African Actors in International Security: Shaping Contemporary Norms 9781626377295

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African Actors in International Security

African Actors in International Security Shaping Contemporary Norms edited by

Katharina P. Coleman Thomas K. Tieku

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2018 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com

and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB

© 2018 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Coleman, Katharina Pichler, editor. | Tieku, Thomas Kwasi, editor. Title: African actors in international security : shaping contemporary norms / edited by Katharina P. Coleman and Thomas K. Tieku. Description: Boulder, Colorado : Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017058209 (print) | LCCN 2017060238 (ebook) | ISBN 9781626377295 (ebook) | ISBN 9781626376960 (hardcover : alkaline paper) Subjects: LCSH: Security, International—Africa. | Africa—Foreign relations. | Africa—Strategic aspects. | Non-state actors (International relations)—Africa. | Social norms—Africa. | International cooperation. Classification: LCC JZ6009.A35 (ebook) | LCC JZ6009.A35 A37 2017 (print) | DDC 327.172—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058209

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

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To our better halves, David and Pat

Contents

Foreword, Mohamed Ibn Chambas Acknowledgments

1 African Actors in International Security: Four Pathways to Influence Katharina P. Coleman and Thomas K. Tieku

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Pathway 1: Participating in the Creation of Global Norms 2 Humanitarian Intervention Linda Darkwa

3 Restricting the Spread of Small Arms and Light Weapons John Mark Pokoo

4 Eliminating Conflict Diamonds and Other Conflict-Prone Minerals J. Andrew Grant

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Pathway 2: Developing (and Diffusing) African Norms 5 The Pan-African Solidarity Norm Gerald Bareebe

6 The Conflict-Mediation Role of Elder-Statespersons Gilbert M. Khadiagala

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7 The Anti-Coup Norm Issaka K. Souaré

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Pathway 3: Shaping Global Norms Through Creative Implementation 8 Escaping the “Resource Curse” by Localizing Transparency Norms W. R. Nadège Compaoré

9 Localizing Transitional Justice Norms Tim Murithi

10 Implementing the Protection of Civilians Norm Annette Seegers

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Pathway 4: Contesting Global Norms

11 Challenging the Universal Jurisdiction Norm Bright Mando

12 Challenging the Primacy of the UN Security Council Walter Lotze

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Conclusion

13 African Agency in Theory and Practice Katharina P. Coleman and Thomas K. Tieku

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List of Acronyms Bibliography The Contributors Index About the Book

257 261 291 293 308

Foreword

Those of us who participate regularly in international forums know vividly that actors from the Global South are major contributors to the norms, rules, and best practices driving our world. Some of the sharpest, brightest, and most astute speakers in multilateral meetings, such as those organized by the United Nations, continental organizations, and regional institutions, come from the Global South. Yet, the dominant narratives and commentaries focus mainly on the contributions of actors in the Global North. This has created the unfortunate impression that key norms, rules, and best practices shaping our world come from, are made in, and are spread by the North. The contributions made by Africa’s illustrious sons and daughters have become victims of this narrowly focused and ultimately incomplete account of the development of international norms, rules, and best practices. The narratives that grant most of the agency in international affairs to people and institutions in the North have engendered the erroneous impression that African actors are just bystanders in the development and promotion of key international norms. This insightful and innovative book challenges the view that Africans are mere norm-takers by adding African voices, experiences, and contributions to the development and promotion of international peace and security norms. The two editors have assembled established and emerging scholars and practitioners mostly based on the African continent to showcase the diverse ways African actors have made major contributions to the creation and spread of norms shaping contemporary international peace and security politics. The continental focus of the book is highly welcome. The editors eschewed the unhelpful and at times demeaning but popular classification

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of Africans into so-called sub-Saharan, Arab, anglophone, and francophone Africa. They took a continental approach, searching carefully for contributions made by African actors who lived or are living anywhere in the geographical space of the continent. For northern Africa, the book shows that African thinkers such as St. Augustine of Tunisia and Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt were instrumental in the conceptualization of our current understanding of humanitarian intervention, while for southern Africa the book showcases the tremendous role that governments, civil society groups, and some businesses in this region played in the evolution and growth of the blood diamond and transitional justice norms. The book demonstrates that illustrious East Africans such as Francis Deng were instrumental in the emergence of the concept of sovereignty as responsibility and the norm of the responsibility to protect. The interesting stories of West African actors changing, refining, and introducing new thinking in the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative and the norms around small arms and light weapons are also highlighted. In addition, the book provides insights into the critical role that actors in central Africa played in current understandings and practices of civilian protection. It is also heartwarming that the contributions to many international security norms made by African regional organizations such as the African Union are acknowledged. The book documents the contributions of both historical figures and contemporary change-makers. The focus on both historical and contemporary figures will make it appealing to students of history and to those who prefer contemporary materials. Although the book is intended for the academic community and not directly designed to provide policy advice, many of the chapters offer food for thought for practitioners in the fields of international organizations, diplomatic service, and public policy, as well as for anyone interested in advancing ideas and agendas at the international level. Many of the chapters show how and why certain actors were effective, as well as why and how some ideas gained traction while others fell by the wayside. In many ways, the book shows diplomats, senior administrators of international organizations, and policymakers some of the best tools and mechanisms available for promoting ideas and agendas in the international setting. Not only should it attract the attention of academics, but it should be read by international civil servants, diplomats, and public policymakers as well. —Mohamed Ibn Chambas Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for West Africa and the Sahel

Acknowledgments

It is certainly a challenge to edit a book whose contributors are located in different parts of the world. But supportive institutions, an enthusiastic publisher, talented research assistants, great colleagues, and accommodating family members made the task relatively easy. While we have been individually and jointly exploring ways to open a dialogue between international relations and African studies for years, the immediate inspiration to write this book came from a 2015 call for proposals for a book workshop supported by the One Earth Future Foundation (OEF), the editors of Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, Lynne Rienner Publishers, and the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS). The call gave us the perfect opportunity to work together. Thank you to Brian Job for forwarding the announcement. We submitted a proposal titled “African Impacts on Contemporary International Peace and Security Norms: Five Pathways of Influence,” and we were delighted when it was selected for support. The generosity of the OEF and the United Nations University enabled us to bring the chapter contributors together for a book workshop in April 2016 at the United Nations Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (UNUINRA) in Accra, Ghana. We couldn’t have wished for better funders and hosts than OEF and UNU-INRA. We thank OEF’s Conor Seyle and Victor Owuor for their deep commitment to the project and UNU-INRA’s Elias Ayuko and Benjamin Turkson for hosting our workshop. The tremendous interest that Lynne Rienner Publishers showed for our project was invaluable. Their early support of our proposal gave us—and our chapter contributors—confidence to commit to the endeavor and additional motivation to produce a manuscript that met Lynne Rienner’s high

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standards. Lynne’s periodic checking on the status of the project and constructive suggestions helped us to move the manuscript through the peer review and revisions process. It has been a sheer joy to work with Lynne and her team. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and for the insightful critiques of each chapter. Good employers make a tremendous difference in the productive life of academics, and we are lucky to be part of two great Canadian institutions. The book benefited from the sabbaticals that Katia and Thomas received, respectively, from the University of British Columbia in 2016–2017 and from King’s University College at Western University in 2017–2018. The refuge from teaching and administrative work enabled us to devote muchneeded time to writing our chapters, reading other chapters, and giving feedback to the contributors. Our creative, energetic, and hardworking research assistants were always available to help with coordination and planning. We are deeply grateful to Carla Winston, Katerina Graham, Nathalie Garrison, Violette Khammad, Omar Garcia, Kwabena Kyei Poakwa, and Enoch Amoako for helping us put the manuscript together, and to Zaharau Shuaibu Shariff and Obed Opoku Afrane for taking notes for us at the workshop. As always, we are forever grateful to our accommodating partners and children. Any factual or linguistic errors fall on our shoulders. —Katharina P. Coleman and Thomas K. Tieku

1 African Actors in International Security: Four Pathways to Influence Katharina P. Coleman and Thomas K. Tieku

This book documents the contributions that African actors—public officials, governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and private citizens—have made to major norms currently shaping international peace and security politics, broadly defined. The book’s chapters collectively contribute to a more complete account of the emergence and growth of international norms, and they highlight the often understated agency of African actors in international politics. The book thus enhances scholarly understanding of two key aspects of international relations (IR). Norms, defined broadly in social science scholarship as the way actors are expected to behave in a given social context (Bolsen, Leeper, and Shapiro 2014) and specifically by IR scholars as “standards of appropriate behaviour for actors with a given identity” (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, p. 891), occupy a special position in IR research and discourse, public policy making, and diplomatic practices. For many IR scholars, norms are critically important in explaining social and political reality. Most global public policy makers, moreover, see norms as restraining egoistic impulses, inducing cooperation among self-interested actors, and providing a way around collective action problems in the international system (Green and Gerber 2010; Bolsen 2013). Critically, international norms are not static. In fact, international perceptions of what types of behavior are permissible or reprehensible in the pursuit of national or international security are remarkably dynamic. Policies that have long been considered commonplace and unobjectionable can become subject to almost universal opprobrium, as the case of antipersonnel landmine use demonstrates (Price 1998). Debate over long-standing international prohibitions may be reopened as national interests and threat

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perceptions evolve, as controversies over preventive military strikes and the use of torture indicate (Doyle 2011; McKeown 2009). Even the scope of what constitutes international security—and therefore what kinds of activity are relevant to international security—continues to evolve as international actors develop cyberspace and energy security policies and debate whether particular diseases (e.g., Ebola) or environmental issues (e.g., climate change) should be approached as international security issues. The IR literature has enhanced our understanding of international peace and security norms by capturing, analyzing, and explaining the dynamic nature of these norms. Constructivist scholars, in particular, have provided important conceptualizations of norm emergence, change, diffusion, and contestation, which are central to the framing of this chapter. Yet while the tremendous scholarly and political interest in peace and security norms has led to an exponential growth of relevant research, few studies focus on the contributions of actors in the Global South to the creation and development of these norms. Most of the actors highlighted in the IR literature are either advanced industrialized states or based in such states. Thus “it is often assumed in this literature that global norms originate in materially powerful Northern countries” (Helleiner 2014a, p. 359). The few published studies that challenge this Western-centric approach to norm emergence, development, and diffusion tend to focus on the impact of the most powerful non-Western states, notably China (Black and Hwang 2012; Contessi 2010; Job and Shesterinina 2014). The contributions of states and actors from materially less endowed countries are understudied and poorly understood. The failure to adequately recognize contributions to the development of norms by actors in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Caribbean is deeply problematic, not simply on grounds of equity but also because it distorts the reality of how international norms are in fact created. This book seeks to enrich the literature on international norms by providing an in-depth, theoretically informed analysis of African actors’ contributions to the development of contemporary international peace and security norms. It contends that African international organizations, governments, and nonstate actors have significantly shaped many prevailing international security norms, though these contributions are largely undocumented and unnoticed.1 This neglect may be partly due to the fact that African contributions become fully apparent only when analysis is extended across the entire spectrum of pathways that affect international norms. It may also reflect the preponderant influence within the discipline of IR of Western scholars, whose expertise in African international politics is often limited (Hoffmann 1977; Waever 1998; Smith 2000).2 By avoiding both pitfalls, we are able to highlight the agency of African actors in international norm development and by extension in international politics.

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We explore four key pathways by which African international organizations, states, and nonstate actors have shaped contemporary international security norms: (1) participation in global norm creation; (2) the development of African-made norms that may or may not remain geographically confined to Africa; (3) the shaping of global norms through creative implementation; and (4) contestation of global norms. The case studies that illustrate each of these pathways substantiate our argument that African actors have profoundly influenced contemporary international norms while also providing a more complete account of the evolution of these norms. These case studies are written predominantly by African scholars, IR specialists, and practitioners, whose expertise is critical in uncovering the African dimension of international norm creation. This chapter presents the conceptual framework adopted in the book. It showcases our understanding of the four pathways of African influence on international norms as analytically distinct, though they may overlap in practice. In addition, the chapter provides a justification of the book’s methodology, an overview of its structure, and a summary of the remaining chapters. Four Pathways of Influence IR scholars have developed a plethora of theories to explore international norm creation, development, and diffusion. The conceptual starting point for this book is that these theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The theoretical literature shows that international norms can emerge in multiple ways, including through argumentation (Risse 2000), social influence (Johnston 2001), acculturation (Brunnée and Toope 2012; Goodman and Jinks 2013), subsidiarity (Acharya 2011b), and bargaining (Moravcsik 2001, 2013; Coleman 2011). Norms can be developed either at the global level or through regional processes that may or may not be combined with diffusion dynamics. Moreover, norm creation is never a one-step or linear process. As Amitav Acharya has noted, “initially articulated universal norms are not only subject to contestation, but also to resistance and modification, whether at international or regional levels” (2014, p. 406). Building on existing norm scholarship, we identify four key processes by which international norms are produced. We argue that each process offers an opportunity for African actors to influence international norm development: if African actors can participate in and affect the process, they will shape the international norm that results from it. Each process thus represents a potential pathway for African actors to influence international norms. Each pathway is analytically distinct, though in practice African actors may shape a given norm through multiple pathways over time. The following sections describe these pathways and identify the

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major mechanisms associated with each by which African actors’ influence can be exerted. Pathway 1: Shaping Global Norm Creation Processes

The first wave of norm scholarship envisioned global norms as emerging primarily through international persuasion efforts by nonstate actors. In their seminal article, Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink contend that the “norm life cycle” begins when “norm entrepreneurs attempt to convince a critical mass of states (norm leaders) to embrace new norms” (1998, p. 895). Once a norm has reached this “tipping point,” it may be rapidly adopted by most remaining states in the system (“cascade”) and may ultimately become internalized (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, pp. 895–905). This conception of norm emergence built on previous work documenting the influence of nonstate actors as norm entrepreneurs (Nadelmann 1990) and has been complemented by numerous additional studies that advanced the norm development literature in three key areas. First, researchers have elaborated on the concept of persuasion, highlighting mechanisms such as grafting, framing, and arguing as critical to successful norm creation (Price 1998; Payne 2001; Charnysh, Lloyd, and Simmons 2015; Grobe 2010; Busby 2007; Deitelhoff 2009; Bower 2015). Second, norms scholars have expanded the concept of norm entrepreneurship to include not only NGOs but also transnational advocacy networks, officials within international organizations, states, and powerful individuals within states (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Johnstone 2007; Black and Hwang 2012; Orchard and Gillies 2015). Finally, several authors have argued that norm emergence is marked by negotiation as well as persuasion: states and nonstate actors “bargain over the content of the emerging norm and strike compromises about the scope, precision, ambition and rigidity of its demands” (Coleman 2011, p. 167).3 When international norm creation is initiated by norm entrepreneurs and accomplished through persuasion and negotiation at the global level, there are at least four key mechanisms by which African actors can impact the resulting norm. First, African individuals, NGOs, state officials, and international secretariat members can act as norm entrepreneurs, either independently or as parts of an international or transnational mobilization effort. African participation is likely to be especially critical where the proposed norm addresses an issue seen to be prevalent in African states, because local knowledge and allies are crucial to the credibility of international mobilization efforts (Sikkink 1993). Second, African states can be important early adopters of a proposed norm, whose presence affects subsequent persuasion dynamics. Finnemore and Sikkink note that “some states are critical to a norm’s adoption” (1998, p. 901). If African states are disproportionately affected by a particular

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issue, African governments’ early participation in international norm creation efforts is critical not only to avoid charges of neocolonial interference but also because persuasion is most likely to succeed when the potential persuadee views the persuader as having authoritative information (Johnston 2001, p. 497). Thus, other states considering whether to support a proposed norm may be especially swayed by the positions and arguments of the actors most affected by the issue at stake. By the same token, African actors’ third potential avenue of influence is as norm skeptics, arguing against the adoption of a proposed norm. If African states are united in their opposition, they may be able to block progress toward norm creation altogether or force significant changes to the proposed norm before it can emerge. Finally, African states may play critical roles in international negotiations of declarations or treaties that establish a new norm. Such negotiations may include “islands of persuasion” (Deitelhoff 2009) where African states can play the norm leader or norm skeptic roles. Equally important, African states often take advantage of their numerical strength and solidarity in international settings to exercise considerable bargaining power in global norm negotiations. They are able to do so because “the procedures for most major multilateral governing efforts are organized around universal participation. Every state gets a seat at the table” (Finnemore and Jurkovich 2014, p. 361). Africa’s fifty-four states represent the largest potential regional voting bloc in such settings, accounting for almost a quarter of all United Nations (UN) member states. Moreover, if an issue centrally concerns Africa, and many of the issues that dominate the international security landscape do, pragmatic negotiators will recognize that the support of African governments is key to a credible international norm creation effort on that issue. Skillful African diplomats can and do take advantage of the fact that many international security issues cannot be addressed without the cooperation of (most) African states to further enhance African agency in norm negotiation outcomes (Adler-Nissen and Pouliot 2014). Pathway 2: African Norms That May or May Not Diffuse Beyond the Continent

Not all international norms originate outside of Africa: some are Africanmade. Critically, international norms are not a “global ‘oobleck’ that covers the planet and homogenizes us all” (Finnemore and Sikkink 2001, p. 397). International norms can emerge in regions or subregions, sometimes—but not always—proceeding to diffuse to other regions and global international organizations. African actors may influence international norms by creating local norms that diffuse beyond the continent. There are also African-made norms that claim little applicability beyond continental Africa. These norms

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shape only continental and regional African political and security landscapes, and they may even contradict established norms elsewhere in the world (Acharya 2011b). Nevertheless, they shape international politics among and within Africa’s fifty-four states. Whether they diffuse or not, therefore, African norms are significant international norms and important elements of the global normative framework. African norms may be developed through at least four mechanisms. First, they may be formulated during continental or regional interstate negotiations to manage particular African security issues or a specific crisis, such as an ongoing civil war. These negotiations can take place within formal institutions, such as the African Union (AU) or one of Africa’s regional economic communities (RECs), which have been major sources of African-focused security norms over the past three decades. Negotiations that create African norms can also occur in ad hoc institutional structures, such as the Great Lakes Regional Initiative for Peace in Burundi (Tieku 2013). In both kinds of setting, negotiations are typically subject to consensual decisionmaking processes where every state wields a potential veto. The emphasis on consensual decisions promotes at least rhetorical affirmation of the negotiation outcomes—including normative statements—by all participants. Since the norms developed in these negotiations are formulated almost exclusively by African actors and tailored to suit the social context of the African region, they may not gain traction, or even significant attention, beyond the African continent. Second, African norms may be developed through a deliberate continental or regional norm subsidiarity effort. Norm subsidiarity is “a process whereby local actors create rules with a view to preserve their autonomy from dominance, neglect, violation, or abuse by more powerful central actors” (Acharya 2011b, p. 97). It is often led by formal institutions, and participants are typically explicit about their emancipatory goals. One major motivation for norm subsidiarity in Africa is to counter global norms viewed as damaging to African actors’ autonomy and sovereignty. African governments have developed regional security norms to protect themselves from what they perceive as overbearing or predatory behavior by former colonial states and other powerful actors in the international system. One example is the Pan-African solidarity norm, which emerged from the first grand intergovernmental negotiations of newly independent African states in the 1960s (see Chapter 5). The norm emerged to promote harmony among African political elites and to protect African ruling classes from abuse, exploitation, and manipulation by, and criticism from, powerful global actors. African governments have continued to mobilize this norm to protect political elites, including during recent efforts to shield Sudanese and Kenyan leaders from trial by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The distinctive feature of norm subsidiarity is its outward focus and the targeting of a norm that has developed at the global level but that is unevenly implemented or is per-

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ceived as unfairly affecting less powerful states. Norm subsidiarity is often a response to “great power hypocrisy” (Acharya 2011b, p. 100). Third, distinctive African norms may emerge through a “coalition of the willing” process, where like-minded African governments develop a norm to address shared needs. They may, for example, face similar security challenges or feel the need to contest existing regional norms. Since these norms are developed by and for coalition members, there is no immediate expectation that other states will respect them: the limited membership of the coalition limits the applicability of the norm that emerges from it. Take for instance the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), whose members commit to a number of governance norms including the requirement that civilian bodies must exercise oversight over security forces. Only the thirty-five African states that are APRM members are expected to follow these norms, leaving the remaining nineteen African states and Western Sahara formally unaffected. Finally, continental or regional African norms may emerge through the agency of local nonstate actors. The NGO community and private individuals may work together to develop specific norms with a view to persuading African states to adopt them. For example, in the early 1990s a group of NGOs met in Kampala to adopt a set of human security norms, with the aim of redefining security and sovereignty in Africa and demanding certain standards of behavior from every African government (Obasanjo and Mosha 1992, p. 260). The mainstreaming of human security into the AU is largely credited to the advocacy work of these civil society groups. All four of these mechanisms feature African actors developing norms for African purposes: the aim is not to develop global norms but to address perceived African challenges or threats to African interests. Such “purely” African norms inherently warrant attention and analysis as significant international norms as they shape the behavior of up to fifty-four states and Western Sahara. In addition, however, some African norms diffuse beyond the continent. Norm diffusion may involve the full adoption and implementation of a regional norm in another region or at the global level, but more partial or incremental diffusion is also possible. Extra-regional actors may adopt only one part of the regional norm, such as a given behavior or a stated ideation, and recombine this with other norm components (Winston 2017). They may also accept a regional norm only in the sense of acknowledging its applicability in its region of origin. At minimum, this would mean supporting a regional norm as applying to regional actors, for example by praising or helping to implement a regional arms trade moratorium, transitional justice practice, or conflict management norm. In addition, extra-regional actors may accept a regional norm as applying to their own activities in the region, for example by allowing a regional conflict management norm such

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as mediation by elder statespersons to shape the design of an international peace initiative in the region (see Chapter 6). African norms may diffuse either because non-African actors adopt them on their own initiative or because African actors actively promote them.4 In the first scenario, the perceived relevance of African realities and experiences to non-African actors is the main driver of the norm diffusion. Garrett Brown (2014, p. 883) suggests that in fact many post–Cold War global security norms developed through “norm ‘up flow,’” where more local and regional innovations drove norm change at the global level. One example is Tanzania’s 1979 intervention in Uganda, which played a key role in the development of modern humanitarian intervention norms (Bellamy 2010). Normative change in these cases is usually a bottom-up process; it seems to be top-down because global powerful elites are often good at co-opting these local and regional norm creation processes as well as by redirecting the new norm back to the local setting or to other global institutions or domestic settings. If Brown is right, then the African region should be a major player in post– Cold War global security norm development given the number of contemporary security crises occurring in Africa and the plethora of conflict management activities and experiments in the region by both local and global actors. The interventions by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Ceasefire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) in the 1990s, for example, served as important markers in the development of norms around the appropriate relationship between the UN and regional bodies in peace operations that have since been mainstreamed into the international global security architecture. In short, global norm entrepreneurs may emulate, or at least choose to learn from, norms and practices developed in Africa. By contrast, active promotion is characterized by a deliberate effort on the part of African actors to prompt others to adopt or endorse African norms. It can occur through teaching, argumentation, and persuasion. In this scenario, African actors convince their international counterparts of the intrinsic quality of an African norm through the power of “the better argument” and, potentially, by mobilizing authority “teachers” (Müller 2004, p. 411; Deitelhoff and Müller 2005, p. 172; Risse 2000; Finnemore 1993). Strategically positioned African individuals may be critical in this process. For example, Boutros Boutros-Ghali used his authority as UN SecretaryGeneral to make African practices of conflict mediation and combatant demobilization and reintegration key elements in emerging global peacebuilding norms (Betts and Orchard 2014, p. 215). Kofi Annan, BoutrosGhali’s successor, also used his position to introduce African values and norms to the international peace and security landscape, including the mobilization of elders as a conflict resolution mechanism (Tieku 2012). Africans called upon either as individuals or as state representatives to provide expertise to extra-regional bodies may also promote the diffusion of African norms

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by teaching and persuading. Their contributions may take the form of consultancy reports, background studies, and policy briefs, or these individuals may serve as members of an international commission or panel of experts. One illustration of how influential African actors can be in this capacity is the case of Mohamed Sahnoun, a former Algerian foreign minister, Kofi Annan’s adviser on Africa, and cochair with Gareth Evans of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, into which he helped carry the conception of sovereignty as responsibility promoted by the Kampala Movement (Obasanjo and Mosha 1992; Evans and Sahnoun 2001). Where global interlocutors are not amenable to argumentation and persuasion, African actors can mobilize social pressure, challenging international norm entrepreneurs to add an African norm to the global repertoire for reasons of equity and representativeness (Epstein 2012). In this case, global norm entrepreneurs adopt and promote the African norm not because they are convinced of its inherent merit but because they feel it is appropriate to include African “ways of doing things” in the global system. Over time, the African practice may be routinized into the global normative structure and its African roots may be lost. Social pressure can be mobilized by states, as for instance, when African governments advocated for change in the global norm requiring regional organizations to inform the UN Security Council before rather than after an intervention (for more details, see Chapter 12). Public intellectuals can also mobilize social pressure, as Francis Deng, for example, did in both the UN and various US institutions5 to ensure recognition of his notion of “sovereignty as responsibility,” thus setting the stage for the emergence of the global norm of the responsibility to protect. Social pressure may be especially effective in informal encounters within formal institutions, where the more intimate, face-to-face setting makes it difficult for actors to refuse others’ principled claims. Even in highly formal institutions such as the UN Security Council, such informal interactions are often critical: a former Australian ambassador to the UN has estimated that private deliberations and decisionmaking consumed 98 percent of his time when he served on the Council (Butler 2012). Finally, African actors may promote the diffusion of African norms through acculturation, a microprocess that makes actors conform to a position advocated by a perceived peer group as a result of real or imagined group pressure (Johnston 2001, p. 499; Brunnée and Toope 2012; Goodman and Jinks 2013). Acculturation differs from social pressure both in the nature of the reference group (a set of actors viewed as valued peers rather than society more broadly defined) and in the mechanism for producing norm acceptance (the threat of peer group sanction rather than activating norms of social inclusion). Peer pressures from African actors may encourage non-African actors to adopt the norms that regulate behavior on the African continent, not because they are convinced of the norms’ intrinsic

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quality or the appropriateness of listening to African actors but because they fear ostracism from the Africa group or want to fit into the African reference group. Two factors make conditions propitious for acculturation by African actors. First, acculturation is especially likely if African actors are numerically dominant in the social relationship with the non-African actor or actors, at least during the initial phase of the encounter. The second factor is consistency; acculturation is more likely when African actors are unanimous in advocating for the norm and, ideally, practice the norm consistently during the period of encounter. The non-African actor or actors in the international system may then mimic that social practice, and over time other actors may also copy it either from the African group or from the nonAfrican actor or actors. Pathway 3: Shaping International Norms Through Creative Implementation

Conventional analyses of international norm creation often highlight dynamic processes of norm emergence and diffusion but take a static view of norm content. For many scholars, norms do not change as they undergo processes of diffusion and contestation. However, more recently researchers have begun to conceptualize “norms as processes [and to] theorize . . . that norms are subject to on-going attempts to reconstitute their meanings, even as they exert effects on patterns of social behaviour” (Krook and True 2012, p. 109). This pathway and the fourth, explored in the next section, reflect the latter view of international norms, positing that norm creation does not end after the first emergence of a norm but continues through a dynamic process of ongoing interpretation and contestation during which African actors can be highly influential. This specific pathway recognizes that international norms emerging in global forums must be adopted and implemented by particular actors in order to progress from relatively abstract, often ambiguous commitments (Chayes and Chayes 1993, p. 189; Krook and True 2012, p. 109) to shaping actors’ actual behavior and international outcomes. In this process of adoption and implementation, norms are potentially subject to two major kinds of change. The first is localization, a process in which strategic actors within a given state or region adapt international norms to render them more compatible with local norms and priorities. In Acharya’s seminal formulation, it is “the active construction (through discourse, framing, grafting and cultural selection) of foreign ideas by local actors, which results in the former developing significant congruence with local beliefs and practices” (2004, p. 245). Going beyond previous findings that international norms are more likely to diffuse if they are already congruent with local priorities or have

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local advocates (Risse-Kappen, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999; Sundstrom 2005), the concept of localization envisions local actors as actually modifying the content of international norms as they are adopted locally. Such modifications may be relatively minor, supporting Acharya’s conception of localization as merely a redefinition of norms that local actors already take as “generally good and desirable” (2011b, p. 98). In other instances, however, localization may significantly alter the international norm. At the extreme, as the next section explores further, localization can become a form of resistance to global norms (Capie 2008; Prantl and Nakano 2011). The second kind of norm change at the implementation stage is meaningin-practice, which refers to behavior enacting an international norm in a specific instance. The concept builds on Antje Wiener’s notion of meaningin-use, sharing its basic assumption that “the meaning of norms . . . is embedded in social practice,” so that “if the practice changes then so will the meaning of the norm” (2004, pp. 191–192). However, the social practices Wiener focuses on are discursive interventions, through which actors debate and contest the meaning of shared norms and thus contribute to their evolution over time. By contrast, meaning-in-practice focuses on material actions by states and other actors that are presented and accepted as implementing an international norm or that shape understandings of how a norm can (or cannot) be implemented. Critically, enacting an international norm in a specific set of empirical circumstances requires translating general prescriptions into a particular course of action. In deciding on a course of behavior, actors may choose actions that have already been accepted as enacting the relevant norm in other (similar) circumstances, or they may select a new behavior and contend that it represents an appropriate—or the most appropriate—way to implement the norm in the given circumstance. They may also prove by their actions that a globally accepted way of implementing a norm is futile or counterproductive. If other actors accept this contention or learn this lesson, the new behavior will become part of the empirical practices socially accepted as enacting the norm. The norm’s meaning-in-practice—what counts as implementing the norm—will evolve.6 In short, localization is a discursive redefinition of what an international norm is understood to mean in a particular state or region, and meaning-in-practice is the translation of a norm’s general prescriptions into a specific action deemed appropriate in a particular set of empirical circumstances. Theoretically, both processes could simply result in a proliferation of distinctive local or situation-specific versions of a norm initially negotiated at the international level (Brown 2014). However, they can also lead to a redefinition of the “parent” international norm through feedback mechanisms linking the local to the international level. For example, Jochen Prantl and Ryoko Nakano (2011, p. 210) suggest that China first localized

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the norm of the responsibility to protect (R2P) and then reintroduced its localized version into international negotiations, leading to a substantial softening of the international norm. For meaning-in-practice, the feedback mechanism is inherent in the idea that particular instances of purported implementation of a norm potentially affect the set of practices internationally understood to enact the norm. Empirically, Alana Tiemessen has argued that Rwanda’s specific enactment of transitional justice norms had significant “feedback effects on the normative structure over time, by redefining the meaning of transitional justice norms and retooling how they can be more effectively institutionalized” (2011, p. 67). This discussion suggests two key ways in which African actors can influence international norms. First, they may localize global norms, redefining their content to render them more compatible with local interests and ideas. At a minimum, this would increase the diversity of existing international norms, offering a greater number of local variations on internationally generated norms. In the presence of local-to-global feedback effects, however, African localizations may transform the “parent” norms as well. Second, African actors can shape the meaning-in-practice of international norms by engaging in innovative behaviors that alter prevailing understandings of what it means (or what is required) to enact a particular norm. It is worth noting that African actors need not engage in these behaviors solely or even primarily in order to alter the meaning-in-practice of existing norms. Actors opting for a particular course of action for non-normative, strategic, and even purely self-interested reasons may still become accidental norm entrepreneurs if their behavior is internationally perceived as implementing an existing norm in a particular way—or showing the inappropriateness of particular means of implementation. Pathway 4: Direct Contestation of Global Norms

African actors may also influence global security norms through direct contestation of prevailing norms, forcing either their abandonment or their renegotiation. Such challenges may take at least five forms. First, African actors may argue that a global norm is “incongruent” (Stevenson 2009) with African conditions, and develop mechanisms to encourage African states not to comply with the norm. African international organizations such as the AU and ECOWAS may adopt treaties, charters, protocols, or declarations designed to facilitate noncompliance with an international norm their members find unacceptable. For instance, the AU developed supplementary rules to the Protocol on the African Court of Justice and Human Rights in part to fight the prevailing global norm of universal jurisdiction (Coombes 2011). African organizations typically make decisions on ignoring or discouraging compliance with the global norm by consensus. Such decisions do not always

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express unanimously held views, but once the decision has been made, solidarity considerations may encourage even governments that originally supported the international norm to flout it. The AU decision to ask its members to ignore the ICC arrest warrant issued against Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir is one example of this dynamic. This kind of contestation by African actors has the potential to encourage global norm entrepreneurs to reconsider the international norm. For instance, the AU’s protest over the application of universal jurisdiction and international criminal norms against African public officials has led to a global review of some aspects of these norms (see Chapter 11; Agwu 2014; Peskin 2009). Second, African contestation and resistance to global norms may occur during negotiations with non-African states. African public officials may challenge the appropriateness of a particular global norm in their interactions with extra-regional actors. They can do so through multilateral channels, as when African states contested the norm of great power unanimity (otherwise known as the veto power) in the UN Security Council (AkufoAddo 2017) or asked the Council to suspend the ICC warrant for the Sudanese president (du Plessis 2012; Peskin 2009). Contestation can also occur bilaterally, such as Rwanda’s fight against the application of the universal jurisdiction norm after its intelligence officer was arrested in London in 2015 (African Union 2015c). It can even occur through multiple unilateral public condemnations of an international norm or its application, as illustrated by the widespread condemnation by African leaders of the Security Council’s invocation of R2P during the Libyan crisis (Neethling 2012). Such contestation of global norms through public diplomacy and negotiation can lead to the development of new norms or facilitate the emergence of a modified version of the old norm. Third, African states and their international organizations may “localize” the international norm to the extent that the norm loses its original meaning (Capie 2008). African actors may change the framing and content of an international norm in order to resist global forces or to subordinate the norm to an existing regional norm (Hirsch 2013). Thus, the AU’s decision to develop the norm of non-indifference may in part be an attempt by African states to preemptively undercut great power hypocrisy and interventionism after the end of the Cold War (Kioko 2003). Fourth, African actors can use domestic tools to contest an international norm. Widespread domestic opposition will often force norm entrepreneurs to modify an existing international norm. For instance, Lauren Dunn, Peter Nyers, and Richard Stubbs (2010) show that widespread domestic opposition to prevailing humanitarian intervention norms, especially in East Asian states, contributed to the emergence of a much softer version of the norm. African states have many domestic weapons to counter international norms they view as objectionable. These include

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enacting contrary domestic legislation, refusing to accede to the international instruments that promote the norm, and encouraging domestic nonstate actors such as the media and civil society groups to publicly criticize and therefore delegitimize the international norm. Alternatively, some states may simply ignore international norms they have objections to. Finally, African public intellectuals may challenge a particular international norm by pointing out deficiencies in its application through their writings, speeches, and other public engagements. They can also challenge the norm through their involvement in international committees, commissions, and expert panels. In some cases, they can use the contrast between the international norm and African realities to show the inappropriateness of the former. The discrepancy between the norm and actual experiences on the African continent may convince norm entrepreneurs that the norm should be modified, leading to the renegotiation of the norm or the development of new elements that take into account African realities. Contestation by African actors can impact the subsequent development of the global norm. For instance, African opposition to interpretations of the norm of the responsibility to protect as justifying “regime change” in Libya in 2011 took virtually all the forms just described, and it has contributed significantly to the narrower and more circumscribed way the norm has been defined and applied in more recent years. Contestation of the regime change element has made the norm take a more pro-sovereignty turn. Indeed, “the backlash against that intervention, combined with growing assertiveness on the part of so-called rising powers that are suspicious of the West’s liberal agenda, is likely to circumscribe both the application and the implementation of the R2P in the decade ahead” (Welsh 2012, p. 291). Contestation may also prevent the establishment of new interpretations of existing norms, preserving existing ways of doing things that may be favored by African actors. Put differently, African opposition and contestation of new interpretations of existing norms may contribute to the maintenance of the normative status quo or limit new norm creation to incremental variations of existing norms (see Chapter 11). Overlap of Pathways

The four pathways just described are analytically distinct, but not hermetically sealed from each other or mutually exclusive. Pathways may shade into each other, or African actors may use multiple pathways sequentially or simultaneously. Global norm creation efforts may present an opportunity for the active or passive diffusion of African norms, but if African perspectives are ignored they may give rise to localization or contestation efforts. Creative implementation and contestation can also be combined, as already indicated in the case of China and the R2P. Similarly, when

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African actors challenge prevailing norms based on African experiences, they may become mediators allowing African meaning-in-practice to affect global norms. Meanwhile, Acharya’s (2011b) insight that some regional norms develop in opposition to global norms suggests an overlap of the second and fourth pathways. African contestation of existing norms can also have an impact on future norm negotiation. For example, vocal African criticism of the application of contemporary international criminal accountability norms is likely to impede international efforts to define additional international crimes, and this criticism may prevent the emergence of new norms enhancing international criminal prosecution. For analytical clarity, however, it is important to identify and distinguish between the four pathways. Doing so helps capture the range of contributions African actors have made to prevailing international security norms. In addition, the delineation of the four pathways facilitates classification and comparison of distinctive strategies that Africans can employ to change international norms. Book Methodology and Structure The central aim of this book is to provide an in-depth, theoretically informed analysis of the various ways in which African actors have contributed to the development of international security norms. We define international security broadly to encompass issues ranging from conflict prevention to peacebuilding. Thus the chapters cover norms in such diverse areas as humanitarian intervention, conflict resources, coups, the proliferation of small arms and light weapons (SALW), and transitional justice in the wake of large-scale human rights abuses. We focus on this key subset of international norms to facilitate a sharply focused, detailed analysis of African actors’ influence. In our estimation, the benefits of close analysis of African contributions to international norm development in this area— showcasing the variety of ways in which a range of African actors have impacted, to greater or lesser degrees, key norms in this one area, with greater comparability between cases—outweigh the disadvantages of remaining silent on similar contributions in other important fields such as the economy or the environment. Methodology

The four pathways discussed here provide the conceptual framework and structure for the remainder of this book. The empirical chapters are orga nized into four substantive parts, which illustrate the importance, key mechanisms, and limitations of each of the four pathways for African influence

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on international norms in turn. Before summarizing the individual case studies, first we offer a brief justification of this book’s overall methodology. This project is an enterprise in theory refinement and in improving the empirical record, not in grand theorizing or theory-testing. We do not contend that African actors influence all international security norms, or that focusing on African actors provides a complete explanation of a given norm’s creation. What we do argue is that accounts of the emergence and development of many key international norms are radically incomplete if we do not pay attention to African agency. We also contend that African actors shape international security norms in multiple important ways, so that a full understanding of their influence must acknowledge the whole spectrum of pathways for actors to exercise influence. The book is designed to substantiate these conceptual points. This focus helps explain and renders appropriate the case study method adopted in the individual substantive chapters. The case study approach lends itself to highlighting the mechanisms through which African actors gained influence, analyzing the circumstances and strategies that made this influence possible, and assessing the extent and limitations of African actors’ influence.7 Each of the empirical chapters in this book presents a case study of African actors shaping one important international security norm, predominantly (but not always exclusively) through one particular pathway. Our case selection was shaped by both conceptual and substantive considerations. Conceptually, each chapter offers a “plausibility probe” (Eckstein 2000, pp. 140–141) for one of the four pathways identified here, though authors were free to also consider additional or overlapping pathways if warranted by the empirics of their case.8 Substantively, we sought to showcase the range of important international security norms affected by African actors. The cases cover “hard” security issues as well as security issues rooted in economics or social processes, all affecting thousands if not millions of contemporary lives. Our case selection is not exhaustive: even within the field of international security, and certainly beyond it, there are other cases of African influence along each of the pathways. However, our cases do thoroughly substantiate the plausibility of each of the four pathways and they highlight the diversity and importance of African actors’ contributions to international security norm development. Collectively, moreover, the case study chapters offer the opportunity to draw lessons through comparisons both within each pathway and across pathways. Given our focus on establishing the relevance of each of the four pathways, the chapters do not include “negative” cases where African actors failed to shape global norms, but they do showcase considerable variation in the way African actors exert influence in the international system and the extent to which they impact prevailing norms. The final chapter in this book draws out these lessons and offers them for further research.

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Structure

The remainder of this book comprises four substantive parts reflecting the four pathways of influence, plus a concluding chapter. The three case studies in the first part of the book illustrate African contributions to global norm creation processes. In Chapter 2, Linda Darkwa shows that African agency has been instrumental in the creation of global norms on humanitarian intervention. Offering a critical review of the long history and complex nature of humanitarian intervention norms, she concludes that both African thinkers and officials and evolving African practices shaped the emergence of current global humanitarian intervention norms in fundamental ways. In Chapter 3, John Pokoo draws insights from different international negotiation settings to argue that African governments and international organizations have contributed significantly to the creation of norms restricting the spread of small arms and light weapons. In particular, he highlights the participation of the Economic Community of West African States and of the Malian state in the creation of global norms to control the trade in and abuse of small arms. Completing our consideration of this pathway, J. Andrew Grant’s contribution in Chapter 4 highlights the critical role that African diamond-producing states and local NGOs played in the development and spread of the global norm of conflict-free diamonds as well as in proposing a conflict-free minerals norm. Somewhat paradoxically, he also shows that some of the same African states were instrumental in blocking attempts to expand the conflictfree diamond norm to cover human rights abuses. The next three chapters illustrate pathway 2: the development of Africanmade norms that may or may not diffuse beyond the continent. In Chapter 5, Gerald Bareebe argues that although the Pan-African solidarity norm is largely confined to the continent of Africa, it remains the heartbeat of Africa’s international politics and significantly shapes the development of other norms on the continent, including the African Union’s emerging non-indifference norm. In Chapter 6, Gilbert Khadiagala contends that the concept of elder statespersons has been mainstreamed into conflict mediation, prevention, and management in Africa. He situates this evolution in a wider movement to foster indigenous approaches to African conflict resolution and to put to greater use the expertise, stature, and wisdom of statesmen and stateswomen in Africa. He notes that although some aspects of the norm have diffused to the global level (witness the creation of the Elders and some appointments of Special Representatives of the UN Secretary-General), it remains largely within the confines of the African continent. Issaka Souaré continues the story of African-made norms in Chapter 7, contending that the reaction of non-African governments and international organizations to military coups since 2000 is driven in large part by the AU’s anti-coup norms and rejection of unconstitutional changes of government. He notes that the norm, which

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has contributed to the reduction of coups on the African continent and is widely respected in Africa, has spread to member states of the International Organization of the Francophonie (OIF). The next three case studies demonstrate the plausibility of pathway 3: African actors shaping international norms through creative implementation of those norms. In Chapter 8, W. R. Nadège Compaoré explores how Ghanaian actors used their participation and implementation of Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) to localize global norms, asserting both Ghana’s agency over the governance of its natural resources and its role as norm-maker rather than mere norm-taker. The chapter suggests that in establishing national ownership over EITI norm implementation, Ghanaian actors have significantly influenced ongoing reforms of the global EITI framework, including redefining key EITI requirements and standards. Similarly, in Chapter 9, Tim Murithi highlights how African actors have consistently asserted their right to determine what it means to implement the norms of transitional justice and reconciliation in particular political contexts. National actors selectively implement particular transitional justice mechanisms that they deem appropriate or beneficial in their specific context, and they have made a number of innovations to transitional justice. In Chapter 10, Annette Seegers rounds out our consideration of this pathway by focusing on the evolution of the protection of civilians norm. She highlights three conceptual additions African actors have made to the norm (retributive justice through regional courts, regional diplomacy to protect civilians, and implementation by counter-insurgency measures) and three aspects of the norm that African actors have destabilized: protecting civilians in partnership with local actors; by military force-of-numbers; and by political deterrence through the threat of retributive justice and intervention. Importantly, she notes that motivations of the African actors whose actions shaped the meaning-in-use of the global protection of civilians norm were often not primarily normative but instrumental and oriented toward immediate material interests. Finally, we turn to pathway 4: the direct contestation of global norms by African actors. Bright Mando demonstrates in Chapter 11 that concerns about anti-African bias and misapplication of the universal jurisdiction norm led to the expansion in June 2014 of the jurisdiction of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights to include international crimes (genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity) and transnational crimes (trafficking in persons or drugs, terrorism, and piracy), as well as to the granting of immunity to senior African policymakers. The move allowed the African regional court to claim the legal space that certain European courts were carving for themselves over Africans and thereby undercut the misuse and abuse of universal jurisdiction by non-African entities. In Chapter 12, Walter Lotze highlights the emergence of a complex peace and secu-

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rity regime in Africa, in which the UN has increasingly had to recognize and acknowledge African actors as indispensable partners in the maintenance of international peace and security in Africa. Within the space of a decade, African actors have come to directly challenge the prevailing international norm of the primary responsibility of the UN Security Council for international peace and security when it comes to the affairs of the African continent, and African actors are reshaping this norm from a logic of hierarchy to a logic of shared responsibility. The chapter traces this normative evolution, examining in particular the manner in which African actors, through various norm contestation processes, have been able to effectively influence and change a prevailing global security norm. In the conclusion of the book, we highlight common themes and contrasting insights of African agency and norm development uncovered in the empirical chapters, return to the issue of overlap among pathways, and reflect on our contribution to the fields of international relations and African politics. Notes 1. Rare exceptions include Finnemore and Jurkovich 2014; Helleiner 2014b; Sikkink 2014; Acharya 2014; Williams 2007; Souaré 2014. 2. For important exceptions, see DeLancey, Reed, Spyke, and Steen 1997. 3. See also Elgström 2000. 4. This echoes the distinction between “active” and “passive” EU influence on other regional actors in Lenz and Burilkov 2017. 5. These included the US Institute of Peace, the Brookings Institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, and the Library of Congress. 6. Carla Winston (2017) links this dynamic to the emergence of “normative clusters.” 7. For an exposition of the advantages of case study design in international relations theory, see Bennett 2004. 8. In the initial stages of the project, some cases were moved from one pathway to another, as the empirics dictated.

2 Humanitarian Intervention Linda Darkwa

The notion of humanitarian intervention, defined as the use or threat of the use of force by one state against another for the protection of the human rights of populations that are not citizens of the intervening state, has often been portrayed as a relatively recent innovation led mainly by the Global North, and one that is vehemently opposed by Africans. However, the norm of humanitarian intervention has a far longer and more complex history that includes contributions from African philosophers, leaders, statespersons, and institutions. This chapter presents the agency of Africa in shaping the norm of humanitarian intervention through literary contributions, practice, and institutionalization. I begin with the premise that the notion of humanitarian intervention is as old as antiquity and has been recognized by various religions of the world (Hashmi 1993, p. 55; Halbertal and Hartman 2007). What has become known as the contemporary norm of humanitarian intervention is a combination of the beliefs and traditions of various societies, which have over time been distilled to produce a minimum set of criteria acceptable to those who believe in the existence of such a norm. Rooted in the natural law tradition, it is quite preposterous to ascribe the development of the humanitarian intervention norm to any particular person or group of persons per se. A number of philosophers and scholars have distilled the various conceptions of the notion that populations abused by their leaders are entitled to protection into what has become known as the contemporary norm on humanitarian intervention. Even though the contemporary concept of humanitarian intervention is often traced to the work of philosophers and scholars of the North such as St. Thomas Aquinas and Grotius, the work of the North African philosopher and theologian St. Augustine was instrumental in shaping the discourse of

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the Just War theory, which is the bedrock of contemporary humanitarian intervention. This chapter seeks to demonstrate the contribution of Africa to the development of the contemporary norm of humanitarian intervention. I submit that African agency in shaping the contemporary norm of humanitarian intervention manifests in three main ways: through literary contributions by Africa’s philosophers and scholars; practice by African states; and institutionalization in the legal provisions of Africa’s subregional and regional multilateral organizations. Through practice, moreover, African countries have individually and collectively contributed to defining the contexts within which humanitarian interventions may take place, and they have addressed the fear of hegemonic interference, which has been a sticking point in the discourse on humanitarian interventions. Further, Africa has contributed to the institutionalization of the humanitarian intervention norm through provisions in various legal frameworks of its regional and continental multilateral arrangements such as the Economic Community of West African States, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the African Union. Even though the humanitarian intervention norm is as old as humankind, Africa’s contribution in shaping the norm and in influencing the discourse even at the level of the United Nations cannot be overlooked. The agency that African actors exercised over the norm, which is largely unrecognized in mainstream international relations scholarship, lends strong empirical support for the first pathway outlined in the introduction to this book, highlighting Africa’s contributions to global norm creation and institutionalization processes. The Contemporary Concept of Humanitarian Intervention: A Historical Overview The prerogative on the use of force in pursuit of national interest (until the promulgation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928 and the 1945 Charter of the United Nations) and in self-defense is fundamentally based on a longstanding consensus on the jurisdictional sovereignty of states. An essential characteristic of jurisdictional sovereignty is a state’s ability to act within its own territory without the threat of or the actual use of force by other states against it in its domestic affairs.1 Therefore, while a state may use force against another state in the protection of its citizens within that state, the distinguishing element of humanitarian intervention is the fact that the use or the threat of the use of force by one state against another is for the purposes of protecting noncitizens of the intervening state from the abuses of their own government (Blockmans 1999; Brownlie 1974). Military intervention in another state is antithetical to the principles of sovereignty, non-interference, and respect for territorial and political integrity.

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It is generally prohibited under customary international law. Notwithstanding, customary international law has also long provided exceptions for humanitarian interventions. Despite the different representation of the structure of the state as a political community in different religions in the preclassical and medieval periods, there was consensus on the need to protect vulnerable populations from the violations of their leaders, irrespective of the religious affiliation of the victim population. All of the three Abrahamic religions—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism—have provisions that enjoin their followers to defend not only fellow believers but also vulnerable persons in need of protection (Nardin 2003; Chesterman 2002). It was on the basis of the customary law position on humanitarian intervention that European countries intervened in Ottoman territory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in protecting Christians who had been subjected to human rights violations by Ottoman Turks (Benjamin 1992; Finnemore 1996). It is noteworthy that premodern African states were willing to provide military support to overthrow tyrannical rulers who oppressed their subjects. The Akyem state in premodern Ghana was one such state that provided military support to the Akwapims to fight off the suzerainty of their tyrannical Akwamu overlords (Kwamena-Poh 1973). The consensus on the exceptions to humanitarian intervention runs through the course of history. Writing in 1950, Hersch Lauterpacht suggested that “in cases where a state maltreats its subjects in a manner that shocks the conscience of mankind,” humanitarian intervention is permissible (1950, p. 32). Citing Lassa Oppenheim, J. N. Moore also affirmed this position by positing “customary international law recognized a right to use the armed forces in the territory of another state both for humanitarian intervention and for the protection of nationals” (1969, p. 261). During this period, there was thus a general recognition of the limits to sovereignty and a tacit admittance that when citizens were subjected to mass atrocity crimes by their governments, they had a right to be defended by other states. In the opinion of Richard Lillich, humanitarian intervention “appears to have been so clearly established under customary international law that only its limits and not its existence is subject to debate” (1969, p. 210). The permissibility of humanitarian intervention under customary international law was limited to a strictly defined context, namely situations of gross human rights violations perpetrated by the state against its citizens. Two main and interlinked conditions were therefore required under customary law to justify humanitarian intervention: first, there had to be human rights violations by a state against its people; and second, the degree of atrocity had to be such that it shocked the conscience of the world. This customary law position on humanitarian intervention has however been muted by the conditional prohibition on the use of force by the UN Charter, and a number of the critics of the humanitarian intervention norm tend to

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cite the customary law position on non-interference without consideration for its circumscribed position on protection. Although the focus of this chapter is not to discuss humanitarian intervention in customary law, it is useful to state, albeit briefly, that the two most cited cases used against humanitarian intervention, the Corfu Channel and Nicaragua cases, deviate from the permissible parameters of humanitarian intervention provided within customary law. Notwithstanding the customary law parameters provided, there are still gray areas on the issue of humanitarian intervention that cannot be ignored. For instance, given that the parameters do not allow for preventive action, what is the objective criterion for determining the point at which intervention may be undertaken and who makes that determination? There are no easy answers, and efforts have been made by various scholars and statespersons to shape the norm in order to balance the demands of sovereignty, non-interference, and territorial integrity on one hand, and the need for protection on the other. Africa’s Contributions to the Conceptualization of the Humanitarian Intervention Norm The North African Catholic theologian Augustine of Hippo was among the first to address the question of intervention, in 418 A.D. Augustine’s focus was on providing Catholic rulers with guidance on the use of force in their interactions with rulers of other states. In his Just War theory, Augustine advocates three main considerations that should guide the use of force by outsiders in countries other than their own, for purposes other than selfdefense. These are: • That the use of armed force should be sanctioned by a legitimate authority. • That the use of force should aim to correct a wrong committed, and be used as the absolute last resort. • That the decision to use force should be limited to righting the wrong caused, and not in furtherance of personal aggrandizement/interest (von Elbe 1939).

While Augustine’s work focused on the rightness or wrongness of war, it was influential in conceptualizing the notion of humanitarian intervention and setting the parameters within which external intervention for the protection of non-nationals was permissible. First, it broke with the idea of absolute sovereignty and established that in the face of wrongdoing by a governing body, the use of force by another in defense of persons who are not its citizens could be legitimate. Second, although focused essentially on

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proselytizing, which provides the justification of the use of force largely in relation to undertaking religious wars rather than the defense of human rights in general, it serves as the bedrock of the concept of humanitarian intervention on which later philosophers and legal experts further developed the notion of limited sovereignty in the face of atrocities. Research for this chapter did not unearth any other African contributions in the pre-medieval and classical periods. However, since about the mid–twentieth century African statespersons, collective security organizations, and scholars have been involved in conceptualizing, developing, and convincing a critical mass of states to accept and embrace the norm of humanitarian intervention. Especially in the post–Cold War period, African international civil servants and scholars such as Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Egypt), Francis Deng (Sudan), and Kofi Annan (Ghana), to mention a few, have played critical roles in convincing the international community of the limits of sovereignty, and in the case of Deng and Annan, they have also encouraged the utilization (and thereby further legitimation) of the humanitarian intervention norm. Using their agency as leaders in the global multilateral institution the United Nations, these Africans promoted innovative thinking on the issues of sovereignty, non-interference, and the need to protect populations from grave human rights violations by their own governments. In the trajectory of the development of the norm, Annan stands out for raising the difficult questions associated with the humanitarian intervention norm and encouraging the international community to explore plausible options for engagement. On June 17, 1992, almost a year after the beginning of armed conflict in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Secretary-General of the United Nations at the time, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, presented his seminal work, An Agenda for Peace, to world leaders. In his submission, Boutros-Ghali stated that “the revolution in communications has united the world in awareness, aspiration and in greater solidarity against injustice.” He continued by reminding world leaders that while the sovereignty and integrity of states were fundamental considerations in international relations, “the time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty, however, has passed; its theory was never matched by reality” (Boutros-Ghali 1992). Even though An Agenda for Peace does not make explicit reference to the notion of humanitarian intervention, it makes two significant contributions to the discourse on the twin principles of sovereignty and non-interference. One, it draws attention to the fact that the world was united against injustice; and two, it punctured the notion of ironclad sovereignty that had dominated interstate relations in that period. Coming on the heels of the Cold War, during which sovereignty was argued to be a non-negotiable concept and issues of injustice were considered to be within the internal affairs of states, Boutros-Ghali’s statements on the movement against injustice and the new notion of sovereignty were significant.

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Two years after Boutros-Ghali’s seminal work, the world watched as Rwanda plunged into a genocide that led to the death of an estimated 800,000 people in about a hundred days (Carlsson, Sung-Joo, and Kupolati 1999). Notwithstanding Africa’s demonstration of support for humanitarian intervention four years earlier in Liberia, it failed to intervene in Rwanda to prevent the genocide. According to an independent inquiry into the actions of the United Nations during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, lack of resources and political will were the main reasons for the UN’s failure to act in preventing the Rwandan genocide (Carlsson, Sung-Joo, and Kupolati 1999). Writing a year after the genocide, Sudanese scholar Francis Deng again raised the issue of sovereignty and intervention. In his work “Frontiers of Sovereignty,” Deng (1995) reiterated the fallacy of the concept of absolute sovereignty and called for a rethink of the notion of sovereignty in the face of atrocities. According to him, from a normative standpoint, the needed response to the dilemmas of sovereignty is to reaffirm the responsibility of sovereignty and accountability to the domestic and external constituencies as interconnected principles of the international order. The conceptual framework of such a normative code would be to assume that in order to be legitimate, sovereignty must demonstrate responsibility, which means at the very least ensuring a certain level of protection for, and providing the basic needs of the people; that most governments under normal circumstances do in fact discharge that responsibility; that when they cannot do so for reasons of incapacity, they will call upon the international community to assist; but that under those exceptional circumstances when governments fail to discharge this responsibility and masses of its citizens become threatened with severe suffering and maybe death as a result, the international community will in one way or another step in to provide the needed remedy. (35)

In the wake of the mass atrocities that characterized armed conflicts in parts of Eastern Europe and Africa and the uneven response of the international community to the crises, Kofi Annan reintroduced the question of sovereignty and intervention into the agenda of the UN in 1999, when he focused his report to the fifty-fourth session of the General Assembly on human security and interventions. At the time of his report, the international community was still divided on the course of action to take on the almost eight-year-old armed conflict in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, which had been characterized by massive human rights violations. Despite the horrendous atrocities perpetrated against civilians in the conflict, two of the five permanent members of the Security Council—Russia and China— threatened to veto any resolution authorizing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to intervene in the escalating crisis in Kosovo. Annan, who was familiar with the cost of insufficient or ineffective action, saw an opportunity to encourage a discourse on the difficult issue of

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humanitarian intervention. About five years earlier, as head of the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), he had witnessed how the UN’s failure to act in a timely and efficient manner had made it possible for the Rwandan genocide to occur even with the presence of a UN peacekeeping mission. Annan’s later apology—both in his personal capacity as head of the DPKO and on behalf of the UN as a whole—over the failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide sheds light on his determination, as Secretary-General, to find a solution to the vexed question of addressing the Charter provisions on sovereignty and protection of suffering populations. Utilizing the opportunity provided through the Secretary-General’s report to the General Assembly, he encouraged innovative thinking on ways to provide much needed protection in exceptional cases, for citizens suffering human rights violations at the hands of their governments, without generally undermining the Charter provisions on sovereignty and non-interference. Annan buttressed the earlier points on the changed nature of sovereignty made by Boutros-Ghali and Deng by stating that “the state is now widely understood to be the servant of its people, and not vice versa” and reiterated the responsibility of the United Nations to ensure that “massive and systematic violations of human rights—wherever they may take place—should not be allowed to stand” (Annan 1999). His most significant contribution to the norm of humanitarian intervention was perhaps his effort to expand the scope of the discussion to include preemptive intervention and interventions without Security Council authorization. Using the example of Rwanda, Annan asked rhetorically whether intervention by a coalition of states to prevent the genocide would have been considered wrong because of the lack of Security Council authorization (Annan 1999). A year later, in his Millennium Report, Annan (2000, p. 48) again put forth the issue of humanitarian intervention, asking: “If humanitarian intervention is indeed an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica—to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?” Annan’s question reignited the discourse on the delicate balance required in guaranteeing the sovereignty of nations and the protection of human rights; a discourse that has remained on the international agenda to this day. Annan used his leadership of the UN to make significant contributions to the emergence of the humanitarian intervention norm through a number of reports that framed humanitarian intervention as part of the continuum of collective security and a responsibility to protect rather than interference in the domestic affairs of states.2 In response to the concerns Annan raised, and with his encouragement (Coleman 2013, pp. 159–160), the Canadian government established the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty to assist in identifying ways for reengineering the concept of sovereignty to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. The major outcome

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of this enterprise was the development of the normative principle of the responsibility to protect, which reformulates the humanitarian intervention norm by shifting its focus “from the interests of intervening states toward the lifesaving needs of victims” (Popovski 2011). Annan upheld his commitment to receive the completed report, and his efforts encouraged the consideration of the international community, which led to a reconfiguration of the concept of non-intervention. Following the publication of the report, he worked toward addressing the concerns of the different audiences and eventually succeeded in creating compromises on the scope of the norm of humanitarian interventions that led to winning over a number of the skeptics of the norm3 and facilitated its emergence.4 In short, even though the idea of humanitarian intervention predated their contributions, Augustine, Boutros-Ghali, Deng, and Annan were instrumental in conceptualizing the contemporary norm of humanitarian intervention, enhancing its relevance in contemporary international relations discourse, and encouraging its utilization by appropriate actors. They were—by definition—not the only actors engaged in this global process, but they were pivotal both in the formulation and in the promotion of the norm. Africa’s Contribution to the Development of the Humanitarian Intervention Norm Through Practice Despite their initial resistance to the humanitarian intervention norm, African leaders were also among its early adopters, setting key precedents that ultimately shaped the global norm creation process. Africa’s colonial and immediate postcolonial experiences greatly influenced the conceptualization of sovereignty on the continent, contributing in no small way to the institutionalization of the principle of non-interference in its collective security mechanism, the Organization of African Unity (OAU).5 Staunchly opposed to interventions on the continent, African leaders institutionalized the triple principles of absolute sovereignty, respect for territorial integrity, and noninterference in the 1963 Charter of the OAU. Paradoxically, some of the fervent proponents of the non-interference principle, such as Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, were also proponents of sovereignty as responsibility. Africa’s tolerance for humanitarian intervention was first tested with the 1967 civil war in Nigeria. At the outset of the war, the principles of sovereignty, respect for territorial integrity, and non-interference were upheld by the OAU. However, as the conflict continued, divergent considerations began to emerge. Confronted with the massive loss of lives and property, Presidents Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire, Omar Bongo of Gabon, and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia announced support for the Biafran cause on humanitarian grounds. In a communiqué

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recognizing Biafra, Gabon stated among other things that “when one thinks that hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians—women, old men and children—are condemned in an absolutely illegal struggle to pay with their lives for the right of existence recognised to every human being, the Gabon people and Government could not without hypocrisy take refuge behind the principle of the so called no-interference in the internal affairs of another state” (Ijalaye 1971, p. 554). In a similar tone, Tanzania decried the indifference of the OAU and suggested that sovereignty and territorial integrity could not be used as shields for inaction in the face of human suffering. Recognizing the Republic of Biafra, Tanzania submitted that states are made to serve people; governments are established to protect the citizens of a state against external enemies and internal wrongdoers. It is on those grounds that people surrender their right and power of selfdefence to the government of the state in which they live. But when the machinery of the state, and the powers of the government, are turned against a whole group of society on grounds of racial, tribal, or religious prejudice, then the victims have the right to take back the powers they have surrendered, and defend themselves. (Mwakikagile 2007, p. 570)

Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire questioned the utility of the protests against apartheid South Africa and minority rule in southern Africa when the OAU was unwilling to criticize what he referred to as genocide in Nigeria. It is important to note that although most African countries sided with Nigeria’s federal government, several governments also expressed concern at the deteriorating conditions and succeeded in obtaining Nigeria’s caveated consent to have the matter discussed by the Assembly of the OAU (Amate 1986). In the end, although there was no intervention to save dying Biafrans, and the secessionists were eventually defeated by the federal government of Nigeria, the concerns expressed on the deteriorating situation and the position of the countries that recognized Biafra provide a commentary that suggested a chipping away of the absolute notion of non-interference. Even though there was no unanimity on the notion of non-indifference, the positions taken by African leaders on the Biafran war revealed that there was no agreement on absolute sovereignty in the face of massive human rights violations. A second instance that buttressed the gradual chipping away of the ironclad sovereignty norm of the immediate post-independence period was the reaction of African leaders to Idi Amin’s treatment of Ugandans. Notwithstanding the avowed principle of non-interference, a number of African leaders verbally “interfered” and made scathing comments on Amin’s treatment of Ugandans. Citing concerns over Amin’s human rights record, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, and Botswana’s Seretse Khama objected to Amin’s assumption of the chairmanship of the OAU and boycotted

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the 1975 OAU summit, held in Kampala, Uganda. Tanzania complained of double-standards and that it was hypocritical for African states to condemn apartheid and racism and turn a blind eye to the violations of the human rights of the citizens of newly independent African states by their own government (Bizimana 1999; Kannyo 1981, p. 16). Although these objections did not lead to the use of force, and so may not qualify, strictly speaking, as humanitarian intervention as defined in this chapter, set against the background of Africa’s initial position on sovereignty and non-interference, they shed light on a new, more restrictive interpretation of sovereignty by some African leaders at the time. Tanzania did ultimately take military action in Uganda, making headlines again almost a decade after the Biafran crisis. First, Nyerere waded into what was otherwise an internal affair of Uganda when he openly condemned Idi Amin’s 1971 coup against Milton Obote and announced that he would not recognize the Amin government (Amate 1986). Subsequently, in response to Idi Amin’s annexation of the Kagera Salient (a territory of Tanzania) on October 9, 1978, Nyerere deployed troops to fight Uganda and retake this territory. This action was undoubtedly within Tanzania’s right of self-defense as provided for in the Charter of the United Nations. However, after the recapture, Nyerere decided that the intervention should be continued to protect Ugandan civilians who were at risk of Amin’s retaliation for having supported the Tanzanians (Acheson-Brown 2001). Thus, while the first part of Tanzania’s intervention was well within its right of self-defense, its decision to continue the fight to protect Ugandans at risk of abuse by their leader falls directly within the remit of humanitarian intervention. Tanzania’s intervention in Uganda prompted a keen debate among African decisionmakers on the legitimacy or otherwise of humanitarian interventions. Discussions at the 1979 meeting of the OAU in Monrovia, Liberia, revealed the deep divisions among the participating state leaders on the concept of sovereignty and the principle of non-interference. While the outgoing chairperson, General Nimeri of the Republic of Sudan, decried Tanzania’s actions in Uganda, the incoming chairperson, William Tolbert of Liberia, stated that “the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states has become an excuse for our not speaking out appropriately against inhuman actions” (Winfrey 1979, p. 32). Tolbert even proceeded to propose that there should be an explicit provision in the OAU Charter that entrenched human rights. At that meeting, Amin’s successor, Godfrey Binaisa, decried the former regime’s human rights record and called for an OAU resolution to condemn the severe human rights violations that were being perpetrated around that time by the governments of Equatorial Guinea and the Central African Republic. Although Ahmed Sekou Touré of Guinea opposed Binaisa’s proposal, the events at the meet-

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ing were further evidence of the cracks that had emerged in the previously ironclad notion of sovereignty (Winfrey 1979, p. 32). Upon his assumption of power, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni used his maiden speech to the OAU to condemn the indifference of most of the continent’s leaders to the atrocities perpetrated by Idi Amin against Ugandans. He argued that given the provisions of protection in the charters of both the OAU and the UN, it was untenable to employ select aspects of those same instruments to justify silence and inaction in the face of atrocities (Kuwali 2011; Tieku 2017). Museveni’s speech was a daring call for an interrogation of the dearly held principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and non-interference. In August 1990, African leaders put their rhetoric into practice in the West African country of Liberia. The wider international community’s failure to respond to the atrocities that characterized the armed conflict in Liberia led the Economic Community of West African States to intervene (Darkwa and Attuquayefio 2014). Despite the varied political considerations of member states on the intervention (Ero 1995), the official position communicated by ECOWAS to the Security Council was that intervention had occurred “to stop the senseless killing of innocent civilian nationals and foreigners” (United Nations 1990, p. 3). Notwithstanding its contravention of Charter principles in deploying without a direct UN Security Council mandate, the action by ECOWAS received no condemnation from the international community. Rather there were plaudits, and the UN legitimized the violation retroactively through the adoption of Resolution 788 on November 19, 1992, in which the UN Security Council commended ECOWAS for its role in Liberia and placed an arms embargo on Liberia to benefit its efforts. The loudest UN endorsement, however, was through the adoption of Security Council Resolution 866 on September 22, 1993, which established the United Nations Observer Mission in Liberia (UNOMIL), essentially riding on the back of the successes achieved by ECOWAS’s intervention. While the UN’s reaction to the ECOWAS intervention does not necessarily suggest a general consensus on the humanitarian intervention norm, it was a significant milestone in the development of global norms of humanitarian intervention because it demonstrated a tacit acknowledgment of the permissibility of humanitarian intervention under conditions of grave danger (Levitt 1998; Finnemore 1996). The discourse generated by ECOWAS’s intervention drew attention to the legal tensions between UN Charter provisions and the customary law provisions on humanitarian interventions. It also created a perceived need for greater clarity on the standards for intervention, especially in light of the UN’s provisions on the use of force. Six years after the ECOWAS intervention in Liberia, NATO, citing humanitarian reasons, intervened in Kosovo without a Security Council authorization. Although NATO’s efforts did not receive the kind

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of widespread consensus the ECOWAS intervention had earlier, Russian efforts to demand a halt to the intervention did not succeed. Out of the three African nonpermanent members on the Security Council in March 1999, only Namibia voted for the draft Russian resolution. Christopher Greenwood cites the ECOMOG intervention as one of two cases that “contain a substantial body of state practice in support of the existence of a right to intervention in an extreme case of humanitarian need” (2002, p. 168). Subsequent events confirmed that the paradigmatic shift on the anti– humanitarian intervention stance was gaining traction on the African continent. In November 1990, a number of African eminent persons and institutions6 met in Addis Ababa to brainstorm on options for addressing Africa’s security challenges. In its report, the meeting concluded among other things that “it is most essential that the OAU’s principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of a member state should not be misconstrued as indifference to human suffering” (Africa Leadership Forum 1990, p. 8). Following from this brainstorming meeting, African leaders and civil society converged in Kampala in 1991, for the first Forum on Security, Stability, Development, and Cooperation. Among its recommendations, the meeting called for the establishment in Africa of a Conference on Security, Stability, Development, and Cooperation for the provision of a comprehensive framework of security, among other objectives. The outcome document recommended the creation of a peacekeeping machinery to be deployed in situations when the security of the state is threatened. Although the focus of attention for this proposal was the state, the discussion clearly signaled a shift from the sacrosanct notion of sovereignty to a much more expansive idea. What is most significant here, however, is the call made at the forum for African leaders to consider ceding “some degree of sovereignty to the sub-regional or regional body involved” (Africa Leadership Forum 1990, p. 7) in peacekeeping operations or peacemaking activities. For a continent that had jealously guarded the triple principles of absolute sovereignty, territorial integrity, and non-interference, this call was rather bold. The real test of Africa’s stance on humanitarian intervention, however, was with the 1990 conflict in Rwanda that resulted in the 1994 genocide.7 The OAU was instrumental in the quest for a political solution to the conflict at the early stages and even deployed a 50-person military observer mission—the OAU Neutral Military Observer Group to Rwanda—from July 1992 to July 1993, expanding it to 150 persons in August 1993. This notwithstanding, African leaders were unable to translate their rhetoric of protection into concrete action even as the conflict escalated into a genocide. For the purposes of this chapter, the essence of the OAU’s efforts in Rwanda lies in the fact that although a number of factors, which are not the focus of this chapter, may have contributed to the failure to intervene, the blanket aversion to humanitarian intervention of its earlier years cannot be

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cited. Following the deployment of the Observer Mission to Rwanda, the OAU also deployed missions to Burundi and the Comoros in 1993 and 1997, respectively. Africa’s Contribution to the Development of the Humanitarian Intervention Norm Through Institutionalization African actors also shaped the global processes leading to an emerging humanitarian intervention norm by gradually institutionalizing such a norm on the African continent. In doing so, they demonstrated its increasing acceptance in the Global South and thus undermined claims by opponents of the global norm development effort that a humanitarian intervention norm would purely be an imposition by Western states. In 1993, African leaders established the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, and Resolution. Even though the focus of the mechanism is conflict prevention, it also includes provisions for limited civilian and military missions for conflict management (Organization of African Unity 1993). This was the first institutionalization of the shift from absolute non-indifference to collective conflict management, although it was by no means an official endorsement of humanitarian intervention. The rationale for recounting the experiences of the 1990s is that it provides the trajectory from absolute non-interference enshrined in the Charter of the OAU, to non-indifference and the right of intervention provided in the Constitutive Act of the African Union. West Africa’s regional body ECOWAS was the first regional security arrangement to document its position on intervention. Three main provisions in the December 1999 ECOWAS Protocol Relating to the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution, Peacekeeping, and Security shed light on the position of ECOWAS on the notion of intervention. The preamble provides that the mechanism is, among other things, “to consolidate [the] achievements in the resolution of conflicts through” the ECOWAS Ceasefire Monitoring Group. Since the ECOMOG interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone are generally acknowledged as humanitarian interventions, it can be concluded with a degree of certainty that the mechanism is to, among other things, provide guidance on the region’s position on humanitarian intervention. In addition, one of the objectives of the Mechanism is to “constitute and deploy a civilian and military force to maintain or restore peace within the sub-region, whenever the need arises.” To this end, the protocol provides for a Mediation and Security Council that is mandated to “authorize all forms of intervention and decide particularly on the deployment of political and military missions” (Economic Community of West African States 1999).

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Continent-wide, the provisions of Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act and Article 4(j) of the Protocol on Peace and Security institutionalized the norm of humanitarian intervention. In July 2000, African leaders meeting in Lomé, Togo, adopted the Constitutive Act of the African Union, which provided for a radical shift from the principle of indifference to one of non-indifference. Article 4(h) provides the Union with the right to “intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.” Two years later, in 2002, African leaders once again accepted the inclusion of humanitarian intervention, in the protocol establishing the AU’s Peace and Security Council (PSC). The unanimous acceptance by all African states8 of Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act and Article 4(j) of the Protocol on Peace and Security automatically propelled the norm of humanitarian intervention into the category of international law in Africa, as member states generally acknowledged an obligation to intervene in certain critical situations. Redefining the Humanitarian Intervention Norm in Africa Through Meaning-in-Practice? Through its practical responses to the security challenges on the continent, Africa has significantly influenced discussion at the UN on the use of force in protection of victim populations of extreme human rights violations. Generally, international law evolves in response to the sociopolitical and technological changes of the entities it serves. Thus, given that accelerated mobility and advancement in technology means that large-scale human rights violations can be committed within a relatively short period, one is left wondering about the utility of the customary law parameters of humanitarian intervention in the contemporary world. In addressing the dilemma between the law and practical security needs, Africa’s agency is again evident. It is to Annan’s credit that the more expansive effort at protection, the normative principle of the responsibility to protect, which provides for prevention, reaction, and rebuilding, was developed. In response to his questions on how the world may respond to human rights violations perpetrated by states against their citizens, the Canadian government set up the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) to explore options for the consideration of the international community. Although the normative principle of the R2P is clearly different from the humanitarian intervention norm, it builds on the primary premise of humanitarian intervention, which states that populations subjected to gross human rights violations need external protection.

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But the evocation of the R2P norm for intervention in Libya and the ensuing consequences have significantly affected its appeal, especially in Africa. About a week after the outbreak of protests in Libya in 2011, the AU’s Peace and Security Council raised concerns about the violation of the rights of protesters and called on the government to “ensure the protection and security of the citizens” (African Union 2011c). Subsequently, the PSC, meeting at the level of heads of state and government, decided to establish an ad hoc high-level committee on Libya. Among its tasks, the committee was to engage with the parties to the crisis, assess the evolution of the situation, engender dialogue, and engage the AU’s partners for a coordinated approach to the timely resolution of the crisis (African Union 2011c). The PSC also stated unequivocal “rejection of any foreign military intervention, whatever its form,” and suggested that the situation in Libya called for “urgent African action.” The position adopted in the resolution suggested a qualification of intervention. Essentially, the message that was being communicated was that intervention to protect civilians from gross human rights violations on the continent was an African prerogative. Seven days after the AU’s second resolution, the Security Council voted for Resolution 1973, which, evoking the R2P principle, authorized the use of “all necessary measures to enforce compliance with the ban on flights.” Even though the three African countries that were on the Security Council at the time— Gabon, Nigeria, and South Africa—voted for Resolution 1973, African leaders were highly critical of the intervention. The decision in 2013 by leaders of the Great Lakes region to deploy a Neutral Intervention Force (NIF) comprising 3,500 troops into the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to protect civilians from human rights abuses perpetrated by armed groups is also noteworthy (United Nations 2013). Although the decision was based on a need to protect civilians, which in its narrow sense focuses on the practical measures of implementing the humanitarian law principle of distinction from the effects of war and armed conflict and as such does not qualify as humanitarian intervention, it is relevant for this chapter for two reasons. First, it extends the intervention argument to include situations where a state may not itself be a perpetrator but may be unable to protect its citizens from abuse by nonstate actors. Second, it points to a new direction in intervention, which are instances where a UN intervention may fall short of providing the needed protection for citizens from atrocious human rights violations (see also Chapter 10). In the case of the DRC, the UN was forced to act when it became evident that the leaders of the Great Lakes region were determined to deploy even without its support. Following a series of tripartite negotiations among the UN, the AU, and leaders of the Great Lakes region, the Security Council unanimously adopted the Secretary-General’s proposal for the deployment of an Intervention Brigade into eastern DRC (United

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Nations 2013). Thus, on March 28, 2013, the UN “converted” the plan of the leaders of the Great Lakes region by authorizing an Intervention Brigade within the UN mission in the DRC (through Resolution 2098) using the same SADC troops that would have been deployed under the NIF (Roux 2013). Africa’s role in pushing for the intervention brigade based on humanitarian considerations was acknowledged in the press statement that followed the passage of the resolution, which stated that the Council’s decision was an answer to “the call of Governments in Africa’s Great Lakes region” (United Nations 2013). The AU’s approach to handling the crisis in Burundi raises issues with its avowed position on intervention. In May 2015, in the face of the deteriorating situation and the human rights violations against civilians in the Burundian conflict, the Peace and Security Council instructed the AU Commission to make arrangements for a possible deployment to protect civilians and property (African Union 2015a). In December 2015, the PSC signaled its determination to intervene in the Burundian crisis. However, although specific aspects of the Constitutive Act, which provides justification for intervention, were evoked in the communiqué of December 17, 2015, mention of Article 4(h) of the AU Constitutive Act, which is the explicit provision on humanitarian intervention, was conspicuously absent. Rather, the proposed mandate of the African Prevention and Protection Mission in Burundi (known by its French acronym as MAPROBU) was to prevent the further deterioration of the security situation, create a conducive environment for the facilitation of dialogue, and protect civilians under imminent threat of danger (African Union 2015c). The most striking aspect of the communiqué, however, was the PSC’s request for Burundi’s consent. The defining character of humanitarian intervention is the absence of consent. Thus, the provision clearly demonstrated that MAPROBU was not intended as a humanitarian intervention mission. Notwithstanding the preparations, including the development of the operational concept for the deployment, MAPROBU was not deployed (African Union 2016b). This was due to the fact that the AU Assembly of Heads of State and Government considered the deployment to be premature. Drawing from the behavior of African leaders in the Libyan and Burundian crises, it is evident that while there are no contentions on the need to protect citizens against the atrocities of their governments, there is a determination to redefine the parameters of intervention. Using the responses to Libya and Burundi as case studies, it appears that there is a shift away from humanitarian intervention and toward the protection of civilians. However, it may be early days yet, and Libya and Burundi may just be the exceptions rather than the norm, in the AU’s implementation of its institutionalized norm of humanitarian intervention.

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Conclusion African scholars and statespersons have made significant—but insufficiently recognized—contributions to the conceptualization, development, and institutionalization of the contemporary humanitarian intervention norm. Their efforts were often geared toward addressing continental challenges, but given UN Charter–based prohibitions on intervention they could not do so through purely regional norm creation. Instead, African actors affected global humanitarian intervention norms through direct advocacy during the conceptualization of the norms as well as by setting historical precedents for the norm and shaping it through institutionalization on the African continent. Two caveats should be noted, however. First, there has often been dissension among African leaders on the humanitarian intervention norm. African scholars and statespersons have therefore had to negotiate both among themselves and, together with non-African actors favoring norm development, with others in the wider international community in order to promote acceptance of the humanitarian intervention norm. Second, the AU’s handling of the Libyan and Burundian crises also reveals a contestation of the implementation of the humanitarian intervention norm on the continent. While Africa has successfully charted a path that provides it with the opportunity to offer protection to citizens against the atrocities of their governments, and against violations committed by others when their governments are unwilling or unable to respond, fears of neocolonialism, imperialism, and regime change are still present. There thus appears to be a movement by African states to modify the notion of intervention by limiting the right to intervene to African states (see also Chapter 5). As the humanitarian intervention norm continues to evolve, therefore, African scholars and international civil servants have a responsibility to persuade African leaders to balance their anti-imperialism stance against the need to offer protection to populations in critical need as provided for in the continent’s collective security regime. Notes 1. In both the Corfu Channel case and the Nicaragua case, the International Court of Justice emphasized that the principle of non-intervention was clearly established in practice and was not negotiable (International Court of Justice 1986, p. 14). 2. The reports include High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change (convened by Annan), A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (United Nations 2009b), and Annan’s own response, In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security, and Human Rights for All (Anna 2005).

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3. Thanks at least partly to Annan’s engagement, almost all the reports focused on collective action and emphasized the need for interventions to occur primarily for the protection of persons in danger and to be undertaken under the authorization and control of the United Nations. It can be inferred that this emphasis was to address the fears of hegemonic interferences especially in the internal affairs of small, less powerful states. 4. The inclusion of paragraphs 138 and 139 in the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document, which was unanimously adopted by all members of the United Nations, indicated that most states recognized the need for caveated intervention for the protection of non-nationals. 5. The seeming unequivocal condemnation of interference in Africa was institutionalized in Article III(2) and (3) of the Charter of the Organization of African Unity. 6. The Africa Leadership Forum jointly with the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa convened the meeting. 7. See United Nations Security Council Resolutions 812 (1993) and 893 (1994). 8. South Sudan was not part of the states that unanimously accepted Article 4(h) because it had not been recognized as a state.

3 Restricting the Spread of Small Arms and Light Weapons John Mark Pokoo

The destructive impact of the misuse and abuse of small arms and light weapons has attracted international attention, particularly in the past three decades. There are an estimated 7 million such weapons circulating in sub-Saharan Africa. Worldwide, just 35 percent of these weapons are used by the military. The rest are in civilian hands, and the majority of these owners are unaccountable for the use of their weapons. The proliferation of SALW prolongs conflicts, facilitates violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law, and puts civilians at high risk of death or injury from weapons-related violence (Beerli 2013). SALW are responsible for up to 90 percent of direct civilian deaths in conflicts (Shah 2006). At the peak of the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s, then–UN SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan described SALW as West Africa’s weapons of mass destruction (Ebo 2003). The control of the illicit transfer of SALW is thus necessary for peace and stability, particularly in Africa. Governments, international organizations, and regional arrangements have long adopted norms aimed at restricting the illicit spread of small arms around the world. These norms initially focused on the state as the main actor in arms manufacture and use, enabling states to act in silos regarding the management of their arms stockpiles (League of Nations 1921). Under this set of norms, official arms were largely unmarked and official arms procurement and management arrangements were mostly unregulated and shrouded in secrecy. Since the 2000s, however, SALW control norms have shifted toward a more thorough approach that targets accountability of all arms produced, transferred, and used across the world (United Nations 2001). This latter set of norms is collaborative and cooperative in nature but also intricate,

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recognizing the role of nonstate actors in arms control but also relying on the principles of transparency and information sharing at national and international levels to control illicit transfers and mitigate the excessive use of force against civilians by state and nonstate actors. In that regard, a number of specific legal, policy, and operational instruments and reports were adopted by the United Nations and regional arrangements targeting divergent components of small arms and light weapons control. Key among these instruments are the United Nations Protocol Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Their Parts, and Components and Ammunition, Supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (often referred to as the UN Firearms Protocol; United Nations 2001); the United Nations Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons, Their Ammunition, and Other Related Material (United Nations 2001); the UN’s Report of the Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms (United Nations 1997a); and the ECOWAS Convention on Small Arms and Light Weapons, Their Ammunition, and Other Related Material (Economic Community of West African States 2006). Africa’s role in the creation, adoption, and spread of this set of SALW control norms remains underexplored. This chapter explores Africa’s contribution, focusing in particular on the significant role of Mali in the development of these norms in the 1990s. The chapter shows that Mali played the role of agenda setter, norm entrepreneur, and mobilizer of support for the creation of the current norms governing SALW. First, Mali’s invitation to the United Nations in 1993 to assist its government to control the destructive impact of small arms and light weapons singularly helped raise the SALW issue as a security concern that the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) had to address (Garcia 2009). This request set in motion the processes that eventually led to the adoption of the UN Firearms Protocol (United Nations 2001; Aning 2008; Garcia 2009). Second, Mali not only led the Africa Group within the UN system to play assertive roles during the negotiations of the firearms protocol, but it also sponsored important resolutions that significantly shaped the norms contained in the firearms protocol and subsequent legal and policy arrangements around the world. Finally, Mali galvanized its neighboring states in West Africa to develop similar normative standards for members of ECOWAS. These subregional mobilization efforts led to the adoption of the voluntary Moratorium on the Importation and Exportation of Small Arms and Light Weapons into West Africa (Economic Community of West African States 1998) and the binding ECOWAS Convention on Small Arms and Light Weapons, Their Ammunition, and Other Related Material (Economic Community of West African States 2006). The adoption of these measures by ECOWAS encouraged other African regional economic communities to develop similar norms and subregional instruments on small arms and

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light weapons. Thus, the chapter illustrates empirically the ways and means African actors such as states contribute to global norm creation processes. It reinforces the agenda-setting and entrepreneurial roles during global norm creation and diffusion processes that Katharina Coleman and Thomas Tieku describe as central to the first pathway in the introduction to this volume. The rest of this chapter is organized into four sections. The first defines small arms and light weapons. The second begins to explore the evolution of global and regional norms on SALW by indicating the status quo prior to the 1990s. The third section provides background to Mali’s involvement in setting the agenda for the current norms for international SALW control, highlighting some of the international arrangements emerging from the original efforts triggered by Mali that anchor the current SALW control norms. This section also shows how internal political and security concerns pushed Mali to prioritize a strategy that led to the creation of global and regional norms on SALW. The fourth section explores Mali’s role in the creation and diffusion of the SALW norms at the levels of the UN and ECOWAS. What Are Small Arms and Light Weapons? The most commonly used definitions for SALW in various parts of the world are based on the definition adopted by a 1997 UN panel of governmental experts tasked to consider the types of SALW used in conflicts being dealt with by the United Nations (United Nations 1997a). The panel’s report focused on weapons with a smaller caliber than those covered by the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms (e.g., mortars with a caliber of less than 100 millimeters), but excluded clubs, knives and machetes, and other offensive but nonlethal weapons captured by the report of the Expert Group Meeting on Gathering Information on and Analysis of Firearm Regulation Under the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) (1997). Broadly speaking, small arms are those weapons designed for personal use, and light weapons are those designed for use by several persons serving as a crew (United Nations 1997a). Examples of small arms thus include revolvers and selfloading pistols, rifles and carbines, sub-machine-guns and assault rifles, and their parts and associated cartridges or rounds. Examples of light weapons include heavy machine-guns, hand-held under-barrel and mounted grenade launchers, portable antiaircraft guns, portable antitank guns, recoilless rifles, portable launchers of antitank missile and rocket systems, ammunition and explosives, mortars with a caliber of less than 100 millimeters, antiaircraft and antitank systems, landmines, and associated shells and missiles. Despite these technical differences, the terms small arms, guns, firearms, and arms are used interchangeably in this chapter.

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Context of Mali’s Global Norm Advocacy: West African Regional Norms on SALW Until the 1990s Norms are “standards of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity” (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, p. 891). As Coleman and Tieku note in the introduction to this book, norms can be global or regional. They suggest that regional norms may diffuse beyond the region where they were developed, and this chapter presents some evidence to this effect. However, it also centrally highlights another dynamic: that a perceived inadequacy or lack of regional norms may lead particular regional states to become norm entrepreneurs not just within their region but also at the global level. This was the case with Mali’s engagement on the development of global SALW norms. The SALW control norms that prevailed in much of West Africa until the 1990s largely reflected the principles of the 1919 Convention for the Control of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition, and its Protocol, and the demands of the Cold War, which led to an emphasis on regime security. Critically, the way the 1919 convention was applied in West Africa exempted arms directly used by the state from legal regulation. This allowed states to trade in arms freely while restricting access to arms by individuals and other nonstate actors. To put things into perspective, the 1919 convention was adopted at a time when just twenty-three sovereign states existed on the planet, with several colonial territories. Most immediately, the convention sought to ensure that arms used in World War I did not end up in illicit hands. More generally, it sought to regulate the trade in arms among sovereign states. At the time, conventional interstate warfare was the order of the day, and there was no consideration of the possibilities of nonstate actors legitimately accessing arms. Consequently, international trade in arms was only recognized to occur between states with self-government. The convention was introduced into the legal system in much of Africa and fundamentally served the interests of colonial powers rather than colonized territories. In those colonial territories that lacked self-government, the convention prohibited manufacture and trade in arms. The colonial governments also insulated arms meant for the direct use of the state from legal control, and these principles were still maintained in the 1980s. As a result, and laced with the impact of the Cold War, the notion of international cooperation in fighting the transnational abuse and misuse of small arms escaped the conceptual underpinnings in the arms legislative framework of many African states. This focus on maintaining state sovereignty regarding small arms still persists: for example, the laws in many African states still classify sharing information about national arms with an agent of a foreign power as a treasonable offense.1 Additionally, as parts of the norms translated into the initial legislation on arms by the colonial governments in much of Africa, the colonial gov-

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ernments introduced tighter restrictions on access to arms by individual civilians. National-level arms acquisition and possession processes for individuals lacked transparency: applications to possess arms could be denied, and already authorized weapons issued to individuals could be confiscated by the state without explanation. However, these strict rules did not necessarily translate into effective control of SALW in colonial territories. The restrictive regime introduced by the 1919 convention and translated into national legislation only enabled the state to account for the few arms it issued to its citizens, while the wider society clandestinely patronized locally manufactured and imported weapons in opposition to the uncompromising posture of the state. Moreover, regulations for managing arms stockpiles were shallow and there were no weapon identification mechanisms that linked weapons to agencies or individuals to enable effective tracing when weapons were found at crime scenes or in zones of conflict. Postcolonial African states did not fundamentally change colonial-era legislations or challenge their underlying conceptual framework. The combined effect of the practice of the 1919 convention by postcolonial African states and the impact of the Cold War on state behavior on the continent was that weapons acquisition became a key part of the expression of the sovereign power (Klare 1996). The exclusionary regime that opened the arms trade only to sovereign states ensured that some countries deliberately imported quantities of arms beyond their needs and diverted some of the excess arms to support uprisings in countries whose governments they opposed. In this regard, some countries supported the liberation struggles in other parts of the continent with arms. This trend has continued to the contemporary era, especially in the 1980s and 1990s when some states supported nonstate actors to undermine political stability in foreign territories through arms diversion strategies (Garcia 2009). Thus the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) (2005) has stated that the transfer and circulation of small arms around the world is often shrouded in secrecy, and while anchored by noted criminals in the context of transnational organized crime, it still sometimes occurs with official complicity. Additionally, the United Nations Department of Public Information (UNDPI) (2006) has indicated that about 25 percent of the $4 billion annual global trade in small arms is illicit or not recorded as required by law. Emerging and Current Global Norms on SALW: An Overview The contemporary discussion of small arms norms is rooted in the concept of humanitarian arms control (Wisotzki 2009; Carpenter 2011; Garcia 2014).

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This concept seeks to balance national security needs with limiting the extent of human suffering from excessive use and misuse of arms. Among other things, the current international norms on SALW address wide-ranging issues on small arms including legislative reforms that create opportunities for constructive collaboration and coordination among states in managing the transfer of arms; effective arms stockpile management; penalties and administrative sanctions for offenses involving the misuse or unlawful possession of firearms; mitigation of, or exemption from, criminal responsibility, amnesty, or similar programs that individual member states of the UN determine to be appropriate, so as to encourage citizens to surrender illegal, unsafe or unwanted firearms; a licensing system, including the licensing of firearm businesses, to ensure that firearms are not distributed to persons convicted of serious crimes or other persons who are prohibited under the laws of the respective member states from owning or possessing firearms; an international arms procurement system that prevents arms from misuse to destabilize underprivileged regions and cause terror and genocide; a role for civil society actors in arms control that brings the wider society in cooperation with the state in responding to excessive SALW availability; an institutional mechanism that sustains national arms control responses and coordinates national actions with similar efforts in neighboring countries; and a recordkeeping system for firearms, including a system for the commercial distribution of firearms and a requirement for appropriate marking of firearms at manufacture and at import, to assist criminal investigations, discourage theft, and ensure that firearms are distributed only to persons who may lawfully own or possess firearms under the laws of the respective member states (Economic Community of West African States 2006; United Nations 1997a, 2001, 2005b). These norms are captured in several international and regional legal and policy documents, protocols, and treaties. At the global level they are enshrined in the 2001 United Nations Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects (UNPoA) (United Nations 2001; Carpenter 2011). The UNPoA has inspired the development of a number of regional and subregional legal and policy norms across the world. The ECOWAS Convention on Small Arms contextualizes the thrust of the UNPoA at the subregional level. The convention underpins ECOWAS postconflict arms management efforts, and therefore compliance is necessary toward peace and stability in West Africa. A key milestone in global negotiations on SALW was a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly during its discussions on SALW in 1996, requesting the Secretary-General to seek the views of member states on the effective collection of weapons illicitly transferred into war-affected countries (United Nations 1996). In particular, the resolution requested the Secretary-General to prepare a report on the types of SALW used in conflicts being dealt with by the UN; the nature and causes of the transfer of SALW,

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including their illicit production and trade; the ways and means to prevent and reduce the transfer of SALW and their role in conflicts; and what the UN could do to mitigate the misuse of SALW with particular attention to the complementary role of regional organizations. The United Nations Governmental Panel on Small Arms (see United Nations 1997a) was established as a result of this resolution. Additionally, several other governmental panels of experts on various aspects of arms control as well as policy documents and tools have been developed since 2001 to ensure effective management of arms and ammunition. These include the Group of Governmental Experts on Illicit Brokering in SALW (brokering comprises the intermediary services linking arms manufacturers or suppliers with end-users) (United Nations 2007a); the Expert Group on Stockpile Management (processes that ensure accountability, safety, and security of arms) (United Nations 2008a); and guideline for effectively managing ammunition (United Nations 2008a). Furthermore, the Open-Ended Working Group to Negotiate an International Instrument to Enable States to Identify and Trace, in a Timely and Reliable Manner, Illicit Small Arms and Light Weapons was established in 2003 (United Nations 2005a). The work of this working group culminated in the adoption of the International Instrument to Enable States to Identify and Trace, in a Timely and Reliable Manner, Illicit Small Arms and Light Weapons, also referred to as the International Tracing Instrument (ITI), which was adopted in 2005. For this working group, Africa was represented by Sylvester Rowe (Sierra Leone) and Ncumisa Notutela (South Africa), adding to the list of influential African actors in the norm negotiation process. South Africa hosted one of the regional sessions of the Governmental Panel of Experts on Small Arms and went on to produce one of the most comprehensive national firearms legislations in history. Sierra Leone is the only ECOWAS country to have completed a review of its national small arms legislation incorporating the provisions of new and emerging international regimes such as the 2006 ECOWAS Convention on SALW and the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty. Several other African countries also participated in the deliberations of the working group. Nigeria, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Algeria, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal, and the Nairobi Secretariat on SALW (an African civil society group based in Kenya) all provided input during the various sessions of the working group. The outcome of these sessions was the draft ITI, which was adopted in 2005. Mali’s Role in the Creation and Diffusion of SALW Norms at the UN and ECOWAS Levels While, as noted, other African states have also played important roles in global negotiations about SALW norms, the evolution of these norms is especially linked to the original contribution of Mali that, first, transformed

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SALW into a security issue for discussion by the UN Security Council and, second, promoted the adoption of the UN Firearms Protocol and the UNPoA. In Mali, the Tuareg rebellion that began in 1964 intensified in the 1990s as a combined effect of exclusion from power, draught, and harsh economic conditions prompted the Tuareg youth to join either refugee camps or rebel groups. The rebels were able to access arms from a multitude of sources including through looting of state armories as well as acquiring arms from Libya and the conflict in Chad and illicit arms supplies from Algeria’s Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC). In the midst of the rebellion, the government of Mali invited the assistance of the UN Secretary-General in 1993 to enable Mali to assess the security situation caused by the widespread availability of weapons in that country (Ebo 2003; Florquin and Pézard 2005). Indeed, the impact of the proliferation of small arms in Mali at the time was not just felt by civilians: partly because of the availability of weapons, the rebel groups were splitting and fighting among themselves (Florquin and Pézard 2005). The governmental request by Mali, together with other scholarly work elsewhere and also subregional civil society activism, significantly increased international awareness of the necessity of destroying postconflict weapons, and it transformed the problem of small arms into an international security issue (Aning 2008; Garcia 2009). This section explores the role of Mali both at the level of the UN and within ECOWAS toward the adoption of related SALW norms by sponsoring important resolutions, contributing to the work of specific UN panels, and galvanizing West African countries to develop their own subregional norms for small arms control within ECOWAS. Within the UN, Mali went on to sponsor a number of resolutions during the small arms control–related discussions at the General Assembly in the 1990s (United Nations 1997b, 2001). In addition to helping to maintain the SALW issue on the global agenda, these resolutions made several concrete contributions to the development of global SALW norms. One contribution was to draw attention to ongoing internal and subregional (i.e., West African) practices on arms control that the UN processes could benefit from. For example, the resolutions showcased the initiatives taken by Mali’s government and within the ECOWAS framework to facilitate the collection of SALW in the affected states of the Saharo-Sahelian subregion. They also recognized at the level of the UN the declaration of a Moratorium on the Importation, Exportation, and Manufacture of Small Arms and Light Weapons in West Africa, adopted by heads of state and government of ECOWAS at Abuja on October 31, 1998, and urged the international community to support the implementation of the moratorium. Furthermore, the resolutions recognized the strategic decision of the government of Mali to help curb the flow of small arms into Mali and the Saharo-Sahelian subregion by supervising the destruction of thousands of small arms at a “Flame

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of Peace” ceremony in Timbuktu on March 27, 1996. These weapons had been handed over by ex-combatants of the armed movements of northern Mali, and they were burned to mark a return to peaceful coexistence in Mali (United Nations 1997b, 1999b). That activity was also significant in showing that retrieved weapons in a society in crisis must be destroyed publicly to inspire confidence among belligerent actors. Additionally, the resolutions proposed the setting up of national commissions against the proliferation of small arms in the affected states, and they invited the international community to support, as far as possible, the smooth functioning of the national commissions where they had been established. These commissions have become synonymous with national institutional frameworks for coordinating national responses to SALW within Africa and beyond. In West Africa, the national commissions for small arms are legally created with cross-sectional representation (including civil society actors) to coordinate national efforts at SALW control and advise government on its commitments to the ECOWAS Convention on SALW. The commissions work closely with the Small Arms Division at the ECOWAS Commission and together constitute a useful transnational SALW control architecture that brings aboard state and nonstate actors in common pursuit of SALW control objectives. In 2001, Mali sponsored another resolution at the General Assembly (United Nations 2001) that recognized the complementary role of the African Union, which had made a declaration on small arms at its Ministerial Conference on Security, Stability, Development, and Cooperation in Africa in Abuja on May 8–9, 2000. The resolution requested the UN to set up a Regional Center for Peace and Disarmament in Africa to work closely with the AU. The regional center was subsequently established; it is based in Lomé, the capital city of Togo. It provides strategic and policy-level technical assistance to African governments on arms control. Additionally, the resolution encouraged the involvement of civil society organizations and associations to support national committees to combat the illicit traffic in small arms and also to participate in the implementation of the then ECOWAS moratorium on the importation, exportation, and manufacture of small arms and light weapons in West Africa. Indeed this initiative by Mali formalized the unfolding role of subregional civil society actors in small arms control in West Africa. Membership of the various national commissions for small arms is now inclusive of civil society representatives and also women’s groups, especially the national network members of the West Africa Action Network on Small Arms (WAANSA), which include community-based organizations, religious bodies, and other conflict prevention nongovernmental organizations. Furthermore, the resolution highlighted ministerial-level initiatives within ECOWAS and in cooperation with the UN to set up the Programme for Coordination and Assistance for Security and Development

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(PCASED), which was to provide technical assistance to ECOWAS member states to implement the aforementioned moratorium. While playing its role at the UN level in the late 1990s, Mali was also a key actor in regional processes on SALW. Then–president of Mali, Alpha Oumar Konare, initiated a negotiation process within ECOWAS’s institutional framework for a freeze on the import, export, and manufacture of SALW in West Africa. However, largely because of the clandestine support provided by some regional governments to the warring factions in Liberia and Sierra Leone, Konare’s singular efforts were met with mixed reactions in the subregion (Aning 2008). Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal (incidentally, key supporters of the ECOWAS peacekeeping monitoring group in Liberia) were in support of Mali’s initiative, but other states, probably linked to clandestine support to the armed factions in Liberia and Sierra Leone, displayed indifference to or ignorance of the anticipated moratorium (Aning 2008). For example, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Guinea became part of a network of illegal small arms trafficking routes, exchanging arms for diamond, rubber, and timber for more than a decade (Garcia 2009). Significantly, the government of Guinea allegedly imported mortar rounds and ammunition from Iran and reexported them to Liberia for one of the warring factions, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), in 2003. The Malian diplomatic efforts finally bore fruit on November 1, 1998, when the subregional Moratorium on the Importation, Exportation, and Manufacture of Light Weapons in ECOWAS member states took effect for a renewable period of three years. The moratorium, however, emerged as a soft law: it was legally nonbinding on state parties and it had no provisions for sanctions. Nevertheless, it represented a useful precedent within the African continent as the first attempt by a subregional arrangement such as ECOWAS to impose such a measure. Furthermore, the moratorium was reinforced with a code of conduct in 1999 that introduced a number of checks and operational standards of arms control in the subregion. For example, the code of conduct introduced an “exemption certificate” process that required of member states to submit their arms procurement documentation to the ECOWAS Secretariat for an assessment of the likelihood of such arms being used to destabilize the subregion before a certificate was issued to the member state to proceed to procure such arms. The code of conduct also enjoined member states to establish national small arms commissions to coordinate national responses to arms control, and it permitted the creation of structures within the ECOWAS Commission to support respective national efforts. Annexed to the code of conduct was a list of weapons categories that were covered by the moratorium and also those permitted for individuals within ECOWAS member states to possess for nonmilitary purposes. Also in the code of conduct, the national commissions were to process individual applications to possess weapons and notify the ECOWAS president. Significantly,

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the moratorium succeeded in galvanizing the AU to follow suit by adopting the Bamako Declaration on small arms for the entire continent in 2000 in Mali. The subsequent SALW conventions of the other regional economic communities of the AU (apart from the Southern African Development Community, which benefited directly from the South African experience) were modeled on the ECOWAS Convention on SALW. The moratorium and the code of conduct directly provided a framework for controlled importation of arms into countries in the subregion and also for the establishment of technical national focal agencies, now known as the National Commissions for Small Arms and Light Weapons, in the fifteen ECOWAS countries. The national commissions are set up as umbrella national agencies to spearhead a collaborative response to the problem of SALW. The commissions are also mandated to report on the implementation of the moratorium (replaced by the ECOWAS Convention on Small Arms in 2006) and other related international agreements to which a member state is a party. Furthermore, ECOWAS continues to use personnel of the national commissions in the member states, many of whom have received Japan-supported tailor-made capacity development training in small arms control at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra, Ghana, to develop a network of governmental technical personnel that it uses to advance its proposals during the negotiation of related agreements at the UN. The structures of the commissions also continue to serve as the rallying framework within which ECOWAS sharpens its voice toward regional and international engagements on SALW. For example, ECOWAS now organizes separate governmental and independent meetings ahead of major armsrelated international conferences to develop common positions. Examples include the negotiations relating to the International Tracing Instrument, second and third reviews of the UN Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in SALW in All Its Aspects, and the negotiations leading to the adoption of the Arms Trade Treaty. In the latter case, one of the key objectives for ECOWAS was to ensure that it becomes mandatory for arms manufacturers and suppliers to verify the procurement documentation of its member states to strengthen its exemption certificate regime. The ECOWAS pursuit also converged with the expectation of the arms-producer countries to dissociate themselves from the supply of arms to African states that end up in fueling violent conflicts. The next step in cementing regional SALW norms (and establishing West Africa’s international reputation as a global norm leader on SALW) occurred when the heads of state of ECOWAS transformed the moratorium into a binding convention on June 14, 2006. The ECOWAS Convention on Small Arms and Light Weapons, Their Ammunition, and Other Related Material (also referred to as the ECOWAS Convention on Small Arms) seeks to advance the gains of the moratorium by making structural provisions at both the national

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and subregional levels to facilitate international exchange of information among member states while responding to nationally set targets within national plan of action processes. The convention required a minimum of nine national ratifications to become operational. ECOWAS announced that the ninth ratification (including Mali) was achieved on September 29, 2009. The convention invites member states to take action in a range of strategic and operational areas to position the fifteen member states to contribute to an effective subregional control of small arms, light weapons, and related parts and ammunition. The national intervention areas mentioned earlier relate to transfers, manufacture, operational mechanisms, institutional arrangements, and sanctions. Conclusion

By skillfully utilizing the goodwill garnered from its singular request for assistance from the UN, Mali played a key role in placing small arms on the global agenda and prompting states to negotiate a body of norms that continues to guide arms control initiatives. It is important to recognize the contribution of strong and effective institutions in such multilateral engagements. The UN is the foremost global multilateral forum for norm creation regarding the spread of small arms, and ECOWAS has proven to be the equivalent of the UN in West Africa. That said, while the progress of the 2006 ECOWAS Convention on Small Arms from the adoption stage to the ratification and implementation stage marks a show of increased political or governmental commitment, the critical test of the convention is whether the conduct of its signatories conforms to its provisions. In the terminology introduced by Coleman and Tieku in the beginning of this book, West African states—including Mali—may also shape the meaning-in-practice of regional and potentially global SALW norms. Evaluating this process lies outside the scope of this chapter, but it is increasingly crucial for the regional small arms policymaking community. Given the historical intertwining of regional and global norm creation efforts, it also has potential implications for the development of global SALW norms—which in turn illustrates the potential for overlap among the pathways for African actors to influence international norms. Notes

1. For example, Article 3 of Ghana’s State Secrets Act (Act 301 of 1961) considers the sharing of information about Ghana’s arms with an agent of a foreign power as a treasonable offense.

4 Eliminating Conflict Diamonds and Other Conflict-Prone Minerals J. Andrew Grant

The scholarly literature on international norms—covering aspects of the “norm life cycle” from the emergence of norms to their “cascade” to their internalization (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998)—is relatively robust and has been applied to myriad human security issues, including the linkages between natural resources and violent conflict. Since the 1990s, scholars have reflected on the ways in which natural resources influence the onset and duration of civil wars. This scholarly work has examined a wide range of potentially negative impacts of natural resource availability and highlighted what is referred to as the “resource curse” (Auty 1993; Le Billon 2001; Ross 2004; Shaxson 2005; Collier 2008). Research on the nexus between natural resources and civil war later expanded to include studies of the severity of civil warfare as well as regional security, regional stability, and subsequent challenges of peacebuilding and postconflict reconstruction (Shaw, Söderbaum, Nyang’oro, and Grant 2003; Stevens and Dietsche 2008; Grant 2010; Obi 2010; contributors to Sowman and Wynberg 2014). The nexus between natural resources and civil war has challenged policymakers as well as academics. Its applicability to regions across the globe has led to discussions of how to develop or improve both natural resource– related policies at the national level and governance initiatives at the regional and global levels. These discussions are not merely technical debates about which outcomes particular policies are likely to produce, but also at least implicit—and often explicit—deliberations about how states and other actors should behave. In other words, debates about the promulgation of policies are also discussions about norms. This does not mean, however, that participating actors are purely normative: governance and peacebuilding mechanisms typically reflect not only the ideas but also the

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interests of participating private and public stakeholders (Alorse, Compaoré, and Grant 2015; Grant, Djomo, and Krause 2016). Despite the growth of scholarly interest in norms and their relevance to managing the potential connections between natural resources and violent conflict, relatively little attention has been allocated to understanding how African state and nonstate actors have helped establish or transform global norms in this area. This gap is surprising given that the processes of creating, implementing, and adapting many of these norms not only profoundly affect but also prominently include African actors. African state and nonstate actors have firsthand experience of the need for norms that mediate structures and events that impact negatively on human security. Rather than being passive norm recipients, these actors have not only participated in the creation of global norms but also resisted or adapted various global norms to suit particular domestic political interests, often through strategic alliances with other global actors, which I refer to here as “glocal” networks. By employing a rationalist approach to constructivism, this chapter illustrates how African countries—such as South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Angola, and Zimbabwe—have influenced constitutive norm dynamics within the Kimberley Process on conflict diamonds as leaders in the early phases of the norm’s creation. It also shows how African actors subsequently shaped the norm through glocalization, as the norm evolved with ramifications for local, national, and regional peace and security considerations. This chapter, which is based on analyses of primary sources ranging from Kimberley Process documents to participant observations to in-person interviews, is structured as follows. It begins with an overview of the theoretical and conceptual approaches to norms in the context of agential constructivism and localization/glocalization via glocal networks. Next it examines the dynamics of the “conflict-free diamond” norm in three related empirical cases within the Kimberley Process: (1) the coalescing and establishment of the norm from 2000 to 2002; (2) responses to changing the norm from 2005 and in conjunction with the Kimberley Process Working Group (KPWG) on Alluvial and Artisanal Production; and (3) the Zimbabwe “crisis.” The chapter emphasizes the mechanisms by which African actors have served as norm leaders as well as those employed in subsequent localization and adaptation through meaning-in-practice. With regard to the latter dynamic, the chapter also suggests that while African actors are vital members of glocal networks, glocalization is not always shaped by local actors alone. Rather, there are several kinds of local actors as well as national and global actors (e.g., states, civil society, and industry) that are involved in glocalization dynamics. The chapter also includes a discussion of the extent to which African state and nonstate actors have helped to establish, shape, and influence a more recent global governance regime—the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region’s Regional Certification Mechanism (ICGLR-RCM)1 and its “con-

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flict-free mineral” norm (Grant 2014). The chapter concludes with a summary of its main points and reflections on their significance. This chapter contributes to two of the edited volume’s main themes. Reflecting the first pathway, it provides insights into the leadership of African state and nonstate actors in norm creation. However, it also elucidates the third and fourth pathways by exploring the relationships between the influences of localization with the contestation of international norms and the attendant behaviors by these actors. Critically, this work thus also underscores that once a particular global governance regime is established, the outcome of further diplomacy cannot easily be classified according to discrete categories. Rather, the norm creation dynamics of the first pathway continue well after an international treaty or a global regulatory regime comes into effect, at the same time as the glocalization dynamics of the third and fourth pathways also come to the fore. Theoretical and Conceptual Approach This chapter subscribes to a rationalist variant of constructivism that can be described as “agential constructivism” (Grant 2018). Constructivist international relations scholars acknowledge the importance of norms and their impact on state and nonstate actor behavior. I place less weight on the various structural inequalities that often appear in other variants of constructivism. Structure is important, but it should not downgrade the agency of actors by holding them to their traditional positions in the international system. Whether owing to the legacy of colonialism or other structural constraints in the international system, actors from the Global South are often assumed to be norm-takers rather than norm-makers. “Structuralist constructivism” also restricts the possibility of stakeholder groups holding multiple positions on related issue areas. In contrast, agential constructivism recognizes that rational actors affect and shape the legal, political, and social environment in which they operate—including prevailing norms. It rejects the assumption of actors from the Global South as fully bound by structural constraints; hence, the analysis can give these actors overdue recognition as norm-makers, as emphasized under the first pathway as discussed in the introduction to this book. For instance, post-apartheid South Africa has been among the leading advocates seeking to establish the norm of “African solutions to African problems” and related norms of promoting the human security of vulnerable populations, reinforcing the rule of law, and ending violent interstate and intrastate disputes via multilateral negotiations (van der Westhuizen 1998; Black and Wilson 2004; Grant and Hamilton 2016). It also played an integral role, together with other state and nonstate African actors, in the

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establishment of the conflict-free diamond norm, which is a central focus of this chapter. In addition, however, agential constructivism also fits well with analyses concerned with how international norms develop and change over time. It thus permits the examination of the second norm development dynamic this chapter explores: the continued evolution and contestation of global norms through glocalization. This represents a variation of the third pathway as formulated in the introduction of this volume. The pathway notes the dynamic of localization, in which local actors reformulate aspects of a particular global norm based on local conditions, values, attitudes, and interests. My conception of “glocalized” norms, by contrast, emphasizes the dialectics and interactions between the “global” and the “local.” It envisions networks among global and local state and nonstate actors—including nongovernmental organizations and industry—as increasingly salient in shaping the dynamics of norm development and diffusion.2 Such glocal networks are not immune to extant power dynamics and hierarchies, which affect the agency of stakeholders within the network as well as attendant norm development (Grant, Djomo, and Krause 2016; Collins, Grant, and Ackah-Baidoo 2018). Moreover, while glocal networks may produce norms for the “common good,” they can also generate norms that benefit a narrow segment of society. As Robert Keohane (1990) cautioned, not all multilateral cooperation promotes the public good. This is an important corrective to the often prevailing discourse on the need for local-global collaborations to address governance challenges, which tends to ignore that such collaborations may aim to generate private goods such as funds for “purchasing” the support of elites, youths, and armed militias. The concepts of glocalization and glocal networks apply well to natural resource governance issues and attendant global governance initiatives. Sandra MacLean (2003) applied her conceptualization of networks of “plunder” (in contrast to networks for “peace”) to the role of natural resources, armed militias, and state actors in the DRC. Philippe Le Billon (2001) reminds readers that networks supporting plunder are a rational response by local actors in the Global South to the structural imperatives of neoliberal economic policies promulgated by actors in the Global North. He builds upon the work of Erik Swyngedouw (1997) to provide the contours of “glocal political economies” based on “local patterns of resource exploitation” that are connected to “global markets” (Le Billon 2001, p. 576, emphasis in original). Although somewhat structural in approach, these scholars emphasize the overlooked agency of social actors in the Global South. Incorporating David Capie’s observation (2008) that localization can be employed as a form of resistance to global norms, networks of plunder can be understood as a local—or glocal—resistance response to the norms underpinning neoliberal economic policies, albeit for personal rather than wider societal gains. Either through long-standing frustration or a clear-eyed view of reality,

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neoliberal norms of hard work and individual initiative are reformulated through the forces of glocalization—and impact glocal network density— when exerted within natural resource sectors in the Global South. To be sure, glocal networks are not the same as localization, nor is the subversion of global norms through glocal networks in itself a form of localization. However, as the editors to this volume aver in Chapter 1, “the concept of localization envisions local actors as actually modifying the content of international norms as they are adopted locally.” Although glocal networks can produce outcomes and indeed norms that are “generally good and desirable” (Acharya 2011b, p. 98), this modification of the facets of a particular norm can be less than desirable if it is for personal gain, such as profit or undue influence or if it has deleterious human security repercussions. Hence, as the forthcoming analyses of the various facets of the Kimberley Process seek to illustrate, glocalization can also produce outcomes that benefit elite groups rather than the wider community. Establishment of the Conflict-Free Diamond Norm The “conflict-free diamond” norm—or “anti-conflict diamond” norm—may be defined as “a standard of expected behavior whereby diamond traders, middlemen, exporters, importers, wholesalers, jewelry stores, and consumers do not purchase diamonds that are mined in war zones” (Grant 2018).3 As I describe in this section, the norm arose as part of a series of meetings that became known as the Kimberley Process (named after the South African mining town and location of the first gathering in May 2000), in which African governments, civil society, and business interests formed a crucial presence. Not all initial participants in the early Kimberley Process meetings sought to establish a conflict-free diamond norm, but it nevertheless coalesced rather quickly as a key—albeit contested—facet of a global regulatory framework (Grant, MacLean, and Shaw 2003; Grant and Taylor 2004; Paes 2005; Bieri 2010; Santiago 2014; Grant 2010, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2017). Conflict diamonds are overwhelmingly produced in Africa, though any region of the world that is home to rough diamonds that can be mined by rudimentary tools is susceptible to such systematic violence. During the 1990s, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the DRC were ravaged by civil wars. United Nations efforts to put a permanent end to these conflicts were largely ineffective. They tended to focus on humanitarian intervention and addressing political grievances and disputes, and they paid little attention to the role of the trade of minerals in providing financial support for the various armed groups. As the 1990s wore on, civil society groups sought to draw attention to the linkages between the minerals trade and the perpetuation of violence and threats to human security in these countries. Diamonds were the

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most notorious type of mineral involved in the fighting—especially in Angola and Sierra Leone—and they started to appear in media reports on the civil wars. In December 1998 and January 2000, Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada published scathing reports on how the trade of rough diamonds was fueling the civil wars in Angola and Sierra Leone, respectively. When South Africa—along with Namibia and Botswana—convened the first gathering of diamond-sector stakeholders in May 2000, there were no plans to initiate a conflict-free diamond norm. While South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana were keen to remove a source of funding from the aforementioned civil wars—which was laudable, but not particularly different from the position of the wider international community—it was the perceived threat to their own diamond sectors that was the larger impetus for action. Diamond jewelry has been marketed for several decades to represent positive emotions and values such as love and commitment. Images of amputations, child soldiers, and destruction not only were a jarring contrast to this narrative but also risked fomenting a consumer boycott on diamonds. At the turn of the millennium, Botswana, South Africa, and Namibia were, respectively, the first, third, and fifth largest diamond producers in the world (by value). Botswana had long enjoyed a lucrative fifty/fifty joint venture— Debswana—with De Beers, generating profits in the range of $1.5 billion to $2 billion annually (Hazleton 2002, p. 3). In 2000, rough diamonds represented four-fifths of all exports and one-third of the gross domestic product in Botswana. Diamond-sector profits, royalties, customs fees, and related investment inflows represented approximately 85 percent of all government revenues in 2000 (Hazleton 2002, p. 3). Though not as critical to the economy as in Botswana, the diamond sectors in Namibia and South Africa were also significant—and remain so. The Namibian government participates in a commercial joint venture with De Beers—Namdeb—which mined roughly 80 percent of the country’s diamonds at the beginning of the 2000s. In the early 2000s, diamonds represented 12 percent of all Namibian exports by value, and Namdeb was Namibia’s “largest taxpayer and foreign exchange generator, and its second largest employer” (Hazleton 2002, p. 10). In South Africa, diamonds accounted for 8 percent of all exports, though De Beers did not operate any joint ventures in the country. In 2000, De Beers generated 95 percent of South Africa’s large-scale diamond-mining production (Hazleton 2002, pp. 14–15). Even something less than a consumer boycott of diamonds would have deleterious impacts on the economies of these three countries of southern Africa—not to mention other African diamond producers—as well as on diamond firms such as De Beers. This economic imperative certainly helped focus the efforts of state and nonstate actors to address the conflict-diamond issue. If the May 2000 Kimberley meeting did not begin with a deliberate strategy to establish a conflict-free diamond norm, then how did the norm

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arise? The May 2000 meeting made no explicit mention of the need for such a norm but highlighted the urgency of addressing the conflict-diamond issue. Thereafter, the norm quickly crystallized as the participants began to devise a solution to the problem. During the June 2000 Luanda meetings in Angola, the focus coalesced on ways to make clear to the international community, diamond traders and dealers, and consumers (and, in effect, rebels and other nonstate armed groups) that the trade of conflict diamonds would not be tolerated. Moving beyond mere declarations against the trade of conflict diamonds, participants in Luanda began to devise ways of excluding such gems from the licit diamond trade by improving transparency and strengthening national regulatory controls pertaining to the exportation and importation of rough diamonds. Given the ambitious agenda and collaborative behavior among state and nonstate attendees, the Angola meeting was the initiation point—or “tipping point”4—for the conflict-free diamond norm. Namibia and other African countries, as well as non-African countries, hosted regular meetings through 2002 that led to the creation of a global regulatory framework aimed at stemming the trade of conflict diamonds. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, then South Africa’s minister of minerals and energy, was particularly influential during this period. Although not a norm entrepreneur per se, she did possess similar characteristics, including persistence and an admirable ability to navigate the governance networks ranging from African and transnational civil society groups to firms and commercial associations to the bureaucracies of international organizations to government ministers and ministries across Africa and the globe. In addition to ensuring that a South African, Abbey Chikane, served as chair for these meetings, through Mlambo-Ngcuka’s leadership South Africa also managed to insert conflict diamonds into the agenda of the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council, the Group of Eight (G8), and the World Trade Organization (Smillie 2010). Mlambo-Ngcuka’s success in persuading these organizations to engage the conflict-diamond issue was partly due to her experience having worked in the NGO sector before being elected to the South African parliament in 1994 (Smillie 2010, p. 178), which helped her develop the requisite acumen to tap into civil society and related social networks as well as engage bureaucrats and technocrats. Mlambo-Ngcuka was also able to effectively communicate to these organizations how the Kimberley Process was addressing several crosscutting “debates about African development, underdevelopment, sanctions busting, resource exploitation, mercenaries, theft, murder, state collapse and war” (Smillie 2010, p. 192). In turn, these weighty international organizations lent their institutional clout to the Kimberley Process, and their declarations, resolutions, and other forms of support injected a welcome dose of legitimacy and visibility into the conflict-free diamond norm.

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Ultimately, the conflict-free diamond norm thus arose incidentally, but not in the traditional sense of the term as being an accompanying but minor facet of a particular outcome. Rather, while the conflict-free diamond norm was not directly envisaged in the initial meeting that launched the Kimberley Process, it emerged as a key means to address the meeting’s concerns. It transformed from being implicit to explicit, and it developed concomitantly from 2000 to 2002 as a major facet of a global regulatory framework that in 2003 would become known as the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS). Critically, the key actors in the process of creating this global norm were African states and nonstate actors, including both NGOs and industry representatives, working through a series of negotiations in Africa and eventually in global international organizations that also included nonAfrican actors. The case thus fully illustrates the first pathway of African influence on international norms. Countervailing Forces: Change and the Conflict-Free Diamond Norm Soon after becoming explicit in the KPCS framework, as well as in supporting resolutions from a range of intergovernmental organizations, the conflict-free diamond norm experienced pressure to expand its purview to include broader human rights and envision governments as well as rebel groups as potential human rights violators. This section examines these changes and challenges, highlighting two important findings. First, even norms that are created with significant input by African actors can become contested over time or by other African actors (the fourth pathway). Second, African actors are not passive recipients of norms even when they or other African actors helped create these norms, and glocalization dynamics (the third pathway) can—and do—impact these norms. As the introduction to this volume notes, the pathways to influence are analytically distinct, but not necessarily mutually exclusive. In 2005, the Civil Society Coalition of NGOs (African and nonAfrican) within the Kimberley Process sought to expand the definition of the conflict-free diamond norm to recognize cases where government forces—rather than rebels—perpetrated violence and violated human rights in diamond-producing areas. Examples of such violence included using force to extract informal taxes on output, and violent forced removal of illegal miners. There were also reports of peacekeepers trading diamonds with rebels or otherwise collaborating with rebels in diamond-mining areas, and of transnational terrorist networks engaging in the raw diamond trade. In short, reports of armed groups other than rebels benefiting from the proceeds of rough diamonds had emerged and gained traction. These reports

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were often difficult to verify, but they served as the impetus to expand or change the official definition of conflict diamonds to include those used by any type of armed group engaged in substantial human rights abuses. By contrast, the KPCS (2003, para. 1), which is central to the contours of the conflict-free diamond norm, defines conflict diamonds only as those “rough diamonds used by rebel movements or their allies to finance conflict aimed at undermining legitimate governments.” Broadening the official definition to include the possibility of government forces participating in the trade of conflict diamonds would open the passage “undermining legitimate governments” to interpretation. It would cast light on cases wherein personnel from national armed forces might employ violence to control and informally tax diamond output from a particular area as a way of supplementing meager government salaries or for personal enrichment. Another scenario, though very remote, could involve controlling the proceeds from diamond mining to fund a de facto fiefdom or launch a military coup. This challenge to the conflict-free diamond norm has become a key debate in Kimberley Process meetings, discussions, and workings, and African actors play a significant role in both advancing and hindering efforts to reshape the conflict-free diamond norm, effectively engaging in contestation (the fourth pathway) both to promote further norm creation and to maintain the normative status quo. The basis for this divergence among African actors may be understood via the concept of glocalization (my variant of the third pathway). The rationales for changing or retaining the current definition of conflict diamonds derive from the dynamics of glocal networks and glocal political economies on the ground in Africa. For example, both Sierra Leone’s government and the Sierra Leonean NGO Network Movement for Justice and Democracy (which is part of the Kimberley Process Civil Society Coalition) are inclined to support the internationally proposed expansion of the conflict-diamond definition because of their firsthand, local-level experience of the destructiveness of conflict diamonds. In contrast, Zimbabwe’s government has sought to block any expansion of the conflict-diamond norm because there is a real possibility of government troops returning to Zimbabwe’s diamond fields in Marange and violently imposing informal taxes to compensate for diminished government paychecks. Similarly, the African Diamond Producers Association, which is nominally an NGO but has links to both southern African governments and business interests, and has official Observer status within the Kimberley Process, would most likely lobby against any expansion of the conflict-diamond norm to safeguard its commercial interests both locally and globally. Institutionally, the Kimberley Process enhances the ability of African state (and, less formally, nonstate) Participants to promote or restrict norm changes through official communiqués, declarations, and decisions because it employs consensus-based rather than majority voting–based decisionmaking.

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This gives African countries a veto-like power equivalent to that of China, Brazil, or the United States. Moreover, by convention, the consensus-based decisionmaking is extended to Observers, such as the Civil Society Coalition (which comprises several African NGOs), the African Diamond Producers Association, and industry (most diamond firms operate in Africa) (Grant 2013b, pp. 326–327). The Civil Society Coalition has been the most vociferous stakeholder group within the Kimberley Process advocating an expansion of the definition of conflict diamonds to include terminology pertaining to human rights violations by both rebel and pro-government armed groups. It draws attention to not only deaths but also beatings, sexual assault, and other violent human rights abuses perpetuated in diamond-mining areas. Yet over the past dozen years, different approaches to include wording related to human rights in the annual Kimberley Process “final communiqué” have been blocked by African and non-African state Participants ranging from Zimbabwe and South Africa to China and Israel. Thus only indirect references to linkages between human rights and diamonds have occasionally (e.g., in 2005, 2010, and 2012) appeared in Kimberley Process final communiqués. In recent years, Zimbabwe’s delegation has often taken advantage of consensus decisionmaking to invoke what amounts to a veto in order to have the term “human rights” removed from Kimberley Process directives. Nevertheless, African and non-African advocates of including human rights terminology in the definition of conflict diamonds have persevered. The Kimberley Process Working Group on Alluvial and Artisanal Production (WGAAP) has been the venue most open to discussion of human rights concerns related to diamond mining. The WGAAP’s origins lie in discussions aimed at improving governance of artisanal and small-scale mining activities within the borders of many Kimberley Process member states, including Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Angola, and the DRC. Discussions on artisanal and small-scale mining arose during the October 2004 Kimberley Process plenary meetings in Gatineau, Canada, and led to the establishment of a small ad hoc subgroup that operated under the Working Group on Monitoring (WGM). Its membership was roughly half-African, including Angola, Sierra Leone, and the DRC. In 2005, the ad hoc subgroup attempted to collect and consolidate information on the challenges facing countries engaged in artisanal and small-scale mining and identify best practices for addressing such governance challenges. It delivered a preliminary report to all delegates during the November 2005 Kimberley Process plenary meetings in Moscow, Russia. The magnitude of the endeavor quickly became apparent to delegates, and discussions shifted to the need to establish a full-fledged working group focusing on issues of artisanal and small-scale mining. During the November 2006 Kimberley Process plenary meeting in Gaborone, Botswana, the WGAAP was formally established.

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Since 2006, transnational NGOs such as Partnership Africa Canada and Global Witness as well as African NGOs such as Green Advocates (Liberia), Network Movement for Justice and Development (Sierra Leone), Centre du Commerce International pour le Développement (Guinea), and Centre National d’Appui au Développement et à la Participation Populaire (DRC) have submitted information on governance challenges relating to safety and health concerns of artisanal miners to the WGAAP.5 This information, gathered via field work and glocal networks, tends to focus on the human security (e.g., development and economic) aspects of human rights. For their part, many member states are sympathetic to the human security concerns raised by civil society, as safety and health concerns place a burden on limited healthcare systems. Member states also wish to capture more revenues from the production of diamonds through artisanal and small-scale mining via formalization (miners paying permits) and exports via government channels (export taxes, levies, and fees). Kimberley Process participants are also well aware that the overwhelming majority of conflict diamonds have been extracted via artisanal and small-scale mining, since it requires only a modest level of skill and investment in tools and machinery—not to mention the comparable ease of smuggling the minerals supported by glocal economies. Moreover, conflict diamonds (based on the current definition) from artisanal and small-scale mining sources were mined in the 2000s in the DRC and Côte d’Ivoire, and most recently in the Central African Republic. Other members of the WGAAP, such as Sierra Leone and Angola (which served as chair of the working group from its inception to November 2016), have not forgotten the role that conflict diamonds played within their respective civil wars during the 1990s and early 2000s. Though progress has been slow, the WGAAP has thus included discussions of human rights as part of its meetings and teleconferences as well as in its reports to the chair of the Kimberley Process—an important executive position in which South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, the DRC, and Angola have all served. For example, the WGAAP report to the 2011 Kimberley Process intersessional meetings in the DRC mentions explicitly the importance of human rights in artisanal and small-scale mining of diamonds (Kimberley Process 2011, p. 11). In 2012, the World Diamond Council, an official Kimberley Process Observer that represents industry, also spoke about the need to include human rights within Kimberley Process terminology. While these were only small steps toward expanding the definition of conflict diamonds, their symbolism and momentum-generating potential should not be underestimated. Kimberley Process Participants and Observers have a reputation for obsessing over the wording—including the punctuation—of the paragraphs that comprise the annual final communiqués. One of the tasks of the Cyclical Kimberley Process Review, chaired by Botswana, was thus to examine the issue of expanding the conflict-diamond

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definition to include wording about other armed groups and human rights. However, consensus could not be reaching during the Kimberley Process plenary in Washington, D.C., in November 2012: During 2012 the [Cyclical Kimberley Process Review] discussed the subject of [Kimberley Process] reforms and the proposed changes to the definition of “conflict diamond,” among other proposals. The discussions were guided by the proposals regarding a revised definition of “conflict diamond.” After lengthy discussions, no consensus was reached on whether or not to change the definition. The Plenary reaffirmed the mandate of the [Cyclical Kimberley Process Review] to continue discussions and consultations on the subject of conflict diamond definition. (Kimberley Process 2012, para. 31; emphasis added)

The 2013 final communiqué of the Johannesburg Kimberley Process plenary, released after members reviewed all wording of all paragraphs, affirmed again that consensus could not be achieved on expanding the definition of conflict diamonds (Kimberley Process 2013, para. 33). The most sizable hindrance to changing the definition of conflict diamonds to include human rights considerations was the Zimbabwean delegation and its actions at the Kimberley Process, especially from 2009 to 2012. In turn, Zimbabwe’s behavior jeopardized not only the KPCS but also the conflict-free diamond norm. As earlier mentioned, some glocal networks can have deleterious effects—especially as regards natural resource sectors. Glocal political economies can be illicit and financially benefit nonstate actors, but they can also support human rights abuses as well as the personal enrichment of government personnel. The “Zimbabwe crisis” within the Kimberley Process illustrates this negative potential of glocalization. The fourth pathway informs our understanding of how norms are negotiated—and contested—after they are created. The Zimbabwe crisis reveals a case whereby African actors (Zimbabwe and its allies) have sought to restrict the expansion of the conflict-free diamond norm beyond its narrow initial mandate, thereby formally defending the normative status quo but arguably endangering even the original norm by undermining the KPCS.6 The case also highlights that African actors in global norm (re)negotiations should not be portrayed as a monolithic or unitary group. While Zimbabwe was among the first set of African countries to join the Kimberley Process, it kept a low profile and contributed very little to the governance of the organization. The former characteristic changed in June 2006, as the country experienced a “diamond rush” in the Marange region. Over the next two years, tens of thousands of artisanal and smallscale diamond miners would arrive in Marange, overwhelming the hamfisted efforts by the police to establish order in the region. The Zimbabwean military then responded with violent repression and various types of

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human rights abuses in Marange, accounts of which slowly began to circulate via NGO and media reports by the latter part of 2008. These diamonds, despite their provenance from miners subject to violence and human rights abuses, did not conform to the official definition of conflict diamonds, which—as earlier noted—only considers gems that finance anti-government armed groups to be conflict diamonds. Yet this distinction did not deter the Civil Society Coalition from pressing the Kimberley Process to sanction the Zimbabwean government in the wake of Operation Hakudzowki (“No Return”) and the deaths of more than 200 small-scale diggers and traders in Marange (Global Witness 2012; Human Rights Watch 2009b; Partnership Africa Canada 2009, 2010, 2012). Mozambique, which was not a member of the Kimberley Process, was a primary destination for most of these rough diamonds. Although the Zimbabwean military controlled the outflow of Marange’s artisanal and smallscale diamond production, the proceeds—worth millions of dollars per month—did not end up in government coffers (Partnership Africa Canada 2012, p. 1). Zimbabwe denied that human rights abuses were occurring in Marange and that artisanal and small-scale production from the region was being smuggled out of the country; “quiet diplomacy” and nudging from South Africa finally resulted in a 2009 Kimberley Process review mission to investigate. Members of the team uncovered government noncompliance with the regulatory components of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme as well as “evidence of [Zimbabwean] government involvement in human rights abuses” (Partnership Africa Canada 2010, p. 4). There was pressure in some Kimberley Process quarters to suspend Zimbabwe, but several southern African delegations resisted this course of action (Grant 2013a, 2013b). The consensus-based operation of the Kimberley Process meant that a compromise would have to be struck. The compromise centered around having a former Kimberley Process chair—Abbey Chikane from South Africa—function as a “special monitor” who would review how Zimbabwe mined and exported diamonds as well as conduct in-person visits to Marange’s diamond areas. As part of this special arrangement, Zimbabwe also pledged to stockpile Marange diamonds until the Kimberley Process deemed that the country had complied with the KPCS. Although the Zimbabwean government adhered to its commitment to stockpile official government production from Marange, human rights abuses and corruption persisted. Frustrated by Zimbabwe’s contravention of this key aspect of the special arrangement, the Civil Society Coalition boycotted the 2011 Kimberley Process plenary meetings held in Kinshasa. For its part, South Africa appeared to consign the Zimbabwe crisis and the special Kimberley Process arrangement to yet another “successful” episode of “quiet diplomacy” with its northeastern neighbor. After much wrangling behind the

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scenes, Zimbabwe was finally permitted to officially resume rough diamond exports after a Zimbabwean civil society Observer noted during the November 2012 Kimberley Process plenary in Washington, D.C., that human rights abuses had abated in Marange (Grant 2013a, p. 230, n. 22). To be clear, this outcome had nothing to do with broader human rights protections in mining areas. Hence, the Zimbabwe crisis was not resolved to Global Witness’s satisfaction, leading one of the founding civil society members to withdraw permanently from the Kimberley Process in 2012. The other African members of the Civil Society Coalition were not pleased; they remained in the Kimberley Process until the end of 2015.7 Although the credibility of the Kimberley Process suffered a severe blow as a result of the Zimbabwe crisis, the conflict-free diamond norm wobbled but was not extinguished. Norm Reproduction? The ICGLR Regional Certification Mechanism Despite the vulnerabilities of the conflict-free diamond norm, it did serve as inspiration for the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region’s Regional Certification Mechanism. The chapter now turns its attention to the ICGLR-RCM, as it sheds light on the extent to which the conflict-free diamond norm can help establish a conflict-free mineral norm, presenting another potential global norm creation effort (the first pathway).8 Yet it also highlights how one aspect of the ICGLR-RCM has started to exhibit the characteristics of glocalization wherein a modification of this norm is becoming less than desirable. Like the first Kimberley Process meeting, the ICGLR did not set out with a deliberate strategy to establish a conflict-free mineral norm. Rather, the ICGLR arose from the recognition that the status quo of norms governing how countries in central and eastern Africa interacted with one another in regional peace and security terms was no longer acceptable. For more than two decades, central and eastern Africa had been home to military coups, armed insurrections, and cross-border support of armed militias. From the late 1990s onward, the DRC witnessed millions of civilian deaths and the forced displacement of many of its citizens to makeshift settlements across the vast country as well as to refugee camps in neighboring states. In the early 2000s, several countries in the region, weary after years of persistent instability and violence, sought to address the sources of such conflict— which included minerals—in order to boost regional and national security. The African Union, the UN, and a loose association of stakeholders referred to as the Group of Friends (consisting of ten multilateral organizations and twenty-eight states with interests in the region) were early supporters of the ICGLR. This multilateral effort resulted in the promulgation of the

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Pact on Peace, Stability, and Development in the Great Lakes Region, which was initially signed by eleven African countries9 in December 2006. The pact is based on five main themes that reflect a wide range of international peace and security issues and their constituent norms, such as peacebuilding and postconflict reconstruction, good governance, human security and social issues, and economic development. One of the five themes is a set of ten protocols that aim to provide regional and national security for the signatories, and one of these protocols underlines the connection between conflict minerals and instability in the region—the Protocol Against the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources. One of the most pressing reasons for forming the ICGLR was the recognition that “lootable” natural resources—especially “conflict-prone” minerals such as diamonds, gold, coltan, tin, and tungsten— were funding armed insurgent groups, ranging from rebel groups to mutinous army battalions to armed militias supported by neighboring states,10 in central and eastern Africa. Signatories decided that the ICGLR should meet regularly to promote the implementation of the five themes and ten protocols, including the Protocol Against the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources. A secretariat for the forum was established in mid-2007 and allocated a staff complement of twenty-eight, which included two externally funded technical advisers (Bøås, Lotsberg, and Ndizeye 2009, p. 8). Based in Bujumbura, Burundi, the ICGLR Secretariat oversees a rather ambitious agenda related to several avenues of peace and security in the region. Funding and capacity are intertwined challenges for the now twelvemember ICGLR. Members often encounter difficulty meeting financial contributions to the ICGLR. Although donors have helped to bridge the funding gap—the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs provided the ICGLR with a vital initial operating grant of $300,000 that was administered by the UN Development Programme (Bøås, Lotsberg, and Ndizeye 2009, p. 2)—financial challenges remain. Similarly, the capacity to ensure implementation of various themes and protocols is limited. Civil society groups have provided some relief on this front, especially regarding the Protocol Against the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources. Since previous and ongoing peace agreements, ceasefires, and the presence of UN peacekeepers have provided only brief respites from violent conflict, the state governments in the region wanted to remove this crucial source of funding—which operated via glocal networks and glocal political economies—for the armed groups. The ICGLR sought to implement a mineral regulatory scheme that was similar to the KPCS treatment of conflict diamonds. Thus it invited Partnership Africa Canada, one of the founding civil society organizations of the Kimberley Process, to serve as an adviser during the development phase of the regulatory scheme (Partnership Africa Canada 2009, p. 14).11 From 2005 onward, Partnership Africa Canada served in this capacity, which has included efforts to track various minerals and address the logistical challenges

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of the scheme.12 Partnership Africa Canada played a significant role in the multistakeholder initiative by taking the lead in designing the certification scheme—known as the Regional Certification Mechanism—for gold, coltan, tin, and tungsten, which was endorsed by all ICGLR members in December 2010. The first RCM certificate was issued by Rwanda on November 5, 2013. By late 2016, several hundred RCM certificates had been issued.13 As Ambassador Liberata Mulamula, the ICGLR’s executive secretary noted, the RCM “is a home grown solution that involves actors from the private sector as well as states and civil society” (Blore and Smillie 2011, p. 5; emphasis added). The proposed conflict-free mineral norm sets a standard of behavior that mirrors the conflict-free diamond norm but has a larger scope in terms of its anchoring definition: it proscribes traders, middlemen and “tributors,” exporters, importers, mineral wholesalers and refiners, jewelry retailers, and consumers from purchasing gold, coltan, tin, and tungsten that are mined by armed groups regardless of the ultimate objectives of such groups and their standing in relation to a government. Although this norm was not explicit when the ICGLR was founded in December 2006, it did underpin the subsequent development of the RCM over the next four years. In comparison to the KPCS, references to the deleterious impact on human rights posed by conflict minerals are much more direct. According to the ICGLRRCM preamble: The illicit trade in tungsten, tin, tantalum and gold (hereafter referred to as designated minerals) is a matter of serious regional and international concern, which can be directly linked to the fueling of armed conflict and to the activities of armed groups engaged in illegal activity and/or serious human rights abuses . . . and/or serious human rights violations [that] can include both rebel movements aimed at undermining or overthrowing legitimate governments, and otherwise legal armed units from the army or police or other national force acting illegally by engaging in or profiting from the extraction, trade or transport of designated minerals, or else by engaging in serious abuses of the human rights of their fellow nationals engaged in the extraction, trade or transport of designated minerals. (International Conference on the Great Lakes Region n.d., p. 2; emphasis added)

Moreover, human rights abuses are defined in an explicit manner. Drawing upon the “Due Diligence Guide for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas,” of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the ICGLR-RCM targets the following serious human rights abuses: (i) “any forms of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”; (ii) “any forms of forced or compulsory labour, which means work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of penalty and for which said person has not offered himself voluntarily”; (iii) “the worst forms of child labour”; (iv) “other gross human rights violations and abuses such as widespread sexual

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violence”; and, (v) “war crimes or other serious violations of international humanitarian law, crimes against humanity or genocide.” (International Conference on the Great Lakes Region n.d., p. 4)

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Finally, the ICGLR-RCM infuses the norms associated with enhancing human security (a set of global norms) with the conflict-free mineral norm (a regional norm with global aspirations) insofar as its global governance framework explicitly sets out “to promote the mineral sector’s role in the peaceful economic and social development within the Member States of the Great Lakes Region by establishing common regional standards for transparency (both of mineral flows and of payments to government from the mineral industry), working conditions, environmental performance and community consultation” (International Conference on the Great Lakes Region n.d., p. 4). It would seem that the parties devising the ICGLR-RCM were able to introduce human rights throughout the definitions and clauses of the framework, obviating the need to do so later and face possible resistance. This is an example of glocal actors applying the “lessons learned” from the barriers experiences within the Kimberley Process concerning expanding the definition of conflict diamonds to include human rights—not to mention expanding the number of categories of actors in particular and scope in general. Another example of the glocalization of lessons learned—though with a different outcome—speaks to the tripartite relationship between governments, civil society, and industry within the Kimberley Process, along with the attendant benefits of having industry “buy-in” as part of a global governance framework and hence set of supporting norms. That is, as part of the efforts to promote wider diffusion and acceptance of the conflict-free mineral norm, the ICGLR’s civil society participants were quite open to finding ways to boost the participation of industry actors within the RCM. For example, in 2012, the Conflict-Free Smelter Program was launched by the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition–Global e-Sustainability Initiative (EICC-GeSI), a joint initiative between two nonprofit electronics trade industry associations based in the United States and Belgium, respectively. This governance initiative emphasizes the importance of being able to track the provenance of minerals. The program employs independent, third-party auditors to identify the source of conflict-prone minerals that pass through member smelters.14 In an effort to assist member smelters in their efforts to secure conflict-free minerals, the Conflict-Free Smelter Program recognizes minerals containing the ICGLR’s RCM certificates as coming from conflictfree sources. The regulatory aspects of the ICGLR in general and the RCM in particular have the additional benefit of directing—at least in theory—the full proceeds of natural resource extraction to government coffers (which is an incipient global norm in its own right).

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This initiative was initially greeted by much optimism and fanfare within the ICGLR and beyond, since it appeared to signal an increased global acceptance of the ICGLR’s proposed conflict-free mineral norm. However, over the past four years of its existence the EICC-GeSI has focused primarily on US and Belgian industry associations, with little engagement with African governments or civil society. Moreover, it has become a “one-stop shop” for industry actors to receive certification that their supply chains are free of conflict-prone minerals. If the EICC-GeSI were an inclusive entity that was providing extensive audits throughout central and eastern Africa, its proliferation would not be problematic. However, there are doubts regarding the extensiveness of audits, and the EICCGeSI has effectively shut out any other actors—including African ones— from providing alternative and hence competing services related to certification of conflict-prone minerals supply chains. In other words, the glocalization of the conflict-free mineral norm has not resulted in a full integration of African actors in certifying smelters within the wider regional and global regulatory efforts. Nevertheless, the conflict-free minerals norm is developing, and African actors have been intimately involved in its creation and, in all likelihood, will continue to participate in the negotiation phase as it moves from the regional to its intended global acceptance. Conclusion The primary norms examined in this chapter—conflict-free diamonds and conflict-free minerals—are infused with the intertwined constitutive norms of human rights and human security. Although the conflict-free diamond and conflict-free mineral cases illustrate how African actors can—and do— play a vital role in creating global norms (the first pathway), the fact that these norms also face challenges from other African actors via glocalization highlights that this process can shade into the third pathway (localization) and the fourth pathway (contestation). The challenges identified in this study (especially concerning Zimbabwe in the Kimberley Process) risk turning “African solutions to African problems” on its head: efforts to make further progress on providing public goods via expanded conflict-free norms—even if developed with substantial input from African actors—may meet “African hindrances to African solutions.” This is meant to extend the argument that African actors should be recognized as agents who go beyond the role of norm-takers. While it is clearly true that African actors can be norm-makers, it is also important to emphasize that initial norm-makers can go on to block or restrict the further evolution of the norm they helped create (the fourth pathway). Doing so has potentially deleterious knock-on effects for the norm in question, since, as depicted in the Kimberley Process

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case, these restrictions may well jeopardize other international actors’ commitment to the norm by making it appear static and unable to evolve in concert with on-the-ground conditions and realities. Within the Kimberley Process, this stagnation is most apparent in the inability to expand the definition of conflict-free diamonds to include broader human rights violations committed by pro-government as well as dissident armed groups. Yet, it is also apparent in the dynamics of the WGAAP, which has been quite effective at identifying the governance challenges facing its members and enumerating a series of best practices, but has achieved little progress on implementing reforms. It is possible, however, that Angola’s relinquishing of the chairperson position after eleven years of incumbency will bring in “new blood” of glocalization, reinvigorate the WGAAP, and allow for a deeper level of collaboration between African state and nonstate actors to promote the human security aspects of the conflict-free diamond norm. Like the Kimberley Process and the KPCS, the ICGLR and its RCM have made a great deal of progress in recent years. They have been integral to the establishment of a conflict-free mineral norm with regional origins but global aspirations. The ICGLR appears to have achieved the impossible through its founding—bringing together neighboring states that have a long legacy of supporting each other’s insurgent militia groups in a collaborative forum. However, effective governance of conflict-prone minerals in the region and beyond depends on deepening the cooperative relations between ICGLR member states and between regional and global actors. The violent reprisals between Uganda and the DRC over oil exploration and fishing rights in Lake Albert since the mid-2010s suggest that ICGLR member states have not let the past go completely. Yet the ICGLR’s technical personnel, who comprise nationals from most ICGLR countries, do not let these disputes hinder their work on the RCM. Nevertheless, like the KPCS, the ICGLRRCM faces governance challenges. The vast majority of certificates have been issued from only two countries, Rwanda and the DRC. Other ICGLR members must participate more actively in order for the RCM to work effectively—and uphold the conflict-free minerals norm. Otherwise, the more notorious glocal networks and glocal political economies will chip away at the RCM’s credibility. The EICC-GeSI component of the ICGLR-RCM also faces credibility concerns. It must do more to incorporate African state and nonstate actors within its governance structure, or its dominance over the smelter certification will reduce the process to a financial transaction—a “cost of doing business”—rather than an example of veritable good governance of supply chains that upholds the conflict-free mineral norm. Finally, the ICGLR needs to open up greater participatory space for African civil society members. Having a representative from an African NGO on the ICGLR’s proposed Independent Mineral Chain Auditor—an office akin to

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an ombudsperson—would promote independent evaluation of member compliance with the RCM via regular monitoring and unannounced auditing. Likewise, greater engagement by African firms and other corporate interests must come to the fore within ICGLR circles. Credibility, engagement, and participation are important yet often overlooked agential forces that influence the evolution of norms after they have been established. As depicted in the agential constructivist approach to the case of the conflict-free diamond norm, a global norm can continue to be shaped by international negotiations even after the “emergence” point. These forces are also present in the context of glocalization whereby implementation and feedback of norms can result in resistance and contestation—but not necessarily for the better or common good. As the cases of the KPCS and the ICGLR-RCM illustrate, African actors are important norm-makers, but the prospects for the continued influence of the conflictfree diamond and conflict-free mineral norms are by no means guaranteed. Notes Several grants from Queen’s University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, including a Partnership Development Grant, provided funding for the field work component of this chapter. I thank Katharina Coleman, Thomas Tieku, Victor Owuor, Elias Ayuk, and the participants at the April 2016 United Nations University–Institute for Natural Resources in Africa workshop in Accra, Ghana, for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. I also thank Shahid Vawda, Gilbert Khadiagala, David Hornsby, and the University of the Witwatersrand for providing institutional support during the initial data collection and analytical phases of the project. 1. The RCM is concerned with the trade of coltan, gold, tin, and tungsten. Rough diamonds, despite their notoriety as conflict minerals, are excluded from the ICGLR-RCM because they are under the aegis of the KPCS. 2. Traditionally, glocalization has referred to the economic and political variants of neoliberalism within discourses on globalization (Swyngedouw 1997; Germain and Kenny 1998; Murphy 2000) or globalization’s impact on culture and modernities (Robertson 1995; Lidén 2013). 3. The terms “conflict-free diamond” and “anti-conflict diamond” can be substituted for each other for this norm. 4. A concept popularized by Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink (1998, p. 895). 5. On occasion, diamond industry representatives will attend WGAAP meetings during the Kimberley Process intersessional and plenary meetings and provide advice and suggestions on technical and logistical matters. 6. Of course, it is possible that the conflict-free diamond norm would persist even if the KPCS became defunct. Nevertheless, the stakes are high in these norm negotiations, for without a global governance framework or regime to provide “teeth,” the conflict-free diamond norm could very well weaken. 7. All members of the Civil Society Coalition, both African and non-African, boycotted the Kimberley Process intersessional in 2016 over displeasure with the

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incumbent Kimberley Process chair, the United Arab Emirates, for what they found to be a failure to improve governance within the country’s domestic diamond-purchasing and reexporting practices. This boycott stayed in place through to the end of the year. Although one person from Centre National d’Appui au Développement et à la Participation Populaire (CENADEP) did attend the Dubai Kimberley Process plenary as a guest of the Kimberley Process chair, he neither represented nor spoke on behalf of the Civil Society Coalition. 8. This section draws upon insights gleaned from participant observations and in-person interviews conducted in Uganda (Kampala and around Lake Albert near the border with the DRC) in May 2016. 9. The ICGLR now consists of twelve members including South Sudan. 10. According to Christoph Vogel (2013), over fifty armed groups are active in the region. 11. Partnership Africa Canada has also served on most—if not all—Kimberley Process governance initiatives, committees, and working groups, such as the Kimberley Process Working Group on Alluvial and Artisanal Production. 12. Author interview with a member of the Kimberley Process Civil Society Coalition, Swakopmund, Namibia, November 2, 2009. Partnership Africa Canada has (and continues to maintain) close relationships with civil society groups throughout Africa, which informed its role in the creation of the ICGLR-RCM. Partnership Africa Canada has researchers drawn from Uganda and the DRC conducting continuous fieldwork on governance issues relating to conflict-prone minerals more generally, which helps it keep abreast of ICGLR-RCM developments. Author interview with a member of the Kimberley Process Civil Society Coalition, Ottawa, Canada, July 8, 2016. 13. The vast majority of RCM certificates have been issued by Rwanda. Despite its keenness to issue RCM certificates, thereby supporting the ICGLR, Rwanda has expressed little interest in joining the Kimberley Process. Although home to minimal diamond reserves, Rwanda is a potential conduit for illicit diamonds or conflict diamonds. Curiously, in 2016, Rwanda rebuffed the Kimberley Process chair’s inperson invitation to begin initial procedures of possibly becoming a Kimberley Process Participant member. Author personal communication with the chair of the Kimberley Process, Dubai, November 17, 2016. 14. For more details on how the Conflict-Free Smelter Program operates, see Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (n.d.).

5 The Pan-African Solidarity Norm Gerald Bareebe

The norm of Pan-African solidarity has come to dominate postindependence debates on African identity (Emerson 1962; Chrisman 1973; Nantambu 1998; Tieku 2017). As its basic premise, the norm advances the idea that African leaders should act, think, and speak of themselves collectively as “Africans” representing Africa’s interests and identity (Emerson 1962, p. 280; Binaisa 1997, p. 52). Proponents of this norm argue that it offers the most appropriate means to unite the people of Africa based on shared race, culture, and a history of socioeconomic and political oppression (Quist-Adade and Dodoo 2015). Critics dismiss the normative foundations of Pan-African solidarity, perceiving it as a misguided romantic dream based on false promises and debatable sources and unable to break the constraints of state sovereignty (Emerson 1962). Other scholars have argued that, even though the idea of Pan-African solidarity could lead to more effective action for Africa’s progress, the continent lacks common values and practices to anchor a robust solidarity norm (Costantinos 2014). This chapter seeks to show how the Pan-African solidarity norm emerged and shaped the African Union’s intervention policies, practices, and justifications. African states are willing to intervene in situations that appeal to the normative foundations of Pan-African solidarity, even when such interventions carry significant human and financial costs. The chapter makes a case that by defining who is “African” and how “Africans” should be protected, the Pan-African solidarity norm has enabled African heads of state and government, under the auspices of the AU, to transcend traditional state boundaries to protect other Africans at risk. By redefining and sentimentalizing “Africanism” and instilling a sense of oneness among Africans, the norm has put African statespersons under pressure to intervene to protect

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citizens other than their own from humanitarian disasters. Yet the PanAfrican solidarity norm has made African actors less willing to countenance intervention in African states by non-African actors, even if the latter cite humanitarian principles. The chapter uses three specific cases—the conflicts in Somalia, Darfur, and Libya—to show how this norm, which has remained primarily within the African continent, has influenced AU’s response to domestic African wars. The chapter thus provides empirical support for the proposition that African actors shape prevailing international security norms through the creation of distinctive African norms, captured as the second pathway in the introduction to this volume. The rest of this chapter is organized into three sections. First, it highlights the roots of the Pan-African solidarity norm in the traditional PanAfrican ideology that emerged in the nineteenth century in response to racism, oppression, and denigration of people of African descent. Second, it describes and traces the emergence of the contemporary Pan-African solidarity norm. Third, it shows how the Pan-African solidarity norm shapes the discourse on interventions within Africa. The case studies of AU interventions in Somalia and Darfur illustrate that African states have been willing to intervene in situations that enhance the Pan-African solidarity norm even when such interventions carry significant costs. Yet the Libyan conflict of 2011 shows that while African states are generally supportive of “self-intervention,” they are largely united in opposing interventions by Western actors on the continent, because such interventions are inconsistent with the normative foundations of the Pan-African solidarity norm. Normative Roots: Pan-Africanism Pan-Africanism has traditionally been defined as a political movement that aspires to “realize or recapture the dignity, freedom, autonomy and/or unity of Africans and/or people of African descent” (Welz 2012, p. 2). As an ideology of emancipation, it spearheads the “struggle for social and political equality and freedom from economic exploitation and racial discrimination” (Murithi 2007a, p. 1). It promotes “the sense that all Africans have a spiritual affinity with each other and that, having suffered together in the past, they must march together into a new and brighter future” (Emerson 1962, p. 280). As an ideal of liberation, Pan-Africanism emerged in response to structural difficulties that Africans endured over the centuries. These include (1) the removal of millions of African people from the continent through slave trade, which created what is now called the African diaspora; (2) the continent’s impoverishment as centuries of slave trade deprived Africa of key economic as well as human resources by decimating its prime population; (3) colonialism, which left the continent economically weak and politically vulnerable.

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Pan-Africanists see Africans and their descendants all over the world as sharing a historical connection rooted in the suffering they endured at the hands of the European and Ottoman colonial administrators (Tageldin 2014). The original Pan-African movement was popularized by African descendants in the diaspora, particularly in the United States, France, and the British Indies. They included W. E. B. Du Bois, an American scholar; George Padmore of the West Indies; Marcus Garvey of Jamaica; and Price Mars of Haiti (Ratcliff 2013). These scholars played a crucial role in early attempts to create the Pan-African “we feeling” through organizing the PanAfrican Conference of 1900 in London, multiple Pan-African congresses (in 1919, 1921, and 1927), and later the All-African People’s Conference in Accra, Ghana (Woronoff 1970). These conferences were aimed at nurturing unity, promoting the liberation and independence of Africa, highlighting the condition of subjugated blacks all over the world, and promoting the idea of a single administration unit for the peoples of Africa (Sherwood 2012). In general, organizers of these assemblies saw Pan-Africanism as a springboard for spearheading the emancipation of former slaves and for advancing the dignity of Africans and African descendants. In the early Pan-African congresses, uniting the “black race” to fight colonialism and slavery through a nonviolent approach was the most pressing issue. Du Bois, for example, argued that it was only through nurturing the Pan-African spirit that Africa and its descendants could present a united front against a global system that oppresses them (Du Bois 1937). He assailed most African Americans for their ambivalence toward Pan-Africanism, noting that the civil rights struggle in the United States should be linked with the international liberation of all Africans. Thus, Pan-Africanism was considered the most suitable ideology to inspire the exploited black people all over the world to join a struggle to free themselves from a subjugating system (Du Bois 1937). The independence of black Africa in the 1960s and 1970s led many scholars to predict that the bourgeoning Pan-Africanism spirit would either weaken or die (Tageldin 2014) because the new postcolonial political dispensation would deprive Pan-Africanism of an emotionally unifying factor. Since the turn of the millennium, Pan-Africanism has been argued to be obsolete (Murithi 2007a, p. 1), with the “logic of trans-territoriality and trans-temporality that informed Third World solidarity in the 1950s–1970s represent[ing] a forgotten legacy of Pan-Africanism” (Tageldin 2014, p. 303). This chapter contends that this depiction is inaccurate. Whereas some of the traditional pillars of Pan-Africanism may have vanished, PanAfricanism has not died; it has evolved. This evolution has produced a new African solidarity norm that is vibrant and critical to contemporary African international politics. In tracing the evolution of this norm, this chapter not only helps to account for the AU’s turn to active intervention to address the problem of armed conflicts on the continent, but also illustrates the political

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significance of a key norm developed in Africa and applicable only on the continent. It thus dovetails with the second pathway of this book, as it shows attempts by African actors to develop norms to shape African peace and security architecture. Development of the Pan-African Solidarity Norm The first attempt to develop a Pan-African solidarity norm is reflected in the actions of post-independence African leaders who led a campaign for Africa’s self-determination. Concerned that centuries of colonial domination and slave trade had stripped Africans of their culture, customs, language, and history (Chrisman 1973; Sherwood 2012), they envisaged a continent that was not only politically but also economically, ideologically, and socioculturally independent (Mazrui 1963; Green and Seidman 1968). Their actions and rhetoric highlighted a distinctive and sentimentalized African identity (Kah 2012). For these leaders, being an African denoted embracing a “we feeling” (Tondi 2005). Racial categorization and the oppression of Africans have formed an enduring foundation for developing a sense of belonging (Mazrui 1963, p. 93). Among the leaders who led this first attempt to ingrain the Pan-African spirit in post-independence Africa were Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Sékou Touré (Guinea), Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Modibo Keita (Mali), Haile Selassie (Ethiopia), Ahmed Ben Bella (Algeria), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), and Patrice Lumumba (Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Leaders were divided, however, as to whether Pan-Africanism was best implemented by immediate continental political unity (the Casablanca Group) or via an array of independent nation-states (the Monrovia Group), with the latter vision ultimately prevailing. The Organization of African Unity, created in 1963, enshrined and came to vigorously defend the sovereignty of its individual member states while also enjoining solidarity among them, notably in opposition to continued minority rule and intervention by outside actors on the continent. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, a new generation of African leaders emerged with a new vision for African solidarity. They refined and transformed Pan-Africanism into a fully fledged solidarity norm that has robustly shaped Africa’s peace and security architecture. This generation includes leaders such as Nelson Mandela (South Africa), Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe) Yoweri Museveni (Uganda), Jacob Zuma (South Africa), Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria), Meles Zenawi (Ethiopia), Paul Kagame (Rwanda), and Muammar Qaddafi (Libya). In addition to these statespersons, there emerged influential nonstate actors who became influential in sharpening the Pan-African solidarity norm. They include former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan; former head of the AU Commission and South African anti-apartheid activist

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Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma; and Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, the former SecretaryGeneral of the Pan-African Movement. This generation of African actors is the main driver of the contemporary Pan-African solidarity norm, whose influence is apparent in patterns of behavior and actions that, taken together, show an important evolution from older forms of Pan-Africanism. The new Pan-African solidarity norm has three key elements. First, there is a strong affirmation of African “we feeling,” reflecting the norm’s roots in pan-Africanism and mirroring the OAU’s rhetoric. Although the discourse on territoriality and state sovereignty remains significant in Africa’s interstate relations, there is a tendency by the leaders to (at least rhetorically) portray themselves first as Africans and second as leaders of particular territorial nations under one Africa. Speeches by African leaders are laced with phrases such as “we shall neither relax nor relent until all Africans and all black men are free” (Obi 2006, p. 79). In other words, Africans and their leaders typically present themselves as being Africans, albeit Africans of a particular territory. This “we feeling” is forged based on perceived shared challenges resulting from colonial injustices, slave trade, and imperial exploitation. It is so well entrenched in Africa’s international relations that African leaders remain united in their commitment to PanAfrican solidarity even when they profoundly disagree on foreign policy, as for example during the Libyan conflict. Second, the contemporary Pan-African solidarity norm comprises a perception of opposition from and to the West and, consequently, an unwillingness to publicly criticize other African leaders. As in the OAU era, there is a tendency for African leaders to shield each other from international criticisms. African leaders tend to close ranks when confronted with powerful external actors, including in supporting undemocratic regimes against international institutions that demand accountability and good governance. For example, there have been sustained efforts to protect Kenyan and Sudanese heads of state from the trial by the International Criminal Court. African leaders stood by the Kenyan government as it undermined ICC attempts to prosecute President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto for crimes related to the 2007–2008 post-election ethnic violence by intimidating witnesses and refusing to hand over vital documents (BBC News 2014a). In the case of Sudan, several African countries, including ICC members Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Djibouti, and Chad, refused to arrest and surrender President Omar al-Bashir to the ICC. Frustrated by the lack of cooperation, the ICC ended its investigation into war crimes in Darfur in 2014. In a victory speech, President Bashir mocked the ICC and observed that it had “raised its arms and surrendered” (BBC News 2014c). Tellingly, he framed the entire trial as intended to “humiliate” Africans, and he thanked the people of Sudan and Africa who “stood firm and said that no Sudanese official shall surrender to colonial courts at The Hague or anywhere else” (BBC

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News 2014c). This aspect of the Pan-African solidarity norm was also apparent when African leaders rallied to support Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe after the European Union (EU) imposed sanctions over electoral fraud and human rights abuse in 2002. In short, the norm encourages African leaders to reject Western intervention in matters internal to the continent and to criticize Western institutions for unfairly targeting Africans and promoting an imperial agenda (Edozie and Gottschalk 2014). African leaders perceive a common interest in defending the sovereignty of the continent against external interferences, specifically by Western powers. Third, however, the contemporary Pan-African solidarity norm includes the idea of solidarity with, and support for, African populations facing dire threat from famine and epidemic diseases, terrorist groups, rebel movements, and their own repressive regimes. Proponents of the norm have acknowledged the possibility of repulsive behavior by African actors against African populations (Ayittey 1998). They castigated the OAU’s indifference to recurrent African civil wars in the 1980s and 1990s, and they argued that Pan-African solidarity should transcend constraints imposed by state sovereignty and territoriality (see also Chapter 2). Pan-African scholars such as George Ayittey evoked the Pan-African spirit to implore the continental organization to do more to help people affected by wars (Ayittey 1998, p. 1). Political observers such as Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the first female chairperson of the AU Commission, argued for trans-African recognition of the shared need for prosperity and peace (Allison 2013). Tajudeen, for example, observed that “no one [African] country can be a sustainable miracle if its neighbours are in hell” (Diescho 1990). African statespersons such as President Jacob Zuma of South Africa observed that African solidarity should provide hope to “parts of our continent that are still plagued by war and conflict, political instability and the removal of governments by unconstitutional means.”1 Consequently, the AU has departed from the OAU’s emphasis on state sovereignty as a sacrosanct principle and non-intervention as a core principle in its charter. Article 4(h) of the AU Constitutive Act resolutely affirms “the right of the Union to intervene in a member state pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity” (African Union 2000). Article 4(j) allows a member state facing a crisis to “request intervention from the Union in order to restore peace and security.” In Article 4(m), the AU commits itself to promoting democracy, human rights, and rule of law. Remarkably, this move toward a more active intervention role in conflicts dovetails with the vision of early Pan-Africanists such as Nkrumah, who noted that Ghana’s independence was “meaningless unless it is linked up with total liberation of African continent” (Abdul-Ganiy 2015, p. 63). In transforming the OAU into the AU, African statespersons were acting in

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line with a long-standing demand by Pan-Africanist activists for a robust organization with a mandate to address Africa’s security challenges. Even pessimists of the Pan-African solidarity norm such as Simon Allen admit that it is hard to find an African who does not “like the idea of us all working together for the common good, pooling our skills in the spirit of continental Ubuntu for the betterment of all” (quoted in Allison 2013, p. 1). Contemporary norm entrepreneurs such as Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem and Dlamini-Zuma mobilized this previously latent aspect of Pan-African solidarity to promote the contemporary Pan-African solidarity norm, which includes the idea that African states under the AU should actively intervene in other parts of Africa where human atrocities are taking place. The Norm of Pan-African Solidarity and the AU’s Intervention Discourse The Pan-African solidarity norm matters in Africa’s international relations, shaping institutions, policy options, and available justifications of foreign policies, and constituting the normative environment within which African states act (Tieku 2009). Since its Constitutive Act was adopted in 2000, the AU has taken steps to establish new structures that would ease its response to contemporary security challenges. The AU’s Peace and Security Council became operational in 2004 and is granted powers to make key decisions on all matters concerning security, stability, and peace in Africa (Murithi and Lulie 2012). Since its establishment, the PSC has successfully appealed to the Pan-African solidarity norm to garner the support needed for its activities. It has already authorized operations in AU member states including Somalia, Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Comoros, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Lotze 2013; Williams 2011). The AU has also embarked on an ambitious structural reform project that has resulted in the creation of new organs to support conflict intervention, including the Council of Eminent Persons, the African Standby Force (ASF), and the Pan-African Parliament (van Walraven 2004; Williams 2009; Woronoff 1970; Yihdego 2011). These reforms are in line with the AU’s overall objective of reestablishing Africa as a community of interest and stimulating a willingness of African people to support intervention in other parts of Africa to protect fellow Africans at risk. The Pan-African solidarity norm thus provides moral justifications and mobilizes Africans to transcend traditional state boundaries in their quest to protect other Africans at risk. It has also pushed African leaders to make resolutions such as the Ezulwini Consensus (Aning and Atuobi 2009), which legalizes conflict intervention. In what follows, I explore the conflicts in Somalia and Darfur to show how the Pan-African solidarity norm is driving African states to intervene

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in conflicts even when such interventions carry significant human and financial costs. However, I then also explore the Libyan conflict of 2011 and argue that, while African leaders are in full support of self-intervention, they are largely united in opposing intervention by Western actors on the continent, because such intervention contravenes the normative foundations of the Pan-African solidarity norm. AU Intervention in Somalia

By the early 1990s, political and economic problems in Somalia had led to societal breakdown, famine, and a series of repressive regimes (Adekanye 1997; Ahmed and Green 1999; Bradbury 1994). Although Somalia is a homogeneous nation, deep rooted inter- and intra-clan politics are responsible for decades of political violence and humanitarian crises. By the 1990s, the Hawiye clan, which controlled some parts of south and central Somalia, including Mogadishu, was split between General Mohammed Farrah Aidid of the Somali National Alliance and Ali Mahdi Mohammed of the Somali Salvation Alliance. In the extreme south, the battle for control was between the Darood clans and the Somalia National Front of Siad Barre. There were also other groups such as the Somali Patriotic Movement. In the northwestern “Somaliland” area and northeastern parts of the country, there were internal battles within Salvation Democratic Front, which controlled the Majertain homelands (Harper 2012; Woodward 2013). The ensuing humanitarian catastrophe prompted calls for international—and African—action. As one Somalia refugee lamented, “Somalia is burning. People are dying in droves daily from bullets and starvation. Yet African leaders are doing nothing to stop the war” (as quoted in Ayittey 1994, p. 13). African scholars and policymakers have long expressed divergent views over the appropriate mechanism for resolving the conflict in Somalia (Osinbajo 1996). Some regional analysts argued in favor of a UN-led intervention to protect African lives, while others rejected this idea on the grounds that “a long-term solution to those problems can come only from Africans themselves, not from well-meaning occupying powers or grandiose nation-building schemes of the United Nations” (Ayittey 1994, p. 1). Thus, both sides of the debate mobilized aspects of the Pan-African solidarity norm. In a bid to address the dangers of state failure in Somalia, the UN created the first United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM I) in April 1992 (Ahmed and Green 1999). Initially, UNOSOM was established to monitor the ceasefire and to ensure humanitarian deliveries. In April 1992, the mandate and strength of UNOSOM I was enlarged to include protecting humanitarian convoys and to establish a secure environment for humanitarian assistance (United Nations 1997c). At its peak, the mission comprised 3,500 security personnel, 50 military observers, 719 logistic

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support personnel, and about 200 international civilian staff (United Nations 1997c). However, this approach of a foreign-imposed Leviathan failed and Somalia remained in a state of anarchy (Anderson and Rolandsen 2014). UN policymakers and regional security experts feared that the lack of a functioning state would provide a safe haven for radicalization and indoctrination of Somali youth into terrorist activities. In December 1992, the UN Security Council voted to authorize a military intervention. This led to the creation of a Unified Task Force (UNITAF), which was made up of contingents from twenty-four countries led by the United States. UNITAF’s mandate was to “use all necessary means” to protect innocent civilians, humanitarian envoys, and distribution centers across Somalia. The situation further deteriorated throughout 1992, putting UNITAF, which covered only 40 percent of the country, in dire straits. Despite the UN intervention, the security environment did not significantly improve, as incidents of violence continued in towns such as Kismayu and Mogadishu (Diehl 1996). This forced the UN Secretary-General to request the Security Council on March 3, 1993, to approve a recommendation effecting the transition from UNITAF to a more expansive mission––UNOSOM II. The mandate of UNOSOM II included monitoring that all factions continued to respect the cessation of hostilities and other agreements to which they had consented; preventing any resumption of violence and, if necessary, taking appropriate action against any faction that violated or threatened to violate the cessation of hostilities; maintaining control of the heavy weapons of the organized factions; seizing the small arms of all unauthorized armed elements; and securing or maintaining security at all ports, airports, and lines of communications required for the delivery of humanitarian assistance. At its peak, UNOSOM II was composed of approximately 28,000 military personnel, 2,800 international and locally recruited staff, and dozens of police personnel (United Nations 1996). The year 1993 was the most difficult for the UN intervention forces in Somalia. In June, twenty-four UNOSOM II troops from Pakistan were killed and fifty-four were fatally wounded in an ambush staged by General Aidid, a ruthless and ambitious Somali faction leader who wanted to overrun the entire country by force. UNOSOM II continued to lose troops through sniper fire, as it was difficult for peacekeepers to respond without jeopardizing the lives of innocent civilians under their protection. Making matters worse, General Aidid instigated civilians to protest UN troops, thereby creating a hostile environment for the peacekeepers. Indeed, less than two weeks after the death of Pakistani troops, the peacekeepers responded to mob violence by firing into the crowd, killing twenty civilians. The United Nations Security Council launched an investigation into the death of civilians and called for the arrest of those responsible. The

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evidence from the investigation indicated that it was General Aidid and his followers who were responsible for the attack. In response, UNOSOM II troops conducted several unsuccessful raids on Aidid’s hideouts. About eighteen US troops lost their lives trying to capture him. Later, the UN placed a $25,000 price on Aidid’s head, which enraged the reclusive general. In reaction, Aidid’s soldiers shocked the world by dragging the dead American soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu. Faced with mission creep, the Security Council abandoned its mission to capture Aidid in December 1993 and instead created a special commission to investigate the death of its peacekeepers. In 1993, Aidid joined peace negotiations with Ali Mahdi (on behalf of the Somali Salvation Alliance), but they failed to agree on a roadmap that would lead to some level of normalcy. By the end of 1993, many of the UN troop-contributing countries, including the United States, France, Germany, and Italy, withdrew or began to withdraw some or all of their troops (Diehl 1996; Carroll 1997; Bradbury 1994; Patnam 1997). The final withdrawal of the UN mission took place in March 1995. The tragic failure of this mission vindicated many PanAfricanists who argued that outside forces could not provide an enduring solution to Africa’s crises. The beginning of 2002 saw a significant shift in the attitude of African leaders toward conflict intervention. This resulted in the transformation of the OAU (an organization built on the principle of non-intervention) into a more interventionist organization––the African Union. The main difference between the two organizations is that the former enshrined the “right of the Union to intervene in a Member State” and created two important internal organs to work on peace and security agenda: the Peace and Security Council and the AU Commission. In addition, the AU established two internal divisions: the Peace and Security Directorate, which is responsible for achieving the goal of establishing peace and security in Africa, and the Peace Support Operations Division, which manages AU peacekeeping logistics, conflict mediation, and postconflict reconstruction. Within two years after its formation, the AU engaged in strategies to restore peace and rebuild national institutions in Somalia. In 2004, it helped Somalia’s factions form the first transitional federal government. But this approach, too, was rife with serious shortfalls. The transitional federal government lacked legitimacy among Somalis and failed to exert its authority beyond Baidoa (Talbot 2006). It also suffered from constant power struggles and political opportunism. Hence, the AU’s attempt to entrench the transitional federal government failed equally at both political and military levels. On February 20, 2007, the United Nations Security Council authorized the deployment of new AU peacekeepers in Somalia, which led to the formation of the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM). Uganda and Burundi were the first countries to contribute troops for this mission,

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followed by Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, and Sierra Leone. To date, there are over 17,600 AU military personnel in Somalia, of whom 6,700 are from Uganda, 4,700 from Kenya, and 4,400 from Burundi (Kato 2012). Although AMISOM remains overstretched, the mission has made significant progress in terms of civilian protection and in helping Somalia to establish a functioning government (Chonghaile 2012). Notably, AMISOM troops have evicted Al-Shabab militias from Mogadishu, thereby creating space for the transitional federal government––which had long operated from exile in Kenya–– to be relocated back to Somalia (Cilliers, Boshoff, and Aboagye 2010). While several Afrocentric scholars and regional political analysts have extolled the success of AMISOM in Somalia, they have largely overlooked the influence of Pan-African solidarity in the creation and success of the AU’s intervention mission in Somalia. As the country lay in ruins and chaos with no functioning government, advocates of the Pan-African solidarity norm were encouraging African leaders to do everything possible to stabilize the country. For instance, while asking President Yoweri Museveni to deploy Ugandan peacekeepers to Somalia, James Magode Ikuya, an influential member of the central executive committee of Uganda’s ruling party, invoked the Pan-African solidarity norm to argue that “it is an African adage that one should run to the rescue of a neighbor’s house if it is on fire” (quoted in Ikuya 2009, p. 1). On his part, President Museveni noted that by sending peacekeepers to Somalia, he was fulfilling the PanAfrican solidarity call for “joint action by all African countries and continental bodies to put in place mechanisms of solving African problems using home-grown methods.”2 The willingness of African states to incur significant costs in the pursuit of the Pan-African solidarity norm is remarkable––especially as these costs far exceed any material benefits. It is important to emphasize that Uganda (with about 6,200 AMISOM troops) and Burundi (with about 5,400 troops) have little, if any, geopolitical interest in Somalia. Geographically, these countries are situated in eastern Africa but they spearheaded military intervention in a country located in the Horn of Africa––that is, in a country with which they do not share a geographical borderline. The conflict in Somalia posed little, if any, threat to the national security of Uganda and Burundi. Nonetheless, the actions of these countries have come at significant costs, which shows that African states are willing to incur costs in the pursuit of the Pan-African solidarity. For instance, in Museveni’s case, the decision to send troops to Somalia was opposed by many Ugandans (BBC News 2012). As well, both countries have sustained considerable casualties in their battles with Al-Shabab militants. Unlike the United Nations, which provides a public catalogue of its peacekeepers’ fatalities, the AU provides no such records for its AMISOM operations in Somalia, making it a daunting task to obtain accurate figures about military losses.

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The failure by the AU to provide reliable figures for the conflict has led journalists, commentators, and academics to speculate on the number of AU personnel killed in Somalia. The highest estimate so far has been provided by Greg Mills and Dickie Davis, who claim that between March 2007 and January 2015, AMISOM lost “perhaps over 4,000” troops, though AMISOM officials dispute these figures (Allison 2015). The AU Commission says it does not provide public records because the decision to release such information rests with troop-contributing countries. Although these countries have chosen not to publicly reveal information about their fallen personnel, several indicators point to the magnitude of the loss incurred by troop-contributing countries. For instance, in May 2013, UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson announced that, since the commencement of intervention in Somalia, about 3,000 soldiers from the AU’s intervention force, mainly from Uganda and Burundi, had been killed (Voice of America News 2013). In September 2010, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting revealed that a further thirty-three Ugandan soldiers had been killed in clashes with Al-Shabab (Sai 2010). In October 2010, an attempt by the Ugandan government to conceal information about the loss of its soldiers backfired when pictures surfaced online showing over seventy dead soldiers in Ugandan military uniform being dragged by Al-Shabab fighters through the dusty streets of Mogadishu (The Observer 2015). In October 2011, the New York Times reported that about eighty AU peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi were killed in a deadly insurgent attack against a multipronged assault by Al-Shabab militants. In the same month, another seventy Burundian soldiers were killed in an ambush near Mogadishu. In what was considered a humiliation to the AU mission, their bodies were displayed to reporters in the Al-Shabab–controlled town of ElMaan (Al Jazeera 2011). Furthermore, in September 2015, several reports indicated that dozens of Ugandan soldiers were killed when Al-Shabab overran the Janale AMISOM military base ninety kilometers southeast of Mogadishu. Later, without giving figures, the Ugandan president admitted during a trip to Japan that Al-Shabab had indeed killed and taken Ugandan troops as prisoners, but blamed his own commanders for being “asleep” during the attack (Moritsugu 2015, p. 1). On August 12, 2012, three of the four Ugandan Mi-24 helicopter gunships that took off from Entebbe military airbase to Somalia crashed in mysterious circumstances over Mount Kenya, killing seven soldiers, including two senior pilots (Gettleman and Kron 2012). Also, Uganda faced a deadly retaliation attack from Al-Shabab when members of the group bombed its capital, Kampala, in 2010, killing seventy-eight civilians. After the attack, Al-Shabab issued a statement claiming responsibility and affirming that Uganda was not its enemy but had carried out the attack to make a point that Uganda should withdraw its troops from Somalia.

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It is puzzling that Burundi and Uganda, which are among the poorest countries on the planet, and have suffered repeated episodes of civil war since independence, have been willing to spend their meager resources on the AU’s intervention mission in Somalia. Burundi, for example, is still reeling from internal strife. A year before Burundi joined the AU mission in Somalia, blue helmets were patrolling the implementation of its own ceasefire agreement with its domestic opposition factions.3 Some observers have argued that by encouraging poor states such as Burundi and Uganda to send their troops to places like Somalia, “we have ended up with a system where the weakest groups go to the hardest places . . . and that is a recipe for significant losses” (Dickinson 2011, p. 1). Further troubling is not just the high numbers of lives these countries have lost in the battlefield but also the conditions within which their soldiers operate. For instance, following the October 2011 battle in which seventy Burundian soldiers were killed, it was revealed that the AMISOM mission lacked a single helicopter at that time. In fact, the force commander lamented that many of his soldiers “bled to death because they couldn’t be airlifted out” (Dickinson 2011, p. 1). Another soldier lamented that on the fateful day his unit lacked armored personnel carriers or tanks, and that what they were doing in that battle was “basically suicide” (Gettleman 2011, p. 1). However, we should not be puzzled by the willingness of poor countries such as Burundi and Uganda to commit their meager resources to the AU’s intervention missions even in situations from which they will see few or no material benefits. These are countries led by individuals who believe in PanAfrican solidarity and who have exploited the norm for both humanitarian and personal gains. This situation is well captured by the way Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni justified his decision to deploy peacekeepers in Somalia. He argued that he joined the AU mission in Somalia because “we could not ignore our brothers, the Somalis” (New Vision 2013). Whereas it can be argued that the need for conflict intervention may have given shrewd dictators such as Museveni an opportunity to bolster their reputation and status through projecting themselves as Pan-Africanists, the cost that intervening countries incur in the name of protecting citizens other than their own from atrocities is a clear indication that Pan-African solidarity has gained relevance. AU Intervention in Darfur

The crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan started to attract international attention in 2003 and 2004 after Janjaweed militias, supported by the government of Sudan, launched a military onslaught against populations living in the western region of Darfur (de Waal 2007). The cruel activities of Janjaweed militias were reinforced by the Sudanese government’s policy of indiscriminate aerial bombings, ground attacks, and raids, which resulted in

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the death of an estimated 70,000 civilians (Khalid 1990). As a result, human rights violations such as mass killings, systematic rape, burning and looting of villages, and ethnic cleansing were being committed on a large scale (Zambakari 2013). Within the international community, there was a consensus that something should be done to stop the atrocities, but there was no clear agreement on what exactly should be done and how precisely it should be done. Among Africans, the conflicts attracted voices urging the AU to act swiftly to protect civilians in Darfur.4 Bishop Desmond Tutu, one of Africa’s most influential voices, reasoned that the AU could not turn a “blind eye to genocide,” while former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan noted that the conflict was a “hell on earth for our fellow human beings in Darfur” (United Nations 2005b). Indeed, voices from the African continent urging the AU to act and save fellow Africans at risk were loud and clear. Consequently, in 2003, the AU authorized the creation of the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) with endorsement from the UN Security Council. A call on African states to contribute peacekeepers for Darfur was launched by the AU with the PanAfrican solidarity norm as a guiding principle for the intervention mission. About 7,000 armed personnel and 1,560 civilian police officers from Rwanda, Nigeria, South Africa, and Senegal were deployed. A mediation team to bring parties to the negotiation table was formed and representatives of both parties met in Chad, where a ceasefire was agreed upon. As Chapter 6 of this volume emphasizes, Darfur is a rare conflict where the idea of elder African statespersons mediating conflicts has been mainstreamed into the prevention and management of conflicts in Africa. AMIS was unable to entirely end the suffering in Darfur, but it did contribute to its unfolding on a substantially lower scale.5 Although the AMIS mission was underfunded, underequipped, and understaffed, it received compliments for taming a grim security situation. UN Security Council Resolution 1706 credits AMIS for “reducing large-scale organized violence” (US Government Accountability Office 2006, p. 45). AMIS peacekeepers played a significant role in protecting displaced civilians from the Janjaweed militias and the brutality of the Sudanese military. Speaking about the impact of AMIS, a UN official noted that “the AU has been very effective in decreasing violence in areas where it maintains a presence in Darfur region. . . . [I]t has prevented some attacks from happening through local negotiations on the ground” (see African Centre for Constructive Resolution of Disputes 2006). The presence of AU peacekeepers also facilitated security and freedom of movement of civilians and humanitarian workers (Reeves 2005). UN SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon later observed that “AMIS soldiers, police officers, together with their civilian colleagues serving in UNAMID, worked tirelessly under difficult and often dangerous circumstances to sustain a presence throughout Darfur” (United Nations–African Union Mission in Darfur 2008).

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The Pan-African solidarity norm was influential in compelling Africans to commit peacekeeping troops to protect other Africans at risk. Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame cited the 1994 genocide as the reason he agreed to send Rwandan troops to Darfur to “use force to protect civilians” (BBC News 2004). Even though the intervention was initially opposed by President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, the AU expressed willingness to intervene in Darfur despite al-Bashir’s objection. The late Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi noted that his country “is ready, the troops are equipped, and we are waiting for a request from the AU and the United Nations to disperse the troops to Darfur” (Reuters 2007). Nigeria’s president Olusegun Obasanjo, who also authorized the deployment of Nigerian peacekeepers, noted that “it was not in the interest of Sudan nor in the interest of Africa . . . for us all to stand by, fold our hands and see genocide in Darfur” (IRIN News 2005). Indeed, it took the persuasion skills of Obasanjo (then AU chairman) for al-Bashir to accept negotiations with the rebels, resulting in a peace agreement in May 2006. Although the conflict in Darfur is yet to be resolved, AMIS has been praised for its peacekeeping efforts in Darfur. In 2005, Jan Pronk, the special representative of the UN Secretary-General, noted that “the AU force has helped to establish more stability” and that they “have done an admirable job, highly professional, with much dedication” (IRIN News 2005). Likewise, the former Clinton administration’s African director, John Prendergast, concurred that with its intervention in Darfur, the AU has showed that “it can make a difference in Africa” (Goering 2004). Following their visit to Darfur in 2004, Jon Corzine, a senator from New Jersey, and Richard Holbrook, a former US ambassador to the UN, expressed appreciation about the role played by the AU in Darfur. They observed that “surprisingly, the strongest efforts to stop the fighting have come from the African Union, which is facing the first test of its visibility as an organization since it replaced the weak and ineffective Organization of African Unity in 2000” (Corzine and Holbrooke 2004, p. 1). Owing to the influence of the norm, many African states were willing to contribute peacekeepers for Darfur. African countries like Burkina Faso, Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Zambia, and Zimbabwe willingly contributed troops and police officers to protect civilians in Darfur. Pan-African Solidarity and Libya’s 2011 Conflict

The Libyan conflict of 2011 offers an opportunity to evaluate commitment to the Pan-African solidarity norm by African states in face of challenge from Western norms such as the responsibility to protect. This is so because the AU leaders perceived the NATO-led intervention in Libya as a blatant violation of Libya’s sovereignty and contravention of the Pan-African solidarity

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norm, yet NATO perceived it to be a legitimate case of humanitarian intervention. The West argued that the words and actions of Muammar Qaddafi carried an intent to commit genocide (Bloching 2011). He had urged his supporters to “come out” of their homes to “attack [the opposition] in their dens.” In his speech delivered on February 22, 2011, Qaddafi also called those protesting his regime “cockroaches” and “rats” who do not deserve to live and ordered his supporters to “go out and cleanse the city of Benghazi.”6 In the eyes of the international press, diplomats, and various opinion leaders, Western powers had a moral obligation to intervene in order to protect Libyans from Qaddafi’s tyranny (Pattison 2011). The United Nations Security Council first asked the Libyan regime to fulfill its “responsibility to protect” and said that if the regime failed to protect its people, other governments would be mandated to intervene to protect those at risk (Resolution 1970 of 2011). On March 17, 2011, the Council authorized “all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in Libya, including Benghazi” (United Nations 2011b). Gareth Evans, one of the framers of the R2P norm, justified NATO’s intervention in Libya, calling it “a textbook case of the R2P norm working exactly as it was supposed to” (quoted in Stark 2011, p. 1). The condemnation of Qaddafi’s actions, particularly from Western leaders, was quick and clear. His brutal action against unarmed civilians, the West emphasized, should not go unpunished, since the international community has a moral obligation in the face of the killing of innocent civilians. British prime minister David Cameron emphasized that the world “shouldn’t stand aside as a dictator murders his own people” (Randall and Macintyre 2011, p. 1). US president Barack Obama noted that the “people of Libya must be protected and . . . our coalition is prepared to act and act with urgency” (Al-Shalchi and Lucas 2011, p. 1). US secretary of state Hillary Clinton warned that “if the international community is to have credibility . . . then action must take place” (Reuters 2011). The Libyan crisis inevitably placed the AU between a rock and a hard place. It was forced to make a choice between either siding with an unpopular strongman (Colonel Qaddafi) or breaking the Pan-African solidarity norm by supporting a Western-backed intervention to oust an African leader. In a move of emphatic support for the Pan-African solidarity norm, the AU’s Peace and Security Council resolved to oppose any form of military intervention in Libya in favor of dialogue between Qaddafi, a rebel movement called the National Transition Council, and other opposing groups. Thus, two contradicting approaches were at play in Libya: the AU’s mediation approach and NATO’s military intervention approach. Even though the idea of a military action against Qaddafi’s regime was popular within the international community, many African leaders were publicly against it. For instance, it was made clear in the AU roadmap that the African Union rejects any Western “intervention whatever its form” in

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favor of a mediation approach to the crisis that could lead to an immediate ceasefire, protection of foreign nationals, and a dialogue between Qaddafi’s government and armed opposition (de Vos, Kendall, and Stahn 2015). It should be noted that while African countries were united in their rejection of Western intervention, disagreements over how to address the crisis were apparent. Some leaders were pro-Qaddafi and wanted him to consolidate his grip on power, albeit with some reforms, while others wanted him to relinquish power and create space for an interim government. This internal division led to some suggestions that the AU was a pro-Qaddafi group with a pro-regime agenda. This accusation was validated by the fact that the AU’s roadmap was silent about Qaddafi’s future. Instead, African leaders, led by Jacob Zuma, castigated the intervention by outsiders and specifically requested NATO to cease its bombings campaign against Qaddafi’s military positions and give ceasefire a chance (Sherwood and McGreal 2011). The ardent unity of African leaders in opposing NATO’s military intervention in Libya and the solidarity with Qaddafi, whom they saw as being unfairly targeted by Western imperialists, was a clear victory for the PanAfrican solidarity norm. Former Ghanaian president John Kufuor argued that the intervention was a sad day for Africans and that the “oppressed people would surely rise one day to demand accountability” (GhanaWeb 2011). Former Namibian president Sam Nujoma noted that the intervention “must serve as a lesson to Africa that foreign aggressors are readying themselves to pounce on the continent” (AllAfrica.com 2011). Tanzania’s foreign minister described the intervention as “wrong in the first place,” while Zimbabwe’s ruling party said the intervention had led to the ouster of a “true African hero” and marked “the beginning of a new recolonization of Africa” (Meldrum 2011, p. 2). Other African leaders, such as Uganda’s Museveni, castigated NATO for orchestrating Qaddafi’s downfall, noting that Qaddafi, “whatever his faults, is a true nationalist. I prefer nationalists to puppets of foreign interests.”7 Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe pointed out that Qaddafi’s ouster and his subsequent death were “a loss, a great loss, to Africa, a tragic loss to Africa” and accused the UN of allowing itself to be “abused” by NATO, an organization that, he said, derives its inspiration from “the arrogant belief that they are the most powerful among us” (New Zimbabwe 2012). Going by the reaction of these African leaders, it is apparent that, while there may have been disagreements on the strategic approaches to end the conflict, African leaders––both democrats or dictators––were largely united in their opposition to foreign intervention in Libya. The vocal opposition to the intervention by democrats and those who had nothing in the cobweb to worry about, such as Ghana’s John Kufuor and Namibia’s Sam Nujoma, is indicative of the fact that the rejection of the intervention was not driven by considerations of regime survival. The mutual agreement to oppose the intervention was reflected in the statement

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issued by the AU’s Panel on Libya, which emphasized that “Libya’s unity and territorial integrity must be respected as well as the rejection of any kind of foreign military intervention.”8 Pan-African solidarity was also reflected by the manner in which African leaders agreed not to recognize the NATO-backed National Transition Council as a legitimate representative of the Libyan people, even after more than forty countries, including the United States, had recognized it. Instead, the AU requested for an “allinclusive transitional government” to be set up in Libya, as part of a framework that would involve key members of Qaddafi’s regime (Dersso 2011). Uganda’s Museveni, a member of the AU’s Panel on Libya, was harsh in his assessment of Libya’s opposition groups, branding them agents of foreign interests, and wondered how the National Transition Council could be cooperating with NATO while snubbing the AU. He noted: “I would feel embarrassed to be backed by Western war planes, because the quislings of foreign interests have never helped Africa.”9 By opposing NATO’s intervention and refusing to recognize the transitional federal government in Benghazi, Libya, the Pan-African solidarity norm was at play. In fact, unlike in Rwanda (1994) (see BBC News 2014b), Liberia (1996–2002), or the DRC (1998–2004), the AU’s failures in Libya were not due to lack of action but rather because every solution that the organization proposed hit a wall of Western interests––many of which were beyond the AU’s control. To be clear, this argument should not be misconstrued to suggest that, other than the strong influence of the Pan-African solidarity norm, some African leaders did not have a subjective interest in Qaddafi’s hold on power. Indeed, over the years, the AU has demonstrated serious organizational weaknesses––many of which were in fact exploited by Qaddafi to bolster his status among fellow African leaders. The failure of many African countries to fund the AU left a void that was exploited by Qaddafi to fund the AU’s budget and to bail out several cash-strapped African economies. Thus, besides the Pan-African solidarity norm, these countries wanted Qaddafi to remain in power because of his financial support to their economies. This means that Qaddafi’s stamp of authority and political influence were felt not simply in Libya but also throughout Africa. By 2011, his investments in other African countries were estimated at $150 billion.10 Therefore, it should come as no surprise that when conflict broke out in Libya, there were many African leaders who supported Qaddafi. Notwithstanding the financial contributions of Qaddafi to the AU and other African countries, the Pan-African solidarity norm was influential in uniting African leaders (both supporters and critics of Qaddafi) against Western intervention in Libya. Like the ICC’s intervention in Kenya’s postelectoral violence, the lack of consideration for African solutions angered the African leaders to a level where they requested member states to ignore the arrest warrant issued against Qaddafi by the ICC, accusing the Court of

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being “discriminatory and focused on crimes committed in Africa but ignored those committed by Western powers” (New York Times 2011). In fact, the political crisis that has unfolded in Libya following NATO’s intervention vindicates a position taken by many Pan-Africanists that solutions to African problems should be initiated and driven by Africans. Conclusion Several insights can be drawn from this chapter. First and foremost, the norm of Pan-African solidarity is very influential in AU’s intervention policies. The norm provides a discursive framework in which decisions are made. African leaders seem to be willing to act if their action fosters the solidarity norm, but they are also willing to oppose intervention if they perceive it to violate the Pan-African solidarity norm. Second, because of the influence of the Pan-African solidarity norm, the AU’s shift from nonintervention to non-indifference has attracted the widest appeal on the continent, and there is a willingness among AU member states to take part in implementing intervention decisions. In situations where the interest of PanAfrican solidarity encounters Western-led transnational norms (e.g., R2P in Libya), Pan-African solidarity is seen to be holding strong. To protect Africa’s interests––specifically the independence, dignity, and unity of Africans––African leaders have shown a rare sense of harmony in their opposition to Western intervention on the continent as well as a (far from perfect) willingness to cooperate for AU-mandated interventions. Hence, the Pan-African solidarity norm is now a continentally held norm that is shifting attention of African states away from the narrow appeal of nationalism, territoriality, and self-interest and leading them to engage in self-intervention to protect the collective interests of all Africans as a people. Notes 1. A speech by South African president Jacob Zuma at the opening of the Pan African Parliament, available at http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/pebble.asp. 2. See President Museveni’s 2014 address to the Pan African Parliament, available online at http://www.statehouse.go.ug/media/news/2014/03/18/president-museveni -addresses-pan-african-parliament-midrand-south-africa-18th. 3. See also Dickinson 2011. 4. See also Adam 2013. 5. The United Nations–African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) took over the command of a 7,000-strong AU peacekeeping force in 2007. See, for example, https://www.un.org/press/en/2007/sc9089.doc.htm. 6. A transcript of this speech is available at http://www.blogs.aljazeera.net/live /africa/libya-live-blog-march.

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7. Uganda’s President Museveni as quoted in Foreign Policy, February 2011. 8. See a statement by the ad hoc High-Level AU Panel on Libya, available at http://www.ipsnews.net/2011/03/african-union-at-a-loss-over-libya. 9. See President Yoweri Museveni’s letter on Libyan conflict, available at http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/03/24/the-qaddafi-i-know-2. 10. Eki Yemisi Omorogbe notes that “Gaddafi had played an important role on the continent through his support for anti-colonialism, including the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He had also played an instrumental role in the founding of the AU from 1999 onwards. He was the first North African chairperson of the AU in 2009–2010. Gaddafi’s Libya was also a major source of funding for the AU, as one of the five major states that provided 75 per cent of its assessed dues” (2012, p. 155).

6 The Conflict-Mediation Role of Elder-Statespersons Gilbert M. Khadiagala

The norm around elder-statespersons as critical actors in African conflict prevention and management emerged in the early 1990s in response to the escalation of civil conflicts on the continent. The key elder-statespersons have been former presidents such as Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki (South Africa), Quett Masire (Botswana), Joaquim Chissano (Mozambique), Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria), Pierre Buyoya (Burundi), and Benjamin Mkapa (Tanzania). Proponents of the inclusion of elders in conflict prevention and management highlight the wisdom, counsel, and moderation they can bring to bear on peace processes. There has been a proliferation of these elders in conflict prevention and management in recent years. The pool of elder personalities now includes people such as former Organization of African Unity Secretary-General Salim Ahmed Salim, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Mozambican foreign minister Leonard Simao, former Kenyan army general Lazarus Sumbeiywo, and former Burkina Faso intelligence minister Djibril Bassole. The African Union and Africa’s regional economic communities have also strengthened initiatives to institutionalize the role of elder-statespersons in conflict prevention. This is reflected in the establishment of the Panel of the Wise as part of the AU Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), the creation of the position of elders by a number of RECs, and the establishment of the Pan-African Network of the Wise (PanWise) to provide coherence and coordination to the various initiatives (Murithi and Mwaura 2010, pp. 77–90; el-Abdellaoui 2009; Kaninda 2007). The norm of African elder-statespersons’ participation in mediation exercises is an example of an indigenous approach to solving African international security challenges, and thus corresponds to the second pathway identified in the introduction to this book.

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Starting initially as bids to promote more ownership of African problems, the norm has evolved in two directions. First, working in African institutions, African elder-statespersons have invited external actors and institutions to help in conflict resolution. Forging partnerships with nonAfrican players has denuded the norm of its exclusiveness, but this has been inevitable because of resource constraints and the intractability of many conflicts. Second, from the initial preference for former heads of state as mediators, the norm has expanded since the early 2000s to include other prominent African personalities who have been called upon, alone or in conjunction with other external actors, to intervene as conflict preventers and mediators. There are currently efforts at capacity building for mediation across a whole array of African actors and institutions, in part reflecting the deepening of the norm. There are similar initiatives internationally that draw from, and are inspired by, the African experiences. In probing the evolution of the African norm of elder-statespersons’ engagement in conflict mediation, this chapter suggests that the changing conflict terrain shaped the parameters of this norm and the actors coalescing around it. Since norms germinate in circumstances of profound changes in ways that states organize their relationships, the onset of this norm reflected equally significant alterations in approaches to managing African interstate relations. Previously, the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention had prevented African actors from engagements in the internal affairs of states, but with the upsurge of civil wars the opportunity arose for new actors to become prominent interveners in intrastate conflicts (Mwanasali 2008, pp. 41–62; Williams 2007, pp. 253–279; Makinda and Okumu 2007; see also Chapters 2 and 5). This norm was driven primarily by the pragmatic objectives of ending the threats from conflicts that were perceived to be destabilizing states and regional neighborhoods. I argue in this chapter that while the norm was prompted by the need to promote indigenous ownership of African problems and to reinforce the distinctiveness of local approaches to conflict resolution, over the years African actors have compromised to permit the participation of external actors and institutions alongside African elder-statespersons in resolving conflicts. Thus the norm has evolved to incorporate ideas, entreaties, and pressures from multiple sources that have complemented the intervention efforts of local actors. These compromises have stemmed largely from the fact that African elder-statespersons have faced inadequate capacities and resources to effectively manage their own conflicts. Furthermore, to minimize competition from outside actors who have often intervened in African conflicts, African mediators have had to forge a division of labor around mediation that acknowledges complementarities and partnerships among actors. In this respect, while African actors were critical in shaping the initial norm, diverse international actors and institutions have contributed to

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its evolution and maturation through supporting the initiatives of African elder-statespersons. Similarly, the norm has gained global resonance, captured in the multiplication of envoys that the United Nations and other institutions have appointed to intervene in numerous conflicts. I first offer a brief conceptual overview of the debates on elderstatespersons in conflict prevention and management. The subsequent sections furnish comparative analyses of some of the major conflicts that attracted prominent personalities as mediators and peacemakers. The analysis will probe the expectations around elder-statespersons, their institutional anchorage, and relationships with various external actors. Furthermore, through an analysis of the intersection of these variables, I assess their effectiveness in conflict resolution. A brief section on global envoys shows how the norm of African elder-statespersons has gained international applicability. The conclusion addresses lessons and experiences of these actors in light of the proliferation of elder-statespersons and the quest for sound coordination mechanisms. Conceptual Overview: Evolution of the Norm The norm of mobilizing elder-statespersons for conflict mediation emanates from the desire of African countries to use these individuals’ wisdom, expertise, and experience in managing conflicts. These personalities include former heads of state, former leaders of African regional and continental institutions, and prominent individuals who have held diplomatic positions in national and international organizations. Former heads of state are the most popular elder-statespersons, but increasingly the AU and RECs are drawing from a wide range of African actors who are called upon to work alone or alongside professional mediators in resolving conflicts. As more democratic elections are held in Africa and as more presidents retire through term limits, the pool of former presidents as elder-statespersons has expanded. As the introduction to this book suggests, most studies of international relations have failed to acknowledge norms forged in the Global South. As part of the denial of agency in the South, this neglect has privileged Northern actors and voices in the generation of vital values and norms shaping international politics. Focusing on norms forged in the South is a corrective to this bias and allows recognition that norms may be creative and localized responses to the problems occasioned by changes in interstate relations. Germinated in local contexts, however, norms gradually evolve, are subject to international influences, and, over time, may also influence global patterns and practices. Elder-statespersons form part of the ideas and practices around intervention in African conflict resolution. There are rich African traditions that

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place elders at the apex of reconciliation and problem solving, celebrated in palavers, barazas, imbizos, lekgotlas, and other communal arenas. Anthropologists have documented traditional mechanisms of conflict resolution and mediation across diverse African settings (Kouassi 2008, pp. 233–246; Osaghae 2000; Fred-Mensah 2000; United Nations Economic Commission for Africa 2007; Porto-Gomes and Kapinga Ngandu 2014). Yet postcolonial conflict management mechanisms were largely state-centric, responding to the OAU’s paramount principles of territorial sovereignty and non-intervention. Although the non-intervention norm was important in stabilizing the African interstate system, it failed to deal with intrastate conflicts that grew in intensity, starting in the mid-1980s with Uganda’s civil war and escalating into the 1990s with conflicts in Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. In the 2000s, electoral violence and constitutional turbulence in Madagascar, Kenya, South Sudan, and Zimbabwe continued to highlight the centrality of local actors in conflict prevention and management. Elder-statespersons have been invoked for their wisdom, imprimatur, and stature, but also, more critically, for their broad experiences in previous leadership positions (Khadiagala 2007; Herbert 2003). Elder-statespersons’ credibility in conflict mediation grows out of their previous standing in their countries. In addition, without the encumbrances of office, elder-statespersons have sufficient time to devote to conflict resolution exercises that often take long to conclude. These interventions frequently require patience, persistence, and perseverance. As will be shown with reference to Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi’s mediation in Uganda’s civil war, serving heads of state are constrained as mediators by competing national priorities and fears of overexposure to the vagaries of conflict resolution. These lessons influenced the choice of former heads of state as mediators. Although these qualities have enhanced their standing as peacemakers, elder-statespersons are anchored in national, regional, and international institutions that afford them leverage for effective intervention. In short, most of these actors have found their intervention capacity in their moral suasion, previous leadership positions, and ability to draw from national, regional, and international resources. To be effective, therefore, elder-statespersons have drawn from indigenous practices, norms, and expectations as well as from the instruments of economic sanctions, globalized pressures, and the expert advice of co-mediators from outside Africa (Mutwol 2009; Khadiagala 2007). The institutional bases of elder-statespersons are critical to comprehend how they galvanize leverage for intervention, but they are also germane because African national and regional institutions are themselves still struggling to define their mandates and authority. Thus, one of the problems elder-statespersons face is how to navigate their roles against the backdrop of weakly institutionalized structures of conflict resolution. From the out-

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set, the promise of elder-statespersons inhered, in part, in their ability to overcome the constraints of weak institutionalization by borrowing power from national, regional, and international institutions. They are expected to draw from these sources, but without being unduly beholden to any of these institutions (Nathan 2010; Engel and Porto 2014). From this perspective, elder-statespersons would be better placed to manage feuding parties in conflicts because of their strong grounding in institutions while at the same time transcending these institutions due to their moral authority and stature. But in the course of the evolution of elder-statespersons’ roles, it became apparent that they could not operate independently of most regional and international institutions. This is why, over time, there have been attempts to build on the authority and popularity of elder-statespersons by incorporating these roles in the formal institutions of the AU and RECs. Another salient theme is how elder-statespersons have managed the problem of external competitors in conflict prevention and management. Initially, tensions arose between African mediators and external actors because of complaints about the intrusiveness of largely Western actors on local processes. These perceptions deepened as elder-statespersons sought to carve out distinctive spaces as authors and owners of peace processes. Yet in the circumstances where African mediators lacked sufficient financial resources to competently organize and sustain mediation, they had to compromise by allowing the participation of Westerners who primarily funded these initiatives. This dependence forced elder-statespersons to listen to external actors and hence facilitated the emergence of the reciprocal links between African and external actors and institutions that have helped to mitigate resource scarcities. Thus, while the norm had local origins, it could not be sustained without international partnerships. Alongside the appreciation of solid partnership with external actors as necessary for effective initiatives, gradual learning and experimentation has characterized the norm of elder-statespersons. As discussed later, prominent elders such as Mandela, Masire, and Nyerere participated in processes of peacemaking in which their authority was scrutinized and censored. Humbled by the enormity of these tasks, these actors adapted to their roles by listening to their critics, learning their limits, and acknowledging failures. These experiences have fostered innovation and experimentation that have strengthened elder-statespersons’ intervention capacities. Mediating Civil Wars Before Elder-Statespersons The norm of elder-statespersons as conflict mediators emerged against the backdrop of seminal changes in the meaning of sovereignty in Africa’s interstate relations. These changes were propelled by the onset of civil conflicts in

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the mid-1980s that forced an African rethink of the adherence to non-intervention and territorial sovereignty. In this respect, the intervention of Kenya’s president Daniel arap Moi in Uganda in 1985 set the stage for the norm alterations that became widespread in the 1990s. In the face of Uganda’s civil convulsion, Moi mobilized the power of his office to bring the disputants—the National Resistance Army, led by Yoweri Museveni, and the interim administration of General Tito Okello—to Nairobi for three months of negotiations to forge a transitional power-sharing arrangement (Mwagiru 1994, pp. 275–281). Although Moi’s position lent power and urgency to the mediation, competing burdens of state nullified his authority as a mediator, demonstrating that serving heads of state were incapable of sustaining the cumbersome processes of mediation. The Nairobi negotiations hurriedly produced an agreement that fundamentally helped to extricate the mediator from the time-consuming process, an agreement that collapsed when Yoweri Museveni forcibly seized power in January 1986 (Museveni and Kanyogonya 1997; Khadiagala 1993, pp. 231–255). Although the Nairobi agreement was internally weak because of the power imbalances between the disputants, its failure also stemmed in large measure from Moi’s own lack of credibility and legitimacy as a mediator. Beyond the issue of time, mediators in civil conflicts assist in institutional change for lasting peace, and their prescriptive formulas are grounded in the idioms of democracy, power-sharing, and constitutionalism. In 1985, Moi was not an adherent to these norms, rendering his mediation suspect. These lessons shaped subsequent searches for actors who would have more credibility and legitimacy. Moi’s experience suggested that former heads of state would be attractive as mediators, combining their previous leverage and institutional standing with more time to devote to mediation. Equally vital, their prescriptive leeway as mediators would be potentially enhanced if they had retired or given up power peacefully. This is one of the expectations that attended the intervention of Nyerere, Mandela, and Masire, who had each surrendered power peacefully. In another instance of mediation that dovetailed with the emerging norms of non-indifference and intervention, Tanzania led the negotiations toward ending Rwanda’s civil war between the government of Juvenal Habyarimana and rebels of the Rwandese Patriotic Front in 1992–1993. Building on its wider credibility as a model of ethnic harmony in eastern Africa, the Tanzanian government assigned the mediation to a team of foreign affairs ministry officials. This team managed the mediation without the distractions of competing state functions (Jones 2001). Furthermore, the lower ranks of the mediators enabled the negotiations to proceed in relative isolation, free from the pressures and expectations associated with presidential mediations. Haltingly implemented, the Arusha Agreement of August 1993 did not save Rwanda from the genocide that started in April 1994, but the mediation was

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conducted professionally in ways that improved on Moi’s mediation in Uganda. Lower-level officials were preferred in this context to avoid the mistakes of overexposing the head of state to the uncertainties of the mediation. Origins of the Norm of Elder-Statespersons as Conflict Mediators The significance of mediation initiatives by Kenya and Tanzania in their neighborhood spurred interest in engaging elder-statespersons in conflict mediation. Normative pressures for intervention in regions coincided with the need to encourage respected African leaders to take active roles in mediation. Moreover, since the Cold War was ending and African states increasingly had to fend for themselves, the invocation of local solutions to local problems became a powerful organizational impetus for the new norm. Norms also evolve when there is steady leadership around them, a role that was played in this case by the then–Secretary-General of the OAU, Salim Ahmed Salim. Attempts to alter the OAU norms on non-intervention started with the OAU decision in Cairo in June 1993 to establish the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, and Prevention (Organization of African Unity 1993). A major objective of the Cairo Mechanism was to enable the Secretary-General to play a more proactive role in conflict prevention, management, and resolution (Packer and Rukare 2002). The SecretaryGeneral was mandated to “resort to eminent African personalities in consultation with the Authorities in their countries of origin. Where necessary, he may make use of other relevant expertise, send special envoys or special representatives as well as dispatch fact-finding missions to conflict areas” (Organization of African Unity 1993). The Cairo Mechanism marked a major moment in inaugurating the norm of elder-statespersons as players in conflict prevention. This norm was further solidified in the 2002 AU Constitutive Act through the creation of the Panel of the Wise to assist in conflict prevention, management, and resolution (African Union 2002; Packer and Rukare 2002, pp. 369–377). The Panel of the Wise is thus an attempt by the AU to institutionalize the norm. Entry of Elder-Statespersons in Conflict Mediation in the Great Lakes Region: Nyerere, Mandela, and Masire From the mid-1990s, Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela, and Quett Masire mediated civil conflicts in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. These conflicts formed the foundational cases that tested the intervention skills of former heads of state and established some of the key

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parameters of the new norm. As new mediators, the role of these actors was posited by some authors as the resurrection of the African tradition of deference to elders (Williams 1996). Yet in reality, as this chapter illustrates, the value of former heads of state lies primarily in their potential to overcome some of the organizational encumbrances of state mediators. Where presidents and foreign ministers are often consumed by weighty affairs of state, elder-statespersons have more time to dedicate to conflict resolution. Where state mediators tend to be biased toward incumbent governments in civil wars, the relative insulation of elder-statespersons from the parties affords them greater flexibility to stand above the fray. These themes are captured in the first phase of interventions by elder-statespersons in the Great Lakes region. Nyerere’s appointment as a mediator in Burundi in 1995 resulted from the convergence of regional and international attempts to prevent Burundi’s descent into further violence in its seemingly intractable Hutu-Tutsi conflict. Nyerere was perceived as the mediator with the moral stature to help end the conflict. But while Nyerere’s supporters harped on the power of his personality in the mediation, his leverage came to depend more on the mix of pressures and incentives that accrued from national, regional, and international levels. Throughout his intervention, Nyerere relied on the collective will of regional leaders, including economic sanctions that regional leaders imposed when Tutsi-led army officers overthrew the Hutu government in 1996 (Chounet-Cambas and Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue 2011, pp. 37–52). Burundi’s isolation forced coup leader Pierre Buyoya to negotiate with the opposition. When the talks resumed in 1998, the European Union and other external donors who funded the negotiations prevailed upon Nyerere to expand the mediation team to include various international experts (Hara 1999). With Nyerere’s death in October 1999, the mediation mantle fell on Mandela, who had just retired from South Africa’s presidency. Mandela built on his vast reputation as a conciliator and peacemaker during the South African transition. His stature was also reinforced by strong anchorage in South African power and by his international reputation (Lieberfeld 2003; Park 2010). Unlike Nyerere, who had been criticized by some Burundian parties of partiality toward Hutu parties and Tanzania’s proximity to the conflict, South Africa’s relative distance insulated Mandela from such charges. As Simon Mason has observed, Mandela combined the power of persuasion and censure to inject life into the Burundi negotiations: Unlike the Western notion of a “neutral mediator,” Nelson Mandela showed how the role of a moral chief mediator, or “facilitator” as he called himself, can be undertaken in a very outspoken manner. He worked for mutually acceptable solutions, but at the same time, he was openly critical

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of the government (e.g., about how they held political prisoners), and he compared the IDP [internally displaced person] camps to concentration camps. This form of “moral pressure” cannot be exerted by anyone, but when exercised by Mandela, with his personal reputation as the “Father of the Nation,” it was effective. (2008, p. 21)

Mandela equally benefited from the groundswell of international support and pressures that helped in persuading Hutu and Tutsi populations to share power through the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement in August 2000. In follow-up negotiations to obtain a ceasefire and implement the Arusha Agreement, Mandela ceded mediation roles to South Africa’s then–deputy president, Jacob Zuma, and later to South African minister of state security Charles Nqakula (Bentley and Southall 2005; Boshoff, Vrey, and Rautenbach 2010; Khadiagala 2013). This transition demonstrated a unique aspect of an elder-statesperson, based in a national context, paving the way for entry of national mediators in conflict resolution. Between 2001 and 2009, South Africa took the lead in peacemaking in Burundi by building on Mandela’s legacy. Masire waded into the DRC conflict in 2001 as part of regional initiatives to implement the 1999 Lusaka Peace Agreement, which aimed to end the regionalized war that followed the ouster of the authoritarian regime of Mobutu Sese Seko and the rise of Laurent Kabila (Apuuli 2004; Davis and Hayner 2009; African Centre for Constructive Resolution of Disputes 2009, pp. 14–17). Under this agreement, regional armies that invaded the DRC in August 1998 were to withdraw, followed by an Inter-Congolese Dialogue (ICD) between the Kabila government and rebel movements. Regional leaders chose Masire to mediate this dialogue, but it was not until the death of Laurent Kabila in January 2001 and the ascension to power of his son, Joseph Kabila, that talks began in Ethiopia in October 2001. Like Nyerere and Mandela, Masire’s mediation operated within the constraints of multiple actors that converged around the mediation. He also had to manage the large number of Congolese parties in the negotiations. Caught between these pressures, Masire relied increasingly on resources from the South African government, Western envoys, and the United Nations (International Crisis Group 2002). Thus, when the talks moved to South Africa in 2002, Masire could no longer claim control of the process. Amid widespread criticisms about Masire’s indecisiveness in handling the mediation, there were some demands in May 2002 to replace him with a more powerful mediator. But a compromise was reached whereby the United Nations appointed two African envoys—Moustapha Niasse, the former prime minister of Senegal, and Haile Menkerious, an Eritrean diplomat—to assist Masire’s mediation team. In addition, South Africa assumed a more prominent role in the negotiations. By this broadening of the mediation, Masire’s

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peacemaking efforts were placed within the ambit of South African power and international legitimacy. According to Emeric Rogier, when the talks stalemated in October 2002, in “desperation, Sir Ketumile Masire appealed to South African President Thabo Mbeki to try to broker a last minute deal” (2004, p. 31; see also Tonheim and Swart 2015). The interventions of Masire, Mandela, and Nyerere established two trends that shaped the norm of elder-statespersons in subsequent African conflicts. First, while acknowledging the broad repertoire of tools and strategies that eminent persons lend to mediation, there was recognition of the critical role of regional and international pressures to complement such efforts. Second, even as these actors attempted to straddle the informal (nonstate) and formal (state) domains of mediation, their strength depended primarily on their grounding in steady regional and international institutions. Institutionalizing the norm required elder-statespersons to operate in existing regional and continental structures rather than working autonomously. This was important to give coherence to mediation initiatives that often attracted a host of local and international actors. Consolidation of the Norm: Salim, Chissano, Mbeki, and Annan In the consolidation phase of the norm, elder-statespersons began to diversify to include not just former heads of state, but also other eminent personalities. The change was driven by the fact that the former heads of state were few and overstretched. Furthermore, since the 2000s, eminent persons mediated as representatives of the United Nations, the AU, and various RECs. At times, elder-statespersons worked alongside special envoys from these institutions, bringing more actors and additional collective pressures to mediation. But the enlistment of other actors to assist elder-statespersons frequently spawned competition and turf wars typical of organizational domains. These were, at times, amplified by the fact that some elder-statespersons felt constrained by the institutions in which they had to operate; in other cases, they did not want to be overshadowed or marginalized by special envoys with less prominent stature and standing. Managing the tensions between elder-statespersons and other envoys is instructive in the evolution of the norm of elder-statespersons. Salim and Eliasson Forge a Partnership on Darfur

The mediation role of former OAU Secretary-General Salim in Darfur was an example of new efforts to combine African and international initiatives in mediation. In May 2006, various actors had mediated the Darfur Peace

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Agreement in Abuja, Nigeria, between the government in Khartoum and Darfur rebel movements. The agreement was severely limited by the fact that only one of the rebel factions—Sudan Liberation Army of Minni Minnawi—signed the agreement with the government. But amid a stalemate in the implementation of the agreement, international actors coalesced around a joint AU-UN mediation team led by Salim and UN envoy Jan Pronk, a former Dutch foreign minister. Salim and Pronk sought to mobilize distinctive but complementary pressures on the parties and to preempt competitive mediation initiatives. When the Sudanese government expelled Pronk from the country in October 2006, he was replaced by Jan Eliasson, the former president of the UN General Assembly (International Crisis Group 2007; Flint 2010). With the assistance of an AU-UN joint mediation support team, Salim and Eliasson tried to reach out to the parties who had boycotted the Darfur Peace Agreement and to convince the government to accept the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force to replace the African Union Mission in Darfur (AMID). But in addition to the prevailing mistrust among the parties to the conflict, the Salim-Eliasson team faced the multiplication of mediators. In particular, Libya, Eritrea, and Chad tried to influence some of the parties. In defiance of the AU-UN mediation framework, Libya hosted a number of meetings of Darfurian parties culminating in the Tripoli Consensus in April 2007. Despite being upstaged by Libya, Salim and Eliasson developed a roadmap in June 2007 to resolve the logjam, emphasizing the need for “coordination and convergence of all initiatives under the AU-UN lead” (United Nations 2007b). In seeking to diminish the multiplication of initiatives, the roadmap emphasized that it was the role of the special envoys to “ensure maximum coherence and convergence of national, regional, and international efforts. The international community’s support to the implementation of this roadmap will be coordinated through the AU and UN” (United Nations 2007b). In the end, however, the parties ignored the SalimEliasson roadmap, and after the failure of additional diplomatic efforts to reopen the talks the mediators resigned in June 2008 (Flint 2010). The Salim-Eliasson engagement in Darfur is illustrative of the attempt by the UN to latch onto the growing norm of problem solving by African actors. For the AU, the involvement of Salim alongside a UN representative epitomized the deepening of the norm, particularly since Salim had been at the heart of previous initiatives to strengthen Africa’s mediation and intervention capacity. That the two prominent actors could converge around Darfur lent credence to the notion of partnership that sought to demonstrate that rather than abandoning Africa, the UN would buy into, and learn from, credible African personalities and institutions (see also Chapter 12). In some respects, the UN’s appointment of Eliasson started the process of internationalizing the norm of elder-statespersons mediating conflict in Africa.

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Mbeki Battles Bassolé

The principle of partnership contributed to solidifying the international legitimacy of the norm of elder-statespersons. By the same token, as the UN took a leading role in African peace initiatives, African actors became less defensive in the quest for local solutions to African problems. Soon after the collapse of the Eliasson-Salim initiative, in a fresh bid at collective international ownership and partnership, the UN and AU appointed Burkina Faso diplomat Djibril Bassolé as the UN-AU joint chief mediator in Darfur. Invoking the language of partnership in the evolution of the norm of elderstatespersons was not new; Bassolé was, in fact, appointed to reinforce the trend established previously by Eliasson and Salim, with the expectation that he would better coordinate the mediation process. Unlike Salim, however, Bassolé did not fit the description of a prominent personality, having previously served in the Burkina Faso government as a cabinet minister. Like Niasse and Menkerios in the DRC negotiations, Bassolé was a special envoy, several rungs below an elder-statesperson. Apart from this position, Bassolé’s mediation role was hamstrung from the outset by the AU’s appointment of the High-Level Panel on Darfur, consisting of Mbeki, former Burundi president Pierre Buyoya, and former Nigerian president Abdulsalim Abubakar. Tasked with examining peace, justice, and reconciliation issues in the wake of the indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court, the panel injected a competitive layer of actors in Darfur’s peacemaking. For the AU, however, the Mbeki panel demonstrated the determination to galvanize the power and authority of elder-statespersons in seeking solutions to the Darfur conflict. As one of the first panels of former heads of state, the High-Level Panel on Darfur strengthened the norm of elderstatespersons as mediators who promised to bring their collective energies to their efforts. Despite its collegiality, there was nonetheless a hierarchy within the panel, with Mbeki playing more prominent roles and occupying the limelight more than Buyoya and Abubakar. During his years as South Africa’s president, Mbeki was famous for taking strong positions on African and global issues. In particular, Mbeki was—and has remained—skeptical of, and at times hostile to, what he regarded as inordinate Western interference in African affairs (Moore 2014; Phimister and Raftopoulos 2004). Exuding confidence and unwilling to budge easily on core values, Mbeki has had an indelible stamp on various peacemaking ventures in Sudan since 2009. Beyond Sudan, and despite having his hands full with the Sudan docket, Mbeki made a brief foray as a mediator in Côte d’Ivoire in December 2010 following the contested elections, where he criticized the UN for favoring the winner, Allasane Ouattara (Mbeki 2011).

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The AU expected Bassolé to coordinate his Darfur efforts with Mbeki in the aftermath of the AU’s acceptance of the report of the High-Level Panel on Darfur, which was issued in October 2009. The panel report acknowledged that serious crimes had been committed in Darfur and made several recommendations to end injustice, promote reconciliation, and reach a peaceful settlement to the political crisis. Subsequently, the AU transformed the panel into the High-Level Implementation Panel, also headed by Mbeki, to implement the previous panel’s report and assist the Sudanese government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) to conclude agreements on key outstanding issues in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended the war in the south (African Union 2009d). Wearing the Darfur and the north-south peacemaking hats gave the new panel substantial clout in Sudan. Although devoting most of its attention to the north-south issues, the Mbeki panel tried to exert influence on the new Darfur negotiations in Doha, Qatar, conducted by Bassolé in conjunction with the Qatari government, which financed the negotiations. This put Mbeki and Bassolé at loggerheads, in part reflecting a clash between anglophone and francophone Africa as well as that between an elder-statespersons and a special envoy. Compounding Bassolé’s problems were the strained relations between himself and the AU chairperson, Jean Ping, and the head of UNAMID, Ibrahim Gambari. According to Omer Ismail, Laura Jones, and John Prendergast: “Mbeki’s personal ambitions and history with Bassolé, as well as AU Commission Chairman Jean Ping’s distrust of the mediator, quickly put Mbeki and Bassolé at odds with each other. The expansion of Mbeki’s role as chair of the African Union High Level Implementation Panel on Sudan, . . . which included North-South issues in addition to Darfur, only served to further exacerbate the already existing tensions” (2011, p. 7). At the start of the Doha negotiations in April 2009, three major rebel movements decried Mbeki’s role in Darfur because of his support for Khartoum’s efforts to launch locally based negotiations that would compete with the Doha process. Fissures also emerged between Mbeki and Bassolé amid accusations that Mbeki was colluding with the AU Commission to remove the mediator (Sudan Tribune 2009a, 2009b). Throughout 2010, the Bassolé team convinced the Darfurian parties to sign ceasefire agreements meant to prepare for negotiations for a comprehensive peace agreement (Williams and Simpson 2011). But the squabbles between Mbeki and Bassolé continued to overshadow the negotiations. In a progress report submitted to the AU in November 2010, the Mbeki panel criticized Bassolé’s mediation: While the AU-UN Joint Chief Mediator has made efforts to involve Darfurian civil society in the peace talks, his effort has, to date, been purely consultative, selective and ad hoc. This has had the unfortunate result of

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becoming an issue within Darfur itself. And by limiting the talks to the armed groups, this process has empowered the armed movements to act as spoilers if they so wish, and the two most significant movements, the JEM and the SLM-Abdul-Wahid, have refused to participate in the Doha talks, rendering any agreements that are signed moot. (Sudan Tribune 2011a)

As the conflict escalated in April 2011, the AU Peace and Security Council threw its full weight behind Mbeki, accusing Bassolé of disregarding the directives of the AU to work with the High-Level Implementation Panel: “[The] Council regrets that such coordination has not taken place and that, as a consequence, the necessary coordination and harmonization between the Doha process and the DPP [Doha Peace Process] and other AU policies, do not yet exist” (Sudan Tribune 2011a). Furthermore, the PSC called on the AU Commission to instruct Bassolé “to consult with it and the [High-Level Implementation Panel], before taking any further decisions, especially those relating to any extension of the Doha peace process.” Despite AU bids to wrest the Doha mediation from Bassolé, neither the UN nor the Qataris were enthusiastic about Mbeki taking the helm of the mediation. After the Darfurian rebel movements and the government signed the Darfur Peace Agreement in Doha in July 2011, Bassolé resigned as the mediator (Ismail, Jones, and Prendergast 2011, p. 7; Sudan Tribune 2011b). The battle between Mbeki and Bassolé compromised the coherence of African initiatives on Darfur and gave Qatar the upper hand in shaping the negotiations. Qatar’s engagement in Darfur was consistent with the growing recognition that African mediators would depend on international resources and pressures. But the acrimony between Mbeki and Bassolé further weakened the African position and heightened the sense of confusion. This confusion stemmed primarily from the fact that while the norm had privileged former heads of state as the fonts of wisdom and knowledge in mediation, it had not adequately addressed coordination problems between African special envoys and elder-statespersons. In this respect, the norm faced internal inconsistencies in application that needed to be corrected if it was to retain its appeal and gain additional footing. Mbeki Mediates in Sudan and South Sudan

To maintain coherence and reduce the competition among multiple mediators, Mbeki assumed control of the mediation of several conflicts between Sudan and South Sudan from 2011 until the present. In putting his stamp on these negotiations, Mbeki has also restored the normative framework of partnership whereby supportive international actors are occasionally brought into the negotiations to lend pressures and break deadlocks. In this regard, Mbeki’s mediation in Sudan and South Sudan has benefited from the convergence of responsibilities between the AU and the UN that characterized

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the Darfur initiatives. Similarly, Western governments and special envoys have consulted Mbeki in their interventions in these conflicts. For the most part, however, Mbeki, a fervent believer in African solutions to African problems, has favored African leadership of the peace processes. This steadfastness has contributed both to deepening the norm and garnering it wide acceptance in Africa, despite the limited successes Mbeki and his colleagues have made in resolving the problems in Sudan and South Sudan. Three cases will illustrate these themes. First, in the contested border region of Abyei, Mbeki intervened following the invasion of the Sudanese Armed Forces in May 2011. The mediation by Mbeki in collaboration with the Ethiopian leadership culminated in a ceasefire agreement and the deployment of the United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNIFSA), the withdrawal of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), and the establishment of a joint interim administration in Abyei. Although Mbeki has continued to work with the AU, the UN, and local actors to find a lasting solution to the Abyei crisis, engagement since 2011 has not yielded any tangible outcomes on its final status (Belloni 2011; Sansculotte-Greenidge 2011; Gerenge 2015a). Second, since June 2011, Mbeki has been drawn into the conflict in Sudan’s Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile states, commonly referred to as the Two Areas. This conflict pits the Sudanese government against the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement–North (SPLM-N), an offshoot of the larger movement. When the war broke on the eve of the independence of South Sudan, Mbeki brought the government and SPLM-N together in negotiations that produced a framework agreement signed on June 28, 2011. But after years of further mediation by Mbeki, which included various international actors in supportive roles, the Two Areas talks have plodded on inconclusively. Third, Mbeki was engaged in resolving the conflict that arose when South Sudan’s military seized the Heglig oil fields on the Sudan–South Sudan border in March 2012. This conflict presented Mbeki with one of the most challenging mediation initiatives in Sudan. Although Khartoum recaptured Heglig, Mbeki led renewed international pressures on both parties to resolve the outstanding bilateral questions. Lending weight to Mbeki’s mediation was the AU Peace and Security Council’s decision that forced both parties to adopt a roadmap in April 2012 that imposed a ninety-day period in which Mbeki could conclude the negotiations. The UN Security Council followed suit in May 2012 by endorsing the AU roadmap and threatening economic sanctions in the face of breaches in the timelines established by the roadmap (Deng 2012; Gamal 2012). Drawing on these pressures, between June and August 2012, Mbeki nudged the parties to reach agreement on the bones of contention. These negotiations led to a

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September 2012 cooperation agreement between the parties that eased tensions and reinvigorated negotiations on outstanding bilateral issues (Deng 2012). The September agreement also reaffirmed the international partnership that had been established since the intervention of Eliasson and Salim in Darfur. Mbeki relied almost exclusively on international pressures from the UN and the US secretary of state during decisive moments of the talks (International Crisis Group 2013, pp. 17–20). Mbeki’s mediation in Sudan and South Sudan has been the longest engagement of an elder-statesperson in an African conflict, revealing the strengths and weaknesses of the norm. Africa’s determination to maintain a mediation presence irrespective of the odds remains a critical component of conflict ownership that undergirds the norm. Further, this persistence is grounded on the conviction that without amicable solutions to these conflicts, Africa will continue to pay a high price for their escalation. Yet despite the coordination of various international and regional pressures, Mbeki has had many failures in Sudan and South Sudan. These failures speak to the stakes in the conflicts and, more important, the inadequacies of the prescriptive powers of elder-statespersons in intractable conflicts. Elder-statespersons are primarily mediators who can suggest alternative visions out of conflicts, but if the parties to these conflicts are unable or unwilling to countenance these proposals, then the mediators’ effectiveness becomes limited. Chissano Mediates in Northern Uganda and Madagascar

In another instance of an international initiative that was led by an African elder-statesperson, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed Joaquim Chissano to lead the mediation between the government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) that commenced in Juba, South Sudan, in December 2006. Although the UN Secretary-General has routinely appointed Special Representatives of the Secretary General (SRSGs), including Africans, to negotiate in global hotspots, Chissano’s appointment marked the first one of a former African head of state. For this reason, this engagement could be appraised as an instance of the diffusion of the norm of elderstatespersons to the global level. By tapping into the growing norms about the stature of former heads of state as mediators, the UN Secretary-General reaffirmed the significance of the norm, appointing a leader who would wear the hats of both an elder-statesperson and an SRSG. In appointing Chissano, the UN Secretary-General highlighted his contributions to ending Mozambique’s civil war in the early 1990s, knowledge that would be useful in northern Uganda. The Juba talks sought to end twenty years of a brutal war that had paralyzed northern Uganda. They were, however, held in the shadows of the ICC’s indictment of LRA leader Joseph Kony and his colleagues for crimes against humanity. In

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various engagements with the parties over a two-year period, Chissano was assisted by the then–vice president of the SPLM, Riek Machar, who was designated as the chief mediator. The Juba peace talks proceeded through stages covering six substantive issues; at the conclusion of negotiations for each of these issues, the parties signed separate agreements that were expected to be part of a final agreement. By February 2008, the parties had reached agreement on the substantive issues and scheduled the signing of a final agreement in April 2008 (Hendrickson and Tumutegyereize 2012). Kony, however, failed to show up because of concerns about the ICC indictment. In May 2008, Chissano recommended peaceful engagement of the LRA alongside military pressure to induce Kony to return to the negotiations (Amoru and Eriku 2009). Subsequently, the Ugandan government, with the assistance of regional countries, embarked on military operations against the LRA. In May 2009, the UN Secretary-General suspended Chissano’s mandate, acknowledging the failure of these efforts. After northern Uganda, SADC chose Chissano to mediate in Madagascar following a coup led by Andry Rajoelina that ousted President Marc Ravalomanana in March 2009. Soon after Rajoelina formed a high-transitionalauthority government, SADC and the AU suspended Madagascar. Reflecting the need to anchor the mediation in global partnerships, Chissano led a joint mediation team comprising the UN, the AU, and the International Organization of the Francophonie. In September 2009, the mediators convinced the parties to sign the Maputo Political Agreement, which proposed the establishment of a government of national unity that would pave the way for the return to constitutional order through elections (Ploch and Cook 2012; Nathan 2013). After almost two years without the implementation of the Maputo Agreement, SADC launched new negotiations in February 2011. Assisting Chissano on the joint mediation team was a former Mozambican foreign affairs minister, Leonardo Simao. These negotiations resulted in a roadmap that included the establishment of transitional institutions, a framework for elections, and international mechanisms to support the implementation of the agreement (McNeish 2011). But soon after the Chissano team unveiled the roadmap, opposition parties refused to sign it because it gave disproportionate powers to Rajoelina. Facing the stalemate, an extraordinary SADC summit meeting in June 2011 reversed the mediator’s roadmap, amending it to address the concern raised by opposition leaders. After the reversal of the roadmap, some observers criticized SADC for failure to communicate effectively between the SADC Secretariat and the Chissano mediation team (Nibishaka 2012; Christie 2011; Cawthra 2010). But the reversal, in effect, damaged the credibility of the mediators and made it impossible for Chissano to continue with the negotiations. Moreover, given the intransigence of the parties to the conflict and the

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international forces converging around the conflict, it became clear that SADC, rather than Chissano’s mediation team, needed to lead the mediation. With the negotiations requiring more pressure from SADC heads of state, Chissano’s team became less relevant to the process. As a result, in September 2011, SADC dispatched a high-level team of South African, Tanzanian, and Zambian ministers to put pressure on Rajoelina to sign the amended roadmap. Further interventions by SADC and South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, in 2012 and 2013 led to the final implementation of the roadmap, ending in the election of a new president in December 2013 (International Crisis Group 2014). The norm of elder-statespersons as conflict mediators thus faced a critical test in the Madagascar conflict. While SADC initially sought to draw on the expertise of Chissano and his team, the lack of communication between SADC and the mediation team essentially forced SADC to take charge of the process. In addition, because of the complex nature of the conflict, SADC realized that the elder-statesperson was an ineffective player in the conflict. It is thus more accurate to state that, like Mbeki in Sudan and South Sudan, the elder-statesperson was useful at some stage in managing the conflict; subsequently, regional and international actors became much more prominent in the mediation than the elder-statesperson. Annan Mediates in Kenya

In the aftermath of ethnic violence that resulted from Kenya’s December 2007 election, the AU appointed a Panel of Eminent African Personalities comprising Annan, former Tanzanian president Mkapa, and former South African first lady Graça Machel. Depicting the collective mobilization of the resources of elder-statespersons, the panel was an effort to include more elders and laid the foundations for initiatives such as the Mbeki panel in Sudan and South Sudan. In this regard, the Annan panel further fortified the norm by seeking to bring more mettle to the mediation while also demonstrating the strong African institutional anchorage around the initiative. In a context where the two parties—Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity and Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement—were deeply divided and mistrusted the intrusion of external actors, the Annan panel faced many obstacles to restoring peace and forging consensus on political reforms. Through the mobilization of the collective energies of the three prominent elders, the AU drew on their varying strengths and experiences. Annan’s strength inhered in international structures of authority and leverage. He also had the nerve to shame, threaten, and harangue the parties at decisive moments in the negotiations (Griffiths 2008; Lindenmayer and Kaye 2009). Mkapa brought neighborly pressure and familiarity with the principal parties to the mediation. Machel, with a strong international repu-

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tation, lent stamina and sharpness to the process by disarming recalcitrant parties at crucial phases of the mediation (Baldauf 2008a). The Annan mediation built on the short-lived initiatives by various envoys, including then–chairperson of the AU and Ghana’s president John Kufour, who made initial forays into the conflict in January 2008. More critically, the mediators benefited from both international pressures from Kenya’s Western partners and strong domestic constituencies that pushed for a peaceful solution. In the preparatory phase of the mediation in late January 2008, Annan insisted on obtaining assurances from Western and African leaders that there would be no competing mediators. As he noted at the end of the talks: “I said we have to make sure there is just one mediation process. Otherwise you have the protagonists trying to bottom shop, looking elsewhere if they don’t like what you are offering. You get diplomatic tourism and that is not good” (cited in Cohen 2008). The absence of competitors allowed the Annan panel sufficient room to manage the negotiations by establishing the broad agenda that helped the parties search for mutually acceptable solutions (Griffiths 2008; Baldauf 2008b; Kanyinga 2011). In forty days of negotiations, the Annan panel engaged the parties around four core components: stopping violence and restoring human rights; addressing the humanitarian crisis and promoting national reconciliation; overcoming the political crisis; and developing long-term strategies for durable peace. Despite the government’s reluctance to share power with the opposition, the Annan panel insisted on a coalition government that would restore peace and initiate political reforms. These objectives were achieved in February 2008 when the parties signed the power-sharing agreement, the National Accord and Reconciliation Act. The accord created a government of national unity, which launched institutional reforms to address long-term issues of development and reconciliation (Sihanya and Okello 2010). The remarkable success of the Annan panel in Kenya strengthened the norm of elder-statespersons as mediators. The replication of the norm in the Mbeki panel in Sudan and South Sudan was due in large measure to the Kenyan experience. But in addition to the collective pressure the Annan panel exerted on the Kenyan parties, there was also significant pressure from Kenya’s Western donors who did not want the country to lapse into a civil war. The Kenyan case was thus a unique instance in which the fortuitous combination of pressures and actors enabled the norm to produce the intended outcomes. The Panel of the Wise The Panel of the Wise is informed by notions of Africa’s elder-statespersonship, notably the centrality of eminent persons in peacemaking (Murithi and Mwaura

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2010; Gerenge 2015b). In Article 11 of the Protocol Relating to the Establishment of the Peace and Security Council, the Panel is envisaged to comprise “five highly respected African personalities from various segments of society who have made an outstanding contribution to the cause of peace, security, and development in the continent” (African Union 2007). As part of the APSA, the Panel is at the center of early warning, conflict prevention, mitigation, and conflict resolution. Through the new Pan-African Network of the Wise, the Panel has reached out to the other eminent personalities established by the RECs. When needed, the Panel also draws on the expertise of former members called the Friends of the Panel. All these institutions are creating a large number of peacemaking actors and institutions, but their proliferation raises profound questions of coordination, convergence, and rationalization of resources. These questions are gradually being negotiated as these actors evolve in their roles and capacities. Since its inauguration in 2007 with a team composed of Ahmed Ben Bella, former Algerian president (North Africa); Miguel Trovoada, former president of São Tomé and Príncipe (central Africa); Salim, former AU Secretary-General (East Africa); Brigalia Bam, then–chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa (Southern Africa); and Elisabeth Poignon, former president of the Constitutional Court of Benin (West Africa), the Panel has focused primarily on advising the commissioner of the Peace and Security Department and the AU Commission on issues of peace and security and has undertaken fact-finding missions in countries in conflicts. One of its first interventions was in the Central African Republic in 2007 to consult with the government and rebel groups about setting up mechanisms for a national dialogue (Gerenge 2015b, pp. 1–4; Porto-Gomes and Kapinga Ngandu 2014). The Panel also organizes annual forums of African mediators and envoys to share experiences and best practices. In 2008, the Panel commissioned a major report on preventing election violence in Africa that was approved by the AU General Assembly and has formed the basis for AU long-term observation missions in countries facing the threat of electoral violence (African Union 2010c). Pre-electoral missions have emerged as the most dominant feature in the Panel’s conflict prevention repertoire. Furthermore, these missions are often conducted in collaboration with eminent persons from the RECs. For instance, the Panel has engaged ECOWAS, the East African Community (EAC), SADC, and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) in several pre-electoral missions in countries such as Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, the DRC, Egypt, Kenya, Senegal, and Tunisia. Despite efforts to institutionalize and expand the Panel of the Wise, the norm of elder-statespersons will still hinge on ad hoc processes of selecting former heads of state to deal with emerging conflicts. In recent years, former heads of state who are not members of the Panel of the Wise, such as

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Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo, Mali’s Alpha Konare, Botswana’s Festus Mogae, and Tanzania’s Jakaya Kikwete, have been invited to intervene in various peacemaking initiatives alone or with the Panel. Perhaps the flexibility of the norm lies in the fact that it has straddled both informal and formal domains, permitting many actors to gravitate around it. As the Panel of the Wise and its regional iterations focus primarily on election monitoring, elder-statespersons will retain the more profound tasks of intervention and mediation in serious conflicts. Such a division of labor may also be one way to manage the proliferation of peacemakers without diminishing or whittling down the designation of elder-statespersons. In recent years, the AU’s Peace and Security Council has also led efforts to establish a mediation support unit modeled on the UN mediation unit. Once it is established, the support unit will draw from the wide expertise of academics, policymakers, and elder-statespersons in initiatives that are geared toward professionalizing African mediation. International Diffusion of the Norm of Elder-Statespersons as Conflict Mediators As hinted earlier in the UN Secretary-General’s appointment of Chissano to mediate in northern Uganda, the norm of elder-statespersons as conflict mediators has gradually started to inform international practices beyond the African continent. Although the global migration of the norm has been slow and selective, some of the key assumptions about the norm have featured in the appointments of UN special envoys. Probably the most publicized institution that borrows from the idea of eminent persons with clout and prestige is the Elders, a group of international leaders that Mandela launched in Johannesburg in July 2007 (Snow 2007; Pierce 2007). The founders of the Elders were convinced that “many communities look to their elders for guidance, or to help resolve disputes. In an increasingly interdependent world—a ‘global village’—could a small, dedicated group of individuals use their collective experience and influence to help tackle some of the most pressing problems facing the world today?” (Pierce 2007, p. 4). Composed of eleven international figures, the group currently includes Annan; Lakhdar Brahimi (Algeria, currently the North African representative to the AU Panel of the Wise and former UN diplomat); Machel (South Africa/Mozambique); Martti Ahtisaari (Finland, former prime minister); Ela Bhatt (India, founder of Self-Employed Women of India); Hina Jilani (Pakistan, founder of a women’s legal firm); Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil, former president); Mary Robinson (Ireland, former president); Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico, former president); Gro Harlem Bruntland (Norway, former prime minister), and Jimmy Carter (United

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States, former president). In the first six years of its existence, the Elders was chaired by Desmond Tutu, who was then succeeded by Annan. Since the formation of the group, the Elders have carried out initiatives to promote dialogue, peace, and human rights. They have intervened in the search for peace in South Sudan and Sudan, Egypt during the Arab Spring, Cyprus, the Korean Peninsula, Sri Lanka, Israel-Palestine, and Burma. They have also championed themes such as the abolition of child marriages; women’s equality; climate change; efforts to alleviate human suffering resulting from extreme poverty, injustices, and intolerance; and the strengthening of the UN (Shannon 2017). While the Elders depict the explicit migration of the norm of elderstatespersons as conflict mediators to the international level, the mushrooming of envoys by multilateral institutions such as the UN, the Commonwealth, and the EU represents the increasing trend toward deployment of prominent individuals to lead mediation and conflict prevention efforts (Gowan and Kugel 2015; Kugel 2015a; Whitfield 2015). A recent study has revealed that in 2013, there were some fifty-two multilateral envoys working in twenty-nine locations around the world, most of them in African trouble-spots (Kugel 2015b). The UN, in particular, has expanded the numbers of special envoys, notably the UN Secretary-General’s special envoys and representatives. As Nora Gordon (2015) notes, “the overall number of active UN multilateral envoys, including those involved with border disputes, joint/double-hatted envoys, and heads of regional missions, more than doubled from 2010 to 2013, increasing from 6 to 16 envoys.” Most of these envoys tend to be high-profile individuals, including former heads of state, selected because of their prestige, influence, access, and leverage in facilitating peace agreements. On the list of eminent persons appointed by the UN Secretary-General are Robinson, who was appointed in March 2013 as chief UN mediator, and Brahimi, who was appointed in August 2012 as the UN–Arab League joint special representative for Syria. Conclusion African actors and institutions have made a vital contribution to forging norms around the intervention of intermediaries in conflicts, including most notably elder-statespersons. Norms result from the need to address existing challenges, forcing innovation and experimentation. Driven by the imperatives of managing civil conflicts in the 1990s, the norm has evolved to reflect the emergence of new actors, the changing nature of conflicts, and international inputs into African peacemaking efforts. Elder-statespersons remain relevant to ending African conflicts, and the institutions around them are part of a trend to establish professionally led peacemaking institu-

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tions. These actors have become widely accepted in African conflict mediation because they complement and supplement national and regional institutions of peacemaking that have yet to find firm resources and capacities. Efficacy stems from both the gravitas these actors bring to the mediation and their ability to draw on regional and international sources of leverage and pressures. Over the years, the AU and RECs have provided the broad umbrella for the coordination of collective African conflict resolution efforts, including by elder-statespersons. Actors such as Mbeki, Chissano, and Salim have found strong institutional anchorage in the AU and RECs as these institutions have broadened their conflict resolution roles. Operating in these institutions lends them more local power and may contribute to the accumulation of knowledge and experiences that these institutions could draw from in future. As mediators proliferate at the AU and RECs, however, there will need to be more efforts at coordination and coherence to minimize competition and contestations. This will be even more critical because the elder-statespersons seem set to remain as ad hoc actors outside the AU Panel of the Wise and other peacemaking institutions. For this reason, as the norm has evolved, it has had to accommodate a variety of actors and practices that are all seeking to advance peacemaking efforts in Africa. With respect to engagement with international institutions, partnerships with the United Nations and Western actors have been critical mechanisms in shaping the capacity of elder-statespersons. Thus, as global actors have bought into the norm, they have furnished legitimacy and resources to sustain the norm in Africa. Since Nyerere and Mandela, elderstatespersons have combined local respectability with aggressive mobilization of outside resources. More vital, the success of local efforts hinges on the ability of external interlocutors to present a united front in their initiatives, as demonstrated by the Mbeki panel’s mediation over the Heglig oil field dispute. African mediators wearing UN hats such as Chissano in northern Uganda and Menkerios in the DRC and Sudan are also gaining popularity as the UN strengthens its ties with African mediators. Like the case with local institutions, however, African mediators have to continually address questions of coordinating multiple external voices and actors to enhance their intervention abilities. The popularity of elder-statespersons as conflict mediators is starting to reverberate at the international level in the selection of mediators by multilateral institutions. The norm has thus gained traction and appeal, becoming part of global efforts to build and strengthen mediation expertise and capacity. Thus far, however, the majority of envoys have been appointed by multilateral institutions to deal with African issues, largely because of widespread conflicts in Africa. The norm will deepen globally—and fully prove its international diffusion—only when there are more elder-statespersons managing conflicts elsewhere.

7 The Anti-Coup Norm Issaka K. Souaré

A few years after the dawn of political independence on the continent, military coups became a frequent occurrence in African countries. Between July 1952, when the first military coup in Africa was registered in Egypt, and July 2000, when the now defunct Organization of African Unity (OAU) adopted a normative policy banning military coups, a total of seventy-eight successful putsches was counted in Africa, in addition to countless attempted and failed ones. This is an average of nearly sixteen coups per decade, or three coups every two years. The African Union, into which the OAU metamorphosed in 2001, has maintained and even strengthened the anti-coup norm, defined as a rejection of all forms of unconstitutional changes of government, that its predecessor introduced in 1997 (Souaré 2014; Tieku 2017). The AU has since called for “zero tolerance for coups and sanctioning of coup-born regimes” (Souaré 2014). The AU did so first through its 2001 Constitutive Act, and most extensively through the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance (African Charter), which was adopted in January 2007 and entered into force in February 2012. Other regional organizations on the African continent have adopted the same norm, and it has also found resonance with a number of nonAfrican institutions and state actors. The gradual spread of this African anti-coup norm across the continent falls squarely under the second pathway of norm development identified in this book, namely the creation of African norms shaping security politics on the continent, which may also diffuse to other regions on the international stage. Thus this chapter looks at both the regional origins of the norm and instances constituting evidence of its diffusion beyond Africa—that is, the stage of globalization.

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The chapter proceeds in four main sections beyond this introduction. The first provides a brief definition of military coup and presents the African anti-coup norm and its evolution, particularly in the framework of the main relevant instruments of the OAU/AU and Africa’s regional economic communities. The second section takes stock of the record of successful military coups on the continent and their often detrimental effects on patterns of acceptable governance. This is the main motivation for the development of the norm. The section also looks at the promotion of the norm and shows evidence of its firm establishment on the continent, pointing out the main actors who championed it and pushed for its adoption at various levels. The third section focuses on instances in which African actors have been successful in exporting the norm outside the continent and shaping non-African responses to coups occurring in Africa. In the final section, some possible challenges and obstacles that may hinder the norm’s prosperity in the long run are highlighted. Coups d’État and the African Anti-Coup Norm In this section I define military coups and the anti-coup norm as well as explore the various iterations of the two concepts as they emerged and developed through the policy frameworks of the OAU/AU and regional economic communities. Military Coups

Coups occur when the highest executive leader of a government is suddenly and illegally displaced by the action of a relatively small group of people, in which members of the defense or security forces of the state play a key role, either on their own or in conjunction with a number of civilians (First 1970, p. 19; McGowan and Johnson 1984, pp. 634–635; Souaré 2006, pp. 28–30). The coup is said to be successful when the coup-makers manage to hold on to power for at least one week (Powell and Thyne 2011, p. 252; Souaré 2014). The most important elements of this definition are that (1) the process of seizing power must be illegal; (2) the deposed leader must be the highest person or the head of the executive branch, meaning either the executive prime minister (in parliamentary countries) or the president; and (3) the operation should be sudden and often covert. While events orchestrated or initially spearheaded by civilian elites, and even sometimes by the populace, could constitute the trigger of some military coups, this is not a disqualifier from this definition so long as the final strike comes from elements of the defense or security forces, who could have done it alone, unlike civilians (Souaré 2014).

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The focus of this chapter is on successful coups, meaning the analysis excludes alleged “coup plots,” which are sometimes pretexts used by incumbent regimes to get rid of opponents. It is also difficult to verify the truthfulness of unsuccessful coups. Because the focus of the chapter is on the anti-coup norm established by African actors, it makes more sense to concentrate on coups whose authenticity can be verified. Essence of the Anti-Coup Norm

To frame its anti-coup norm, the OAU introduced the concept of unconstitutional change of government. This concept is broader than the definition of coup earlier in the chapter but coups are the key constituent part of it. This anti-coup norm can be found in and is defined through the identification of a number of situations considered as unconstitutional changes of government, including military coups. These scenarios are outlined in three main policy instruments of the OAU/AU and replicated in similar instruments of some regional organizations on the African continent. The first continental instrument is the Lomé Declaration on the Framework for an OAU Response to Unconstitutional Changes of Government. This was adopted in the Togolese capital, Lomé, in July 2000 during the thirty-sixth ordinary session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the OAU. The second instrument is the Constitutive Act of the AU (in force since May 2001), while the third, as indicated earlier, is the African Charter. One regional instrument that contains the anti-coup norm is the December 2001 additional Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance of the Economic Community of West African States. Both the Lomé Declaration and the African Charter consider four main situations as constituting instances of unconstitutional changes of government:

1. Military coup against a democratically elected government. 2. Intervention by mercenaries to replace a democratically elected government. 3. Replacement of democratically elected government by armed dissident groups and rebel movements. 4. The refusal by an incumbent government to relinquish power to the winning political party after free, fair, and regular elections.

Article 23(5) of the African Charter adds a fifth situation: “Any amendment or revision of the constitution or legal instruments, which is an infringement on the principles of democratic change of government.” This is the broad definition of unconstitutional change of government, of which coups are a part. However, until recently, the focus of African actors with regard to the broad application of the norm was on military

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coups. In fact, despite moves to expand the application of the norm to other aspects of unconstitutional change of government, particularly since the Arab Spring of 2010–2011, it is still primarily an anti-coup norm, as it was against coups that the norm was and is still most forcefully evoked and applied. This could be explained by the fact that African leaders thought coups were the most prevalent of all these situations and that it would be easier to deal with this particular phenomenon than with others. This is also what justifies the focus of this chapter on military coups. One critical, and arguably evolving, aspect of the African anti-coup norm regards the context in which coups are deemed to take place. Coups are seen as being against the respect of constitutions, a cornerstone of multiparty democracy gradually espoused on the continent since the end of the Cold War. Therefore, the wording in the aforementioned instruments seems to indicate that an overthrow of the government in power is not a military coup if it is staged against undemocratically elected regimes. This could be construed as implying that the norm would apply differently depending on the nature of the regime that is overthrown. The analytical definition of coup provided earlier is obviously indifferent to the nature or democratic credentials of the ousted regime. The practice in Africa has not followed a systematic distinction in this regard, though language of condemnation of armies overthrowing regimes considered as truly democratic (e.g., Mauritania in 2008, Burkina Faso in 2015) has tended to be stronger than when the overthrown regime was deemed less democratic, as was the case in Niger in February 2010 (Souaré 2012). Looking more closely at these instruments, it is clear that the Lomé Declaration focused on setting the stage for the norm by trying to justify it, while the Constitutive Act and the African Charter strive to develop the operational aspects of the norm, particularly the measures by which it can be enforced. Thus, in the preamble of the Lomé Declaration, African leaders stated that “coups are sad and unacceptable developments in our Continent, coming at a time when our people have committed themselves to respect of the rule of law based on peoples’ will expressed through the ballot and not the bullet.” One can clearly deduce two things from this statement. First, African leaders tried to delegitimize and render abnormal a phenomenon that was until then considered normal. Second, they explained why they were taking this position, as the erstwhile de facto “normal phenomenon” was clashing with another “normal matter” that has the unparalleled advantage of being “noble”—that is, democracy and the rule of law. The Lomé Declaration therefore advocates a position of zero tolerance vis-à-vis military coups. This zero tolerance is an important element of the norm’s operational aspects. Article 30 of the Constitutive Act of the AU stipulates: “Governments which shall come to power through unconstitutional means shall not be allowed to participate in the activities of the Union.” Article 25(4) of the

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African Charter goes further to ban what can be considered as “coup laundering” when it states: “The perpetrators of unconstitutional change of government [e.g., military coup] shall not be allowed to participate in elections held to restore the democratic order or to hold any position of responsibility in political institutions of their State.” In addition to its public condemnation and the call for the speedy return to constitutional order in the country concerned, all three instruments indicate, in varying degrees of detail, that the country should be suspended from all the decisionmaking organs of the AU while the new authorities are given a period of up to six months to restore constitutional order. At the expiration of the six-month suspension period, a range of targeted sanctions should be instituted against obdurate coup-makers. Evolution of the Norm

The most significant step taken by African leaders toward the adoption of the anti-coup norm came at the thirty-third summit of the OAU, held in Harare, Zimbabwe, in early June 1997. This summit was held barely a week after a coup in Sierra Leone overthrew the democratically elected government of Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. Kabbah had been elected after nearly half a decade of a brutal civil war in the country. The coup was therefore seen as a double blow: a violation of the democratic process and a regress in the peace process in the country (Kabbah 2012). The summit formally condemned not just the Sierra Leone coup, but all unconstitutional changes of government. Between Harare and Lomé, discussions continued with regard to the concrete action to be taken against the “scourge” of unconstitutional changes of government, particularly military coups. If the thirty-fourth summit of the OAU, held in Ouagadougou in June 1998, made a mere declaration of intent to “work toward the establishment and consolidation of effective democratic systems” in Africa, the thirty-fifth summit of July 1999 in Algiers marked a decisive move to develop the declaration made in Harare. Here, African leaders declared that “Member States whose governments came to power through unconstitutional means after the Harare Summit should restore constitutional legality before the next Summit,” requesting “the OAU SecretaryGeneral to be actively seized of developments in those countries and to assist in programmes intended to return such countries to constitutional and democratic governments” (Organization of African Unity 1999). The Harare and Algiers declarations did not provide the leadership of the OAU the powers to explicitly condemn coup-makers, but gave the mandate for a firm encouragement to restore constitutional order before the next summit. The Lomé Declaration and the Constitutive Act of the AU added more teeth to the evolving norm, in terms of providing a mandate for clear condemnation of military coups and sanctions against perpetrators. But the norm

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as envisioned in these two instruments had loopholes that needed to be corrected. For example, the two instruments did not prevent “coup laundering,” for it did not matter who restored constitutional order. Coup-makers could have done it themselves and the suspension of their countries would automatically be lifted. This was seen as insufficient disincentive against military coups. Also, while the Lomé Declaration had some legal weight, as it emanated from the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the OAU, it did not have the same legal force as a charter open for signature and ratification by state parties. Finally, the anti-coup norm was until now focused on modes of accession to power while neglecting the conditions of maintaining it. The African Charter strove to attend to these concerns (Souaré 2012). A final point on the evolution of the norm is the provision of Article 25(4) of the African Charter, as noted earlier. However, because this provision could have become operational only after the ratification of the charter by the requisite number of member states, which did not happen until February 2012, a decision of the fourteenth AU Assembly of Heads of State and Government, held in Addis Ababa in February 2010, “operationalized” this specific provision in the meantime (African Union 2010a). This decision was informed by the experience of the Mauritanian coup of August 2008. This coup was orchestrated by Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz against the democratically elected government of Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi. The initial reaction of the AU Commission and Peace and Security Council to the coup was a firm insistence not only that the ousted president be reinstated, but also that should new elections be held, no member of the military junta, including Abdelaziz, should be allowed to stand. This position was based on Article 25(4) of the African Charter and, most important, on the fact that Mauritania had been the first country to ratify it, on July 28, 2008, barely a few days before the coup. But neither the Senegalese mediators in the talks between the Mauritanian parties that culminated in the July 2009 elections nor the AU had a valid legal basis to oppose Abdelaziz’s candidacy. Indeed, the continental body was later forced to accept this scenario and eventually recognize his “victory.” The AU summit decision on Article 25(4) was therefore an interim safeguard before the entry into force of the African Charter. It was forcefully pushed against coup-makers in Mali and Guinea-Bissau, which happened, respectively, in March and April 2012, a few weeks after the entry into force of the African Charter. A True African Norm

The anti-coup measures indicated in the aforementioned continental instruments are not simply a set of policies or principles, but constitute a genuine international norm. To establish this, recall the operational definition of norms that the editors provided in the introduction of this volume.

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Norms are defined as “standards of right and wrong, which proscribe certain activities and legitimate others” (Williams 2007, p. 258). They are also defined as standards of shared expectations of appropriate behavior for actors within a given group identity or a community of states (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, p. 891). The essence of the African anti-coup norm is to consider coups as an “unacceptable and anachronistic act” and proclaim zero tolerance vis-à-vis coup-born regimes. Here the “standard of right” and the “appropriate behavior” is to come to power through constitutional means, which proscribes military coups as a “standard of wrong” for African actors. When someone engages in it, his or her action generates disapproval and condemnation by African regional organizations and other states. In fact, as we will see later, African coup-makers since 2000 systematically spend a considerable amount of energy to justify their actions within the framework of the anti-coup norm, arguing that they were forced to act in defense of democracy, which is the ultimate aim of the norm. We are therefore, with no doubt, dealing with an established norm. In addition to being an established international norm, it is also authentically African. On this point, it is worth noting that apart from the AU and African RECs, there is no other region or regional organization that has a norm calling for (1) automatic rejection and condemnation of military coups; (2) systematic sanctioning of coup-makers by the suspension of their countries from continental and regional decisionmaking bodies; and (3) concerted efforts to have other major partner organizations outside of the continent to respect this decision, condemn coups, and sever ties with coup-makers. The only other two regional organizations that have an anti-coup norm are the International Organization of the Francophonie (OIF) and the Organization of American States (OAS). We shall consider OIF’s policy in the next section, but in the meantime let us focus on the OAS, which adopted an anti-coup norm even before the OAU and African RECs. Notwithstanding similarities, there are some marked differences between the OAS anti-coup norm and the African one that justify the latter being considered a distinctive African innovation. The aforementioned three elements of the African anti-coup norm are the key distinctions with the OAS anti-coup norm. Three most prominent and widely cited OAS instruments on coups are (1) the OAS General Assembly Resolution 1080 of June 5, 1991; (2) the Protocol of Washington, adopted in December 1992 to amend certain provisions of the organization’s founding charter and which entered into force on September 25, 1997; and (3) the Inter-American Democratic Charter, adopted in Lima, Peru, on September 11, 2001. While Resolution 1080 declares a clear commitment to the promotion and consolidation of representative democracy, it defers, with regard to the recognition of undemocratic regimes in the region, to “the policies of each member country.”

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More forceful and very similar, even in wording, to African instruments is Article 1 of the Protocol of Washington, which provides for the possibility of coup-born regimes being “suspended from the exercise of the right to participate in the sessions of the General Assembly” and other deliberative and decisionmaking bodies of the OAS. But here again, this instrument falls short of instituting a policy of automatic condemnation and suspension of member states, contrary to legal instruments of the African anti-coup norm. As for the last instrument, its target is clearly not coupborn regimes, but rather the authoritarianism of civilian regimes that may have initially come to power through democratic means (Heine and Weiffen 2014; Olivari 2014). However, given its precedence over the African anticoup norm and the wide knowledge about its existence, one must acknowledge the possibility that this charter may have influenced, at least in some regards, the African norm. Motivations for the Anti-Coup Norm and Its Promotion In this section, I look at the motivations behind the creation of the anti-coup norm in Africa, which starts with the record of military coups on the continent and their detrimental effects on patterns of acceptable forms of governance. The section also considers the promotion and firm establishment of the norm on the continent, including the main actors who championed it. Record of Military Coups in Africa

The African anti-coup norm emerged and developed in response to a pattern of frequent coups on the continent that often had highly detrimental consequences for the affected countries. From the first successful military coup in postcolonial Africa, registered in Egypt in July 1952 to August 2017, a total of ninety successful coups were recorded on the continent, the most recent one having occurred in September 2015 in Burkina Faso. Prior to 1990, military coups were the main mode of leadership change in the majority of African states (First 1970, pp. 4–6; Charlton 1983, pp. 281–282; Houngnikpo 2010, p. 111). Figure 7.1 shows that the period 1971–1980 was the most coup-prone decade, with a total of twenty-five coups, followed by the previous decade, 1961–1970, with a total of twenty-one coups, while the two decades from 1981 to 2000 saw the curb descending, as they each registered fifteen successful military coups. Yet as it will be seen in the next section, and critical as far as the emergence of Africa’s anti-coup norm is concerned, it would be a mistake to view the decline in coups after 1990 as an indication of a

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Figure 7.1 Successful Coups per Decade, 1952–2016 30

Number of Coups

25 20 15 10

5 0

1952–1960 1961–1970

1971–1980 1981–1990 1991–2000

2001–2010

2011–2016

Source: Author’s own unpublished database. Note: For methodological considerations, the period 1952–1960 is considered a decade, while the period 2011–2016 is also considered a decade, in order to have a complete decade for a more balanced comparative analysis in the time series. This is by no means a prediction that there will not be any successful coup before 2020, but the decline it shows in the curve is similar to the previous decade of 2001–2010.

diminishing severity of the problem. This is because the decade 1991–2000 coincided with the “third wave” of democratization on the continent (Young 1999); hence the record of coups in this period is in reality more disturbing than the record in the previous decade. It is this reality that explains partly why the OAU moved to ban them. Champions of the Norm and Its Establishment on the Continent

Several key actors championed the adoption and the promotion of the anticoup norm in Africa, and most had both normative and instrumental motivations. Some were leaders who either had been victim of military coups or were potential targets of the same, like Ahmad Tejan Kabbah (Kabbah 2012). There were also other African leaders who may not have been directly affected or threatened, but who had a high level of aversion to military regimes and thought that their continued existence on the continent was not honorable for Africa in the twenty-first century. Former South African president Thabo Mbeki (1999–2008) is one such leader. At the eighty-eighth anniversary celebrations of the African National Congress (ANC) in January 2000, Mbeki called for an end to military rule in Africa. He is reported to have urged his colleagues to “intensify the struggle to

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ensure that by the end of 2000, all the countries on our continent are at peace and that none is ruled by a military regime” (Stoppard 2000). He made a similar statement two years later, in his annual accounting (budget) speech to the South African parliament in June 2002, when he said that ending military coups should be a priority for the continent in its search for growth and stability (Boyle 2002). The former Nigerian and Senegalese presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Abdoulaye Wade raised similar considerations, particularly in the period 2000–2004. The particular role played by these African leaders at this period can be explained by two main factors. First, this was the period of transformation of the OAU into the AU, and these African leaders were keen to show to both their national publics and the international community at large that the transformation was profound and based on the ethos of good governance. Second, this period coincided with the adoption and promotion of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), which was championed by the same leaders with the mantra of good governance in Africa to facilitate attracting more foreign investment and a sincere partnership between Africa and the rest of the world. Mbeki was campaigning for his idea of “African Renaissance,” as another push for NEPAD. All these initiatives were at odds with military coups. A second group of champions of the anti-coup norm in Africa included members of the OAU Secretariat, which later became the AU Commission— most notably their respective heads—and officials in similar positions in certain RECs. For the AU Commission, in particular, its first chairperson, former Malian president Alpha Oumar Konaré, was vociferous in his criticism of military coups. During his tenure at the AU Commission (2004– 2008), he did not miss an opportunity to condemn them and promote strict adherence to the Lomé Declaration. He also played a pivotal role in the adoption of the African Charter. For example, after the sudden death of Gnassingbé Eyadéma in Togo in February 2005, the military suspended the constitution and prevented the president of the National Assembly from succeeding him as per the constitution. They nominated one of the late president’s sons, Faure Essozimna Eyadéma, as the new head of state. Both ECOWAS and the AU, with vigorous personal involvement of Konaré (chairperson of the AU Commission) and Obasanjo (chairperson of the AU), condemned this action and urged the military and their appointed head of state to abide by the constitution. Their strong opposition forced the Togolese political elites to organize elections in April 2005, which Faure Essozimna Eyadéma won (Souaré 2005). In fact, in a statement issued on its website just after these elections, the main political opposition party in Togo, Union of Forces for Change, had this to say: “After the coup of 5 February 2015, Alpha Oumar Konaré was the first leader to express his disapproval. One could even argue that

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his stance forced African Heads of State, unwillingly for some, to espouse the same position. Without Konaré’s stance, Faure Gnassingbé would have very easily been installed in the presidential chair of Togo” (Union of Forces for Change 2005). African leaders have also promoted the anti-coup norm through their countries’ representation in regional bodies. The newly established fifteenmember Peace and Security Council of the AU, for example, came to play a critical role in championing the anti-coup norm, not only rhetorically but also in practice, since its operationalization in mid-2004 (Souaré 2012). Although the PSC is a structure of member states, which are represented there by their ambassadors, its working modalities and statutes render it an autonomous body. This makes it, in many regards, an actor in its own right. Its role in promoting this norm became—and still is—so important that Kathryn Sturman and Aissatou Hayatou rightly contend, in an assessment of the work of the PSC, that it is on unconstitutional changes of government “that there has been the most significant progress in the institutionalization of a norm” in the work of the AU in general, and that of the PSC in particular (2010, p. 71). At the level of the RECs, the role of ECOWAS, the organization representing the region most known for its coup record, has been especially important. In 2001, the West African regional bloc reinforced its conflict prevention arsenal by adopting an additional Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance supplementary to its 1999 Protocol on Conflict Prevention. Article 1(c) of this supplementary protocol highlights, as a constitutional principle that ought to be shared by all member states, “zero tolerance for power obtained or maintained by unconstitutional means” (Economic Community of West African States 2001). A third and very important set of champions of Africa’s anti-coup norm have been numerous civil society organizations, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens on the continent. In addition to advocating for this norm and applauding subregional and regional organizations whenever they appear, in their eyes, to have acted firmly against coup-makers, these actors have been vocal in criticizing intergovernmental institutions when they judged them to be insufficiently committed to the norm. It is worth noting, at this point, that the champions of the anti-coup norm have faced some challenges in their enterprise. One challenge has been divergences between those who are supposed to stand together, particularly among the institutional actors. This was clear in the case of Mauritania in 2008 and 2009. The late Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was the chair of the AU in 2009, making him the African head of state who was supposed to be the most vocal in condemning the coup. He did not; rather, he called for its acceptance. Fortunately, the PSC exercised its independence in this regard and stood firm on its decision to maintain the suspension of Mauritania.

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Another challenge is posed by coups overthrowing a leader who was not a model of good governance. This point is linked to the earlier discussion as to whether coups are defined by being against a democratically elected government or whether the definition is blind to the nature of the overthrown regime. With the AU and regional blocs espousing a principled stance against coups and a long-term view of their (un)desirability, this position often puts them at loggerheads with substantial sections of the populations, both in the country concerned and elsewhere. Ordinary citizens and some civil society organizations often focus on the vices of the overthrown leader and the sweet promises of the new military rulers, but at times fail to consider what could become of the military junta if they were given a blank check. Many ordinary people also tend to overlook the overall experience of military regimes in the history of the continent. Yet this experience shows that, as John Clark rightly notes, military rulers have, in most cases, “turned out to be at least as corrupt and authoritarian as the civilians whom they replaced” (2007, p. 141). Nevertheless, over time and thanks to the efforts of these champions, the anti-coup norm has become widely and effectively established in Africa. Perhaps the most poignant element that demonstrates this fact is the evident change in the perception of military coups since 2000. One important indicator of this change is the promptness with which postLomé coup-makers have promised to restore constitutional order, and the number of them who were forced to hand over power to a transitional government or an elected leader. Indeed, they all did or were forced to do so with varying duration of their stay in power (see Table 7.1). Yet this was not the case before Lomé, and two of the fifteen coup-born regimes between January 1990 and July 2000 were ended only through the death of their leader (Sani Abacha in Nigeria, 1993–1998) or through a counter-coup (Valentine Strasser in Sierra Leone, 1992–1996). A second indicator is that the fifteen coup-born regimes between 1990 and July 2000 spent an average of about twenty months per regime, including five of them spending more than two years in power. The twelve similar regimes that were in power from July 2000 to December 2015 spent an average of about eleven months. Only Madagascar’s went beyond two years. In fact, half of these regimes stayed in power for only a month (Guinea Bissau, April 12–May 11, 2012) or less (Guinea Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe, 2003; Togo, 2005; Mali, 2012; Burkina Faso, 2015). A third piece of evidence is the fact that only one coup-born regime (Sierra Leone, 1997–1998) was forced out of power prior to Lomé, whereas half of the twelve such regimes since Lomé (the just-mentioned six cases) were pressured to give up power either to the overthrown leader, the constitutional successor, or a consensual caretaker president within a month or less.

Table 7.1 Duration and Constraints of Coup-Born Regimes in Africa, 1990–2016 Military Coups January 1990–July 2000

Mali, March 1991– May 1992

Lesotho, April 1991– April 1993

Duration (months) 15

24

Nigeria, November 1993– April 1998

53

Sierra Leone, April 1992– January 1996

45

Burundi, October 1993– January 1994

2

Constraints and Outcome

No suspension from OAU/AU; promise of swift resolution of constitutional order; elections held eventually No suspension from OAU/AU; promise of swift resolution of constitutional order; elections held eventually No suspension from OAU/AU; no promise of swift resolution of constitutional order; no elections held until a counter-coup or death

No suspension from OAU/AU; promise of swift resolution of constitutional order; no elections held until a counter-coup or death No suspension from OAU/AU; promise of swift resolution of constitutional order; elections held eventually

Military Coups Since Lomé, July 2000–December 2016

São Tomé and Príncipe, July 16–23, 2003

Guinea Bissau, September 14–23, 2003

Duration (months)