trust, however, precedes cooperation and is based upon a shared moral and emotive disposition, allowing members to empathise and identify with one another. Whereas the loss of strategic trust results in disappointment, the loss of emotive trust prompts much more intense reactions, generating “feelings of betrayal, which shake the foundations of community” (Koschut, 2014, 542–543). An example of emotive trust facilitating cooperation is provided by the transformation of the OAU into the AU, a step “of great faith, into the unknown,” facilitated in large part by a shared pan-African identity (Corinne and Rukare, 2002, 379, Williams, 2007).
Existing studies have highlighted the role that inward-facing ‘good’ emotions, such as solidarity and honour, and outward-facing ‘bad’ emotions, such as hatred or fear, play in stabilising emotion-based communities (Terzi, 2021, Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008). However, inward-facing ‘bad’ emotions can also play a stabilising role, due to the effect of emotion norms that condition the understanding of emotional expressions in a way that emphasises amity amongst members and enmity towards outsiders. Negative emotions within a community “are perfectly compatible with the norm of amity because they carry a fundamentally different meaning than the outside emotion norm of enmity” when directed at an outsider (Koschut, 2014, 547).
When the response of the member that has provoked anger in others is shame, embarrassment or any emotion that represents an acknowledgement of their moral trespass, social bonds can be repaired. It implies understanding that their deeds have led to the “loss of ‘love and respect of those whose approval matters’ and it is this type of appraisal that can lead to social conformity” (Koschut, 2014, 554). To illustrate this, Koschut focuses on the stabilising effects of emotion norms within NATO, following Germany’s voting abstention from UN Resolution 1973, authorising a no-fly zone over Libya in 2011, while Berlin was a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council (UNSC). This represented the first time Germany went against its transatlantic partners in the UNSC over a major security issue, and prompted expressions of disappointment and anger from the leaders of Britain, France and the US.
In turn, however, those sentiments were met with expressions of remorse and shame from the German political and military class, and concerted efforts to reaffirm its previous status within the community through expressions of gratitude and respect towards other members. In time, the result of those efforts was a process of transatlantic reconciliation, notable for the development of particularly close ties between the Merkel and Obama governments, marked by emotions of respect, admiration and trust (Koschut, 2014, 548–557).
Emotional communities provide a valuable lens through which to capture dynamics within formal and informal security institutions. They facilitate investigation of how political leaders hold one another to account and how intra-group expressions of amity and enmity can strengthen emotional bonds between members. However, a variation of the expression of enmity within groups that warrants further investigation is one in which negative emotions, rather than being voiced between members, is felt by the whole community on account of its collective failures in the past. What occurs in periods of collective soul-searching when most or all of the community feels regret for how it has matched up to the moral standards and expectations it has of itself?
Enmity between members, as discussed above, can prompt a strengthening of their emotional bonds as long as shame is expressed by the offender, though Koschut also acknowledges that the denial of shame can lead to further alienation and even division within an emotional community (2014, 547). The former option is not available under a ‘collective shame’ scenario, since the community cannot express remorse towards, or ask forgiveness from, itself, as both offender and offended. In any event, an appeal for forgiveness by reference to the norms of the community may not be possible, since the community as a whole is responsible for the offence, suggesting that the offence was not inconsistent with the norms of the collective.
A version of the latter option, entailing alienation and division, might be possible, as a community may disband due to its failures. However, that outcome also seems unlikely if one accepts that emotional communities share profound bonds, a sense of ‘we-feeling’, fundamental assumptions, values, goals and a common identity. Such traits in a social group tend to be ‘sticky’ and engender commitment from members, particularly when their community is enshrined in a formal institution like the AU, which fosters inertia and a tendency towards preservation (Spears and Postmes, 2015, 37, Schimmelfennig, 2015, 96).
A more plausible scenario than either of the above two would be a reappraisal of the foundations of the community, which facilitated (or at least failed to prevent) its arrival at this shameful juncture. While communities tend to persevere, the variables that constitute them, such as identity, values and norms, are subject to constant contestation and reinterpretation (Wiener, 2009). This would entail reconsideration of the moral judgements contained within the guidelines of the community’s emotion norms, and a rethinking of what constitutes a moral trespass and therefore warrants emotive sanction.
A number of factors will influence the type of change that occurs as a result of this reappraisal. These include the intensity of the collectively-felt shame, the centrality of the community features that are changed or discarded because of that shame, and the efforts of those with the emotional knowledge to appeal to Others’ identities, thereby crafting new common understandings of the world. What will result are different emotion norms, new rituals for reproducing valued behaviours, and adjusted collective identities. The emergence of this new version of the emotional community will mark the conclusion of a process of reconciliation between the collective Self and the Other of its own past.
Shame, therefore, will have a more fundamental impact than what Koschut foresees when he describes it as a mechanism for regulating unity and division amongst members (2014, 547). Rather than playing a regulative role, in the circumstances described above, shame is reconstitutive, as the factors that contributed towards the negative emotion are rooted out and reformed emotional bonds are established. The extent of change will vary to greater and lesser degrees, though a complete transformation is no more possible than absolute stasis, given that neither total fixity nor non-fixity is possible for norms or emotions. It is the emotional underpinnings of the community that are interrogated, and those that are viewed as relatively unproblematic by the collective are likely to endure, given that the existence of social groups relies upon some degree of continuity in the narratives they tell themselves (Delehanty and Steele, 2009). A useful empirical illustration of the above argument can be found by examining the process of creating the AU’s security architecture, to which I turn next.
3 The Creation and Design of the African Peace and Security Architecture
APSA’s creation as the framework for AU security cooperation marked a fundamental break from the OAU, with changes in the emotion norms that guided members’ interactions, new rituals introduced to reproduce valued behaviour, and adjustments to the community’s identity. Such changes were stimulated, in significant part, by the shame felt by policymakers at the impotence of the OAU’s response to a number of humanitarian catastrophes and conflicts in the 1990s. The below account also demonstrates that the drive for change was reinforced by an outward-directed emotion of exasperation towards the international community, over its relatively muted response to the same tragedies.
In order to trace the influence of emotions in this process, the following analysis focuses on the manner in which they are represented and communicated. This approach is informed by two assumptions, provided by Bleiker and Hutchison; (1) studying representation is “as close as we can get to understanding emotions,” and (2) representations matter “in a highly politicised manner” in the study of international relations. Representation, as it is understood here, is “the process by which individual emotions acquire a collective dimension and, in turn, shape social and political processes” (Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008, 130).
The privileging of collective over individually-held emotions is important, firstly, because it is not possible to know with certainty the personally-felt emotions of particular actors. Secondly, the inner thoughts and emotions of policymakers are incidental to the previous section’s theoretical argument, which is focused on emotional expressions and connections between, rather than within, policymakers (Koschut, 2014, 549). What follows, therefore, is an analysis of the patterns of collective emotional representation that informed the decision to fundamentally change the security culture that had prevailed in the OAU when it was replaced by the AU.
In order to conduct the investigation, a thematic analysis is performed on a variety of primary and secondary data. These include a series of interviews conducted by the author in late 2016 and early 2017 with officials from the AU, several of whom had worked at the OAU and were involved in negotiations to decide upon the structure of the APSA, as well as former politicians, diplomats and foreign policy advisors from the Nigerian and South African governments at the time of the AU’s establishment. In addition, it draws upon reports and declarations of the OAU and the AU, official speeches from representatives of member states and the OAU/AU, and a selection of data drawn from existing research.
The analysis focuses on patterns of utterances and written statements that invoke emotions in describing the circumstances that led to APSA’s establishment. Because emotional communities are typified by the sharing of emotional expressions that imply amity towards insiders and enmity towards outsiders, the analysis pays particular attention to both kinds of expressions. In order to fully interrogate the theoretical argument outlined in the previous section, however, it also examines inward-facing expressions of enmity towards the collective Self and the temporal Other from its own past.
Since it is not possible to incorporate the complex entirety of APSA into the analysis, the focus is on two particular features of the Architecture. The first is the AU’s peacekeeping mandate, including its robust power of intervention that grants the Union the right to intervene in a member’s territory under certain circumstances, such as war crimes or genocide. The second is the Peace and Security Council (PSC), an organ with the ability to deploy peace missions, administer sanctions and recommend interventions to the AU Assembly. Particular focus is dedicated to the PSC’s rules of procedure, which afford neither permanent seats nor veto rights to members, and its ‘pen-holding’ rights, which are held by the AU Commission, rather than members. Both of the above features are chosen as they represent standout exceptions to the historical trend of OAU security cooperation being heavily circumscribed, due to reluctance on the part of leaders to pool sovereignty in service of multilateral conflict management.
Demonstrating the significance of the changes that occurred with the creation of APSA, and the influence of emotions over that change, first requires reflection on the identity, emotion norms and rituals that guided the OAU’s approach to security management. Although the founding of the Organisation was marked by many disagreements, leaders were united around a pan-African identity that privileged liberation from colonial and racial regimes, and the need for African unity in a world that rarely had the continent’s best interests at heart (Nash, 2020). The OAU Charter included amongst its purposes the promotion of unity and solidarity of African states, eradication of all forms of colonialism, and the achievement of a “better life for the peoples of Africa” (Organisation of African Unity, 1963).
However, although the OAU did play an important role in supporting anti- colonial liberation movements, it did little to improve the life of the average African citizen over the course of its existence. To the extent that solidarity and unity was fostered, it was between elites, many of whom shared a worldview that saw threats from inside and outside their states, leading to the heavy prioritisation of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. Such an understanding of the world was hardly surprising, given that much of the leadership had fought against colonial rules and were highly conscious of the continued aspiration of great powers to retain neocolonial influence.
OAU Assembly discussions regarding security affairs were typified by a norm of emotional restraint and elite solidarity, as leaders abided by the core value of non-interference in one another’s affairs, sometimes to the point that even discussion of particular conflicts in the Assembly was ruled out. The social locus for synchronising their shared perspective and generating the community’s ‘we-feeling’ were rituals that entailed the turning of a solidarist blind eye towards instability and persecution of citizens by leaders. An illustrative example is provided by Idi Amin’s election as OAU chairman in 1975, at the height of his regime’s human rights abuses and brutal repression of political opponents (Welch, 1981).
As the decades progressed, an increasingly authoritarian membership showed “little interest in intervening in fellow African countries’ affairs or investing into the OAU’s capacity to resolve violent conflict, because in the long run this could have only worked against them.” As a result, the Assembly “ceased to be a site of decision-making” and, in time, would acquire the unfortunate moniker ‘club of dictators’ (Engel, 2019, 62, 65).
In order to understand how a reformed emotional security community emerged through the AU, one needs to comprehend the extent to which a series of humanitarian catastrophes in the 1990s played into the thinking of policymakers. The decade was one of the most conflict-ridden the continent had ever known, with genocides in Rwanda and Burundi, and civil wars in Somalia, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia, amongst others. Policymakers’ emotional response to their own inaction, and that of others, proved the catalyst for rethinking the foundations of their emotional community, discussion of which is broken down into the two selected institutional design features, starting with the AU’s peacekeeping mandate.
A consistent theme across the analysis is the viewing of the Rwandan genocide as a critical juncture in African conflict management.1 “Rwanda loomed large as a reminder of just how horribly things could go,” according to Chris Landsberg, foreign policy adviser to the South African government at the birth of the AU and one of the drafters of the organisation’s Mission and Vision Statement. “It is because of Rwanda in particular that genocide and crimes against humanity are a stated unequivocal pretext for intervention” in the legal instruments that inform APSA.2
Expressions of intra-organisational shame, due to the inaction of the OAU in Rwanda, also emerge as a prominent theme. A quote from one of the drafters of the Protocol to Establish the Peace and Security Council, Jakkie Cilliers, illustrates:
There was a great sense of, I think, shame and humiliation that accompanied the Rwandan genocide because, as much as everybody blames the Canadians and everybody blames the Americans or whatever, the reality is that Africa didn’t do anything either. It stood by and let this happen. … So that had a big impact, that unblocked the opposition for Africans to undertake peacekeeping.3
A sense of shame is also conveyed in a report released by the OAU into the genocide, titled Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide (2000b), which was scathing of African leadership. The report describes the peace-making efforts by the OAU in the 1990s as a “story of well-meant initiatives, endless consultations, incessant meetings, commitments made, and commitments broken” with the organisation limited to a role in which it would “call meetings, hope the invited attend, facilitate agreements, and hope that the participants abide by their word” (2000b, 11.19). When it was clear that genocide was taking place, “the OAU, like the UN, failed to call genocide by its rightful name and refused to take sides between the genocidaires (a name it would not use)” (2000b, 15.86). According to the report’s authors, “the silence of the OAU and a large majority of African Heads of State constituted a shocking moral failure” (2000b, 15.87).
Enormous humanitarian costs, being inflicted by conflicts elsewhere on the continent, also weighed heavily on the minds of leaders, according to Said Djinnit, the first Commissioner for Peace and Security at the AU and a central figure in negotiations to establish APSA.
Meanwhile, we have had the genocide in 1994, we had Somalia, we had Liberia, we had Sierra Leone. We realised that as an international community and an African community, we had not been able to address the problem effectively. … The whole principle of moving from non-interference to non-indifference was informed by the genocide in Rwanda.4
In the aftermath of the genocide, OAU Secretary General Salim said it was a “failure for Africa” that had prompted self-reflection from which some lessons had been learned. Chief amongst them was getting “out of the limiting traditional political considerations, such as those of sovereignty and misplaced notions of non-interference, and to embrace each other in a partnership to bring peace and stability on the continent.”5
Exasperation with the international community, embodied by the UN, also emerges as a significant factor in the analysis of data related to the AU’s adoption of a much-increased conflict management role. As already indicated in some of the above excerpts, the OAU and its members were angered and frustrated at the inert response of the international community. In addition to seeing the Rwandan genocide as a failure for Africa, Salim argued in its aftermath that it showed up the ambivalence of the rest of the world towards African suffering.
Experience over the last one year, especially with regard to our operations in Burundi and Rwanda, has taught us some lessons. Principal among those lessons, is that Africa needs to wean itself from the dependence syndrome and the mistaken belief that the rest of the world will always be there.6
The OAU’s Preventable Genocide report echoed this sentiment, providing an illustration of the exasperation felt by African leaders at the inaction of the rest of the international community. The report criticises the UN Secretariat for going “far beyond being merely neutral bureaucrats carrying out the wishes of their political masters in the Security Council”:
Time and again, they imposed on UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda) the tightest constraints imaginable, refusing it the slightest flexibility even when lives were directly at stake. The sole exception to this rigid position was when the lives at stake were those of expatriates as they were being frantically evacuated from the country after April 6 (Organisation of African Unity, 2000b, 15.34).
It furthermore criticises actors in the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) for eschewing their responsibility, undermining the effectiveness of UNAMIR, and misunderstanding the roots of the genocide. Highlighting the significance of such concerns for future peace efforts on the continent, the report states, “This stance does not enhance our confidence in the Secretariat’s capacity to deal with other African crises in an appropriate manner” (Organisation of African Unity, 2000b, 15.37–15.38).
Such concerns were a highly salient factor in the coalition-building efforts of advocates for a more active security role for the AU. Said Djinnit, Salim’s deputy at the OAU, chaired the taskforce that charted the transition and engaged in extensive discussions with member state leaders and officials at the time of the organisational transformation. Having failed in his attempts, along with Salim, to convince leaders of the wisdom of OAU peacekeeping at the start of the 1990s, the growing sentiment that the UN could not be relied upon facilitated their success at the other end of the decade. “The possibility of deploying peacekeeping through intervention was brought back after it was refused in 1992 but then we had the experience of Rwanda and Somalia,” he said in interview. “The UN left Rwanda, the UN left Somalia, the genocide happened without us doing anything about it, so the principle of moving to non-indifference grew over all these years.”7
Further support for the theoretical argument of the previous section can be found by looking at the influence of collective shame over the rules of procedure for the PSC, which also demonstrates the significance of outward-facing exasperation. Collective shame, in both an experienced and anticipated sense, influenced the choices to eschew vetoes and permanent members on the PSC, and grant pen-holding rights to the AU Commission over members. Much of the experienced shame was tied to the mostly toothless policy organs that the OAU established to address conflicts in Africa.
The OAU Charter established only one such organ, the Commission of Mediation, Conciliation, and Arbitration, which the Preventable Genocide (2000b, 11.4) claimed was “stillborn, and has never worked.” Throughout the existence of the OAU, not a single member referred a case for adjudication to the Commission. Efforts to rectify the organisation’s ineffectiveness as a security actor were made in the 1990s with the creation of the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution. Its decision-making committee, the Central Organ, is as close as the PSC has to a predecessor in the OAU. Its role was to anticipate and prevent conflict through peace-making and peacebuilding, although such efforts were restricted to diplomacy as well as observation and monitoring missions of limited scope and duration. As the 1990s progressed, so did the realisation amongst leaders that the OAU’s institutional arrangements for addressing insecurity were inadequate. Speaking to his fellow leaders in 1998, Nelson Mandela said, in the context of governments abusing the concept of national sovereignty to shield themselves from reprimand for tyranny, it was time to “frankly assess” whether the Central Organ was “succeeding to meet the hopes of our Organisation and peoples” (Mandela, 1998).
Like the PSC, the Organ had 15 members, but unlike the former, its seats were not decided-upon through elections or criteria, other than being an OAU member. The declaration that established the Organ stipulated that its membership would mirror that of the Bureau of the Assembly, which was meant to hold annual elections to decide upon its seat allocation. In practice, however, seats on the Bureau were allocated on a rotational basis, meaning each state just had to wait its turn. A place on the Bureau, and by extension the Central Organ, was not a priority for many members, to the extent that some would turn up for summits unaware that they were seat-holders at the time.
Faced with the reality of another moribund security mechanism, advocates for reform prioritised a move away from the merry-go-round approach to seat allocation.
We said, number one; the membership should be elected. They should be elected by member states who are submitting candidatures, based on criteria, and that these members of the PSC should be elected because of their contribution to peace and security, their contribution in terms of peacekeeping, their clear records of commitment to the principles of the OAU, the AU.8
In addition to retrospective shame, anticipated shame also played a role in deciding upon the PSC rules of procedure. A shift towards competitive elections for seats, which in turn became more highly-valued, due to the increased powers of the PSC, prompted tenuous calls from some larger states for permanent seats to reflect their shouldering of the greater burden in responding to future instability. However, a considerable majority of states quickly dampened the idea, by pointing to contemporaneous African efforts to eliminate permanent seats from the UNSC.
The truth is that Nigeria and other AU members it worked with would have preferred that five countries which, more or less, bear the burden of the organisation, are in the PSC as permanent members, but it recognised that there would be great difficulties in getting other member states to accept it. … It would have been hypocritical to be seeking to eliminate permanent membership in the UNSC and at the same time, proposing permanent membership for some countries in the AU equivalent.9
The anticipated shame that would come with seeking to replicate a policy that they criticised in another setting meant the prospect of permanent seats was dismissed as a non-runner at any early stage in discussions.10
As the preceding indicates, inter-organisational exasperation is also a significant factor to take into account when trying to understand the PSC rules of procedure, with the UN again the most prominent source of ire for decision- makers. Permanent seats, the presence of vetoes and the method through which resolutions are written were each identified as causing woes for the continent that prompted leaders to oppose their replication at the AU. A response from a South African diplomat provides an illustrative example of the frustration felt over many years at the presence of permanent veto-holders on the UNSC.
South Africa’s experience of the Security Council was very terrible, as a subject on the agenda of the Security Council, where we had three vetoes every time the topic of apartheid was raised and every time there was an issue in South Africa that needed the Security Council’s response. So we were quite conscious that the Security Council is not as effective a body as it should be, not as democratic as it could be or was supposed to be.11
Jakkie Cilliers, who assisted with the drafting of the rules of procedure for the PSC, said the sentiment that the working methods of the UNSC did not serve Africa well was widely shared amongst leaders. “Permanent seats are a relic of the Second World War that are completely outdated. It should never have been instituted, it was a stupid idea in the first place.”12 The Preventable Genocide report echoed this criticism, specifically in relation to how it impacted the reaction to the Rwandan genocide. Because of the dominance of permanent veto-holding members, the UNSC became a site for “empty rhetoric”, in which the great powers hesitated to even use the word ‘genocide’, non-permanent members were often kept in the dark about developments on the ground, and permanent members “were quite indifferent to, if not outright contemptuous of, African opinion on African questions” (Organisation of African Unity, 2000b, 13.41, 15.13, 15.35, 15.93). As a result, discussions about having permanent PSC members quickly dissipated, whereas little-to-no substantive discussions on the prospect of vetoes took place. According to Said Djinnit, “The veto was not discussed. Africa had been fighting the veto in New York and would not establish a veto at its own level.”13
In addition to the anger and frustration felt at the marginalisation of Africa on the UNSC, the method through which the UN organ arrived at its declarations proved another source of exasperation. Admore Kambudzi, a former director of the AU Peace and Security department who also served as a consultant during negotiations to establish APSA, provides the following explanation of this influence.
The Permanent Five ultimately make resolutions in the Security Council. Why? Because they are pen-holders for most of these things and unfortunately, when it is an African issue, it is still based upon the colonial, neo-colonial pattern. Because it was in charge of Burkina Faso, a former French colony, France writes the resolution. If it’s in Kenya, another country, Britain, does. Then you have the United States which has a strategic umbrella over the whole world so they can write, pen-hold, over anything.14
Displeasure with this arrangement led the drafters of the PSC Protocol to assign pen-holding duties to officials on the PSC Secretariat, whose primary duty is to serve the continental interest, rather than that of any specific state, sometimes to the chagrin of members (Williams, 2014, 151–152).
One final aspect of the theoretical argument that finds support relates to the influence held by those with the emotional knowledge to connect moral categories with Others’ identities and foster new understandings of the world. The article length precludes deep investigation of how emotional knowledge was leveraged, but two examples in particular provide an indication of its significance.
The first relates to the emphasis that the South African government placed on truly convincing other members of the value of establishing a much-changed security architecture for the continent, by reference to an adjusted pan-African identity. It “would not have been ‘You get this, I get that’ type of thing. It was always looking at the general good of the organisation as a whole,” according to one of Pretoria’s negotiators.15 This negotiation style was reinforced by Admore Kambudzi, who chaired many negotiations to decide upon the form of APSA and said part of South Africa’s negotiation success came down to it bringing “a division of thinkers, not just civil servants.”16
The second example that demonstrates the weight of emotional knowledge focuses on Secretary General Salim, who played a key role in convincing members from outside the spheres of influence of the continental heavyweights, South Africa and Nigeria, of the merits of APSA (Hogan, 2020, 20). In his efforts to convince reluctant governments to approve the major reforms, he “argued that ‘every African is his brother’s keeper’, and called for the use of African culture and social relations to manage conflicts” (Adebajo, 2010, 417). According to his former chef de cabinet and the AU’s first Commissioner for Peace and Security, these kinds of interventions by Salim were crucial to the realisation of APSA. Speaking years later, Djiinit said “Salim was the mastermind behind all this transformation process in my view, and I think we have not paid tribute enough to Salim Ahmed Salim.”17
4 Conclusion
In line with the theoretical argument of this article, the sense of collectively-felt shame amongst OAU leaders prompted a reappraisal of the foundations of the community that had led it to the juncture at which it found itself in the mid-1990s. This profound sense of shame was further reinforced by feelings of exasperation with the inaction of the UN. While the community persevered, its identity, the moral judgements contained within its emotion norms, and what behaviours constituted emotional trespasses were reinterpreted under a new institutional banner.
The AU’s Constitutive Act still emphasises Pan-African identity, solidarity and unity, but the interpretation of each has evolved considerably (Organisation of African Unity, 2000a). The Union’s understanding of Pan-Africanism, in line with Salim’s vision, entails a much more central role for being one ‘brother’s keeper’ by responding to major instability and suffering, rather than ignoring it, as the OAU often did. Today, the AU is amongst the world’s most active peacekeeping forces, something its leaders often speak of with pride (de Carvalho, 2020, United Nations, 2019).
The expression of solidarity and unity, having previously been offered solely to elites, through the practice of non-interference in service of regime security, is now more broadly shared. The ritual of turning a blind eye towards the infractions of leaders is now less apparent – though not absent – from the interactions of the community. This can be seen, for example, in the administering of sanctions over unconstitutional changes of government, which were issued 20 times to 15 members between 2000 and 2022 (Atta-Asamoah, 2022). Although application of this norm has been patchy at times, any enforcement marks a major change from the OAU, where such action would have been viewed as unacceptable domestic interference and emotive betrayal.
Drawing attention to the role that collectively felt emotions played in the creation of APSA and the changes that occurred in the affective connections between community members makes a number of contributions. Firstly, it add to the discussion initiated by Koschut (2014) on the value of considering international security institutions as emotional communities, and to the work of those who have called for serious consideration of emotions in international politics (Mercer, 2010, Terzi, 2021, Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008). Where Koschut saw negative emotions between members prompting shame in the offender and ultimately stabilising the community, the APSA case study demonstrates that inward-facing shame felt by the entire community can result in more fundamental changes to its emotion norms, valued behaviours and identity. It furthermore shows that the drive for institutional change can be reinforced by outward-directed negative emotions, such as exasperation. In addition to facilitating elaboration of Koschut’s argument, the case study lends support to his contentions regarding the role that emotional knowledge and rituals play in the structure and interactions of emotional security communities.
In an empirical sense, the article contributes to literature that questions the suggestion that the AU merely replicated the structures and policies of other organisations, most obviously the EU (Haastrup, 2013, Staeger, 2016). It particularly critiques accounts that portray APSA as a product of mimicry, as exemplified by Jetschke’s (2017, 181) claim that the PSC is a “virtual copy” of the UNSC. This is made apparent through several examples of innovation on the part of the Architecture’s designers, which were motivated by the goal of avoiding, rather than replicating, the mistakes of organisations that some point to as normative inspiration (Oksamytna and Wilén, 2022).
By placing the emotions of the OAU/AU community at the centre of the analysis, the article furthermore heeds the call of those who advocate for the development of IR theory that reflects African experiences, rather than trying to ‘square the circle’ of the Global South inside theory that was developed from the perspectives of the Global North (Shilliam, 2021, Coffie and Tiky, 2021). This captures the agency of African actors that is often overlooked when mainstream theory is used to analyse the international relations of the Global South (Seth, 2011). Rather than characterising the establishment of APSA as one organisation copying another, responding to external pressures or converging around global norms, it privileges the perspectives, experiences and assessments of African institutional entrepreneurs (Makinda and Okumu, 2008, Nubong, 2022). Therefore, in addition to contributing towards knowledge on emotions and international politics, the article highlights emotions’ utility for helping uncover lesser-recognised agency on the part of policy actors in Africa and beyond.
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The role of increasingly violent conflict on the continent, and the Rwandan genocide in particular, in the 1990s was cited as a highly influential factor to the security reforms embedded within the APSA by, amongst others, Jakkie Cilliers, one of the drafters of the AU’s Protocol to Establish the Peace and Security Council, Chris Landsberg, one of the drafters of the AU’s Vision and Mission Statement, Said Djinnit, the first Commissioner for Peace and Security at the AU, South African and Nigerian diplomats that worked at the OAU/AU around the time of the transition, and a series of OAU/AU officials.
Interview with the author: Chris Landsberg.
Interview with the author: Jakkie Cilliers.
Interview with the author: Said Djinnit.
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Interview with author: Said Djinnit.
Interview with the author: Said Djinnit.
Interview with the author: Former senior Nigerian official at the OAU/AU.
Interview with the author: Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo; Said Djinnit; Admore Kambudzi, former Director of the AU Peace and Security Department, who also worked as a UN-appointed consultant during negotiations to establish the APSA.
Interview with the author: Former South African diplomat A at the OAU/AU.
Interview with the author: Jakkie Cilliers.
Interview with the author: Said Djinnit.
Interview with the author: Admore Kambudzi, former Director of the AU Peace and Security Department.
Interview with the author: Former South African diplomat B at the OAU/AU.
Interview with the author: Admore Kambudzi.
Interview with the author: Said Djinnit.