Africa's New Global Politics: Regionalism in International Relations 9781955055543

Citation preview

Africa’s New Global Politics

Africa’s New Global Politics Regionalism in International Relations

Rita Kiki Edozie and Moses Khisa

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

Published in the United States of America in 2022 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Suite 314, 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 www.eurospanbookstore.com/rienner

© 2022 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Edozie, Rita Kiki, author. | Khisa, Moses, author. Title: Africa’s new global politics : regionalism in international relations / by Rita Kiki Edozie, Moses Khisa. Description: Boulder, Colorado : Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Explores the myriad ways in which Africa’s diplomatic engagement and influence in the global arena has been greatly expanding in recent decades”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021062898 (print) | LCCN 2021062899 (ebook) | ISBN 9781955055208 (hardback) | ISBN 9781955055543 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: African Union. | Regionalism—Africa. | Africa—Foreign relations. Classification: LCC JZ1773 .E35 2022 (print) | LCC JZ1773 (ebook) | DDC 327.6—dc23/eng/20220105 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062898 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062899 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. 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

vii

African Regionalism in a Plural World

The Making of Africa’s International Relations

Toward Common African Positions

Building a Regional Security Complex

Africanizing Transnational Justice

The Pan-African Global Economy

Engaging China as Partner or Patron?

Africa’s New Global Politics

References Index About the Book

1

25

49

71

93

119

143

167 191 207 221

v

Preface

We are excited to have completed this work on African international affairs. We met four years ago at a seminar on Africa where, despite the workshop’s 100 percent dedication to Africa, the continent’s agency and real contributions were being marginalized. From then on, we both experienced a sense of solidarity and shared fate in appropriately representing Africa in world affairs. Our commitment is reinforced as we observe Africa’s role in a world that is transitioning from a global pandemic and experiencing a Russian-Ukrainian war that is reviving old-style great power politics. Pandemic outcomes and the Russian-Ukrainian endgame are unclear to us. On the pandemic, in year three, will Africa continue to defy the grave predictions that it will succumb to Covid-19’s worst impacts? Will Africans remain neutral as they observe the re-emergence of super-power rivalry in the Russian-Ukrainian war, where for once they are not direct proxies in conflict? And what happens as global racism rears its ugly head as African migrants are discriminated against as they attempt to flee conflict in Europe? As the course of international affairs continues to unfold, we hope that the insights we have documented in the current book will shed light on an African role, contribution, and impact. ***

Although we are the authors of Africa’s New Global Politics, no book of this scope can be penned solely by two people. We’d like to thank collaborators, supporters, colleagues, family members, and friends who contributed to this labor of love. To the attendees at the African Studies Association and

vii

viii

Preface

International Studies Association conferences where we tested our nascent ideas and preliminary research findings, we thank you for the feedback that shaped the chapters’ complex content. At UMass Boston, we are deeply grateful to Dennis Jjuuko and Balkissa Daouda Diallo, who are on their way to receive doctoral degrees themselves. We could not have completed the manuscript if not for their meticulous research assistance. Our tremendous thanks go especially to the founder of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Lynne Rienner, for supporting our project and for her strategic guidance through to its completion. We express our huge gratitude to the entire Lynne Rienner team, as well as to our copyeditor, Jennifer Top. Finally, we owe an intellectual debt to Amitav Acharya for his inspirational support in showing us how to conduct research on international relations in a “truly” global way. Our book aspires to meet this standard. Thank you all! —Kiki and Moses

1 African Regionalism in a Plural World

Withdrawal from a treaty can give a denouncing state additional voice either by increasing its leverage to reshape the treaty to more accurately reflect its interests or those of its domestic constituencies, or by establishing rival legal norms or institutions together with other likeminded states. —African Union ICC Withdrawal Strategy Document, December 1, 2017

The African Union (AU) withdrawal strategy document conveys a set of policy guidelines for African states to justify leaving the International Criminal Court’s (ICC)’s Rome Statute. The communiqué was adopted as a resolution by the AU member states at the organization’s biannual summit held in Addis Ababa in January 2017. While the decision did not result in the mass African exodus from the ICC that African states had initially threatened, the document nevertheless relayed important new terms for how a united Africa would engage with the world. Using the AU as a collective political action platform from which to conduct the continent’s international relations, African states would take a united foreign policy stance to exert the continent’s global leverage. In the name of “Africa,” the African Union navigates geopolitics (e.g., lobbies ICC actors) and develops the continent’s own legal jurisprudence, including amendments to the Rome Statute, UN Security Council reform, recruitment of African staff to the ICC, and ratification of an African criminal court through the Malabo Protocol. As well, African states use the AU platform to engage other global issues from African perspectives. Through the withdrawal strategy, for example, African states proclaimed inter alia

1

2

Africa’s New Global Politics

that they would repurpose global governance to preserve the dignity, sovereignty, and integrity of AU member states on their own terms (AU 2017). Following this trend of the African Union, in referencing the notion of “Africa,” we broach something of a paradox for this book. When Africanist scholars engage the whole continent like we do as a subject of analysis, critics often complain, “Africa is not a country!” Indeed, how can this book talk about “African” global politics when we know that the region is a continent with fifty-five independent sovereign nation-states, each with its own unique foreign policy and state-led international relations? Why even bother to tackle a topic that totalizes and generalizes the whole of Africa as if the continent is monolithic? However, as a matter of course, given its unique history, a continentwide approach to Africa’s international relations is not uncommon. Like others who have done so, we attempt to understand the collective experience of African states, particularly in the context of the hyperglobalized twenty-first century. “Africa” for us refers to the African world region, which we characterize as a political project aimed at increasing and deepening regional cooperation and integration among African states. Drawing on existing practices of African regional and international encounters, we attempt to formulate a theory about Africa’s new role in global politics and international relations. We support our thesis of Africa’s emerging ascendancy by analyzing select historical and contemporary global encounters and structures: racial colonialism/neocolonialism, global governance, international security, international political economy, transnational justice, and China-Africa relations. These encounters illustrate the many regional initiatives taken by African states during a period of twenty-first-century globalization (Pieterse 2017) and reveal how African states’ global policy actions have collectively projected their reposturing of power and self-help in current geopolitical international engagements. We theorize that African states’ changing capacity to exercise power within the global system is a result of the emergence of the continent’s representative and foremost regional actor, the African Union. Too few books on international relations contribute to the African international relations literature in the way we seek to achieve here. As such, with this book, we attempt to capture an important shift and expansion in Africa’s contemporary international relations manifest through the politics of the AU. We are motivated by a 2016 UK conference convened by Africanist scholar William Brown titled “Time to Rethink Africa’s Role in International Relations.” In his mission statement, Brown noted that it is no longer realistic to view the African region as having a peripheral role in international relations given the continent’s marked global transformations since the millennium. Evidence of these transformations, Brown

African Regionalism in a Plural World

3

argues, would include Africa’s role in the UN, the establishment of the African Union, and the ways that African states have begun to interact with outside powers (Brown 2016). Leveraging Brown’s thesis, Paul-Henri Bischoff, Kwesi Aning, and Amitav Acharya’s Africa in Global International Relations: Emerging Approaches to Theory and Practice (2015) similarly presents the continent as a unique case study of global relations. The editors call for a new paradigm for international relations theory that is more global, open, inclusive, and able to capture the voices and experiences of both Western and non-Western world regions. Setting the path for our own approach to the study of African international relations, Bischoff and colleagues’ study is historically steeped in the African context and thus offers a uniquely African perspective. Subsequent and exciting additions to the literature have begun to position the African region as a global actor in international relations. Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of SelfDetermination (2019) is one such study. Getachew characterizes the continent’s historical anticolonial nationalism and postcolonial nation-building as African contributions to world-making in the post–World War II era. We also examine the African region’s participation in contemporary worldmaking by building upon the historical structuralist theories of African internationalism and applying new constructivist theories that reveal African agency and global actorness in an increasingly complex world of multiple actors ascendant from the global South. To this end, Ronald Chipaike and Matarutse H. Knowledge (2018) further ground our view of African international relations by underscoring African states’ increasing autonomy and capacity to enact complex foreign policy negotiations and dirigisme bargains with external actors. We will see how theories of agency and actorness reveal African states’ collective global engagement and geopolitical action to negotiate and bargain with external actors. In the following pages we will analyze what we refer to as the regional internationalism of the collective politics of African states, showing how they are increasingly engaging a global terrain of a deeply contested and embedded pluralist world order. A Thesis: Africa’s Regional Internationalism Africa’s current practice of international relations must be understood as a distinctive internationalist movement exacted collectively by the continent’s states on behalf of its populaces in the context of a historically evolving African world region. Presented as regional political action

4

Africa’s New Global Politics

advanced by African nation-states convened through the institutionalism of the AU, we will demonstrate how African foreign policy is historically rooted in a collective identity, sustained solidarity politics, resurgent activism, and an agent-centric global policy orientation. We rely on several premises about African regionalism to pose questions about the implications of Africa’s contemporary global politics. How is the African region reshaping the continent’s identity as an integrated international and regional actor? What role does regionalism play in shaping the continent’s new global politics? What events are driving the continent’s new genre of international relations and global engagement? What do these events tell us about how Africans exercise power in an international system that is historically structured unevenly to the continent’s disadvantage? In what ways are African states creating alternative global norms, values, and rules of sovereignty, and what effect are these contributions having on the region’s place in the world and on contemporary international relations writ large? In responding to these questions, we hope to tell a story about a new genre of African global politics and international engagement—an African brand of international relations that is being expressed within the changing structures of the contemporary global environment. Our narrative will unravel and analyze the argument that, in the new millennium, Africa’s regionalism is producing and performing for its states and peoples a distinct internationalism through the actions and behavior of the AU. On behalf of the continent’s fifty-five nation-states, the AU represents Africa as a developing-world, global regional actor exercising alternative agency, norm resistance and formation, and international engagement in order to effect African continental reconstructions of the global order. To support our thesis, we examine select global issues and encounters of African affairs that reveal Africa’s historical resistance to colonialism. We examine African states’ bloc engagement with postcolonial global governance reform. We analyze the continent’s security regionalism, developmental and economic regionalism, encounters with transnational justice, and relations with China. Each encounter demonstrates African states’ growing assertion of their collective power and place in the world. We will show, on the one hand, how these global encounters reveal African states’ criticisms of the international system, including the continent’s grievances against global inequality and its resistance to the lingering racial disdain for Africans that mitigates the region’s freedom to navigate and gain opportunity internationally. On the other hand, we will demonstrate how the continent’s post–Cold War global interactions are fostering renewed, dynamic, global political activism and proactive collective action among African states and peoples. Not without challenges, we will thus demonstrate how these engagements are producing a new genre of African politics.

African Regionalism in a Plural World

5

The continent’s regional internationalism is crafting the AU’s evolving infrastructural capacity and creating alternative global norms while also establishing new rules to self-govern Africa in the world. Significantly as well, these encounters exhibit the strategic articulation of African voice, agency, values, and imaginaries in the international arena and the impact that this genre of internationalism has on global transformation and development. This theoretical and empirical background informs the framework for our presentation of Africa’s new global politics. We position Africa as a dynamic world region that at once shapes and is shaped by global trends and transformations. We characterize these developments and actions as the new African internationalism situated in a complex and deeply plural world order. The foregrounding discussion presented in the introduction is elaborated in a subsequent, more detailed presentation of four themes: African regionalism in global politics; Africa and the plural world order; internationalism, multilateralism, and plurilateralism; and African actor agency, the Pan-African identity, and AU institutionalism. We will now turn to engage each theme theoretically to further foreground the book’s thesis, premises, and objectives. African Regionalism in Global Politics In tying together the book’s key themes—internationalism, multilateralism, new regionalism, agency, and pluralism—we establish our core agenda. Our starting point is to examine Africa as an evolving world region that attempts to transform itself while simultaneously transforming the world. As a world region, the African continent was considered by European colonizers to be an area of global transactional and extractional activities including slavery, racial colonialism, and neocolonialism. Whether through states, acephalous communities, or empires, Africans have historically contested these international transactions and impositions of it while also engaging the world globally for centuries even if such engagement has not been adequately documented in disciplinary international relations studies. In presenting Africa as an international region, we will demonstrate how contemporary regional politics in the continent has been informed by the reactive legacies of the colonial and decolonization eras and the post–Cold War era. Karoline Postel-Vinay (2007) argues that for much of its regional existence in the modern world order, global orders (transatlantic slavery, Pax Britannica racial colonialism, World Wars I and II, the Cold War, neoliberal globalization) have been imposed on the developing world, including on the African region. In the past, Africa’s “world region” status has been uniquely linked to processes of negotiating exogenous world orders that

6

Africa’s New Global Politics

have been imposed on it through brutal or more benign forms of power politics (Postel-Vinay 2007). In a world of deepening and complexifying globalization, rather than accepting the status of being simply a territory upon which imperial global transactions were made, Africans are using regionalism as a significant driver of global transformation. In the post–Cold War era, regionalism is being redefined. The late 1980s began to see the reemergence, revitalization, and expansion of regional projects and organizations such as the AU (Söderbaum 2003). During this era, regionalism began to take shape in a multipolar world order as globalization expanded. Whereas the old-order international regimes were imposed “from above,” especially from the West onto the developing world, new regionalism in a new world order came about in a less coercive manner. Regionalism in new world order regimes involved more voluntary processes from within the emerging regions, where the constituent states and other actors experienced the imperative of cooperation, an “urge to merge,” or the pooling of sovereignty in order to tackle new global challenges (Hettne 2005). To this effect, new regionalism has been described as compatible with an interdependent world economy, and the constructivist concepts of actorness and agency are important dimensions of this theory. This is because while old international regions were acted upon, new regionalisms exercise actorness as defined by their larger scope of action and room to maneuver in the world beyond their regions. Actorness defines states’—and now organized regions’—capability to influence the external environment. New regionalism thrives in a space of waning global hegemony occurring after the global financial crisis of 2008. Since then, globalization has begun to decentralize great power polarity and is promoting the creation of a plural world order beyond superpower states and states in general. In this context, through the AU, African regionalism has emerged as a phenomenon that is fostering a new form of African global politics and engagement in the contemporary world. This book is about the way that Africa’s manifestation of a new regionalism is shaping the continent’s global politics and internationalism, thereby making and remaking the continent as a world region. To this end, we position Africa’s upsurge in global engagement within the context of a simultaneous and causative double movement that is explained by this new regionalism and examine this phenomenon in relation to the multilateral action and institutionalism of the AU since its establishment in 2002. We argue that there is a paradoxical effect to the way regionalism fosters and expands a unique genre of African internationalism. In Africa, old regionalism and new regionalism come together in contemporary processes of global transformation in ways that shape a distinctive brand of African politics and foreign policy. This thesis has several layers that we unravel throughout the book. First, we show how African regionalism is newly

African Regionalism in a Plural World

7

expressed given that it is intricately connected to the waning project of globalization. Second, it is expressed through the regional institutionalism of the AU, which provides African member states with a coordinating platform for collective foreign policy and global political action. Third, it exhibits the characteristics and dialectics of a regional internationalism that on the one hand advocates for an open regionalism that strategically has a global focus while on the other hand simultaneously directs inwardoriented, regional integration goals for the continent. Fourth, African regionalism is uniquely actor-centric and agent-centric, embodying a historicity of African racial identity as well as a more contemporary assertion of African leadership activism to combat global inequality and African marginalization. Fifth, it is institutionalist and normative seeking to position Africa’s shifting status and ranking in global politics. Drawing from real-world events, these five premises of regionalism are used throughout the book to reveal how African states are becoming a more assertive, visible, multilateral, and action-oriented—albeit an aggregate and collective—singular global actor in international relations despite the reality that the continent remains the least economically viable region in the world. Africa and the Plural World Order New regionalism and today’s plural world order go hand in hand. International relations scholars have designed varying labels to explain the contemporary world order, including plurilateral (Axtmann 1996; Cerny 1993; Pieterse 1994), heteropolarity (Der Derian 2003), no one’s world (Kupchan 2012), multimodal or multiplex world (Acharya 2018), decentered globalism (Buzan 2011), polymorphic globalism (Katzenstein 2012), and multi-order world (Flockhart 2016, cited in Acharya and Buzan 2019). To understand this situation from a developing-world standpoint, global South scholar Amitav Acharya brought a different perspective to bear on this debate. He describes the contemporary world as deeply plural, characterized by organizational and political pluralism that gives its audience a choice of various movies, actors, directors, and plots all under the same roof (Acharya 2018). It is a world of multiple modernities, where Western liberal modernity is only a part of what is on offer. The deeply plural world order according to Acharya is devoid of a global hegemony and features different economic and political ideologies and systems. However, this genre of global regime includes the remnants of a liberal order that appears to be imploding and is being challenged from within after having become increasingly decentered, plural, and amenable to the counter and alternative agencies of less-powerful global actors (Acharya 2018).

8

Africa’s New Global Politics

Acharya and Buzan (2019) contend that power in an increasingly pluralized international system/society is becoming more diffuse. Superpowers are waning and regional powers are ascending. The world order is becoming politically decentered in terms of power and authority. The old centers of power are losing relative strength while decentralization is empowering nonstate actors against their states, transnationally, and against other states. Where states align with nonstate actors for a range of purposes from aid and development to subversion and destabilization of other states, regimes, and nonstate actors, there exists a layered view of global power, captured by the notion of plurilateralism (Acharya and Buzan 2019). Three interrelated concepts deepen our understanding of Acharya and Buzan’s (2019) description of world order pluralism: deep pluralism, contested pluralism, and embedded pluralism. Deep pluralism, for Acharya and Buzan is “a diffuse distribution of power, wealth, and cultural authority that is set within a strongly integrated and interdependent system in which both states and nonstate actors play substantial roles” (2019, 265). Contested pluralism describes a world where there is substantial resistance to the material and ideational reality of deep pluralism. Embedded pluralism describes the existing world order where main players in global international society not only tolerate the material, cultural, ideological, and actortype differences of deep pluralism but also respect and even value them as foundational for coexistence (Acharya and Buzan 2019). We leverage Acharya and Buzan’s theorization about a deeply plural world, presenting it as they do as a new theory of international relations in a postliberal, hyperglobal era. That is to say, we contend that seeing the world as a plural arena draws attention to some of the absences and erasures in the mainstream international relations narrative that persist despite decades of decolonial scholarship and postcolonial theorizing (Acharya and Buzan 2019). By revealing ways that colonialism shapes and structures the infrastructure of world politics and the international system (Biswas 2013), postcolonial international relations narratives such as theirs pay attention to the hierarchies, hidden interests, political alignments, and power-knowledge nexuses embedded in international relations (Rukmini 2018). The need for postcolonial international relations theses is evident when one observes how the contemporary global order is dominated by debates over the strength or weakness of the global economy and the hegemony, multipolarity, or decline of the United States and the G7, while having little to say about the poorest regions of the world, including Africa. To this end, we apply a postcolonial international relations (IR) methodology to craft an understanding of African global politics. Postcolonial IR is a genre of politics that sees the international system as being composed of multiple and overlapping worlds nested in complex interdependence through which there is a co-constitution of the modern world (Krishna 2001). This

African Regionalism in a Plural World

9

framework informs our study of regionalisms and regional international orders beyond Eurocentric models as we strive to build synergies between disciplinary (IR) and area studies (African Studies) approaches to global studies. The approach is valuable to international relations studies as it both considers the two-way (global North and global South) international diffusion of ideas and norms and investigates the multiple and diverse ways in which civilizations around the world encounter each other. As such, our book combines innovative historical narration with contemporary political studies about Africa’s transformative role in the world, as one of few new monographs on the topic of African international relations. We build upon the historical structuralist theories of African internationalism while also applying newer constructivist theories to our content to capture African agency and actorness in an increasingly complex world of multiple actors ascendant from the periphery. We will see how these actors are navigating and transforming asymmetrical global power relations. Doing so offers an intriguing way to explain the emergence of the continent’s dynamic international performance manifest in forms of renewed expressions of African actor agency, global norm creation, strengthened international institution building, postcolonial international relations, and socially constructivist regional internationalism. Internationalism, Multilateralism, and Plurilateralism Our usage of Acharya’s plural world framework relies upon traditional international relations concepts, including internationalism, multilateralism, regionalism, and newer constructivist ones such as plurilateralism. These concepts reinforce the thesis about the continent’s new global actorness and engagement in relation to five premises that further articulate a conceptual mapping for the current book. First, we examine internationalism inter alia with global politics in the context of a contemporary era of globalization where nations recognize that they cannot act alone to solve the multiple problems they face. With this premise, we will see how nation-states recognize that the problems they face are increasingly transnational and thereby necessitate multilateral approaches that employ an international perspective. Internationalism is based on the premise that nations work together to find common ground and build a safer and more stable world. When it is expressed as a movement, nations or politicians seek to generate a belief in a single cosmopolitan community that emphasizes the need to think beyond national borders, reach out to others, and accept a sense of duty toward fellow humans regardless of their nationality. Second, our theory of multilateralism stems from the reality that internationalism requires forums, platforms, and other institutional organizations

10

Africa’s New Global Politics

where nations may cooperate. International organizations have been established to achieve internationalism through multilateralism by bringing nations together to advance shared goals and common interests. Multilateralism, an institutional form that coordinates relations among three or more states on the basis of “generalized” principles of conduct, fuels internationalism. Multilateralism may involve several nations acting together through international organizations, as in the UN; or it may involve regional groupings, such as the African Union. Mylonas and Yorulmazlar (2012) propose regional multilateralism to suggest that “contemporary problems can be better solved at the regional rather than the bilateral or global levels,” and that bringing together the concept of regional integration with that of multilateralism is necessary in today’s world. Using African regional internationalism as a case study, we will show how the continent’s multilateral actions feed into the regional, which in turn shapes the continent’s internationalism. Third, as a form of multilateral internationalism, regionalism is understood for its role in driving global transformation and development, especially by its inclination to paradoxically tame globalization rather than lead to greater global integration. Examined this way, regional internationalism is best understood as “the degree to which a group of actors inhabiting a contiguous space act and represent themselves as a group” (Ghica 2013, 733). As globalization fostered demands for more innovative forms of internationalism, especially in global governance, regional dimensions of internationalism bring back elements of locality, territory, and geography as the site for governance beyond a nation’s borders. To this end, we see how regionalism, internationalism, and multilateralism operate in the context of globalization and how each reveals elements of territory and geography to reconfigure global governance. For example, the global focus on a narrower construct of region over universe allows national governments back into policy at odds with global governance policies. This way, regional governance encourages a degree of intergovernmental- and/or societal-level collaboration and negotiation that provide greater regulatory authority and capacity by nations and localities over the global policy agenda. A fourth premise relates to our approach to regionalism as a new international relations disciplinary study. We examine regions using a social constructivist framework to focus our analyses of the interrelatedness of structure and agency, to focus on local context as the realm within which people experience, interpret, and gradually reconstitute social structures and create meaning in real-world sites of interaction. For example, we frame the term region “as an institutional construction reflecting the collective history of an area and infusing the everyday lives of its inhabitants” (Murphy 1991, 23). In this context, we expose the ways that the African region has maintained— and progressively evolved—an active participation in global affairs to

African Regionalism in a Plural World

11

impact the continent’s self-determined global transformation. In this respect, in place of the concept of extraversion used exclusively to privilege a pathological internationalist analysis of African affairs (Bayart and Ellis 2000), we employ internationalism, multilateralism, and regionalism to underscore that positivist and normative theories and concepts can successfully be used to understand and analyze Africa’s global affairs. To this end, a fifth and final assumption of our book anchors our study of African internationalist regionalism to a re-envisioned disciplinary study of international relations captured by the concept of plurilateralism. Originally borrowed from the international political economy of world trade literature, plurilateralism is seen to fall between regionalism and multilateralism, referring to any kind of institutionalized cross-continental arrangement between at least three countries. Different from bilateralism (country to country) and multilateralism (inter-country cooperation and with international organizations), plurilateralism reflects the reality that one of the parties in negotiation is a regional trade arrangement (RTA) and another is a country or a region, or when negotiations are between several countries or a series of connected bilateral relationships from different continents (Ndayi 2009). We use plurilateralism in a deeper and broader sense to refer to the decentered, deeply pluralized state of the global system and world society. For Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1994), a plurilateral world refers to an arena where increasing pluralization of power is occurring among political, economic, cultural, and social actors, groups, and communities within states, between states, and across states. Plurilateralism can be identified as “the increase in the available modes of global organization, including transnational, international, macro-regional, national, micro-regional, municipal, and local actors” (Pieterse 2018, 45). Functional networks of corporations, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, social movements, and professionals and computer users crisscross these organizational levels. According to Roland Axtmann (1996), those individuals, groups, and communities partaking in the creation of these networks and affected by them will become empowered and constrained by them in ways quite different from the past when it was the nation-state that determined their political liberty and identity and mediated the effects of the outside world. In this plurilateral world, the idea of an authority that resides in the state, as that institutional arrangement empowered to make, and enforce, collectively binding decisions, has lost its justification (Axtmann 1996). Additionally, in such a plurilateral world order, there exists an increasing desire among states and peoples for more political, cultural, and economic differentiation pushing toward more regionalized and culturally and politically differentiated international societies. This process fosters a greater scope for agency for states and nonstate actors.

12

Africa’s New Global Politics

Plurilateralism reveals structures of a more layered international society with regional and/or subregional differentiation, and lesser powers and nonstate actors play significant roles in global norm and institution building. In a plurilateral world, “neither great power management nor global governance will be sufficient in themselves to support the degree of order and management necessary to deal with shared global fates and critical global issues” (Axtmann 1996). Actor Agency, the Pan-African Identity, and AU Institutionalism Regional internationalism, a plural world order, and the expansion of multilateral global governance to plurilateralism envelop a fourth book theme to underscore our thesis about Africa’s new global politics. To this end, the concepts of actor agency, Pan-African identity, solidarity politics, and African Union liberal institutionalism inform the last set of thematic concepts that help shape the book’s theoretical framework. Too often Africa is still framed and represented as a nonparticipant in international politics: the recipient of aid, the victim of wars and structural adjustment, and a continent pervaded with ethnic conflicts and corruption. These descriptions tend to dismiss the degree to which African individuals, states, and institutions contribute to global development and engage proactively and dynamically in international politics. To this extent, mainstream tropes examining African affairs in international relations deny African agency in global transformation. In a deeply plural world, agency is described as the capacity, condition, or state of acting or exerting state power. As individual, relatively weak states in the global system, African states have limited power. Nevertheless, in a deeply plural world order, we engage a multilayered view of agency that goes beyond state action. Agency includes “the social actor” agent who may be a nonstate actor but who also could foster global change (Wright 2006). We also employ a pluralized notion of agency that goes beyond recognizing the military and economic power of top-tier security states. Agents in this new constructivist world may be transnational norm entrepreneurs, who project narratives of resistance and rejection of global norms. To understand the current global order, we should seek to understand how a genre of global social actors (state and non-state) from the South, “through their material, ideational, and interaction capabilities, construct, reject, reconstitute, and transform global and regional orders” (Acharya 2014, 651). This way of examining non-Western actor agency speaks more intentionally to the instances of collective assertion by African states to exhibit influence in the international arena that are the subject of the current book. We show how it is that “agency is not merely a prerogative of

African Regionalism in a Plural World

13

the strong; it can manifest as the weapon of the weak that can be exercised in global transnational space as well as at regional and local levels” within alternative cultural contexts. Agency in this instance, as Acharya indicates, “means constructing new rules and institutions at the local level to support and strengthen global order against great power hypocrisy and dominance” (Acharya 2014, 652). Agency is an important framework that we use to examine the core phenomenon of African internationalism. International relations theories have traditionally focused upon the absence of African actors, and doing so has led to silencing of narratives about African action and contributions to global development. Yet, agency is a critical prism through which to examine African world experiences and affairs, positioning Africans as centered subjects of history and circumstance who are crafting and building new approaches to development, security, and justice (Acharya 2011). African agency can be further taken to be seen as the way that selfdeveloped African initiatives improve the socioeconomic well-being of African peoples while projecting a posture of power and self-help in international engagements. Agency reveals the degree to which African political actors have room to maneuver within the international system and exert influence internationally. International relations scholars and practitioners have only recently begun to examine Africa’s international relations from a perspective that uses agency (Brown and Harman 2013). There is only now a move away from international development discourses about the African region that focus on the ways that external actors determine African realities. The change in scholarship has occurred because studies in African agency have opened up new dimensions of African international study that focus on how far and in what ways African political actors impact and influence the international system. As such, agency now even speaks to the discursive dimensions of “Africa” as a category used by Africans to construct forms of international political action while also pushing back against external usages of “Africa” as a symbolic racialized category for international intervention. Brown and Harman (2013) ask important research questions about this intellectual shift. Who are Africa’s change agent actors? What are the key sites and sources of agency within Africa? What does their agency look like and how can it be understood? Similar questions drive our thesis about Africa’s agency and new internationalism. The African Union is presented as a global social actor emerging from the periphery that is exercising Africa’s agency in advancing and facilitating a new internationalism for the continent. Defining and presenting this phenomenon as “African Unionism,” we refer to the organization’s construction of a genre of internationalism that seeks to reposition the continent in its global standing. Through the African Union and African states'

14

Africa’s New Global Politics

collective action, our theory of agency describes and explains Africans’ self-maneuvered and negotiated interactions, relationships, and norm building in the global engagement of international relations. Ronald Chipaike and Matarutse H. Knowledge conceptualize “African agency in international relations this way as African political actors’ ability to negotiate and bargain with external actors in a manner that benefits Africans themselves.” African agency can be further taken to mean what Chipaike and Knowledge see as “the initiatives developed and enacted by Africans to improve their socio-economic well-being” and their “posture of power and self-help in international engagements” (Chipaike and Knowledge 2018, 1). In developing their own now classic thesis on African international relations, a theory of extraversion, Jean-François Bayart and Stephen Ellis (2000) imply that Africa has indeed had a dynamic and active relationship with the world despite racial slavery and colonialism. In doing so, the authors argue that African states have shown considerable autonomy in their exercise of postcolonial sovereignty. The theory rightly explains how Africa’s international relations are about individuals, states, and groups who maintain autonomy through the strategies of international engagement; however, in characterizing these strategies as international acts of coercion, trickery, flight, mediation, appropriation, and rejection to control and manipulate resources (internal and external) for their own selfish interests (Bayart and Ellis 2000), the theory of African extraversion presents a pathological, cynical, and even sadistic analysis of Africa’s contribution to world affairs. We reject and further revise a critical salvaging of aspects of Bayart and Ellis’s (2000) theory about Africa’s international relations with the world, using it in reverse to demonstrate African agency and interactionism with the West in more balanced, push-shove contexts. Agency and autonomy among Africans need not be to create disorder and failure as the authors contend. Rather, we argue that the story of Africa’s evolving international relations, while recognizing the agency of Africans, must also be understood in the context of structural inhibitions caused by centuries of racial slave trading and colonialism that Bayart and Ellis do not address at all. African agency in international relations is exercised through complex, asymmetrical multilateral actions and interactions with international actors whose historical intent has been—at least—to exploit and control the continent. The theorists of African extroversion do not present these important normative aspects of African internationalism in a changing world either. To support our thesis, using theories of African agency, African internationalism, and critical geopolitics in a deeply plural world, we highlight African agency and expose the silences that have heretofore disguised the dynamism and critical implications of African action in contemporary international relations. For Africans, today’s global order is an arena in which non-Western actors challenge the once-presumed universality of the core

African Regionalism in a Plural World

15

tenets of international relations—sovereignty and security. African actors such as the African Union are putting forward alternative, localized ideas and institutions that challenge and construct global development differently from what is the norm. Agency and actorness are threads that hold together our thesis about regional internationalism. We show how the current genre of Africa’s international relations has evolved from and is still deeply connected to the history of racial capitalism, slavery, and colonialism. However, the constructivist framework that grounds our theoretical and historical formulation about Africa in the world additionally shows Africans actively transforming this history in ways that have resulted in progressive, critical shifts in African states’ engagement in contemporary geopolitics. The shift began in 2000, in Lomé, Togo, inspired by a changing world that African leaders navigated based on the ideals of an African Renaissance. African countries would reinvent themselves with the formation of the AU by restructuring the now defunct Organization of African Unity (OAU). Unlike the OAU, the new AU would be more ambitious and internationalist in scope and establish for the continent a law of the land—the Constitutive Act of the African Union—to guide Africans toward a radically new vision and mission for the continent’s development through global engagement. The reconfigured Pan-African organization would set off clearly defined objectives and responsibilities that would accelerate the integration of the continent and defend its sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence of member states to achieve autonomy from Western dependency and hegemony, while also asserting African engagement and influence in global power relations in self-determined, agent-centric terms. It is in this context that the AU is currently convened as a regional organization conducting the international relations of the African region on behalf of African states. Yet, like other regions of the world in an era of globalization, African regionalization would assume a dialectical trend as it increasingly both became a manifestation of globalization and exhibited an opposite trend. In this regard, globalization accompanied the regionalization of international relations as the public functions of national states were increasingly transferred to both regional and international levels. As in many developing countries, African countries used regionalization to confront global political and economic competition by facilitating gradual global economic integration, combining openness to the outside world with the protection of national interests via a dirigisme engagement in global governance and public affairs (Jilberto and Mommen 2017). The AU embodied this genre of regional internationalism by revitalizing African states’ long-standing struggle to formulate African norms in international relations that would self-determinedly reposition the continent away from its small-states, bottom-tier status of marginalized, peripheral actors.

16

Africa’s New Global Politics

As a strengthened, collective entity, African states would begin to demand equal global citizenship and partnered global governance as a united, empowered global actor (Edozie with Gottschalk 2014). This would be Kwame Nkrumah’s dream of a United States of Africa. Such an analysis of the African Union, as an African global actor exercising African agency driving the continent’s new internationalism, aims to understand how African-constructed internationalist ideas affect the ways that the continent is self-determinedly processing its own notions of place and politics in the contemporary global world. It is in this context that we characterize African internationalism as African Unionism—a phenomenon that we will argue illustrates and explains not only African states’ growing autonomy from Western dependency but also the ways in which Africa is increasingly shaping the world. The phenomenon of African Unionism captures the continent’s increasing assertiveness in its engagement and influence in global power relations and its capacity to define Africa’s global politics on African terms. Engaging racial identity counternarratives, relentlessly building an authoritative institutional and jurisdictional infrastructure to be used by its members, and dexterously navigating and articulating a sophisticated and united multilateral political narrative and worldview to persuade its case all contributed to Africa’s twenty-first-century development of global norms in international relations. Our portrayal of African internationalism through the AU’s current actions seeks to reveal the dynamic ways that African states collectively, increasingly challenge Western power dominance. In doing so, we reveal how the continent attempts to recreate and reimagine global and regional order through a reinterpretation of the global norms of sovereignty, global governance, international security, transnational justice, and the international economy. These and other themes are addressed in detail in subsequent chapters. Chapter Overview In Chapter 2 we offer the African version of Acharya and Buzan’s (2019) thesis in The Making of Global International Relations by exploring how African international relations have been made and remade. We trace the history of Africa’s place in the world and of the world while engaging the topic of the continent’s evolving practice of internationalism. We use two conceptual arguments about the way that African international relations have developed and are constituted in the present. First is the reality that the international relations of the African region have developed as a collective political action among sometimes loosely and other times disparate African sub-regions, communities, and nation-states con-

African Regionalism in a Plural World

17

nected by shared Pan-African histories, ideas, and identities. A second argument articulates the way that international norms have driven Africa’s collective encounters with the world over time. To this end, in Chapter 2 we provide the overarching historical background to reveal how international relations have been formed in the continent and by African states. We examine epochs in world history and begin with the pre–World War II era to present the symbolic cases of Africa’s League of Nations members, Ethiopia and Liberia, and reveal their role in grounding a formative practice for African international relations. Next, we present the pre–World War II development of global diasporic, Pan-African internationalism as it was shaped by a series of PanAfrican Congresses throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During this period, the norms of self-determination and anti-racialism were prominent in developing and shaping Africa’s relations with the world. African nationalism and pan-nationalism leading up to independence after World War II into the Cold War applied the norms of unity, continental regionalism, and noninterference and nonintervention, paradoxically as African states consolidated their foreign policies into the OAU. By the end of the Cold War, in an era of globalization, international global shifts occurred again as African states employed norms of non-indifference, responsible sovereignty, and humanitarian intervention and a new genre of solidarity regionalism that is manifest in the African Renaissance and institutionally represented by the AU. In Chapter 3 we examine the continent’s early efforts to build a practice of internationalism through a decentralized form of multilateralism within the world’s most significant international organizations. By coordinating common African positions (CAPs), African states attempted to collectively reaffirm the continent’s leading place in the world. African states would pool their foreign policies together through multilateral international organizations like the UN and the World Trade Organization to find cooperative approaches to African states’ most pressing concerns—human security and peace, food security, and the eradication of poverty and disease. African governments have adopted a number of common positions on issues of global concern, dating back to 1987’s African Common Position on Africa’s External Debt Crisis, to the 2015 African Strategy on Climate Change. We examine one of the continent’s most impactful common positions—the Ezulwini Consensus—as it became one of the foremost international relations standpoints from a region on United Nations reform and a more representative and democratic Security Council. By 2015, in rolling out Agenda 2063, African states pooled their common positions into a blueprint of goals and aspirations that resolved that the continent would be a major social, political, and economic force in the world (Agenda 2063). In Chapter 3 we capture these nascent and more

18

Africa’s New Global Politics

recent efforts by the continent to achieve its own distinctive genre of regional-international relations. By pooling their foreign policy common positions into a single institutional platform in Agenda 2063, we will see how African states and peoples (including the diaspora) build a collective foreign policy and agenda for global politics and global governance. In Regions and Powers, Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver (2003) describe the AU-UN relationship as a manifestation of the regional security complex theory that explains post–Cold War security relations and interactions between regions, as well as their interplay between global and regional structures. They argue that regional security complexes may well be extensively penetrated by global powers while their regional dynamics nonetheless have a substantial degree of autonomy from the patterns set by the global powers. The resuscitation of Kwame Nkrumah’s Pax Africana norm by the AU in 2002 produced Africa’s twenty-first-century regime for security regionalism. The AU’s Pax Africana security regime provides an African-led path to self-determined international security and conflict management for the continent. To this end, in Chapter 4 we explain the ways that African states have introduced an array of new norms, institutions, and policies that direct the region toward a security community complex characterized by cooperative intraregional and external relations. We argue that Pax Africana marks a progressive step in the advancement of a new global geopolitics of international security for Africa. The way that the continent is reshaping global security relations is reflected in the following statement by a UN special representative to the African Union: “The African Union is the most important strategic partner between the United Nations and a regional organization in peace and security, development and human rights” (United Nations 2018). Chapter 4 further examines the continent’s efforts to build its regional security architecture in order to manage its state of insecurity collectively on behalf of African states. The chapter chronicles the regime’s admixture of rules, institutions, policies, and field operations that African states have established to enforce the continent’s new security regime. In illustrating the contours of this regional security complex theory—particularly the regionalglobal interface of the AU Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) and the UN Security Council—we also demonstrate Africa’s newly asserted agency and its contributions to advancing and transforming international security relations. Additionally, we see how Africa’s security functions regionally, as an interface between AU member states in conflict and the AU’s strengthening regional institutions, and how it is also distinctively global, given its tendency to interface especially with international security organizations such as the UN Security Council. We show how African states use their emerging regional security complex to transcend their bottom-tier position in

African Regionalism in a Plural World

19

global security structures and assert more power and freedom to navigate geopolitics in their collective interests. We conclude the chapter by revealing a new theory to explain the distinctiveness of Africa’s new global security politics in a multipolar and plurilateral world. The July 16, 2019, ICC acquittal of former Ivorian president, Laurent Gbagbo, and his minister of youth, Charles Blé Goudé, for war crimes was seen as vindication for African states who had starkly criticized what they had deemed the ICC’s injustice toward Africa’s leaders. Chapter 5 examines African states’ variable roles in relation to the global governance of transnational justice from the contending liberal universalist versus constructivist perspectives. Using liberal lenses, we engage Kathryn Sikkink’s justice cascade as a metaphor for the “dramatic new trend in world politics toward holding individual state officials, including heads of state, criminally accountable for human rights violations” (Sikkink 2011) and African leaders culpability. The justice cascade proposes that international criminal law and the establishment of the ICC punish those who mastermind atrocities and discourage others who are tempted to follow their example. Alternatively, we use the chapter to introduce transnational justice approaches developed by more recent constructivist transnational justice scholars such as Kamari Clarke, who examines cascades of justice and international criminal law in Africa as negotiated assemblages of feelings about inequality and power. According to Clarke, these assemblages recognize how other narratives about the ICC in Africa reflect spheres of global power and ways that African feelings of justice and injustice are complex and emerge within an awareness of the continent’s political and economic challenges (Clarke 2020). To this end, in Chapter 5 while we examine the way that the transnational justice cascade movement is influencing Africa’s new global politics, we also reveal how African states are collectively developing an alternative Afrocentric international criminal law. We present initiatives, interactions, and policies used by African states to collectively contest and establish alternative norms and institutions of transnational justice and post-atrocity international conflict resolution models to govern the continent. We analyze the counterinitiatives that the AU uses to promote African norms and models of justice for the region that explain the states’ collective agency in opposing what is considered the ICC’s interventionism: its politicization, its interventionism into African sovereignty, its presumed non-universality and proclaimed illegitimacy in promoting transnational justice norms that impact its ill suitability for prosecuting local crimes. These contending liberalist and Africanist approaches to transnational justice are examined in relation to encounters between the AU and international organizations such as the ICC to reveal Africa’s growing confidence as a global actor engaging a complex world order. One example is evident

20

Africa’s New Global Politics

by the comments of the late Ethiopian prime minister and former AU chair Hailemariam Desalegn, who controversially proclaimed that the ICC had degenerated to race hunting of African leaders in the continent (AFP 2013; Chadwick and Thieme 2016). Desalegn’s accusation followed by the AU’s threat to lead the mass withdrawal of its fifty-five members revealed that under the auspices of the AU, African states had become more confident in confronting what it had always perceived as Western-dominated international power (Chadwick and Thieme 2016, 342). To this end, we begin Chapter 5 by positioning Africa theoretically within Sikkink’s and Clarke’s contending theories of cascades of justice. We then present empirical cases to show how African states have cooperated with cascades of transnational justice regimes and norms in modeling hybrid international courts such as special courts for Sierra Leone (Charles Taylor), Rwanda (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda), and Chad (Hissène Habré). Next, we present Africa’s criticism of the norms of transnational justice, especially through its opposition to the ICC, focusing on the issues of serving-leader immunity in Sudan’s Bashir case, post-atrocity prosecution for victims in the Ivory Coast’s Gbagbo/Blé Goudé case, and sovereign responsibility in Kenya’s Uhuru case. We demonstrate the fullest expression of African global actor agency by its development of a genre of Afrocentric international criminal law in the establishment of an African regional criminal court—the Malabo Protocol. By revealing Africa’s attempts to achieve collective sovereign responsibility in transnational justice while nurturing the establishment of African universality and self-determined international post-atrocity norms, in a final discussion section we exposit the continent’s contributions to transnational justice cascades and global development, presenting them as an important driver of the continent’s new global politics. If the ICC-Africa encounter reflected a high point for the advancement of an African genre of internationalism—seen as the continent’s ability to successfully resist and force change and accommodation in the international system for African benefit—Africa’s engagement with the international political economy remained a low point in the continent’s global dirigisme despite African states’ collective efforts. It is easier for African states to achieve political and cultural agency and ascendency in a deeply plural world. However, achieving gains from the international political economy has been a more critical challenge despite the bolstered capacity of African Union institutionalism. The post-neoliberal turn, where plurilateral trade and economic relationships replace multilateral and bilateral economic transactions, may have provided a turning point for African states that have begun to advance new, more equitable global economic partnerships. To address new political and economic challenges, African states have launched a continent-wide economic initiative and institution, the African Continental

African Regionalism in a Plural World

21

Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA). A new organ of the African Union, AfCFTA functions as an economic diplomacy and collective statecraft instrument used to achieve continental economic integration as well as global economic integration on African terms. In Chapter 6 we analyze these trends and present Africa’s economic indicators and trajectories in the context of “the rise of the rest” phenomenon, from “Africa Rising” to “Pan Africa Rising” (Edozie 2017). We examine the myriad ways that African states are fostering transformative change in the contemporary African international political economy and the challenges that they encounter. We focus on the mechanisms, strategies, initiatives, policies, and global engagement instruments that African states collectively use to achieve their global economic goals in the twenty-first century. We extend our thesis about Africa’s new role in global politics to illustrate an argument about its new role in the international political economy. In this chapter, we examine AfCFTA as a flagship initiative of the African Union, as an extension of the continent’s renewed Pan-African economic agenda, and as an economic diplomacy tool to achieve Africa’s global political-economic objectives. We will see how the AfCFTA is used by African states to make inroads into at least one aspect of the global economy, international trade. Through the AfCFTA, African states exercise agency and control by creating strategies to positively reverse the unequal terms of trade that have historically positioned the continent at the periphery of the global economy. We examine the implementation of AfCFTA in relation to the twenty-year-old African Economic Community regional integration initiative. We show how, through AfCFTA, African states delegate their international and intraregional trade facilitation policies with the continent’s key global trading partners. We also examine the challenges and opportunities that the AfCFTA experiences in exercising economic diplomacy with the World Trade Organization, the UN, the United States, the EU, and China. To do so, we engage several themes, including the challenges of navigating power differentials between Africa and more powerful international actors. Our final sections conclude with a theoretical discussion of how AfCFTA illustrates new trends in the international political economy of Africa in the twentyfirst century, especially reaffirming the role of African Union institutionalism and economic diplomacy, African global actor agency, and regional integration in repositioning the continent to achieve global economic goods on its own terms. An understanding of Africa’s new global politics is incomplete without also understanding China’s rise in the world. The China-Africa international relations agenda is pivotal to understanding Africa’s new global politics, especially given the emerging power’s hotly debated and controversial relations with the continent. Notwithstanding the now voluminous literature

22

Africa’s New Global Politics

on China’s rise and China in Africa studies, the continent’s perspective and standpoint on its China agenda is rarely told. Consistent with our thesis on African agency where agency means that a subject is acting rather than merely being acted upon, in Chapter 7 we argue that Africa’s new role in global politics engages China as a way to assert the region’s own independent authority in a new deeply plural global setting. In this chapter, we examine China’s deepening global involvement in Africa in the context of the continent’s global actor agency and engagement in a world order where there are changing geographies of trade. To this end, we analyze the China-Africa relationship as one of asymmetrical power relations that jostles between partnership and patronship. On the one hand, China’s increasing bilateral involvement with African countries beginning in the early millennium represents an opportunity for the rising power to extend its influence throughout the continent and establish itself as an envoy for African states’ collective external relations. As the continent’s patron, we will show how Africa represents a key diplomatic, strategic, and geopolitical platform upon which China can raise its own international influence to build a more just international order that advances peace, prosperity, and equality worldwide. In this respect, as a developmental state role model, China is also widely seen by African states as an indispensable partner in terms of capacitating the AU to carry out its responsibility. We will show how the China-Africa international relations agenda is pivotal to understanding Africa’s new global politics. On the other hand, our analysis of the relationship between China and Africa recognizes African agency and the continent’s self-directed internationalism with China from an African perspective. We reveal how it is for African states that China’s increasing bilateral involvement with them represents an opportunity for the AU to extend its own regional influence and establish itself as an envoy for the continent’s external relations. Thus we examine the China-Africa relationship within the broader strategic interests of African states vis-à-vis their representation by the AU to reveal the continent’s emergent, collective foreign policy with China. In our final chapter, we revisit our opening thesis questions to reinforce our argument that Africa’s new regional internationalism is shaped by increasing complexity in international politics that has emerged as a result of transformations toward deep global pluralism. By the end of the book, we observe a pattern about the historical and contemporary practice of African international relations to introduce a new theory about the African region’s impact on global politics. We conclude with the final arguments of our thesis that Africa’s regional internationalism is both a product and a driver of transformative global politics in the twenty-first century. Our thesis replaces the extraversion theory of African international relations, which contends the continent’s

African Regionalism in a Plural World

23

elites have deliberately contributed to a relationship of self-interested, dependence in their relations with the rest of the world. In developing our own thesis on Africa’s international relations, we center the continent as an international entity and world region that has experienced long-standing historical global junctures, encounters, and transformations achieved by a variegated assemblage of actors at the community, national, regional, and global levels. By our conclusion, we reveal African states’ collective impact at the regional and global levels. This chapter will confirm the reality that, historically, the continent has been a site of transnational activities and encounters for global actors, including imperialism, transatlantic slavery, racial colonialism, and contemporary neocolonialism. Our book reveals how these encounters have produced an Africa that is a historically situated geopolitical regional construct, forged by European geographers and used to designate groups of peoples who were not immediately aware of the new spatial category to which they were supposed to belong. To this end, we reveal how the idea of Africa has been invented and reinvented for centuries by Africans inside the continent as well as by international actors (Mazrui 2005). In the twentyfirst century, Africa is being reinvented by the regional internationalism of African states constituted as the AU. The theory of Africa’s international relations we present here positions the continent as a historical international region while leveraging the continent’s new regional internationalism to reveal its expanded, evolving participation in collectively reversing the continent’s marginal global position. In this final chapter, we reaffirm our thesis, using it to probe the question of what Africa’s new role in global politics means for the theory and practice of the international relations of Africa. To do so, we reexamine themes engaged throughout the book—global diversity and inclusion, regional-global governance, international conflict management, transnational justice, new China-Africa geographies of trade, and global economy—conclusively applying our theoretical constructs of agency, global South development, and global inequality to a discussion about Africa’s new global politics. Conclusion In the millennium, African states have collectively begun to push back against their portrayal as victims of global exogenous forces and constraints to take on a more assertive, high-level diplomacy role to advance the continent’s interests in the global international system (Brown and Harman 2013). In responding to this global visibility and collective action emerging from the continent, particularly expressed through the regional-internationalist AU,

24

Africa’s New Global Politics

international relations scholars and practitioners have begun to examine the continent’s international relations from a perspective that reflects these changes. We are motivated by these expansive theories of international relations scholarship that capture change in the study of African affairs, and draw from the important subject of how African states collectively deploy agency, through their material, ideational, and interaction capabilities, to construct, reject, reconstitute, and transform global and regional orders. We believe that this is an important intellectual intervention, because when international relations studies recognize multiple forms of agency beyond material power to include resistance, normative action, and local constructions of world order, the discipline becomes a truly global one representing an inclusive, pluralistic universalism and respect for diversity.

2 The Making of Africa’s International Relations

Ethiopia’s emperor Haile Selassie was probably the first African leader to make Time magazine’s Man of the Year, in 1936. The magazine credited Selassie for his extraordinary international relations dirigisme because of his powerful appeal to the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations, calling on it to protect countries like his from aggression from the likes of Italy. Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia, whose previous defeat of a European power in 1896 made it the only African state to evade formal colonial conquest. Italy’s invasion was a revenge mission for the defeat at the historic battle of Adowa under the command of Ethiopia’s Emperor Menelik II. Emperor Selassie fled into exile in England, but Ethiopians relentlessly fought and resisted Italian occupation until 1941, when the Allied powers led by Britain defeated and ousted Italy from Ethiopia. Emperor Selassie was reinstalled, until he was ousted in a popular revolution in 1974 that effectively ended a centuries-old monarchy (Bahru and Pausewang 2002). In part because of this history, the Ethiopian leader would go on to play a major role in forging the international relations of Africa, and today the home of the African Union is Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. The driving force behind African internationalism, the Pan-African independence movement, first took organizational form as the AU’s predecessor, the Organization of African Unity. According to Selassie, addressing the newly independent states of Africa in 1963, “We stand today on the stage of world affairs before the audience of world opinion. We have come together to assert our role in the direction of world affairs” (Selassie 1963). The history of African international relations is ripe with leadership initiatives, pronouncements, and assertive moves like Haile Selassie’s. His historic actions

25

26

Africa’s New Global Politics

supported African agency and contributed to the construction of the international relations of the continent and the world. In their book, The Making of Global International Relations, Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan argue that a comprehensive and more inclusive analysis of international relations is needed to open up the neglected stories of the discipline of IR (2019, 4). Drawing from that book’s thesis about the non-Western world’s academic invisibility in the IR literature, in this chapter we introduce a wider spectrum from which to understand the world by uncovering the ways that Africa has historically contributed to and influenced international relations and global orders. In the chapter, and the book, we present a constructivist history of Africa’s international relations, engaging the topic of the continent’s evolving practice of a historically constituted international regionalism. We consider how to interpret the theory of an African international region in relation to global transformation and African regional world formation. To this end, despite acknowledging the existence of global disparities, hierarchies, and marginalization by which the continent has been historically situated at the bottom tier of a world system (Wallerstein 1974), we present a history of the manifold ways that African states have exercised power in transnational encounters and shaped regional developments through global engagements. African states have done so often through acts of resistance, as well as through local adaptation of global norms and institutions, but also by constructing new rules and institutions while conceptualizing and implementing new pathways to global security, global justice, and global economic participation. Lacking the material power that the West possesses, a reality that underscores African states’ constraints on global power asymmetry (Zondi 2013a, 20), is the reality that individually and collectively African states have often resorted to ideational forces and charted normative aspirations that have sought to both enhance and disrupt existing global norms and orders. A constructivist approach to examining the continent’s historical international relations offers greater scope for observing the ideational forces at work, because constructivism illuminates how Africans have contested and localized Western norms while creating new ones to reform and strengthen world order (Acharya and Buzan 2019). It allows us to see and interject the continent’s subjectivity and agential role in key historical events as participants and co-creators of global world orders. Nonetheless, we are careful not to overstate constructivism’s capacity to show African global agency. For example, we do not state that Africans created or were the core agents of such major developments as the transatlantic slave trade or enablers of colonialism as some scholars have suggested when using agency to describe African history (Bayart 1991; Thornton 1998). Instead, viewing African agency through the lens of constructivism, we hope to demonstrate that nei-

The Making of Africa’s International Relations

27

ther were Africans mere victims who were acted upon during these historical (and contemporary) world processes. Tracing African international relations in key historical periods of modernity and global formation—pre–World War II, post–World War II, Cold War, post–Cold War, and globalization—in this chapter we present these events as the historical building blocks that have produced the continent’s contemporary global politics. We make two arguments about the way that Africa’s international relations have developed historically and are currently constituted in order to understand its practices and values in the present period. First is the reality that the international relations of Africa have developed as a collective political action among sometimes loosely disparate African subregions, communities, and nation-state actors connected by shared histories and identities even as they have wrestled with contradictions, contestations, and conflicts (Zondi 2013a, 19–20). This collective agenda and shared solidarity have produced the continent’s evolving ideology of regionalism and a decidedly Pan-African identity that remains deeply imprinted in the continent’s current geopolitics and internationalism. A second conceptual argument articulates the way that a select set of international norms have driven the continent’s collective encounters with the world over time. We show how Africans have developed their own international norms, including antislavery, anticolonial resistance, self-determination, noninterference, nonintervention, responsible sovereignty, responsibility to protect, non-indifference, and Pan-African solidarity regionalism, using them to shape the evolution of African internationalism in historical eras and in contemporary times. These norms have governed African international behavior historically such that African states have used them to exercise global power and agency to challenge, resist, and penetrate Euro-American colonial and neocolonial power structures. We use these two arguments to show how the collective foreign policies of African communities and states have fostered epochal shifts and transformations in global development. In subsequent chapter sections we support and elaborate on the aforementioned thesis. First, we examine the transformations of international norms engaged by African states during epochs in world history, from antislavery movements and anticolonial initiatives to the World War II era manifest by the symbolic cases of Africa’s League of Nations members, Ethiopia and Liberia, especially revealing Ethiopia’s role in grounding a formative practice for African international relations. Next, we present the pre–World War II era development of global diasporic Pan-African internationalism as it was shaped by a series of antiracist and self-determining Pan-African Congresses in the early twentieth century, climaxing in the movement for the decolonization of the continent. We show how during this era, African nationalism and pan-nationalism leading up to independence after World War II and into the Cold War

28

Africa’s New Global Politics

applied the norms of unity, continental regionalism, and noninterference or nonintervention to engage global geopolitics in a formative way as African states consolidated their early foreign policies into the OAU. We will see how by the post–Cold War, in an era of globalization, international global shifts occurred again as African states employed norms of non-indifference, responsible sovereignty, and humanitarian intervention as a new genre of solidarity regionalism manifest in a period of African Renaissance, positioning a strong African presence in restructuring a global order (Nabudere 2001; Stremlau 1999). Finally, with the launching of flagship AU initiatives such as Agenda 2063 in 2015 as an example, we set the stage for understanding the ways that contemporary expressions of globalization, hyperglobalization, and deglobalization have presented African states with opportunities to develop new norms of democratic Pan-Africanism and regional internationalism, as the diffusion of wealth, power, cultural authority, and shared fates increasingly transform a postliberal world. Pan-Africanism and the Diasporic Origins of Modern African Internationalism Premodern instances of internationalism in Africa can be found across the continent. Mansa Musa of the Malian empire was known to have conducted global excursions to the Middle East—and some say to the Americas. Since the 1300s, the many kings who reigned over the east African kingdom of Bakongo were known to have carried out diplomatic relations with Portugal. Ethiopia is known to have been founded as a result of Queen Makeba’s international mission to Israel, where she conceived a son by King Solomon and upon returning named him Ethiopia. Notwithstanding these deep histories of forging African global orders, the modern history of Africa’s internationalism took a major turn with the European-African imperial encounter that led to the transatlantic slave trade and the creation of global diasporic Africa, and to successive colonial regimes from formal colonization to neocolonial and postcolonial global orders. The effect of the slave raiding and shipping off of a large portion of African peoples to the Americas expands the notion of Africa to one of global Africa that includes the continent and its diaspora. Africa’s modern internationalism has emerged as a response to the encounters and regimes of European structuring that constituted Africa as a global periphery upon which Europe has conducted its global transactions. Whether by separate nations, subregions, or transnational movements, the African response to global peripheralization and exploitation has nurtured a shared identity driven by a politics of solidarity for the continent and its diaspora. To this

The Making of Africa’s International Relations

29

end, African internationalism is about connecting the history of African identity formation to the continent’s historical struggles for justice and against oppressive global power structures. These global struggles translated the idea of Pan-African unity into a forceful ideological vehicle that has become a dominant feature of contemporary African politics. New global African politics have emerged because Pan-Africanism’s shared African voice, collective political agency based on a shared history, and determination to sustain an African identity with which to engage contemporary world politics have informed the norms, values, and actions that drive the continent’s current internationalism. Furthermore, Pan-Africanism has historically contributed to the liberal world order given its interactions and negotiations with European and American global actors on the one hand, and on the other its transnational solidarity with African diasporas. To this end, Pan-Africanism has played an important role in forging the development of a more just, equal, and rule-bound multilateral world (Abrahamsen 2020). The spirit of a united Pan-African voice on the international scene was born out of adversity in the African diaspora (global Africa), in the struggles against slave bondage and the quest for freedom from indignity. The seeds of Pan-Africanism, the ideological and social movement for a united African collective, were sown in the diaspora and among the millions of the continent’s men and women who were stripped of their humanity, cast into the far lands of the Caribbean and the Americas as commodities at the service of profit-thirsty Euro-American capitalism. The experience of enslavement and the struggle to reclaim global Africa’s humanity provided the initial fuel and drive to forge a common identity, a unified agency that matured into the global Pan-African movement. For example, in Haiti, an infusion of enslaved Congolese from Bakongo into Santo Domingo has been directly linked to the northern hemisphere’s first revolution in the Americas (Davis 2016). General Toussaint L’Ouverture’s revolution in Saint Domingue (Haiti) against the French was a historic and groundbreaking development in the struggle to defeat slavery and reclaim African freedom and dignity (James 1989). The Haitian revolution accomplished several fundamental goals that are central to our understanding of African agency and the critical antecedents to contemporary African international relations, especially in the realm of norm setting. For example, it was L’Ouverture’s revolution that pushed the normative value of freedom into a truly global ideal that became a rallying point for oppressed and marginalized people around the world. Before the revolution in Saint Domingue, which created Haiti as the first modern Black republic, the rights of liberté, égalité, and fraternité that anchored the French Revolution were seen as ideals exclusive to some races and not others. Instead of extending these freedoms universally, Africans became “officially

30

Africa’s New Global Politics

and legally” the “slave race” of the world at the time those three ideals had become part of mainstream discourse in Europe and North America. Although the Haitian revolution occupies limited space, if any, in the scholarly debates on the history of freedom in the world, it was the major turning point in the struggle to defeat slavery in the diaspora and colonialism in the continent (West, Martin, and Wilkins 2009, 7). The Haitian revolution was a culmination of long-standing struggles for freedom and resistance against oppression and enslavement in the New World. From the time of capture through the humiliating ordeal of walking hundreds of kilometers in chains, the horrifying voyage of the Middle Passage, the painful conditions at ports of disembarkation, and finally life on the plantations, slave revolts and rebellions were a common theme of the African experience (Gomez 2020). The Haitian revolution in 1791 spurred large-scale slave rebellions in Cuba in 1812 and in South Carolina in 1822 (Adi 2018, 9). These acts of struggle against bondage in the diaspora also took place on the continent, against forced labor and colonial conquest, and became the unifying force for a shared African and African diaspora experience. Such early struggles to reclaim the dignity of African peoples coalesced into movements for abolition of slavery in the diaspora and liberation against colonial pillaging in the continent. The Sons of Africa, an organization started by two West Africans in Britain, Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, was a forerunner to the Pan-African movement that played a leading role in pushing Britain to end participation in the transatlantic slave trade (Adi 2018, 7; Adi and Sherwood 2003, 27). Throughout the diaspora, some among the abolition activists had been born free to recently freed or still enslaved parents, while others fought their way to freedom from being owned. Regardless, these struggles forged the foundation for the subsequent Pan-African network that connected the African continent to the diaspora communities (Adi and Sherwood 2003). From the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, the struggle for freedom and human dignity swirled from the Caribbean and the Americas across the Atlantic back to the continent. Slavery had been formally outlawed in Britain in 1807 and in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, but at the same time increased European exploration of the continent culminated in its colonization in the final quarter of the century. For Africa, it shifted from enslavement in the diaspora to despoliation and dehumanization back at home under colonial conquest and forcible occupation. The colonization of Africa represented the structural incorporation of the continent into the bottom tier of an emerging international world system. As part of a global process that reached across continents, European colonization and domination changed the world dramatically and introduced a new form of imperialism. The Bakongo region of western, Central

The Making of Africa’s International Relations

31

Africa represented the core of European incursion into Africa as King Leopold II gained recognition in Belgium. Under the guise of ending slavery and promoting “civilization” to a “dark continent,” in 1876 Leopold hosted the Geographical Conference on Central Africa, thereby opening Africa to imperial conquest for European resource control. The partition of Africa, also known as the Berlin Conference, took place between 1884 and 1885 at the request of Portugal and under the leadership of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who called together the major Western powers of the world to negotiate questions and end confusion over the control of Africa. The conference was as much about building national wealth and empire in Europe as it was about exploiting an entire continent’s resources. One way European nations demonstrated preeminence was through the acquisition of African territory, and another was to build colonies for surplus settler populations in Africa in the fold of European empire. Africa’s resistance to total conquest was no match for the coordinated European nationalist onslaught, from its global governing institution, the Berlin Conference, to its region by region military escapades. No doubt Africans put up exhaustive and varied responses, including trying to shut out Europeans by not trading with them and not allowing missionaries to stay with them, and forming alliances with European powers often in an attempt to play one European country off another or to find protection against local adversaries (Boahen 1989). Still others put up armed resistance. For example, capturing the sentiment of the whole continent in 1895, the king of Mossi (modern-day Burkina Faso) told a French colonial officer, I know the whites wish to kill me in order to take my country, and yet you claim that they will help me to organize my country. But I find my country good just as it is. I have no need [for] them. I know what is necessary for me and what I want: I have my own merchants: also, consider yourself fortunate that I do not order your head to be cut off. Go away now, and above all, never come back. (Boahen 1989, 1)

Whereas the transatlantic slave trade and the scramble for Africa forged the structural reality of Africa in the modern world system, these events also shaped an African internationalist response in the form of struggles over centuries to transcend its peripheral status. The forebears of the Pan-African movement were the actors and activists in the struggle to abolish slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow segregationist policies in the United States after the Civil War. They provided both the ideological orientation and the programmatic agenda for global African liberation in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and the African continent. In the early post-abolition period, after the British abolished slavery in 1807, some leaders and intellectuals in the diaspora’s struggle for freedom pressed for

32

Africa’s New Global Politics

return to the continent—emigration. They saw emigration back home as the definitive solution to racialized oppression and discrimination that were germane to plantation life, especially in the US South. It was the ultimate reversing sail (Gomez 2020). For example, after sailing to the West African coast and spending time in Freetown, Paul Cuffe returned to the United States persuaded that there was great potential in Africa for communities of freed slaves to forge a new and meaningful life away from the oppressive structures in the Americas. Despite the racist thrust of the American Colonization Society, the official US government agency in charge of facilitating emigration to Africa, the founding of Liberia was for many African returnees a critical step toward fulfilling the dream of total liberation, sovereignty, and freedom for former slaves, notwithstanding the eventual tragedy of Liberia as a quasi-American colony viciously exploited by American transnational capitalism in the form of the Firestone Company. At the height of the Jim Crow era in the United States, the back-toAfrica agenda was reignited by Marcus Garvey and the mass movement he engineered through his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its business arm that included the Black Star shipping line, which was established with the primary aim of easing movement between the Americas, the Caribbean, and the African continent (Bandele 2010; Dagnini 2008). Garvey’s UNIA and Black Star shipping company attracted worldwide membership, and through them many African Americans were mobilized into Garvey’s mission of all-around liberation of Black people, both politically and economically. Garvey sought to create a singular global Africa with himself as the founding president. Inspired by Garvey’s vision, contemporary activists have conceptualized Africa on a global scale and through a transnational prism of divergent lived experiences. Garveyism shows the dialectical engagement between the African diaspora and continental Africa that was set in motion during abolition and the US back-to-Africa emigration program. This agenda later assumed a bigger, prominent, and illustrious international presence in fostering the evolution of the Pan-African movement that began as a series of conferences/congresses convened in Europe and the United States. Pan-Africanism first arose as “a protest movement of American and West Indian Blacks who were reasserting their links with Africa and the achievements of African civilizations” (Wallerstein 1961, 103). African congresses in the diaspora laid the foundation and provided the inspiration for a concerted and collective agenda for continental independence and the eventual founding of the OAU in 1963. The pioneer congress under the leadership of Trinidadian intellectual and activist Henry Sylvester Williams took place in London, July 22–24, 1900. It was attended by a cross section of representatives from Africa, the

The Making of Africa’s International Relations

33

Caribbean, the United States, and Britain (Adi and Sherwood 2003, 191). At this inaugural conference participants discussed problems of inequality and discrimination in the United States and in British colonies, exploitation of natives by colonizing commercial companies, the oppressive system of alien rule in South Africa, and the case for reparations for African peoples at home and in the diaspora (Adi and Sherwood 2003, 191). An important aim of the conference was to underline African agency in a world that discriminated against Africans. The conference would demonstrate that Africans and people of African descent could speak for themselves against racial injustices and in their struggles for freedom (Adi 2018, 21). Subsequent conferences were convened under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois, starting with one in Paris in 1919 that coincided with the Versailles Peace Conference at the end of World War I. This conference aimed to carry forward the agenda of African freedom against the imperial processes of the time. After a series of follow-up conferences in Lisbon, Madrid, and New York, the most important Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester in 1945 at the end of World War II. Several African nationalist leaders who went on to champion the cause of independence in their respective countries attended that conference. It was significant that they did so in concert with continental comrades. National leaders in attendance were Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Kamuzu Banda (Malawi), and Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria), among others. These leaders returned to the continent shortly after the Manchester congress to play critical roles in their countries’ struggles for independence. Among these leaders, it was Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana who spearheaded the formal struggle for independence for the entire continent. Becoming the first sub-Saharan African country to attain its independence from a European power, in 1957, Ghana’s Pan-African struggle marked a decisive turning point in the emergent global order. With Ghanaian independence and leadership, Nkrumah convened the Conference of Independent African States and the All-African Peoples Conference in 1958 (Wallerstein 1961, 114–115). This was a major milestone on the agenda for unity that started in the diaspora and became a permanent fixture of Africa’s regionalism and the continent’s engagement in global politics. Continental African agency in the Pan-African movement thus evolved from individual endeavors for freedom by Black internationalists, to small Pan-African congresses, to the global movement whose foremost unified voice was capped in emerging African nation-states working together under the auspices of the continent’s first regional organization, the OAU. Africa’s postindependence internationalism drew part of its inspiration and experience from the interwar engagement of sovereign African states acting on the world stage at a time when most of the continent remained under colonial rule.

34

Africa’s New Global Politics

Africa in the League of Nations The interwar years leading up to World War II would turn out to be a critical period for global transformation. The Versailles settlement of World War I produced both losers and winners, which meant that peace in Europe was precarious. The losers, especially Germany, sought to get even by launching territorial claims and pursuing expansionist foreign policies. Thus, the interwar period witnessed heightened great power rivalry and aggression that ultimately engulfed the entire world. The rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy reignited the embers of 1919 as both men, particularly Hitler, sought to upend the European geopolitical order concluded at the Versailles Peace Conference and to face off yet again with traditional archenemy France. German aggression in Europe ultimately set off a cascade that lit up the world for a second catastrophe in 1939. On the African continent, otherwise considered peripheral and subordinate to European great power fights for supremacy, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 was an equally important highlight of the tenuous security situation ostensibly being supervised by the League of Nations. Unlike their European counterparts, most African nation-states weren’t independent during this phase of nationalism and state formation. Only Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa were independent at the end of World War I and eligible to be members of the League of Nations. Ethiopia had avoided colonization and freed itself from occupation by defeating a major European power, Italy, in the last decade of the nineteenth century at the time of European scramble and partition of the continent. Liberia had been established as free in 1840 as home to emigrant freed slaves from the United States. South Africa gained independence from Britain in 1910 under white racist minority rule that became the infamous apartheid apparatus. Moreover, because the African continent was still under European imperial subjugation, as a region it had very limited voice and presence in a League of Nations that was somewhat inconsequential due to the insufficient US commitment to multilateralism and collective security. As a result, the League was for the most part hapless in the face of interstate territorial disputes, violations of international law, and simmering violent confrontations among big powers and against small states. The League’s incapacities would affect Ethiopia, who of the three African members, under Haile Selassie would inspire the world to a vision of human rights and self-determination for all of the world’s nations and peoples. In his 1963 address to the United Nations, Selassie would refer to his own 1936 address to the League of Nations: I declared that it was not the Covenant of the League that was at stake, but international morality. Undertakings, I said then, are of little worth

The Making of Africa’s International Relations if the will to keep them is lacking. The Charter of the United Nations expresses the noblest aspirations of man: abjuration of force in the settlement of disputes between states; the assurance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion; the safeguarding of international peace and security. But these, too, as were the phrases of the Covenant, are only words; their value depends wholly on our will to observe and honor them and give them content and meaning. The preservation of peace and the guaranteeing of man’s basic freedoms and rights require courage and eternal vigilance: courage to speak and act—and if necessary, to suffer and die—for truth and justice; eternal vigilance, that the least transgression of international morality shall not go undetected and unremedied. (Selassie 1963)

35

It is instructive that a full-fledged member of the League, Ethiopia, became the victim of foreign aggression and imperial subjugation, yet the League of Nations was unable to get its members to collectively counter Italy’s blatant aggression. It follows, therefore, that the Italian invasion of Ethiopia constituted an important part of the conversation leading up to the outbreak of World War II. German aggression in Europe and the Italian assault on an African member of the League exposed the fickleness of Anglo-Franco appeasement foreign policy. Italy’s belated avenging of its humiliating 1896 defeat at the historic battle of Adwa in Ethiopia drew worldwide condemnation and amplified a Pan-African voice in defense of African ideals, interests, and independence. From Lagos to London and Harlem to Havana, whether in Port-au-Prince or Paris, from Durban to Dublin, Kingston to Cairo, the invasion of Ethiopia reverberated and provided a rallying point for an incipient united African voice linking the African diaspora with the continent. Italy’s imperialist and racist adventures in Africa, happening late in the course of European occupation of the continent, mobilized the interest and attention of Africans and African-descended communities across the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe, and the mother continent. Disparate associations and organizations, expressing solidarity with Ethiopia, sprang up in different American cities, in the Caribbean, across major European capitals, and in West Africa, particularly in the British colonies of the Gambia, Gold Coast, and Nigeria. The Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia, the UNIA, the Council on African Affairs, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the United States; the League of Colored Peoples, the International African Friends of Abyssinia, and the West African Students’ Union in Britain; and the Friends of Ethiopia, the West Indian Youth Welfare League, and Negro Welfare Cultural and Social Association were among the many groups and initiatives that emerged to shape international reaction to, and African agency against, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (Adi 2018, 108–115).

36

Africa’s New Global Politics

These organizations and others spearheaded activism and protests to raise awareness against late European imperialism and to underscore the plight of the colonized peoples. They organized marches and presented petitions to European governments. The more radical and determined groups mooted a bigger endeavor that would include mobilizing resources and recruiting fighters willing to make the journey to fight in defense of Ethiopia (Adi 2018; Tillery 2011). For the first time the African American community was mobilized to take keen interest in affairs transpiring on the African continent. The Black media in the United States extensively covered Italy’s invasion and raised consciousness about a shared fate between African Americans and the people on the African continent (Tillery 2011). The Italian invasion of Ethiopia created at least two global ramifications that are worth highlighting as they underscore our focus on African agency in the making of global orders, specifically and especially regarding the interwar period and the postwar international order. First, it helped galvanize a worldwide African community and contributed to coordinating a stance against racialized injustices among the African diaspora and colonial domination in the African continent. Since Ethiopia was the one African state and territory that remained standing when the rest of the continent was violently and ruthlessly conquered, parceled out, and despoiled, the 1935 Italian invasion represented, at least in perception, a European attempt to complete the puzzle of total colonial occupation of the continent. This was something that Africans in the continent and in the diaspora were willing to fight hard against. This invasion catalyzed anticolonial activism and demands to end European imperialism in Africa and the Caribbean. The collage of pressure groups and activist organizations that proliferated in defense of Ethiopia upped the momentum and propelled a wider, bigger, and consequential PanAfrican convening in Manchester in 1945. It was a point of no return for anticolonial movements and the swirling decolonization wave whose key watershed moment was Ghana’s march to independence in 1957. Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia contributed to the worldwide crisis of colonialism and the start of the disintegration of European imperialism in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Italian aggression and the collusion of the big powers created the conditions for a more strident anticolonial Pan-Africanism throughout Africa and the diaspora (Adi 2018, 117). The second major impact of the Italian invasion was its effect on the new global order and normative framework. The events of the interwar period, of which the invasion of Ethiopia was one of the most important, pushed the world to rethink how it could prevent such occurrences as German and Italian aggression and how to respond when they did occur, a departure from British prime minister Neville Chamberlin’s appeasement policy and posture. Italy’s aggression in Africa, inspired by Germany’s on

The Making of Africa’s International Relations

37

the European continent, exposed the folly of the interwar appeasement and underscored the need for a more robust, comprehensive, and concerted approach in the face of foreign attack on a member state. The norms of territorial integrity and self-determination, which became core provisions of the Charter of the United Nations, came out of the experience of aggression in the interwar period in which Africa was an active player. This norm transformation found domestication in African international relations, to which we turn next. Imagining “Africa”: Self-Determination, Sovereignty, and the OAU Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah put forth the strongest vision of a united Africa that became a countervailing force against the continent’s former colonizers. He knew very well that after decolonization, the artificially created African states would be easy bait for hungry global powers. For that reason, Nkrumah imagined a United African States—which started in the form of the Organization of African Unity and became the African Union— over the territorial nationalism of decolonized states. The independence wave across the African continent in the 1960s birthed the largest addition of new sovereign nation-states into the international system since the inception of the Westphalian norm of sovereign juridical statehood in 1648. The winds of change set off in Indochina after the humiliating defeat of France at the hands of the Japanese, swirled to South Asia, and snarled across the Indian Ocean, arriving on the African continent within a decade of the end of World War II—first in Egypt and Sudan. But it was the independence of Ghana in 1957 that set alight a cascade on the continent. The disintegration of colonial empires was in large measure directly linked to the catastrophe that was World War II. As new global superpowers, the Soviet Union and United States supported decolonization for different reasons. Their own imperial interests could not be served when the world still had colonial powers; if the new superpowers were to exact their influence and impose their will on the world, the old hegemonies and imperial influences had to be swept aside. At another level, both the Soviets and the Americans were wary of colonies slipping into the purview of the other’s ideological bloc as the contest for supremacy got underway in what became known as the Cold War. In fact, the Cold War was set in motion when an imminent communist victory in the civil war in Greece prompted US intervention, kick-starting what became a permanent American military presence in Europe through NATO. Before World War II, decolonization and the independence of colonies in Asia and Africa were seen as a distant-future development to be actualized

38

Africa’s New Global Politics

gradually over several decades. But in a dramatic turn of events, in the aftermath of the war, it became a matter of how fast decolonization was to unfold. While several North African countries had gained independence earlier, it was Ghana’s in 1957 that lit up the continent, and in 1960 at least seventeen African countries achieved national sovereignty (Young 2012, 3). The demand for “independence now” was a rallying slogan and clarion call across the breadth of the continent as independence parties and anticolonial movements pressed for a decisive end to a century of European colonial occupation and plunder. The pathways to independence were varied, but the quest for independence was a unifying ideal, such that by 1970 it was only the Portuguese territories, the final white redoubt of Southern Africa, and a few micro territories that awaited final liberation from colonial occupation (Young 2012, 87). Decolonization established a shift toward a new norm-transforming assertion of sovereignty and self-determination; with the experience of World War II, Africans were no longer willing to tolerate being denied what they had been mobilized to fight for in Europe and Asia. The same principle had been enshrined in Article 1 of the Charter of the United Nations, thus making it difficult to deflect demands for the same by colonized peoples. The quest for independence was unstoppable and the desire to forge new national identities took center stage in the ensuing years. But perhaps the more intractable challenge among African sovereign states was how to deal with territorial borders that haphazardly dotted the continent and conflicted with the grand ideal of African unity. The African continent had been parceled out in 1884–1885 in ways that could not be undone at independence in the 1960s. In fact, it is remarkable that African national borders have remained considerably stable and resilient since before independence compared to how, for example, borders shifted drastically in Europe after the two world wars and at the end of the Cold War. Africa’s colonially created borders were maintained following independence in part because they were politically convenient and it was logistically impracticable to change them (Whitaker and Clark 2018, 34). But whether out of pragmatism or opportunism, or perhaps by dint of both prudence and convenience, one of the most important features of African regional international relations at independence was near unanimous adherence to colonially created borders. Africa’s independence leaders upheld the United Nations principle of territorial integrity, which was enshrined in the charter of the OAU. This principle was reinforced in the Cairo Declaration of 1964, which explicitly provided for the inviolability of colonially created borders. For better or worse, African state borders have remained incredibly resilient over the more than half century of independence. In the rather standard and cynical portrayal of African politics, the resilience of colonial borders is attributed

The Making of Africa’s International Relations

39

to the material benefits that accrue from the norm of territorial integrity and the principle of sovereignty (Clapham 1996; Englebert 2009; Englebert and Hummel 2005). But little credit is granted to African agency and to the fact that African leaders have consistently opposed irredentism and secession, except for Biafra, whose declaration of independence from Nigeria received endorsement from a few African states including Tanzania under Julius Nyerere (Nugent 2004). It is worthwhile to point out that at the dawn of independence African leaders and civil societies did more than just embrace colonial borders. They did not merely acquiesce to maintaining the “balkanization” of the continent. Although there were a few cases of secessionism (as in Nigeria) and irredentism (for example in Somalia), there were many innovative attempts at reconciling the national sovereignty of the new nation-states with the necessity of continental unification and collective problem solving. Indeed, many of the anticolonial movements across the continent aimed not just for independence but independence and unity (Wallerstein 1961, 105). Kwame Nkrumah, for one, was adamant that the independence of his country, the Gold Coast, renamed Ghana, was meaningless unless it was tied to the total liberation and unification of the continent. Different models and experiments of federation were attempted including the Ghana-Guinea Union. This experience was quite intriguing considering that the two countries had no contiguous frontiers (Wallerstein 1961, 117). Given the uncertainties as to the benefits versus the costs of ceding some national sovereignty for a regional or continental federation, there were intractable disagreements over the different attempts to manage the artificial borders without altering them. What transpired was an exercise in pragmatism and the construction of a workable new geopolitical order that paid heed to both international law and the contextual circumstances of the African continent. In the end, the creation of the OAU was a compromise between Pan-African leaders who wanted a quicker, ambitious, and somewhat top-down continental unification that would temper the artificially created national borders and the more nationalist group that sought to guard their newly acquired sovereign power and international status. The debates and disagreements leading up to the OAU spawned two camps and contending ideologies. Kwame Nkrumah and the Casablanca group favored a swift drive for a kind of United States of Africa, and the Libreville/Monrovia bloc, which had as one of its promoters the Ivorian president Felix Houphouet-Boigny, wanted to stick with the colonially created territorial fragmentation. The latter at best stood for engaging in limited regionalism that would not compromise national self-determination. In any event, since its founding in 1963 the OAU provided the platform and space for concerted African diplomacy and especially the struggle to rid the continent of the remaining vestiges of direct European occupation and

40

Africa’s New Global Politics

apartheid—Portuguese colonialism and white minority rule in Southern Africa. The Portuguese had put up the last redoubt against the decolonization wave, holding on to their African colonial possessions and fighting against the tide of the time. This was coincidental to, but converged with, Ian Smith’s racist regime in Southern Rhodesia along with the apartheid apparatus that held sway in the southern third of the continent—in South Africa and South West Africa (Namibia). In its close to forty years of existence, the OAU faltered and floundered, but it contributed significantly and unmistakably to shaping African international relations in ways that mainstream Western scholarship has not been willing to acknowledge. While Western governments, especially the United States and Britain, remained firmly in cahoots with the apartheid regime in South Africa, for both economic and security considerations including Cold War imperatives, the OAU single-mindedly and successfully rallied much of the African continent and the African diaspora in solidarity with and support for the anti-apartheid movement. It was in large part the OAU’s relentless and resounding denunciation of apartheid, in concert with Africa’s disparate diasporas and allied movements, that imprinted a shining stigma on the face of the apartheid regime, tapering its standing and kick-starting in 1990 the process of its dismemberment. The diplomatic isolation of the apartheid regime, the UN arms embargo, and even the eventual Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act belatedly passed in the US Congress in 1986 against President Ronald Reagan’s veto were all possible with the OAU’s activism, lobbying, and leadership on the global stage. No other agenda mobilized and attracted the intense attention of the continent and the concerted efforts of its diasporas than the fight to defeat what was widely viewed as a vicious and reprehensible apartheid regime in South Africa, a regime that nevertheless remained closely allied with London and Washington even at its most vile and brutal. The moral leadership to denounce and deride apartheid fell not on the West, which often claims the high moral ground, but on African governments, especially the Frontline States, united under the OAU. In 1994 South Africa opened a new page with the inauguration of a popularly elected Black president, Nelson Mandela. The negotiations leading up to the historic transition foreshadowed the compromises and concessions that would define the country’s long-term prospects as a multiracial, class-based society. Mandela instantly became an international icon, lauded for pursuing reconciliation rather than revenge, seeking reform and not radical revolution. He contributed to reimagining and charting a new course of international peace and justice in the emergent post–Cold War global normative environment. He was touted by the West as the embodiment of progress and moral vision, given a Nobel Peace Prize to boot. Yet Mandela’s success at driving a pacific transition in South Africa produced a half-empty bottle—a durable

The Making of Africa’s International Relations

41

political settlement was attained but little was done to undo endemic economic injustice that has left majority Blacks trapped in economic deprivation in a country that is ranked top in global economic inequality. South Africa’s historic transition thus demonstrated a global lesson of post-conflict reconciliation and tolerance, but it also underlined the folly of political compromise without economic justice. These continental struggles for liberation and self-determination, and Africa’s overall global politics in the postindependence decades, played out and were in part conditioned by a unique world environment—the Cold War. Cold War Internationalism: Noninterference, Nonalignment, and Communism African states entered the community of international sovereignty at a momentous time—in the throes of the Cold War. The animosity and ideological confrontation between the United States and USSR, both having emerged from the flames of the World War II catastrophe as superpowers even though the Soviet Union had suffered stupendous human losses, started in earnest in the closing stages of the war itself. The “total war” had barely ended when the world was plunged into what historian Eric Hobsbawm (1994, 226) characterized as the “Third World War.” What is not articulated enough about this period is the reality that the Cold War was indeed a third world war, fought largely by proxy in the developing world because the two superpowers could not face off in a direct military confrontation due to their balance of terror and mutually assured destruction. Africa had a large share of these proxy wars, with Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, Sudan, Guinea-Bissau, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Guinea being involved in some of the continent’s most infamous Cold War conflicts. In the end they created a “permanent war,” which after the end of the Cold War received renewed fuel from the so-called war on terror (Amin 2004). The Cold War had multiple fronts in the superpower struggles for supremacy, but African governments at different times asserted their sovereignty against either or both superpowers. The continent was a battleground for the Soviets and the Americans as much as Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America were equally caught up in the maze of economic antagonism and military malfeasance. The Soviet Union and the United States outdid each other in trying to gain the upper hand in the continent. In response, in 1955 African and Asian leaders met in Bandung, Indonesia, and established the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) to assert their independent engagement in international relations and their resistance to Cold War interventionism and superpower confrontation. In the intervening years,

42

Africa’s New Global Politics

the principle of nonalignment was upheld by some African states but disregarded by others. Several states and leaders switched sides at different times or opportunistically played one superpower against the other. The earliest critics of the United States who were either overtly allied with the Soviet Union or aggressively pursued socialist/statist economic policies were victims of Western-sponsored coups and assassinations. The most poignant was the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, assassinated only a few months following that country’s independence from Belgium in 1960, an act that helped put the Congo on a path of internal decay and externally driven despoliation that has persisted. Apparently, Washington was convinced “Lumumba was working to serve the purposes of the Soviets to out the UN from the Congo and take it over on their behalf” (Meredith 2005, 104). In the long run the Congo became a signature case of the malign ramifications of the Cold War rivalry. Although the Soviets and Cubans backed an initial guerrilla attempt to topple Joseph Mobutu following his capture of power in a 1965 coup, the Congo was long a US sanctuary and a buffer of sorts, a rare base in the proxy confrontation with the Soviets in Southern Africa. Between South Africa, Mozambique, and Angola, the United States and the Soviets put up a deadly proxy confrontation that ravaged those countries for decades; Angola remained trapped in civil war even long after the Cold War officially ended. In fact it was not until the assassination of rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in 2002, ironically with the alleged involvement of the same CIA that had backed him for decades, that the Angolan civil war came to an end. Elsewhere on the continent, Kwame Nkrumah, the doyen of PanAfrican unity and radical political change and a vociferous critic of imperialism, was an early victim of the CIA’s sponsorship of military putsches on the continent. He was deposed by his military generals in 1966. Julius Nyerere in Tanzania insisted on homegrown “African socialism,” which was ostensibly shielded from alien influences and independent of external meddling. His Ujamaa (brotherhood) villagization social engineering ultimately yielded disappointing economic results as it brought more poverty than prosperity, but the experiment played a crucial role in deepening a national consciousness and sustaining social harmony. Nyerere was revered as a nation-builder who retired voluntarily from office with a laudable record as a statesman even though his country remained deeply impoverished. Nyerere’s northern neighbor Kenya, under Jomo Kenyatta, shrewdly stayed closer to the capitalist ideological worldview and was in fact on normal terms with South Africa’s apartheid regime, against the common African position. At the turn of the century, most of Africa’s independence era leaders had either been consumed by the passing of time or long fallen afoul of the curses of power. The continent’s politics and international relations were in

The Making of Africa’s International Relations

43

the hands of three major categories of rulers: the first and second generations of coup-makers who had successfully entrenched themselves in power (Muammar Gaddhafi, Omar al-Bashir, Teodoro Obiang), the group who had captured power through guerrilla rebellion (Isaias Afwerki, Meles Zenawi, Yoweri Museveni), and last, those who had been forced into democratization or had come to power during the global “third wave” of democratization (Jerry Rawlings, Thabo Mbeki, Daniel arap Moi). Thus, the African political landscape of 2000 was markedly different from that of 1960 or ’70. The continent’s international relations and role in the new global order had entered a new and still evolving trajectory. The final defeat of apartheid, coinciding with the end of the Cold War, was a major victory for the OAU and the African peoples, but it also called into question the organization’s relevance and the prudence of its model going into the twenty-first century. The OAU was founded to politically liberate the African continent, forge a unified front, and serve as a common platform for international diplomatic engagement. By contrast, the challenges and demands of twenty-first-century Africa, ranging from the desire for accountable government and respect for human rights to the pursuit of economic integration and continental interdependence, required a new framework to drive the African agenda. Thus the founding of the African Union in 2002, to which we turn below, was a direct response to an overarching need to repurpose and rethink continental unity, and to reassert African agency in a new, fast-moving, and complex global order that Africa had to both contend with and help remake. AU Regionalism’s Shift to Post-Apartheid and Responsible Sovereignty Since taking the baton from the OAU in 2002, the African Union has been the frontline actor of African agency and has conducted the continent’s collective diplomacy on the international stage. Whereas the OAU fostered Africa’s regionalism, the AU promoted Africa’s regional internationalism; the former laid a firm foundation on which the latter has built to strengthen Africa’s place in the world. While the AU continued the OAU’s regionalist agenda, that agenda was reconfigured to more strategically engage global issues and transformations. The AU today is the largest bloc of independent nation-states, and its members represent close to 30 percent of the United Nations community. Africans have long toyed with the ambitious ideal of a united Africa across economic, political, and security domains, and the AU has provided the strongest expression of this ideal. The AU has established itself as a formidable regional platform in a world where multilateral engagements are increasingly preferred to the unilateralism of the Cold War.

44

Africa’s New Global Politics

The organization has aggregated African agency on a wide range of issues, both unique to the continent and shared across the globe. It has rearticulated normative standards on global justice, responsibility to protect, and the exercise of state sovereignty. One of the most important global norm transformations to which the AU has contributed has been in the shift from blanket sovereignty, where states were shielded by the principle of noninterference, to a more progressive stance of non-indifference, taking proactive steps against abuses of state power (Williams 2007). The stance taken against unconstitutional changes of government, primarily through military coups and other forceful means, has contributed to a steep decline in incidents of military takeovers in the continent (Souaré 2014; Young 2012). Africa had twenty-seven successful military coups in thirteen states with nine coups happening in a matter of months between 1965 and 1966 (Young 2012, 144). There were as many as eighty successful coups between 1956 and 2001 (McGowan 2003, 346; Young 2012, 147). Between 1970 and 1989, the continent experienced ninety-nine coup attempts—successful and unsuccessful—averaging more than five per year. But from 1990 to 2012, the number dropped to sixty-seven attempts and twenty-five successful (Souaré 2014, 85), averaging just over one per year. The steep decline in military takeovers demonstrated that under the auspices of the African Union there was significant pushback against capturing state power at gunpoint. Backed up by regional initiatives on economic and security matters such as the Economic Community of West African States (see Chapter 4), the AU has used both diplomatic resources and the threat of force to compel coup-makers and incumbents defeated in elections to relinquish power, as happened in Burkina Faso, the Comoros, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, and Niger, and others. The AU became more outspoken and resolute in denouncing military coups and in criticizing rulers who manipulate electoral processes to stay in power. In March 2008, for example, the AU launched what was dubbed Operation Democracy in the Comoros to remove the incumbent administration on the island of Anjouan that had organized an illegal election to cling to power, illustrating how the AU has increasingly provided support for diplomatic and military interventions on the continent (Wilén and Williams 2018; Williams 2007). This move was unthinkable not too long ago, when unconstitutional seizures of power were rampant and the OAU was largely indifferent to even denouncing them. Although this norm change must be understood in the context of a worldwide shift, it speaks to the change in the regional terrain that has become less accommodative of the use of force and abuse of power. Actors who engage in such violations now have to be far more sophisticated and subtler to get away with diplomatic denunciation, military action, and other unconstitutional changes of government.

The Making of Africa’s International Relations

45

African Renaissance and Agenda 2063 Over centuries of history, the expression of African agency—how Africans have made conscious choices to change imposed structures that confine and oppress them—has evolved (Achieng 2014, 49–64). African agency concerns a consciousness, quality of thought, mode of analysis, and actionable perspective whereby Africans are subjects rather than objects in the context of African history (Asante 2007, 15). By 2002, Africans had substantially strengthened their efforts to revitalize global engagement in the form of Afrocentric diplomacy coming out of South Africa. This post-apartheid movement, referred to as the African Renaissance, further led to a new regional-internationalist agenda with bold and ambitious global goals (see Agenda 2063, 2015). While Cheikh Anta Diop first posed the idea of African Renaissance in his book Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in African Culture and Development, 1946–1960, it was Nelson Mandela who gave resonance to the concept when he used it in a speech at an OAU summit in 1994. After his release from a twenty-five-year political imprisonment in South Africa, as a postapartheid leader Mandela symbolically described African Renaissance as a new social imperative that would foster change and recovery in Africa (Iroulo 2017). Dovetailing with the concept of Pan-Africanism, the African Renaissance would come to represent Africa’s conscious need not only for political independence but for regional integration, economic independence, and the revitalization of democratization (Iroulo 2017). The years between 1998 and 2003 were a new golden age characterized by Pan-African agency in world affairs and spearheaded by then president of South Africa Thabo Mbeki. In popularizing the African Renaissance, Mbeki’s governance and foreign policy helped to forge a new school of international relations theory and practice. The African Renaissance emerged as a product of globalization as Africa began to reimagine and reinvent itself along the lines of Afrocentric diplomacy (Landsberg 2013, 3). As a special ambassador of this movement, Mbeki attempted to place Africa and South Africa in a new global context. In his 1997 “I am an African” speech, Mbeki presented an intellectual foundation for an African Renaissance that sought to establish an African identity for postapartheid South Africa while reawakening the African continent and people (Nabudere 2001). The African Renaissance emphasized the importance of African ownership in African institutions (Iroulo 2017) to ensure that Africans are in control of local, national, regional, and global institution building and to foster the self-determination needed to solve Africa’s problems according to African ideals and institutions. The 2013 AU Summit declared a year of panAfricanism and African Renaissance, pledging to facilitate and celebrate African narratives of past, present, and future; to enthuse and energize the

46

Africa’s New Global Politics

African population; and use their constructive energy to accelerate a forwardlooking agenda of pan-Africanism and renaissance in the twenty-first century. Agenda 2063, a product of this new genre of Afrocentric diplomacy and regional globalism, was born during the 2013 AU Summit. African states pledged that by the year 2063, the continent will have moved close to full political-economic integration. Given the continued neocolonial intrusions into the continent (e.g., the Millennium Development Goals had been developed without much African input), the African Union developed Agenda 2063 as a soft power mechanism to exercise its agency as a global actor (Tella 2018b). Aspiration 7 of Agenda 2063 seeks to ensure that the continent is selfconfident in its identity, heritage, culture, and shared values and that it is a strong, united, and influential partner on the global stage, making its contribution to peace, human progress, and peaceful coexistence. As such, it affirms the importance of African solidarity in the face of continued external interference, including attempts to divide the continent and undue pressures and sanctions on some countries. It guides the continent to take its rightful share of the global commons, to become an active and equal participant in global affairs and multilateral institutions, and to become fully capable with the means to finance African development. By 2020, on behalf of its member states, the African Union had pledged to take its rightful place in the political, security, economic, and social systems of global governance, and it established a new concept of global Africa as set out in its sixth-region diaspora clause (Edozie 2012), which expanded “referential” citizenship to Africans in the diaspora. The clause captured the continent’s renewed expression of global actorness, as through it African states pledged to continue the struggle against all forms of exploitation, racism, discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerances and to advance international cooperation that promotes and defends Africa’s interests and the Pan-Africanist vision. Conclusion In this chapter, we have analyzed the evolution of Africa’s international relations as constructivist rather than realist, liberal, or structuralist to reveal how African communities and states have had relative agency in participating in, creating, and shaping different global orders even as the continent has struggled against marginalization. We have seen how African international relations has evolved and been shaped by different forces at critical junctures over centuries. Taking stock of the processes documented here and granting them due attention has not occurred in the mainstream international relations theories. We see instead the critical

The Making of Africa’s International Relations

47

way that the continent and its diasporas have influenced as much as been influenced by global developments both in historical and contemporary times. What we have attempted to lay out in this chapter, and will receive illumination in the chapters ahead, is the agency and normative visions, standards, and principles that have been at play in the longue durée of African engagement with global actors and the construction of regional African platforms. Africa has been both a norm initiator and an opponent of totalizing and universalizing Western standards that trump regional and continental normative ideals. Additionally, noninterference, nonintervention, responsible sovereignty, responsibility to protect, and non-indifference are some of the major norms that have guided African states’ struggle to advance an alternative global order and sovereignty in the international system different from the hegemonic structures of the West. Given their status as colonized subjects, African states have not had the power to preside over international order as Western states have. Africa’s bottom-tier status in the world system has meant that African states have historically been the objects of international security provision both by individual top-tier states and by international organizations and global governance institutions such as the United Nations Security Council. This means that like other developing world states that continue to be subject to, even as they resist, neocolonial and imperial structural control by the top security powers and superpowers, African states have worked together to protect their collective sovereignty and international security. In doing so, African states have enacted multiple strategies against external intervention and interference from the former colonial powers and more powerful nations and multinational corporations. They have established regional international institutions within the framework of continental integration and unity first championed by the OAU and later the AU. Over time, especially since the early 1960s to the present, African institutions have put forth distinctive mechanisms that have reflected African contextual norm manifestations of noninterference, non-indifference, responsible sovereignty, and responsibility to protect. With other developing world regions, much more so than for regime survival as the negative sovereignty thesis suggests (Jackson 1987), especially Africa’s postcolonial states have struggled to build universal and sustained sovereignty for small and weak states in the international system.

3 Toward Common African Positions

A 2007 speech by South African president Thabo Mbeki captured the need for African-derived international norms in new global governance and underpinned an emergent strategy in African multilateral global action. He stated, “Although the concepts of freedom and equality are universal and fully embraced by the United Nations, this global organization has not itself transformed and designed the necessary institutions of governance consistent with the noble ideals that drive modern democratic societies” (Mbeki 2007; Hengari 2007). In criticizing the dearth of global democracy practiced by the UN, President Mbeki was referring to the 2005 Common African Position (CAP) on the Reform of the United Nations, otherwise referred to as the Ezulwini Consensus. Short-referenced as Ezulwini, this most well-known CAP is an African practice in international relations that recommends reform of the United Nations. Ezulwini served as an AU action plan created in collaboration with the African Group of the UN, an informal caucus of African states who use their regional solidarity to lobby for African common positions on UN votes. Ezulwini demonstrated that through an evolutionary brand of multilateralism, African states have increasingly contributed to the changing architecture for global governance. Multilateralism is the driving force for global cooperation and decisionmaking as it facilitates interaction among global actors to sustain a rules-based global order. Since the advancement of globalization, a fluctuating set of intergovernmental and multistakeholder arrangements have emerged with more assertive and diverse actors, such as the African Union. Ezulwini demonstrates that multilateralism and influence in global governance are not a new phenomenon for the continent. In the 1990s, transitioning from the OAU to the AU, African states

49

50

Africa’s New Global Politics

strengthened this practice of pooling of their foreign policies. In doing so, African states became enmeshed in new international networks of regional alliances, pacts, and groupings that strengthened their abilities to seek their own interests and influence external states and nonstate actors’ behavior. As example, in 2021, “African Union Ministers in charge of Gender and Women’s Affairs, adopted the Common African Position (CAP) that ensured that African women and girls have a voice in global discourse at the UN’s sixty-fifth session of the Commission on the Status of Women” (African Union 2021). In this regard, the AU’s gender and women’s caucus used their regionalism to foster internationalism. This genre of regional internationalism has been touted as the next paradigm in global affairs—it is not as easy as it used to be in previous global regimes for any one power to confront global challenges and thus control weaker powers through unilateralism. In the deeply plural world of the twenty-first century, where there is a greater reliance on global social movements to adapt and reform international organizations, through its Common African Position (CAP) policy standpoints, the African region is similarly nurturing new global partnerships through which to exercise the tools of multilateralism. In this chapter we ask several questions in this context: What is Africa contributing to the new multilateralism in the current multipolar world? How is the continent shaping this new multilateralism to invent new forms of internationalism? What role is Africa playing in reforming and readapting multilateral international organizations? How is the continent’s reinvention of multilateralism challenging and shaping global governance? We respond to these questions by examining the emergence of African multilateralism historically, tracing the establishment of African Bloc caucusing at international organizations like the UN and to a lesser extent the World Trade Organization. We analyze the building of the OAU/AU into a multilateral global governance institution in its own right and its formulation of CAP internationalism as a form of global policy communiqués used to foster shared norms and political standpoints among African member states. We will see how it is that because these modalities of African multilateralism emerged more fulsome during the post–Cold War era of multipolarity they provided African states an opportunity to gain a deeper foothold in the international arena while opening up new avenues for the region’s increased role in a new genre of multilateral global politics. For example, it has become commonplace to recognize the way that the AU uses modalities of engagement such as its many intergovernmental organs to advance Africa’s regional integration; however, the way that the continent designs policy guidelines and normative frameworks for international multilateral engagements has not been fully examined as we do in this chapter. We unravel these engagements in this chapter while illustrating the impact that African states’ regional multilateralism has had on enhancing the

Toward Common African Positions

51

continent’s autonomous global decisionmaking power. Early multilateral engagement by African states within international organizations boosted more recent African state agency and activism in international forums and their impact and significance in global governance (Cosgrove and Twitchett 1970, 12–14). Multilateralism was increasingly extended to a concept referred to as plurilateralism. UN global compact politics was a feature of this new form of multipolarity that illustrated a major turn in development thinking as Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals pushed the UN and businesses to acknowledge their common interest in the promotion of sustainable development around the world. Compact global agenda politics brought to light the gradual emergence of more inclusive forms of global governance, such as public-private partnerships and hybrid peacekeeping operations with regional organizations and states in response to the failure of traditional mechanisms of development cooperation (Thérien and Pouliot 2006). To this end, we examine the continent’s nascent efforts to develop a distinctive practice of multilateralism and global governance. We review the role that African agency has played in developing the continent’s multilateral negotiations and examine how they have been used to shape new global normative frameworks for the UN system and other international organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). We show how, through the emergence of African Bloc caucusing, African states reconfigured and strengthened their regional organizations—the OAU and the AU—increasing African states’ navigation, engagement, and shared promotion of global issues and policies. The development of the common African position as a normative practice of African multilateralism is an exemplar diplomatic strategy and proof of long-standing continental global governance engagement. We argue that this early practice culminated in the establishment of Agenda 2063, and in fully delegating their foreign policies to the AU, African states had become more experienced and thus confident in speaking with one voice and in promoting Africa’s interests globally. To this end, we unravel a trajectory of African multilateralism to reveal how the AU began to be characterized as the continent’s leading norm entrepreneur in a wide range of issue areas on behalf of Africa. In subsequent sections of this chapter we first examine the effect of structural changes in international relations ushered in by transformations in globalization in the 1990s on African movements for change of the international system. In doing so, we reveal how Africa’s struggle to achieve international organizational veto power, to develop regional institutional multilateral organs, and to demand a share of global power by developing institutional mechanisms of subsidiarity, equal representation, and partnerships, all become important features of this period’s emergent multilateral

52

Africa’s New Global Politics

internationalism. Next, we present the dynamics of how a style of multilateralism in African Bloc politics gradually nurtured an integrated African voice and produced the common African policy memoranda. We show how African states used CAPs as a strategy for collective African foreign policy action on global issues. Furthermore, we show how, collectively, African states have used CAPs to demand greater representation in the decisionmaking of the UN and other international organization bodies such as the WTO. We present a discussion of Ezulwini as a case study that serves to underscore a formative leadership role for a united “Africa” in promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, and representation in the UN system. We conclude with a discussion of some recent CAPs, arguing that these actions culminate in and pool together the continent’s nascent initiatives in multilateralism, transforming them into an instrument of soft power global politics by 2021. We show how African regional multilateralism captures a dimension of the continent’s own distinctive genre of international relations as common positions guide the behavior of member states and develop outright internationalist agendas for the continent, such as Agenda 2063 (Murithi 2012). African Multilateralism in Global Governance To avoid global governance they disagreed with, national governments took to operating in many venues simultaneously, participating in an array of issue-specific networks and partnerships whose membership varied based on their situational interests, shared values, and relevant capabilities. Regionalism and multilateralism strengthened in this arena, and as multilateral agreements pluralized, plurilateralism (whereby multiple agreements by a multiplicity of global actors occurred) came to dominate the global governance infrastructure. The AU exemplified the changing geopolitics of power that produced new multilateral and plurilateral agreements in the international system of the millennium. AU chairperson Moussa Faki once spoke to the continent’s growing agency and actorness in this regard when he stated, “Multilateralism is the only response to today’s global challenges in an increasingly polarized world” (Lala 2018, 14). By 2020, the AU had become the continent’s foremost multilateral institution providing leadership for the African region on the challenges of the twenty-first century. The organization advanced multilateral dirigisme through its long-standing practice of regionalism, which it used to position the continent globally. Like other new actors from the global South, the African region’s multilateralism was based on a strategy called normative multipolarity, which focused on cooperation among its own member states guided by the continent’s ideational resources

Toward Common African Positions

53

that involved African states’ strong sense of collective identity to pursue common goals through Pan-Africanism at the global level. Through the AU, African states used the Pan-African norm to strengthen their international institutional power as well as their relationships with each other through shared rules and policy platforms. Over time, this genre of multilateralism would serve to enhance African states’ collective capacity for global engagement and action through multiple norms associated with Pan-Africanism such as antiracism, inclusion, self-determination, equal representation, diversity, and pluralism. Pan-African regional multilateralism strengthened in the context of emergent global governance by the second decade of millennium. African states asserted their multilateralism through their engagements with the United Nations in an age when the UN was beginning to assert its own internationalism as the dominant and universally legitimate global governance institution. The UN—and especially the Security Council—is often considered the centerpiece of contemporary global governance because it serves as a venue for coordinating international responses to the world’s most important threats to global order. Nonetheless, despite the powers vested in the permanent members of the UN Security Council, international politics has remained relatively anarchic with the system composed of independent sovereign units (member states) that still do not recognize UN authority. That is why cooperation through multilateralism encouraged regional actors like the AU to guide national actors within the continent to work together to establish common standards of behavior in spheres such as trade, security, and justice. As with UN programs and associative intergovernmental institutions, like UN-AIDS and the ICC, the African region has been a core recipient of UN global engagement. However, as the UN’s role in the region increased, African states began to resist notions of a return to some form of trusteeship despite a spike in conflict in the early 1990s and 2000s. Additionally disconcerting for AU members was that from 2004 to 2014, most of the Security Council’s resolutions were on African issues while the continent was the only region not represented on the Security Council (da Silva and Magalhães 2015). As such, with the global diffusion of power in an increasingly postneoliberal world, African states began to push against the UN’s global leadership and reinforce African regional multilateralism by promoting mantras like “African solutions for African problems.” These actions fostered the decline of universal multilateralism and the increase of regional multilateralism and global plurilateralism, and both processes led to the side-stepping of UN global governance. Thus African ideas and norms about international order began to emerge independently of, or even contrary to, the power and preferences of the UN and Western powers. While the OAU had developed a regional brand of multilateralism

54

Africa’s New Global Politics

throughout the early postcolonial period from 1963 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the practice of multilateral internationalism by African states became globally visible and pronounced with the advent of the African Union. The emergence of the multipolar world by the early millennium turned out to be a political opportunity for African states’ collective geopolitical mobilization through the AU as it led to innovations that are shaping new modalities for regional multilateralism defined as African Unionism. African Unionism refers to the AU’s institutional capacity and leadership dirigisme to strategically engage with African peoples, nations, regions, and the world to achieve incremental, though positive, ends for Africa. As an example, in the early millennium, African Unionism called for the reform and readaptation of multilateral institutions, pushing them to meet post–Cold War realities brought about by the waning dominance of Western powers and global institutions. Through the AU, African states criticized global governance for having led to imbalances in the decisionmaking and policymaking processes of international organizations, evidenced by stalemates in international trade talks in Doha and climate change as per the Paris Accords. Through the African Union, the continent began to engage in new forms of global partnership formations that fostered a changing configuration of global partnerships. These new partnerships expressing African agency stress equity with former global powers, as well as inclusion and representation in multilateral institutions (see Nhlapo 2012). African Bloc Geopolitics: A Roadmap to Multilateral Internationalism As an emerging genre of African regional governance, contemporary African Unionism had formative developmental roots starting from the 1960s–1990s in the UN’s African Group. The African Group at the United Nations is made up of the fifty-four African Union member states at the United Nations, and the bloc coordinates its efforts on various topics, ranging from health and migration to peace and security. The group holds regular meetings to receive briefings from guests and UN officials and discuss UN resolutions and topics so that a common African position can be reached. The African Union Observer Mission serves as a coordinating secretariat for the group by arranging meetings, supporting the chair, and generally providing logistical and administrative assistance where necessary. As African states constituted a regional majority, they emerged as formidable members of the UN. Their decisionmaking processes organically grew to be influenced by the formation of groups united by similar objectives and interests. The African Group or the African Bloc, as it was often

Toward Common African Positions

55

called, would later emerge from a distinctive genre of African politics that became known as African Bloc politics, which generated African common positions on global issues driven by the imperatives and programmatic agendas germane to the post–Cold War world and the twenty-first century. This early genre of African international politics emerged outside of the continent in global geopolitical spaces like the UN, the WTO, and other international organizations where African states had significant membership representation (Lee 2013). As less powerful national actors at these international organizations, African states learned to help each other by developing a means of collective coordination and sharing resources to enhance their capacity to engage in political negotiations and effective decisionmaking in support of their interests. In Geneva, Switzerland, a hub for intergovernmental international organizations and international NGOs, this space has been described as a place in which African states celebrate the successful interventions that individual states may have had in committees or discuss their failures with each other. The space provided African states with shared opportunities for understanding the negotiating process and for sharing ideas about how they might better influence international agendas. It also served as an opportunity for them to collectively develop their capacity building in managing and navigating foreign policy and geopolitics. As well, African states would use this space to enhance their coordination with other developing-country coalitions, such as LLDC (landlocked developing countries), the G20, G33, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the ACP (African-Caribbean-Pacific states). African Bloc politics first emerged in the 1960s during the region’s decolonization when three caucuses—Brazzaville, Monrovia, and Casablanca— formed around their divergent visions for a decolonized Africa. The three eventually united under the umbrella of the OAU. In fact, the formation of the OAU and the African Group at the UN occurred simultaneously. The OAU invited newly independent African governments to instruct their permanent representatives at the UN to establish an African Group to increase cooperation and better coordinate their strategies on matters of common concern and interest. African Bloc geopolitics has worked best in situations in which African states constituted more than one-third of the vote by member states required for decisionmaking. This was true for Africa in the UN General Assembly, where, excluding South Africa, all the independent African states came together to create a single African Group in order to better present and defend the continent’s interests before the international community (Endeley 2009). The newly independent African states became UN members but lacked the means to individually accomplish their goals and cater to the needs of their populations. As a result, they realized that coming together and pooling resources would be the only way for them to make any significant headway into the

56

Africa’s New Global Politics

international political and economic scene. This early strategizing was the genesis of both Africa’s continental regionalism and later its regional internationalism, setting the continent on a path toward integration and the establishment of the common African positions brand of foreign policy (Endeley 2009). The African Group at the UN included all fifty-five independent states that were members of the OAU and later the new AU. It generally comprised about 28 percent of the UN’s membership and was recognized as a significant player in UN international politics. The group achieved its goal of harmonizing and coordinating the diplomatic strategies of the African states within the framework of the UN. At its height, the African Bloc emerged as one of the most dynamic and effective caucusing groups at the UN, and it developed a complex structure of subsidiary organs to accomplish its tasks. In establishing the common African positions, especially reflected in the Ezulwini Consensus for UN reform, the group came to represent concrete dimensions of the Pan-African aspirations of the OAU and what would become the African Union. African Bloc politics also informed a successful feature of other international organizations, especially the World Trade Organization. Of the 157 members of the WTO, 42 are from the African region, accounting for approximately 27 percent of total WTO membership and 35 percent of WTO developing country membership. To capitalize on this plurality, in 1995, African WTO members established an informal African Group to coordinate their positions in the WTO and provide a forum to exchange views on how best to improve Africa’s participation in the multilateral trading system. The establishment of the group was motivated by African states’ coalitional strength given their status as the largest regional group in the WTO. Plurality strength compensates for capacity and expert deficits and other weaknesses. The African Group benefits its members by pooling scarce resources, creating synergies, and serving as a forum for exchanging views and engaging in coordination with other groups. It provides weight of numbers for influencing political decisions that African states hold in common and ensures African representation in small group consultations. The group is part of the constituency system, the modus operandi in WTO work to facilitate consensus decisionmaking among the membership (Apecu 2013). The African Bloc’s foremost accomplishment has been its contribution to the development of the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) in the WTO. The Doha Round is the longest running trade meeting in the history of multilateral trade governance, and in the early millennium, the WTO became a key multilateral arena for African agency to foster and sustain influence in global trade governance. The DDA African Bloc of the WTO involved a large number and a wide range of African states that collectively took the

Toward Common African Positions

57

lead in the negotiating communities to ensure that the continent had a presence and influence at the various meeting rounds at the WTO, especially the Doha Development Round. Thus the WTO system became an effective way of making the best use of the limited capacity within the African Group and acted as a social system where African officials met with each other to share experiences about the negotiating process in global issues. During DDA negotiations, African member states first promoted the issue of cotton subsidies as an intrinsic part of framing the policy issue in development terms. African agency was built upon and sustained by opportunities that arose out of the prevailing discourse of development as well as Africa’s capacity-building efforts (Brown and Harman 2013). African states acting collectively developed the capacity to imitate the discourses and, in so doing, hold the developed states to account for the commitments they had made to development not only in the WTO but in other international organizations including the EU. The decisionmaking process of the DDA negotiations created institutional opportunities for a dynamic expression of agency as African states developed their deliberative capacities and built coalitions with each other and with other developing countries. In essence, the African Group became an early international actor that harmonized the foreign policies and diplomatic strategies of African states by representing African collective interests at the UN in New York, Geneva, Nairobi, and around the world. The group served as the continent’s mouthpiece on matters of international politics within the UN framework. By the millennium when the OAU became the AU and the African Group’s politics became absorbed by the AU, the AU assumed the group’s role and responsibility of pursuing Africa’s interests in all matters, including seeking reform of the Security Council and achieving better global representation for African states. The Global Politics and Policies of the Common African Position The African Group pioneered foreign policy among African states by holding regular meetings to discuss global issues so a common African position could be reached. As an example, in 2009, the Committee of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change was established by the AU to spearhead a CAP to ensure that Africa speaks with one voice in global climate change negotiations. To this end, in preparing for COP21 in 2015, a common African position on climate change resolved to reflect common but differentiated responsibilities. African states reaffirmed multilateralism and country ownership in climate governance for the period beyond 2020. They agreed to keep global temperature increase below 1.5°C and finance

58

Africa’s New Global Politics

climate change in Africa, including capitalizing the Green Climate Fund to meet the $100 billion per year post-2020 target. The CAP represents an African collective action foreign policy strategy, used by African leaders, negotiators, and stakeholders who are actively engaged in the formulation of global agendas to ensure that Africa’s voice is heard and integrated into the international framework. CAPs present a unique opportunity for African states to articulate their priorities and challenges while affirming their regional, continental interests. The common African position constitutes African law; Article 3 of the Constitutive Act of the African Union states that “African states should promote and defend African common positions on issues of interest to the continent and its peoples.” Common African positions are used by the AU to engage the continent’s numerous partnerships with a view toward rationalizing them and enhancing the benefits for African transformation and integration efforts. CAPs notably serve to strengthen African states’ common perspectives on partnerships while facilitating the region’s capacity to speak with one voice on global matters. As we saw from the African Group history, African states use the common positions to realize their power of collective action and achieve their objectives through multilateral policy formulation around global issues. CAP collective action and geopolitics developed multilateral approaches to Africa’s most pressing concerns—human security and peace, the eradication of poverty, food security, climate change, debt reform, and disease eradication. To see the impact of this form of global organizing, take for example a 2019 news report in the Guardian that stated a leaked “common African position paper” had revealed the AU was dissuading African member states from cooperating with an EU plan to set up “regional disembarkation platforms” that would reroute African migrants found in European waters back to Africa to have their asylum requests processed (Boffey 2019). The drafting of the preliminary EU-Africa Migration Compact had apparently included bilateral consultation with African states at the subregional levels, and it ultimately culminated in the October 2017 African regional consultative meeting on the Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. However, in response to and differing from that communiqué, the AU also issued a Common African Position on the Migration Compact, aimed at “ensuring that Africa has a common voice and that the continent’s concerns are properly reflected towards the development [of] the Global Compact on Migration.” The leaked common African position criticized the EU migration policy, arguing that the setup of “disembarkation platforms” would be tantamount to de facto “detention centers” where the fundamental rights of African migrants would be violated and the principle of solidarity among AU member states greatly undermined. The AU CAP also argued

Toward Common African Positions

59

that the collection of biometric data on citizens of AU countries by international organizations would violate the sovereignty of African countries over their citizens. Furthermore, the AU criticized the EU for bypassing its structures and warned of wider repercussions, particularly for Brussels for its ongoing bilateral consultation with individual AU member states. The CAP declared that without the involvement of the AU, the EU-Africa policy served to undermine the significant progress achieved in the partnership frameworks and dialogues between the EU and AU. Through the OAU and AU, African governments have adopted a number of common positions on issues of global concern. One of the earliest position papers was 1987’s African Common Position on Africa’s External Debt Crisis, and one of the more recent is the 2017 African position on disaster risk. Using CAPs as institutional platforms, African states organized to change the dynamics of international engagement and influence policy outcomes. CAPs projected African voices and helped position the continent as a global player that pushed aggressively for integration into the international system (Oloo 2016). Common positions became part of the continent’s journey toward global actor status and provided African states with a platform for exercising agency on a range of issues from UN system reform to climate change, international security, and international trade (Zondi 2013b). Table 3.1 presents a thirty-year profile of common African positions from 1987 to 2017. There is no standard approach to the format of the common positions aside from their agenda to speak as one through a shared platform. The array of common positions that the continent has produced were tailored on a case-by-case basis. African states use CAPs to speak as a continent, usually following a mandate from the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union. CAPs are disseminated publicly as communiqués, and decisions are implemented by the AU’s Executive Council and its ministerial committees. This is the case, for instance, for the African Group of Negotiators on climate change formed at the time of the Rio Summit in 1992, which consists of a small delegation mandated to represent the continent at major international meetings and negotiations. The continent’s efforts to speak with one voice draw on a range of approaches, mechanisms, and strategies led by AU institutions, specific African countries, and individual African leaders as well as champions. For instance, the Ezulwini Consensus and Sirte Declaration containing the common African position on reform of the UN Security Council was driven by a Committee of Ten on UN Reform established in 2005 by the African Union Summit, chaired by Sierra Leone. On the other hand, the African Consensus and Position on Development Effectiveness was largely developed through the African Platform for Development Effectiveness, which

60

Africa’s New Global Politics

Table 3.1 Common African Positions, 1987–2017 1987 1994

1996

1997 2000

2001 2002 2005 2005

2006 2006 2010 2011 2013

2014 2014 2015 2015 2015

2015 2017

African Common Position on Africa’s External Debt Crisis OAU/UNECA Consensus of Dakar on the African Common Position for the Advancement of Women African Common Position on Food Security and the Preparations for the World Food Summit African Common Position on Biodiversity Bamako Declaration on an African Common Position on the Illicit Proliferation, Circulation and Trafficking of Small Arms and Light Weapons Common Position for Africa’s Digital Inclusion African Common Position to the UN Special Session on Children African Common Position on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice The Ezulwini Consensus and Sirte Declaration Containing the Common African Position on the Reform of the UN Security Council African Youth Charter African Position on Migration and Development African Position on Youth Development African Consensus and Position on Development Effectiveness African Common Position on Controlled Substances and Access to Pain Management Drugs African Data Consensus African Common Position on the Post-2015 Development Agenda African Group Perspective on Financing for Development Conference Common African Position on the UN Review of Peace Operations Cairo Declaration: Managing Africa’s Natural Capital for Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication African Strategy on Climate Change Common African Position to the 2017 Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction

was officially launched in 2011 as a continent-wide mechanism, coordinated by the African Union Commission (AUC) and its NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa’s Development) Program Coordinating Agency (Brown and Harman 2013). The processes of formulating common positions are inclusive and often involve consultations with civil society and other stakeholders. African states also promote a common voice through multilateral frameworks such as the Group of 77 and Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Alliance of Small Island States, which tend to advocate shared positions with the African continent on select global issues. CAPs are used by African states to target their foreign policy goals. For example, on January 31, 2014, the AU’s Assembly of Heads and State and Government adopted the Common African Position on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, among other decisions, at its twenty-second annual AU Summit. In its decision, the assembly requested that the High-Level Committee on the Post-2015 Development Agenda meet “as soon as possible” in N’djamena, Chad. That committee had been formed to build regional and intercontinental alliances on the common African position as

Toward Common African Positions

61

well as to coordinate activities of African leaders and members of the UN High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. In specifically identifying African priorities, the assembly also endorsed the articulation of African development goals consistent with existing African frameworks, and agreed that such goals, especially in the post-2015 period, should serve as milestones for monitoring progress toward the development priorities that African states had outlined in Agenda 2063. The Common African Position on the Post-2015 Development Agenda provides a typical framework for African multilateral internationalist action and ends with a communiqué that states, We, Heads of State and Government of the African Union assembled in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, during the 22nd Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the Union on 31 January 2014, NOTE: The participatory approach that led to the elaboration of the Common African Position (CAP) on the post-2015 Development Agenda involving stakeholders at the national, regional and continental levels among the public and private sectors, parliamentarians, civil society organizations (CSOs), including women and youth associations, and academia. This approach has helped address the consultation gap in the initial preparation and formulation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); RECOGNIZE: The efforts of the members of the High-Level Committee on the post-2015 Development Agenda, the coordinating role of the African Union Commission, and the technical support of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) Agency, the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Regional Bureau for Africa, and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in facilitating the process; EMPHASIZE : That the post-2015 Development Agenda provides a unique opportunity for Africa to reach consensus on common challenges, priorities and aspirations, and to actively participate in the global debate on how to provide a fresh impetus to the MDGs and to examine and devise strategies to address key emerging development issues on the continent in the coming years. REAFFIRM: The post-2015 Development Agenda should also reaffirm the Rio Principles, especially the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, the right to development and equity, and mutual accountability and responsibility, as well as ensure policy space for nationally tailored policies and programs on the continent, including appropriate support for the implementation of the NEPAD. (African Union 2014)

After adopting the CAP in Addis Ababa on January 31, 2014, the AU launched it in N’djamena, Chad, on February 28, 2014, positioning the CAP to engage in a dialogue with the wider United Nations community, including member states, civil society, the private sector, and other diverse stakeholders who would be involved in the intergovernmental process of finalizing the Post-2015 Development Agenda. Authors of the CAP also

62

Africa’s New Global Politics

stressed the need to work closely with international consultative bodies such as the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals and the Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing. CAP authors stressed the need to not only engage with the rest of the world on the CAP but to also do so in a way that African citizens, whose aspirations led to the creation of the CAP, fully took ownership of this position and articulated the CAP’s vision and priorities. African leaders also use CAPs to invite their global partners to support their foreign policy endeavors. For example, tensions brought about by the many hybrid peacekeeping partnerships with the United Nations motivated the AU to establish the Common Position on UN Peace Operations Review in 2015. In its preface, the report explained the need for an African common position by citing the challenge that the AU and the UN face in applying the spirit of Chapter VIII (military intervention) without prejudice to the role of the UN Security Council. The CAP would provide a mechanism for African states to develop their own capacity to provide adequate responses to the peace and security challenges in Africa. The report detailed the appropriate consultative decisionmaking framework, division of labor, and burden sharing that should be put in place and how these would impact peace operations, as undertaken by both the UN and the AU. The report further identified several principles underpinning relations with the UN, to ensure that cooperation would not be ad hoc but would proceed in a systematic and predictable manner. These principles were collective security, African ownership and priority setting, and burden sharing. Collective security, in the context of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, reaffirmed the primacy of the United Nations Security Council in the maintenance of international security. This would mean that when the AU intervenes in conflict and crisis situations in the continent, it would do so on behalf of the Security Council and that, therefore, in the case of AU-led missions that are authorized by the Security Council, the UN had a duty to contribute. The principle of African ownership and priority setting entailed closer and consistent consultations between the decisionmaking organs of the two institutions, in particular the UN Security Council and the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC). Finally, the principle of burden sharing would rely on division of labor. The CAP report added that the UN and AU should engage in dialogue on all three elements to foster political coherence. Ahead of the 2009 Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change, the AU fostered a consensus among its members on who would participate. Before the CAP, African states lacked a coordinated stance on global warming, a reality that had limited their negotiating influence at the talks. As such, it was important for the CAP to underscore the point that although the African region accounts for a very small proportion of global greenhouse

Toward Common African Positions

63

gas emissions, the region is impacted disproportionately by its negative effects. The common position, therefore, demanded compensation from more-developed nations for the damages caused by climate change across the continent (Lala 2018). Common African positions serve to coordinate African member states’ domestic policies and align them in the name of Africa to forge African Union foreign policy. Ezulwini: The Common African Position on UN Security Council Reform Because it has contributed to the establishment of an African genre of global governance and multilateralism, the Ezulwini Common African Position on UN Security Council Reform is worth its own in-depth discussion and analysis. Africa’s collective engagement with the UN under the institutional framework of the AU has evolved through a series of initiatives, the most important since the AU’s founding in 2002 being the 2005 common position on reform of the UN Security Council—Ezulwini. The Ezulwini Consensus, named after a valley in central Eswatini where the agreement was made, advocated that Africa be fully represented in all UN organs, specifically the Security Council. Ezulwini called for eleven additional members on the Security Council, proposing to expand it from fifteen to twenty-six, as well as two permanent seats and five nonpermanent seats that would rotate between African countries (one for each of the five regions in Africa—north, east, west, central, and south). The most highly acclaimed of its common position agendas, the AU used the Ezulwini report to engage broader structural issues of global democracy and transformation, recalling that in 1945, when the UN was being formed, most of Africa had not been represented and that in 1963, when the first reform took place, Africa had been represented but had not been in a particularly strong position. The communiqué went on to state that by the millennium (2005), Africa had reached a position to influence the proposed UN reforms by maintaining unity of purpose to make a significant impact on the world. Reaffirming the aims and objectives of the Charter of the United Nations, the Ezulwini Consensus took into account the need to strengthen UN institutions in order to enhance the efficiency of the organization, especially its principal organs, the General Assembly and the Security Council. The Ezulwini report recognized the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security but also stressed the need to consider the views of all UN member states, especially the African states, in order to reflect present world realities and be more responsive to the aspirations of non-Western members. Despite having built

64

Africa’s New Global Politics

a robust African Bloc at the UN General Assembly, for a while, African membership on the UN Security Council had been nonexistent, and African states had not always been nonpermanent Security Council members either, leaving a lack of opportunity for the region to play a prominent role in the core issues of the UN and the world. The Security Council was criticized for remaining stuck in a Cold War structure that did not represent the changing plural world order. As new wars and human security issues overshadowed the traditional security concerns of the former security powers, the Security Council, and by extension the UN, began to lose its legitimacy as the most authoritative international institution. African states became impatient remaining on the sidelines of power and called on the UN to adapt to a postcolonial world. They interrogated whether authorization of military interventions and peacekeeping missions needed to involve the developing world regions— mostly African—that were affected. As a precursor to Ezulwini, in 1994, African states collectively put forth a report that called for “equitable representation on and increase in the membership of the Security Council.” The report famously stated, The increase in the membership of and equitable representation on the Security Council has become imperative because of the need to democratize the Council and make it more efficient and transparent. The democracy that is currently being preached at the national level should prevail in the international system. It is therefore necessary to review the composition and the decision-making process of the Council in line with the above principles, as well as the relationship between the Council and the General Assembly. In the implementation of these ideals, it is important to bear in mind the need for equitable geographical representation with the emphasis on an increase in the permanent membership for the benefit of developing countries, in particular Africa. Ultimately, with the progress in the democratization of the international system, permanent membership and the right of veto would be reviewed and all members of the Security Council would be elected according to the principle of equitable geographical representation in order to ensure their accountability to all the members of the United Nations, on whose behalf they assume the primary function of maintaining international peace and security in accordance with the provisions of the Charter. (African Common Position on Security Council Reform 1994)

This is the context in which the African Union adopted the Common African Position on the Reform of the United Nations Security Council in Sirte, Libya, in 2005. While several other UN regional blocs put forward their own cases for permanent membership on the Security Council, the African Group was the only one to have reached a common position. The African Bloc used the Ezulwini Consensus to intensify the continent’s calls for African inclusion and representation on the UNSC. Three-

Toward Common African Positions

65

quarters of the Security Council’s engagements are on African affairs, and yet the African Bloc had only two nonpermanent members, without veto power. The African position demanded two permanent seats with a veto, chosen by the African Union, along with five more nonpermanent positions for Africa. The seats would be granted to the AU, which would in turn rotate the seats among African states (Soderberg 2015). Not only did Ezulwini represent an advancement of Africa’s regional internationalism and multilateralism, in its failure, it also marked the challenges that the continent faced in navigating the geopolitics of the new global order. For example, there was a lot of criticism of the African common position as it was based on the idea of regional representation, while the UN system focused on representation of countries on the basis of their national merit. Nonetheless, the African region remained bold and forceful in advocating for the continent’s universal and full representation in all UN organs, specifically the Security Council. The AU’s report is the highest membership-based proposal for the reform of the Security Council in the sea of several reform proposals, but it also deviated from these no-veto membership reform proposals since it insisted that African states have the same privileges and voting rights enjoyed by the Permanent Five. Ezulwini justified its permanent-seats proposal on the basis that the continent contributed the highest numbers of troops to UN peacekeeping missions. Ezulwini also questioned the Security Council’s legitimacy and its right to exercise authority over the African region without consultation with African states. Ezulwini made five demands of the UNSC that would foster inclusiveness, voice, and representation for Africans: On the Security Council, the African Union: Recalling that, in 1945, when the UN was being formed, most of Africa was not represented and that in 1963, when the first reform took place, Africa was represented but was not in a particularly strong position; Convinced that Africa is now in a position to influence the proposed UN reforms by maintaining her unity of purpose; Conscious of the fact that the Harare Declaration has made significant impact on the world community and has thus been fairly reflected in the proposed UN Security Council Reforms, adopted the following position: 1. Africa’s goal is to be fully represented in all the decision-making organs of the UN, particularly in the Security Council, which is the principal decision-making organ of the UN in matters relating to international peace and security. 2. Full representation of Africa in the Security Council means: i. not less than two permanent seats with all the prerogatives and privileges of permanent membership including the right of veto; ii. five non-permanent seats. 3. In that regard, even though Africa is opposed in principle to the veto, it is of the view that so long as it exists, and as a matter of common justice, it should be made available to all permanent members of the Security Council.

66

Africa’s New Global Politics 4. The African Union should be responsible for the selection of Africa’s representatives in the Security Council. 5. The question of the criteria for the selection of African members of the Security Council should be a matter for the AU to determine, taking into consideration the representative nature and capacity of those chosen.

Because Ezulwini was never adopted, the status quo remains at the UN. The factors that caused Africa’s policy recommendations to fail reveal the limitations of African global engagement even when Africans are organized. There are at least two explanations for the proposal’s failure to be adopted, and they speak to the challenges and limitations of African states’ emergent multilateral internationalism at the time. One reason was that the Ezulwini Consensus was inflexible in insisting African states be given two new permanent seats with veto power on the Security Council. Given Africa’s weak political economy and higher incidence of conflict compared to other regions, the security powers were not persuaded by the region’s justification for inclusion. A second reason attributed blame to African states themselves, who were seen as unable to gain the required support for their position independently of their own regional members. Leading countries failed to convince other member states about the region’s limited influence and ability to attain permanent representation on the Security Council without support from other players. African states also failed to name possible representatives because of intense rivalry among them and severe criticism of each candidate within Africa. For example, Nigeria and South Africa openly rivaled for the seat. Ethiopia put itself forward to occupy the seats, while Senegal put forward its candidature as the only francophone African country. It was a credit to Ezulwini and to African states’ stature as a powerful emerging global actor to promote change on the Security Council; however, the world put perhaps too much faith in Africa’s role given the geopolitical power disparities between the continent and the Permanent Five in the first place. While the UK and France supported expansion, the United States, China, and Russia did not. In many respects, in the end, Africa could have been seen as a minor bloc in a sea of counterproposals for reform. Regionalizing Global Compacts, Globalizing Regional Agendas by 2063 Launched in 2013 by the AU heads of state and government in their 50th Anniversary Solemn Declaration, Agenda 2063 emerged as the comprehensive common African position that was the culmination of the continent’s efforts to develop an African foreign policy platform and global governance

Toward Common African Positions

67

dirigisme. Touted by some as Africa’s flagship foreign policy and formulated during the AU’s negotiations for the Common African Position on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, Agenda 2063 forged a vision of African transformation in critical Pan-African priority areas. UN member states’ support for Agenda 2063 indicates that while the continental agenda articulates specifically African aspirations and development challenges, Africa’s global agenda is also guided by the spirit and principles of the UN’s Agenda 2030. Agenda 2063 and Agenda 2030 have converged on key elements of development, and it is interesting that African states are now encouraged to “domesticate” both the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the AU’s Agenda 2063 into their national development plans. The convergence of AU and UN goals demonstrated that by 2021 Africa’s regional internationalism had advanced to its highest level. With Agenda 2063, African states pooled their common goals and aspirations into a single blueprint that intended the region to be a major social, political, and economic force in the world. Through the blueprint, the continent pledged to take its “rightful share of the global commons (land, oceans and space)” and become “an active and equal participant in global affairs [and] multilateral international organizations” (African Union 2015, 10). The AU used the blueprint to both regionalize Africa’s global agenda and globalize the continent’s regional agenda. Agenda 2063 laid out the continent’s regional compact while using it to further enhance Africa’s voice in global negotiations. African states pooled their sovereignty and foreign policies and deepened continental integration by fine-tuning and sharpening common African positions. In leveraging the CAP strategy, Agenda 2063 pledged to promote the region’s common interests in the international arena. Doing so ensured that Africa’s regional internationalism would foster close alignment with regional priorities while facilitating the development of a global agenda. While Agenda 2063 aims to position Africa as a united and influential partner in world affairs, it does not gloss over the obstacles to achieving global actorness in the face of continued external interference, including attempts to divide the continent and place undue pressures and sanctions on some countries. Agenda 2063 affirms that Africa will be “an active and equal participant in global affairs, multilateral institutions, and a driver for peaceful co-existence, tolerance and a sustainable and just world” (African Union 2015, 10) and that it will continue the global struggle against all forms of exploitation, racism and discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerances; to advance international cooperation that promotes and defends Africa’s interests, and is mutually beneficial and aligned to [the continent’s] Pan-Africanist vision; to continue to speak with one voice and act collectively to promote

68

Africa’s New Global Politics [Africa’s] common interests and positions in the international arena. (African Union 2015, 10).

Notably, in the 2063 blueprint, Africa does not give up on its CAP to reform the United Nations, stating that the continent will “continue to advocate for the reform of the United Nations and other international institutions, with particular reference to the UN Security Council, in order to correct the historical injustice of Africa not being represented on the Council by a permanent seat” (African Union 2015, 10). Agenda 2063 also speaks to its strategy for global engagement with international organizations. It states that Africa “seeks mutually beneficial relations and partnerships with other regions and continents. It, therefore, looks at the nature of partnerships with a view to rationalizing them and enhancing the benefits to [the continent’s] transformation and integration efforts” (African Union 2015, 10). The blueprint stresses that rationalizing partnerships will be achieved by strengthening Africa’s common perspectives with partners with similar interests and “by speaking with one voice on priorities and views on global matters” (African Union 2015, 10). As a practice in multilateralism, Agenda 2063 has been heralded as a reflection of Africa’s new global politics. It functions as a normative and strategic framework that has potential to bolster the continent’s soft power and advance its influence and standing in the international system (Tella 2018b). In interjecting African solutions for global problems, the blueprint aims to mobilize Africans and instill a sense of ownership over global compacts that affect Africa while encouraging self-reliance and unity. Conclusion The launch of Agenda 2063 as Africa’s global compact demonstrates the importance of the CAP agenda for strengthening African states’ collective foreign policy. With its offices at the UN headquarters in New York and Geneva, and in strategic African subregions, the African Union leveraged African Bloc caucusing to lobby for the African region in the world. African states used the common position agenda to reform and adapt existing multilateral international organizations and to call for a more representative and democratic UN Security Council. Common African positions allowed AU members to participate more visibly internationally, to consolidate the continent’s self-defined development programs, and to nurture solidarity in global negotiations. CAPs shaped the African Union’s regional multilateralism, underscoring African states’ capacity to speak with one voice on global issues. African states’ integration into a single political entity (a united African

Toward Common African Positions

69

state) allowed them to pool their sovereign power for global action (Brown and Harman 2013). Through CAPs, the continent increasingly exercises normative multilateral regionalism, and to some extent multilateral global governance. It uses the AU and its African Bloc pluralities in the UN system and other international organizations like the WTO to overcome the challenges of its own lack of economic and military power. These older institutions have been increasingly criticized by African countries for representing the interests of wealthy Western economies over the aspirations of the developing world. African states have used regional AU multilateralism to foster global governance reform, compelling international organizations to embark upon equitable representation for Africa and other developing world regions (Lala 2018). In this chapter, we have seen how caucusing initiatives have contributed to the AU’s recognition as a leader of African nations that speak with one voice on global matters. In the next chapter, we take up a crucial area in which Africa’s regional norms and practices have interfaced with global institutions to build a global-regional-national African security complex.

4 Building a Regional Security Complex

Asccording to a United Nations special representative to the African Union, the African Union is the most important strategic partner between the United Nations and a regional organization in peace and security, development and human rights. —UN News

Sahle-Work Zewde, the first female president of Ethiopia and the first female head of the United Nations Office to the African Union in Addis Ababa, emphasized that the strength of the UN-AU partnership is what is needed to tackle contemporary peace and security challenges in the world. Thus it is no wonder that the UN Security Council refers to the AU as its partner of choice for its own international conflict management programs in the continent. These programs include peacekeeping missions, dispute mediation, and the use of force in countering threats to peace and security. The scenario reflects a trend toward regional security complexes with a global interface. Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver in Regions and Powers (2003) have theorized this trend in their regional security complex theory (RSCT), which explains post–Cold War security relations and interactions between regions, as well as the interplay between global and regional structures. According to RSCT new global security interdependence is a result of the interweaving relationships among the international, regional, and national arenas. RSCT also conceives of security at multidimensional levels that overlap in regional and international relations. It shows how global hegemonic power structures paradoxically allow a substantial degree

71

72

Africa’s New Global Politics

of autonomy for the regional authority, which in turn exerts influence on global powers and external forces. In this chapter we examine African states’ efforts to build a regional security complex and a distinct peacebuilding architecture through the African Union that would self-govern Africa’s state of insecurity and engage global security on behalf of African states. We analyze the admixture of rules, institutions, policies, actions, and field operations that African states have established to enforce the continent’s new security regime. We explore this emergent dimension of African international relations through the RSCT prism. In illustrating the contours of the RSCT—particularly its regional-global interface as seen, for example, in the African Union Mission in Somalia–UNSC relationship—we also demonstrate the African region’s newly reasserted agency and contributions to advancing and transforming international security relations. In doing so, we hope to underscore how Africa, stationed at the bottom tier of international security and often confined to the margins of global power relations and geopolitics, is nevertheless pushing itself into discourses and practices of global security developments, norms, and transformations. Although the continent has been the object of external influence and domination for a long time, the African Union and its member states have reimagined regional security, with global implications, given its tendency to interface with and shape global relations, especially with international security organizations such as the UN Security Council. To this end, we argue that African states use their emerging regional security complex to transcend their bottom-tier position in global security structures and assert more power and freedom to navigate geopolitics in their collective interests, while at the same time shaping the wider field of international relations. In one sense, these interests build on normative standards and ideals, steeped in Pan-Africanism, which fundamentally depart from Western conceptions of international relations. In another sense, by pushing from the bottom tier and shaping international security policy from the margins, African states and the African Union leverage the fact that regional and subregional actors are better positioned than global multilateral agencies and powerful state actors to effectively deal with security and conflict complexities. In subsequent sections of this chapter we elaborate and support the thesis of an African regional security complex. In the next section we present the continent’s evolving security norms, particularly revealing the security principles encapsulated in the norm of Pax Africana and the AU’s Constitutive Act’s non-indifference or “responsible sovereignty” norm, that depart from the old Westphalian principle of state sovereignty. We show how this departure significantly overrides the post–World War II principle of noninterference codified in the UN Charter and deeply entrenched in the OAU. We show

Building a Regional Security Complex

73

that under the new normative standards, African states have established regional security structures and institutions, the most important of which is the African Peace and Security Architecture composed of the African Peace and Security Council, the African Standby Force, the Continental Early Warning System, and the Panel of the Wise (see Akuffo 2010; Engel and Porto 2010; Whitaker and Clark 2018; Williams 2014). To demonstrate Africa’s new agency and assertiveness in global security relations, we examine the AU’s dirigisme in driving the continent’s regional security complex. We show that this is particularly manifest in subregional initiatives as well as the continent’s collective intervention in members’ conflicts and political crises, such as in Somalia since 2007, Comoros and Sudan in 2008, Libya in 2011, and Mali in 2013. In the following section, we analyze the different ways the AU administers security relations with external partners, primarily the UNSC although increasingly with the EU as well. Here, for example, we highlight the United Nations and the AU’s collaborative partnerships since the latter’s establishment in 2002. We examine the evolving focus on conflict prevention and crisis management that culminated in the 2017 Joint UN-AU Framework for Enhanced Partnership in Peace and Security. To reveal African global actor agency in this relationship, we examine the interactions between the UN Security Council and the AU Peace and Security Council, which is a central driver of the UN-AU partnership that impacts Africa’s emerging regional security complex. In a final section, we explain Africa’s new global politics using the international security relations that we examine throughout the chapter as a model to analyze new global security behaviors among states in a plurilateral, multipolar world. For example, in the long-standing conflict in Somalia, AU peacekeeping operations offer an important contrast to UN peacekeeping, which is constrained by rules of noninterference despite the advancement of humanitarian intervention policies whereas the AU’s Article 4(h) unambiguously mandates military intervention into a member state’s conflict for humanitarian reasons. We conclude the chapter by using the evidence revealed about Africa’s regional security complex to present a theory that explains the distinctiveness of Africa’s new global security politics in a plurilateral world. Evolving African Security Norms and Institutions There has been no other region of the world—aside perhaps from the EU—that embodies the new genre of security regionalism, according to Buzan and Wæver’s RSCT model, more than Africa does. Africa’s security regionalism, its Pax Africana philosophy, speaks to the continent’s quest

74

Africa’s New Global Politics

for collective agency and autonomy that draws in part from its historical marginalization in the global power structures (Zondi 2013b). While this emergent African security regionalism has been adequately documented and described (see, for example, Engel and Porto 2010; Franke 2009; Williams 2009, 2016), what remains less addressed is how to trace and evaluate its significance for contemporary African international relations. RSCT-Africa has its roots in the continent’s fight for independence and the postindependence challenge of navigating sovereign existence at the periphery of global power structures, a situation compounded by Cold War rivalries. It took only three years after most African states had gained independence for Kwame Nkrumah and other African leaders, working with and drawing inspiration from intellectuals and leaders in the African diaspora, to found a continental body, the OAU, which became the vehicle for collectively tackling continental problems, including security. The OAU’s focus on securitization was especially on the fight to fully liberate the continent and rid it of the remaining vestiges of Western colonial occupation, at a time when Africa was a Cold War battleground. The chilling events, including the brutal assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, in the Congo months after independence in 1960, provided early signs of perilous external security intervention in the continent and the destabilization that lay ahead (Meredith 2005, 103–106). The vulnerability of African states and their disadvantaged positioning were indeed clear-cut features of the continent’s international relations very early on at independence. This reality was not lost on the leaders of these new nation-states, who quickly pursued the Pan-African approach to tackle security problems for collective African state sovereignty and to guard against recolonization and neocolonialism. Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah led in articulating a vision for continental collaboration, cooperation, and coordination anchored on the norm of Pax Africana. This vision and norm found expression in the creation of the OAU as the flagship body for exercising collective African agency at the regional and global levels. As early as 1960, before the OAU was fully established, Nkrumah had proposed the idea of an African high command as part of the efforts to attain peace and security in the continent (Soremekun 2006, 187). For the next several decades of independent Africa, the OAU served as the vanguard for a collective African vision of staving off external intrusions and realizing the total independence of the entire continent (Engel and Porto 2010, 1). With most African nations independent by the end of the 1960s, the OAU turned to address white racist rule and colonial occupation of the continent that held firm in Southern Africa—in Rhodesia, South Africa, and South West Africa under apartheid, and in the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. The Cold War only catalyzed the OAU’s unified struggle

Building a Regional Security Complex

75

against white racist minority rule in Southern Africa and the Portuguese holdouts. The United States, the leading protagonist of the Cold War, saw apartheid South Africa as a bulwark against perceived Soviet and Cuban influence in the region, partly the reason why Ronald Reagan vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act passed by the US Congress in 1986. The final defeat of apartheid, coinciding with the end of the Cold War, heralded a new era and offered possibilities to reimagine a collective African security architecture and reassert unified African agency in dealing with security challenges on the continent. The post–Cold War era held prospects for tackling security issues in more robust and pragmatic ways than the OAU’s often lackluster and laidback approach that tended to defer to the norm of noninterference in internal affairs of member states. The new approach to African security regionalism was to be undertaken with a broader African vision, which South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki and other African leaders framed in terms of an African Renaissance (Nabudere 2001; Stremlau 1999). The overarching aim of post–Cold War African international relations was a resuscitation of Pax Africana, Kwame Nkrumah’s postcolonial mantra that called for African states to police themselves to achieve African collective security. Pax Africana received institutional representation when the OAU became the AU in 2002. It was governed by the AU Constitutive Act to give it “a radically new vision and mission, a clearly defined set of objectives and responsibilities, perhaps ‘more teeth’” (Engel and Porto 2010, 2). The transformation was not a mere change of name; it represented a declared will to “tackle African conflicts through African solutions” (Engel and Porto 2010, 19; Williams 2014, 149). Under the auspices of the AU, African states sought to reclaim the power to manage their conflicts and stave off the external meddling and interventionism of the Cold War era (Franke 2009, 2010). For much of the Cold War era external interventions and the security imperatives of outside powers prevented any meaningful cooperation and coordination of peace and security in the continent, despite the early efforts of Nkrumah and his generation of Pan-African-oriented leaders (Franke 2010, 86). However, under the renewed framework of the AU, African states set themselves up for a more aggressive agenda of collective and coordinated security measures and aimed to reposition Africa in global geopolitics. Indeed, Pax Africana represents Africa’s twenty-first-century ideational regime of security regionalism that is based on the agency of the African Union and conducted through initiatives of Regional Economic Communities such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Southern African Development Cooperative (SADC), and in the Eastern/Horn of Africa’s Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). The reimagining of Pax Africana made possible the rearticulation of an autonomous regional security regime and conflict management mechanisms

76

Africa’s New Global Politics

for the continent. This unfolding occurred while the continent remained an active player in the broader, multiplex international security landscape. In this still evolving genre of new security regionalism and collective global engagement, the AU’s African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) has been the flagship institutional arrangement with mechanisms, organs, and structures for managing peace and security questions across the continent (Akuffo 2010; Engel and Porto 2010; Franke 2009; Williams 2014). Put another way, under the aegis of APSA, African states introduced an array of new norms, institutions, policies, and practices all aimed at redirecting the continent toward a security community that is characterized by cooperative intraregional relations and constructive external engagements that were simply impracticable during the Cold War era. From the standpoint of a new Pax Africana with the agency of the AU, the current security regionalism marks progress in the advancement of a new geopolitics of international security for Africa, which plays out in a multipolar order characterized by a plurality of external actors, interests, and ideas. Under the new (and still evolving) African regional security order, perhaps the most important shift to have emerged under the direction of the African Union is the norm against unconstitutional changes of government (Souaré 2014). For many decades, since the dawn of independence, unconstitutional changes of government, in their various stripes but largely manifest in the forceful seizure of power through military coups d’état, were a key source of insecurity and instability across the continent. The roots, instigation, and inspiration of violent changes of government were both internally located in economic and political crises and externally borne of especially Cold War rivalries. While the OAU did precious little to obviate this critical component of the African security conundrum, by the close of the century and in the twilight of the OAU’s existence, the Lomé Declaration of 2000 kick-started processes that were later actualized by the AU through its Constitutive Act and other legal provisions. With the Lomé Declaration, the continental norm against unconstitutional changes of government gained traction. It deepened with the passing of subsequent AU conventions, protocols, and resolutions including the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance. In addition to legal provisions and positions adopted by member states against actions that threatened peace and security on the continent, the AU took practical, and often unequivocal, steps in condemning, sanctioning, and, in some instances, issuing credible threats of or using actual force to remove governments that had taken power through unconstitutional means—primarily coups d’état. The genesis of the norm against unconstitutional changes of government was a set of measures put forward in 1997 by the OAU’s Council of Ministers for the restoration of constitutional order in the West African nation of

Building a Regional Security Complex

77

Sierra Leone. This was in the wake of a coup d’état against a democratically elected president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, as the country was healing from a brutal civil war. The OAU’s Council of Ministers’ key recommendation was for the continental body and its member states not to recognize the coup leaders, to deny them legitimacy since they had overthrown a democratically elected government (Dersso 2016, 2). This was an unprecedented move and a major turning point in African diplomacy and continental norm evolution. Before that, coup-makers and others who captured power through the barrel of a gun effortlessly joined the club of recognized governments and took their place at the OAU’s diplomatic dining table without any questions or approbations. Subsequently, the norm against unconstitutional changes of government received further institutional grounding in the AU’s Constitutive Act of 2001 and later in the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance of 2007, and it was further defined, expanded, and institutionalized within the AU’s African Peace and Security Architecture (Sturman 2011, 2). The AU initially outlined four types of unconstitutional changes of government: military coups d’état, armed rebels seizing power militarily, mercenaries overthrowing governments, and incumbents refusing to hand over power once they had been defeated in free and fair elections. In 2007, the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance in Article 23(5) expanded the definition of an unconstitutional change of government to include the use of constitutional or legal revisions in ways that undermined the principles of democratic change of government—in other words, the manipulative use of the law to cling to power and undermine genuine democratic practice. This additional provision was critical as it spoke to the rising practice of African incumbents who use legal and constitutional maneuvers, including removal of presidential term limits, to subvert democratic consolidation and undermine constitutionalism. The AU construed these practices, and rightly so, as having the potential to create conditions that would lead to political instability and pose threats to peace and security. The rather rapid embrace of this new normative standard for the continent marked a major departure from the era of the OAU, when rebel groups overthrew governments through force of arms and when the armed forces turned on the same civilian authorities they were otherwise mandated to protect. The new norm was a shift from the traditional international relations principle of noninterference to that of non-indifference (Akuffo 2010; Kasaija 2012; Omotola 2011; Williams 2007). The notion of non-indifference is rooted in the Pan-African ideal that forms the basis of a continental approach to African security. It positioned the AU as a “pro-interventionist organization” keen to promote human rights and protect human security in Africa (Akuffo 2010, 75). The shift from what was previously a kind of blanket

78

Africa’s New Global Politics

sovereignty and noninterference to the embrace of non-indifference and responsible sovereignty underscored the AU’s stance and commitment to human security writ large, something that received global resonance in the norm of the responsibility to protect (R2P). Among the concrete steps the AU took to implement the doctrine of non-indifference was the creation of a Peace and Security Council as part of the broader African Peace and Security Architecture to serve as a standing decisionmaking organ charged with facilitating timely response to conflict and crisis situations (Omotola 2011, 18). Through several legal provisions and a series of practical measures, the AU and its subregional member organizations, particularly ECOWAS, demonstrated the new assertiveness in dealing with security issues and political crises in the continent (Franke 2009). From refusal to recognize coup regimes and condemnation of forceful seizure of power to threats of intervention and actual intervention, the AU has charted a new course. Under Article 30 of the AU’s Constitutive Act, governments that come to power through unconstitutional means are banned from participation in all activities of the Union. The AU’s response to unconstitutional changes of government includes three core measures and demands: (1) suspension of the member state in question, (2) reestablishment of an elected government in six months, and (3) prohibition of auto-legitimation by individuals or groups that seize power through unconstitutional changes of government only to turn around and participate in elections organized under their control. In a show of resolve to walk the talk, for example, in March 2008 in what was dubbed Operation Democracy in Comoros, the AU assisted in removing the incumbent administration on the island of Anjouan that had organized an illegal election to cling to power (Whitaker and Clark 2018, 174). In 2015, the AU threatened to use force against an incumbent president in Burundi although this did not happen, and in a similar vein in 2015 in Burkina Faso, the AU and ECOWAS levied sanctions on the coup organizers. The short-lived six-day coup d’état of General Gilbert Diendéré in Burkina Faso in September 2015 highlights an increasingly hostile environment for coup plotters, a major departure from previous practice under the OAU when coups were not met with any semblance of disapproval let alone sanctions (Day, Khisa, and Reno 2020). These and other moves are examples of how the AU has increasingly provided support for a mix of diplomatic, coercive, and actual military interventions on the continent (Wilén and Williams 2018; Williams 2007, 2016). In these and other measures the AU acted in ways that went over and beyond what, for example, the United Nations and the Security Council have done to promote peace and security on behalf of its members. However, in practice the implementation of the normative and legal standard against unconstitutional changes of government has been laced with inconsistencies and ambiguities (Omotola 2011, 35). For example, the

Building a Regional Security Complex

79

AU has not been as forceful in responding to constitutional amendments by incumbents to prolong their stay in power and has not issued sanctions against major democratic deficits and human rights violations, including electoral fraud and repression of political opponents (Dersso 2016, 3; Omotola 2011, 33). Yet, to be sure, these actions that have become quite numerous over the past decade violate the provision of the Constitutive Act and the Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance. What is more, the African Peace and Security Architecture has been criticized for being another “mechanism to extract assistance from foreigners and help preserve regime security” (Williams 2016, 212). As recently as 2021, there have been some positive developments in the democracy and security realm on the continent, such as democratic transitions and smooth elections in Niger, Zambia, Cabo Verde, and The Gambia as well as the relative consolidation of peace in Burundi (leading to its removal from the agenda of the PSC); since 2019, complex factors have also continued to give rise to coups in Africa. The growing state of insecurity is perhaps emerging because of the growth of violent armed groups and sustained authoritarian consolidation of power among select regimes. It is also true, however, that insecurity has a different face in the 2020s for the continent as the African Union has denounced this resurgence of military coups, especially during the pandemic, and it has also unequivocally suspended the membership of four nations—Mali, Guinea, Sudan, and Burkina Faso— where these coups occurred. What is also different regarding the state of insecurity in the continent is that the AU’s peace and security architecture has created a policy space for African state actors to collectively assume increasing responsibilities for the security provision of the continent. For example, AU Peace and Security policy analysts have recommended that the Lomé Declaration adopted by the AU to suspend the continent’s coup regimes be expanded to include the refusal by an incumbent government to relinquish power to the winning party after free, fair, and regular elections. Some have even suggested that the AU implement its own rules on the coup question already part of its 2009 Ezulwini Framework. The policy for preventing coups in this framework is more proactive as it stipulates that suspensions also occur when the constitution is manipulated by authoritarian regimes who hold onto power against the will of the people. Africa’s Regional Security Complex: The Subregional Interface Africa’s new security regionalism plays out at both the continental and global levels. It draws from African agency in shaping international relations, demonstrated in the engagement and encounters with the United

80

Africa’s New Global Politics

Nations, which is the foremost multilateral institution. However, the evolving African security architecture has an important bottom-up foundation, which includes critical building blocks, roles, and influences of individual African nations and subregional agencies, bodies, and organizations. The subregional actors serve critical roles for the AU’s security dirigisme and as relatively autonomous implementation agencies at the continental level within a framework of organized complementarity (Franke 2010, 91). The conscious approach to collaborative and concerted cross-border handling of common security problems by individual states fed into the emergence of several subregional security initiatives and investments in frameworks for Regional Economic Communities (RECs). These were in turn critical and constitutive elements of the OAU and later the AU. The ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) of the West African bloc of states and the IGAD for the East and Horn of Africa bloc have been arguably the most proactive in diplomatic activities, peacekeeping, and interventions involving the use of military force to deal with situations of insecurity and instability. In some instances, the activities and interests of individual states have been at odds and in conflict with broader subregional security aspirations, but the overarching trend, at least at the level of declared intentions and official pronouncements, has tended to be in favor of a shared vision of security, stability, and sustainability internally as well as regionally. The AU’s security regionalism builds on the strength, actions, and political commitments of member states, many of whom work through their respective RECs. This speaks to the two broader principles of subsidiarity and complementarity in regional and international relations. The AU and the RECs have a memorandum of understanding that acknowledges the leading role of the AU in ensuring peace and security while at the same time recognizing the responsibility of subregional bodies to more effectively and swiftly tackle problems in their specific regions (Akuffo 2010, 76). This regional and subregional interface, therefore, forms the basis for collective continental solutions and solidarities that stand out in the area of African security. Each of the subregions of Africa has had unique and specific security challenges that needed to be addressed contextually rather than continentally. For much of the Cold War era, for example, Southern Africa was a battleground for the US–USSR/Cuba rivalry draped in the struggle against apartheid. In Southern Africa, the Frontline States (Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) along with Tanzania, played crucial roles in forging solidarity against apartheid (Sapire and Saunders 2012). These states paid the heavy price of internal conflict, stoked and funded by the apartheid government and the United States. The instability in Southern Africa during that time was germane to the region. And with the defeat of apartheid and the end of the Cold War, the long-running civil wars in Angola and Mozambique

Building a Regional Security Complex

81

came to decisive ends in the early 2000s and early 1990s, respectively. However, the end of the Cold War and the defeat of apartheid, two key sources of conflict in Southern Africa, did not mean the absence of subregional security difficulties as drought and problems of small weapons proliferation continued to present altogether different menus of cross-border security challenges in that part of the continent. Across West Africa, severe state crises in Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, and Sierra Leone in the 1990s catalyzed very important subregional security solidarity, with Nigeria playing a critical role as a quasi-regional hegemon. The construction of a subregional security complex in that part of the continent was invaluable in the making of the AU’s continental security regionalism. ECOMOG intervened in Liberia and Sierra Leone in 1990 and 1997, respectively, to bring about stability and restore constitutional order in those countries despite grave operational problems (Whitaker and Clark 2018, 154, 220). In undertaking interventions and proactive steps in West Africa, ECOWAS set crucial precedents on issues concerning internal conflicts and unconstitutional changes of government in the subregion during the 1990s and into the twenty-first century (Williams 2008, 20). Consequently, over the years ECOWAS became emblematic of the evolution of supranational norms and values that go beyond traditional national sovereignty (Franke 2010, 90). It is now very difficult, for example, for incumbent presidents and parties in the West African subregion to rig elections or blatantly cling to power or engage in brazen human rights abuses without triggering the possible intervention of ECOWAS/ECOMOG. In the Great Lakes region of East and Central Africa, and in the Horn of Africa, there were a series of conflicting and contradictory national security interests, which invariably led to cross-border conflicts in the Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan, and Uganda. Yet, it has to be noted that in tackling intractable conflicts in this subregion of the continent, African statesmen played crucial roles as mediators appointed by subregional bodies, particularly the IGAD and the African Union. Former Botswana president Sir Ketumire Masire was instrumental as the facilitator to the Inter-Congolese Dialogue while Jacob Zuma took over from Nelson Mandela, both former South African presidents, in mediating peace in Burundi. One of Africa’s long-running civil wars was in Sudan, pitting rebels in the south against the Khartoum government. The Kenyan government with support from IGAD and the AU facilitated the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that closed the curtains on that conflict and paved the way for the independence of South Sudan via referendum in 2011. Regrettably, the new nation of South Sudan relapsed into war hardly two years after gaining independence. The flare-up in violence in late 2013 in the capital Juba, triggered by the fallout between President Salva Kiir and his estranged deputy, Riek

82

Africa’s New Global Politics

Machar, prompted the swift response of several neighboring countries, particularly Uganda, which deployed troops ostensibly at the invitation of President Kiir and as a response to calls by the United Nations and IGAD (Kasaija 2014). This conflict has dragged on even as IGAD took the lead in brokering piece, with Ethiopia at the forefront of mediating talks between the government and the rebels (Kasaija 2014, 2015). After many false starts and several rounds of resumption of hostilities between troops loyal to Machar and those under the command of Kiir (more in warlordlike fashion), in the recent past there appears to be a truce holding firm and a power-sharing arrangement in place between the warring parties. In Sudan as well, following the popular ousting of long-surviving autocrat Omar al-Bashir in 2017, overthrown by the military in the face of relentless street protests, again the AU designated IGAD to mediate peace, supported by the Ethiopian government. Through IGAD, the AU (complemented by Ethiopia) presided over the negotiations between the military, the protesters, and the political class, which saw the Transitional Military Council and the Forces of Freedom and Change sign the Constitutional Charter for the 2019 Transitional Period on August 17, 2019 (Vhumbunu 2019). The military under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has maintained a grip on power and sidelined civilian leaders, previously under Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, but the struggle for a return to democratic, civilian rule in Sudan continues. Within the security complexities of the Horn of Africa, for a long time Ethiopia played critical roles as mediator and peacemaker, but since 2020 it is trapped in its own civil war in the northern (Afar, Amhara, and Tigrayan) region with grave implications for the country’s federal arrangement. The AU has been at work through the former Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, but with little success in trying to find a workable solution to the conflict triggered by a fallout between the former dominant party in a ruling coalition, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, and the ascendance to power of another coalition faction of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. Considering that Ethiopia is the home to the African Union commission, and with reports of mass atrocities and possible war crimes, the conflict in the north of the country presented a most serious challenge to the AU and its doctrine of non-indifference. The above cases only but highlight the critical roles that African governments (working through subregional bodies) have played in resolving conflicts, many of which had cross-border ramifications. Across the continent, seldom are security situations confined to the country in which they originally occur—rather, more often than not, given the porous borders and social ties that defy state territorial demarcations, there have been conflict spillovers, cross-border flows of conflict, and interconnected war (Williams and Haacke 2011, 52; Williams 2008, 13). The

Building a Regional Security Complex

83

resulting displacement of people, fueled by activities of nonstate actors who engage in human and arms trafficking with all the attendant destabilizing effects, has necessitated initiatives and interventions of a bilateral and subregional multilateral nature. At the general level, under the vanguard and stewardship of the African Union, national and subregional initiatives have constellated in confronting common security challenges that are transnational and multidimensional. In at least a few issue domains such as the fight against terrorism and tackling pandemics, the push-up from below from the subregions gave rise to a considerable degree of “securitization,” of treating these common problems as existential security threats that require prioritization and urgent attention (Williams 2008). In pursuing common security problems, African states have harnessed the power of collective action at the continental level, feeding into global engagements that are at once partnerships and complementarities, to which we turn next. The Global Interface: From Hybrids to Complementarity—UNAMIS to AMISOM The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) is a manifestation of Africa’s global security partnership, but it also underlines the continent’s agency in shaping regional security complexes in the context of global security realignments. The case of AMISOM underscores the evolution of security regionalism in the context of shifting global dynamics and the changing nature of international norms around military interventions. The 2007 UNSC Resolution 1744 endorsed the AU’s deployment of troops to Somalia under the banner of AMISOM. This all-African peacekeeping mission, initially composed of troops from Burundi and Uganda, had the mandate of stabilizing and assuring peace in Somalia after more than a decade without centralized authority following the fall of Mohamed Siad Barre’s regime in 1991 (Fisher 2019; Williams 2018). However, it took a while, and long after AMISOM was established, for the two organizations—one regional (AU) and the other international (UN)—to compromise on a partnership framework for managing Africa’s security, writ large. The signing of the 2017 joint UN-AU partnership framework on peace and security is evidence that the African Union and the UN have collaboratively evolved a dirigisme strategic global security partnership that plays out at the political, policy, and operational levels (de Coning 2019). It is a unique arrangement in the field of international diplomacy and security as it speaks to the balance between regional security initiatives and global interests and underscores the notion of complementarity. The creation of the UN Office to the African Union based in Addis Ababa

84

Africa’s New Global Politics

in 2010 contributed to the deepening of relations between the UN and the AU in practical engagement and cooperation (Williams 2014, 152). Under the new and still evolving modus operandi of complementarity, both the United Nations and African Union navigate sometimes asymmetrical but also complementary power relations over the scope and authority of international security governance that relates to Africa. The array of domains that these security relations play in ranges from peacekeeping to managing postelection violence situations and the handling of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity under international law (see Chapter 5). In his 2005 progress report on the implementation of the 2000 Millennium Declaration, the then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, noted that “the United Nations and regional organizations should play complementary roles in facing the challenges to international peace and security” (Annan 2005, 52). An example of this regional-global complementarity is precisely the AU-UN partnership, reflected in the case of AMISOM mentioned above, whereby half a dozen African nations have provided the requisite troop deployment to Somalia while the UN, the EU, and the United States contribute financial, logistical, and training resources. This collaboration is an example of what some scholars have referred to as “partnership peacekeeping” (Williams 2014, 152). The partnership reflects a concrete reality: that is, neither the UN nor the AU will deploy peace operations in Africa without close consultations and some form of cooperation with the other given the constraints and strengths of either institution. There are both legal and logistical constraints on each organization but also complimentary resources that each distinctly brings to the table. To this end, both the UN and the AU separately command unique advantages (Akuffo 2010, 85). The AU’s agency and global influence derive from the UN’s incapacities in the region. That is to say, the UN peacekeeping model is not well suited for enforcement particularly in cases of urgent troop deployment for counterterrorism activities or transnational operations involving the use of force (something that the UN Security Council has to sanction). The UN’s rather conservative, bureaucratic hurdles and the slow decisionmaking procedures germane to its institutional nature are compounded by veto politics of the Security Council’s permanent members with all the attendant paralysis that tends to stall swift action. By contrast, the AU, its subregional member organizations (like ECOWAS and IGAD that have demonstrated intervention capacity), and the ad hoc regional coalitions constituted in specific crisis times to deal with urgent security situations have developed the requisite capabilities for relatively swift and prompt action, of the type that is unlikely when pursued directly under the UN (Akuffo 2010, 78). The African Standby Force, for example, although a slow-moving construction and not fully operational, was conceived with a very ambitious deployment goal of putting boots on

Building a Regional Security Complex

85

the ground within fourteen days of the decision to deploy (Williams 2014, 154). Moreover, unlike the UN system and especially its Security Council, the AU framework has an inbuilt Pan-African normative foundation that prioritizes consensus and espouses a shared desire for collective action in addressing problems of peace and security. All this, of course, is scarcely to suggest that the AU is more effective or that its activities and actions (including inactions) are not without problems, as has been underscored by scholars (e.g., Kasaija 2012, 2013; Williams 2014, 2016). Rather, the AU, unlike the UN, faces fewer powerpolitics constraints and can act prudently and promptly. Better still, the AU as a regional body, working with its constituent subregional member organizations (RECs), has a better grasp of the complexities and contours of Africa-specific regional conflict terrain than a multilateral institution that is the UN. In other words, unlike the AU, the UN lacks the benefit of local presence, and its decisionmakers are, at any rate, far removed from the actual realities on the ground. The case of the UN peacekeeping mission to Darfur, Sudan, is instructive here (Akuffo 2010). The mission was delayed for many years in the face of UN Security Council veto-power flexing between, on the one hand, China and Russia, who stood on the side of the Sudanese government opposed to the proposed mission, and on the other, the United States and its European allies whose relations with Khartoum were not very friendly. It was only after the AU signed on to the mission, thereby turning it into a hybrid United Nations–African Union peacekeeping undertaking, that the Security Council approved the mission, whose troop deployment came from African countries (Engel and Porto 2010, 4; Whitaker and Clark 2018, 206). What is more, the AU modus operandi that includes actual military intervention using an African Standby Force is an approach that fundamentally departs from the UN’s traditional peacekeeping model (even though Chapter VII of the UN Charter mandates the Security Council to authorize the use of force). The need to develop a different modus operandi for swift intervention in situations of gross human rights abuses and crimes against humanity was one that the continent had to embrace especially in the wake of the UN’s failure to stop the 1994 Rwanda genocide (Williams 2014, 148–149). The region’s experiences with a range of grave conflict situations and the overarching need to confront intractable security problems inform the AU’s push for a different approach as much as the Pan-African ideal is a huge motivating factor. At another level, the development of African capabilities in regional security helps relieve the pressure on the UN (and Western powers) to conduct complex operations in Africa (de Coning and Mateja 2019). But it also goes a long way in enhancing African agency and assures active presence

86

Africa’s New Global Politics

rather than passivity in tackling the continent’s security challenges—and on terms dictated or directed by Africans and African states, not by external actors, which often come with the crass interests of foreign powers. As such, the RSCT-Africa framework provides the latitude for Africa-specific security measures that are arrived at with the active involvement of African leaders, states, and regional institutions. Such a framework puts into full consideration the continent’s locally inspired normative agendas as prerequisites for constructing peaceful relations and managing long-term continental as well as subregional geopolitical interests and challenges. The AU-UN cooperative security arrangement is emblematic of Africa’s new global security politics, a critical component of the new international relations of Africa driven by Africa’s long-running Pan-African ideals but also by the new forces germane to the twenty-first century. The evolving state of African continental engagements and global relations has to be understood from both the continent’s own contextual circumstances and historical experiences and also the systemic shifts in global relations of the post–Cold War era as they have unfolded in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. African international relations, as we argue in the different chapters of this book, plays out in a decidedly multipolar and plurilateral world where power has become substantially decentered, in which traditional security relations are giving way to human security considerations that far transcend traditional conceptions of security. It is also a world underpinned by post-sovereign political rationality and where solutions to problems of security are now located in a myriad of transnational structures and regional complexes. In this context, Africa’s regionalism is enjoying a resurgence and providing normative prescriptions as well as practical blueprints for managing international security issues in the post–Cold War era. The imperatives of confronting global terrorism, for example, have upped the stakes and created a wholly different menu of perceptions and range of practices in international security (Fücks 2006). In the wake of 9/11, the continent’s former European colonizers, working through the forum of the EU; the United States, as a presumptuous superpower; and the lead international peace and security organization, the UN, have increasingly “subcontracted” the burden of security threats in the developing world to designated regional bodies. The African Union is the foremost regional organization in this regard. In subcontracting security enforcement, Western actors concede their inability to directly confront and contain conflict situations that regional actors such as the AU are better placed to manage. Working through the AU and the UN, Western powers as well as emerging powers like China have pursued cooperative security arrangements based on mutual reassurance and shared interest rather than the traditional realpolitik deterrence (ElAffendi 2009). This approach to international security calculus entails

Building a Regional Security Complex

87

negotiated engagements and not imposed conditions; it plays out in a context where the African region is not the usual passive victim but rather an active player that contributes to articulating normative standards that go beyond the shores of the continent. The global security partnership we have attempted to parse out in this chapter seen in the collaboration and cooperation between the UN and the AU is not without problems and shortcomings. For one, the UN remains under the firm feet of Western powers and the veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, something that often leads to sidelining and blindsiding the African Union and African issues. A vivid example was the 2011 crisis in Libya that culminated in a UN Security Council decision to authorize the use of force against the position of the AU. Ironically, several African states including nonpermanent members of the Security Council supported the UN authorization (Kasaija 2014, 152; Williams 2014, 152). Be that as it may, in leading the collective security interests of African states, the AU has emerged as an exemplar in the practice of the regional security complex syndrome described as a new genre of international security provision. Indeed, the AU is considered one of the regional organizations around the world that is emblematic of “new regionalism” with the requisite institutional mechanism for conflict management (Söderbaum and Hettne 2010, 19). This new security regionalism occurs when states engage in the transformation of conflicts and insecurities by building a security complex that encompasses a range of conflict solutions and mechanisms that emanate from interstate and intrastate relations. Like regional security complexes elsewhere, Africa’s regional security regime fosters geopolitical balance of power relations between regionalization and globalizing trends for the continent. Africa as a Model for International Security Provision in the Twenty-First Century What then has been the impact of the African region’s RSCT model on international security and relations? In building a regional security complex with rules, norms, institutions, and successful peacekeeping interventions, Africa’s regional security complex not only succeeded in fostering and strengthening Africa’s agency in international engagement, it also served as a model for a new international security strategy for a deeply plural global world. By 2018, security analysts began to examine why the world was coming to Africa to engage new security policies and practices. It appeared that many of the continent’s foreign counterparts sought to advance their UNSC resolutions by engaging the African Bloc. Because more than 60 percent of the UNSC’s efforts concern African issues, the region has become

88

Africa’s New Global Politics

the model for global partnering as well. In partnering, the African Union’s strengthened role in the prevention and management of conflict in the region has been successful in establishing the parameters of genuine continental and global partnerships—including role clarification between subregional bodies, the African Union, the European Union, and the United Nations. The African Union has contributed to world-renowned innovations of the continent’s regional security complexes, conflict management, and peacebuilding practices. The institution’s peacebuilding architecture leverages a long-standing African regional peace initiative first established by the OAU and heavily drawn from the UN’s Agenda for Peace. The AU’s programs have been more comprehensive than other regional security programs, mirroring the UN Agenda for Peace’s four key pillars (prevention, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding) as interconnected, interdependent, and mutually reinforcing building blocks of conflict management in the region (Zondi 2017). AMISOM is an example of an AU model of comprehensive peace intervention. Another distinctive AU approach is the continent’s legal enforcement mandate for regional security provision. The AU’s Constitutive Act introduced regional peacebuilding through a legal framework permitting intervention in member states in cases of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide (Zondi 2017). The continent adopted the principle of nonindifference in Sirte, Libya, in 1999, two years before the idea of R2P was proposed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which ultimately provided the foundation for the UN’s R2P policies and principles. What’s more, Africa is the first region to provide the legal framework for setting aside the principle of nonintervention in specific circumstances, before the international community adopted the principle of R2P. Another African invention of the continent’s security complex is its boots-on-the-ground peacekeeping operations. The AU’s African Standby Force and its regional brigades in all five regions of the AU are meant to enable the AU to respond timeously to incidents of violence defined in Article 3 of the protocol establishing the PSC. Finally, the cooperation between the UN and the AU in peacebuilding in Africa is positive for building and strengthening African capacity for peacebuilding as well as for boosting the UN interface with regional organizations in keeping with the principle of subsidiarity. According to Siphamandla Zondi (2017, 124), The AU approach is to lay the ground for such cooperation through comprehensive peace missions of its own, focused on anticipating conflict hotspots, confidence building and peacekeeping. This is essential for African ownership of hybrid missions as well as for building African capacity for peacebuilding. The challenge is to develop a shared conceptual framework for the AU and UN.

Building a Regional Security Complex

89

An example is the African Union’s Peace and Security Council, which is a critical institutional component of the AU’s peace and security architecture, the AU Policy Framework. This collective security arrangement has facilitated timely and efficient responses to conflicts and crisis situations in Africa. The policy framework has been developed by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and aims to provide a common frame of reference and conceptual base for the assessment, planning, coordination, and monitoring of post-conflict reconstruction systems across Africa. The objectives of the AU Policy Framework have been fulfilled in improving timeliness, effectiveness, and coordination of activities in post-conflict countries and to lay the foundation for social justice and sustainable peace, in line with Africa’s vision of renewal and growth. The AU’s peace and security systems have several dimensions that the institution uses to inform the pedestal for peace building. They include security, political transition, governance and participation, socio-economic development, human rights, justice and reconciliation and coordination, management and resource mobilization. Africa’s new security regionalism has repositioned the continent in global geopolitical and security dynamics despite the reality that the region was the last front of Western colonial exploitation and remains a source of raw extraction long after African nations gained independence. Thus, the “new scramble” for the continent, pitting China at the center, continues a long-established trend (Carmody 2016). As such, Jean-François Bayart and Stephen Ellis’s (2000, 267) rather dismissive assertion that “the discourse on Africa’s marginality is nonsense” is patently misleading. It is one thing to say that Africa has been an active player in world affairs and attracted incessant external interest for centuries, and has been an actor not just acted upon (Brown 2012). But it is quite another matter to say that the continent has not been a victim of imperialism, despoliation, and marginalization. For it has and remains despite building continental regional complexes. In the recent past, some Western scholars have tried hard to downplay Africa’s disadvantaged and peripheral place in the global security arena (e.g., Bayart and Ellis 2000; Taylor and Williams 2004). Africa’s place in the world can no longer be interpreted as one of a passive victim of imperialism or as an inconsequential actor lacking in autonomy, agency, and influence in global geopolitics (Brown 2012). We have seen how the African Union played crucial roles (and was in fact the first major regional body) in redefining state sovereignty as entailing responsibility, something that fed into actualizing the international relations norm of R2P that has become institutionalized and consolidated in the UN system (Akuffo 2010, 77). African international relations are underpinned by “a set of PanAfrican norms, among which continental solidarity and an increasing desire to minimize reliance on the ‘goodwill’ of the international community were

90

Africa’s New Global Politics

the most salient” (Franke 2010, 88). What is more, in a rapidly changing world, new shifts and transformations in the continent but also at the global level have positioned African states, through the collective voice and institutional platform of the African Union, to play instructive and influential roles in shaping international security politics. This new African place in the world was in fact inconceivable not too long ago in the dark clouds of the Cold War that dissipated only recently. The cooperative security arrangements between the African Union and the UN, discussed above, and the fact that most major world powers including China and the United States seek partnerships with African states, away from the old-style paternalisms, means that the continent occupies a different position and prism. At the broader continental level, experiences with large-scale and deadly violence in countries like Burundi, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, among others, impressed upon leaders and citizens of these countries the need to play proactive roles in regional peacekeeping missions within the continent such as those in Darfur, Sudan, and in Somalia. Except for the recurring and intractable crises in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, with the somewhat permanent presence of the UN peacekeepers, African nations and the African Union have taken up the challenge and mantle of peacekeeping missions and military interventions when the need arises, as was the case in Burundi, Gambia, and Comoros. In the majority of peacekeeping operations and military interventions over the past two decades, the boots on the ground have been African (Williams 2014, 150). This is well within the spirit of “African solutions to African problems” (Kasaija 2011, 2013). Conclusion: Africa’s New Global Security Politics The new genre of African security regionalism as outlined in this chapter is not without problems, questions, and concerns for the skeptic. Like many sociopolitical configurations and changes, there are contradictions and conflicts. By 2021, for example, the cradle seat of the African Union, Ethiopia, was targeted for intervention for the government’s attacks on human security during the Tigrayan war. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed surprisingly defied the AU’s authority to set up an independent review board into Ethiopia to investigate the government’s crimes, arguing that the AU had no legitimacy. Despite Abiy’s pushback, the AU institution stood its ground responding to its own external criticism that by doing nothing in the crisis in Ethiopia, the security regional complex that it had built to police Africa had no bark. But as is the case with other realms of African regional and international relations, analyzed in this book, unfolding as they are in a complex, multi-

Building a Regional Security Complex

91

polar world, and playing out simultaneously on multiple fronts, it is too soon to make any definitive claims and conclusions on an evolving set of dynamics. The evolution of African regional security regimes and the normative standards that underpin them remain a moving target whose long-term legacies cannot be read off the current state of affairs. What is abundantly clear, however, is that African states and the African Union have charted a new course in reimagining and implementing distinct and innovative measures for managing the continent’s security challenges, moreover in an era of renewed external interests that involve both the traditional players but also new geopolitical actors jostling for a foothold on the continent. At another level, the continent still grapples with intractable conflicts and recidivism in Burundi, the Central African Republic, Congo, Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan. Social demographics, climate change, and pressures placed on the environment are driving new forms of security dimensions for the African continent. Yet, to be sure, there have been tremendous strides, and there are visible trends pointing in the direction of closer security collaborations and collective agency in tackling Africa’s most daunting problems.

5 Africanizing Transnational Justice

On July 16, 2019, four ICC judges adjudicating the war crimes of former Ivorian president, Laurent Gbagbo, and his minister of youth, Charles Blé Goudé, for crimes against humanity, acquitted both African leaders. News of the acquittal ripped across the world, causing a blow to the post– Cold War transnational justice institutions such as the ICC, which had had a series of high-profile failures including one against former Kenyan leader Uhuru Kenyatta and one against former Democratic Republic of Congo vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba. For victims of human rights war crimes in Côte D’Ivoire, the acquittal was especially seen as a letdown and a disappointment. For the African Union, on the other hand, it seemed as if the acquittal would represent a vindication for what had been African states’ stark criticism of what they had deemed the ICC’s “injustice” toward the continent. For example, the AU made its starkest criticism against the ICC, arguing that by 2019, the court had launched ten official investigations, and except for a case in Georgia, all the investigations had taken place in Africa. Furthermore, they complained that all thirty-nine individuals indicted by the ICC had been African leaders—either rebel leaders or heads of state (Aidi 2019). Based on these and other events, in this chapter, we examine the influence that the transnational justice cascade movement has had on Africa’s new global politics. We argue that because of multiple global events in international justice since the millennium, through the AU, African states are collectively exercising renewed expression of international relations agency in the global governance of transnational justice. In doing so, the continent is contributing to alternative brands of international criminal law (ICL) manifest as an Afrocentric transnational justice. These events have had a momentous impact on the geopolitics of Africa. To support this thesis, we present

93

94

Africa’s New Global Politics

initiatives, interactions, and policies used by AU states to collectively cooperate, contest, develop, and establish alternative norms and institutions of transnational justice and post-atrocity international conflict resolution models to govern the continent. Further, we analyze the AU’s counterinitiatives used to promote African norms and models of justice for the region that explain the states’ collective agency in opposing what is considered the ICC’s Africa interventionism. Using this scenario as a backdrop, we invoke several critical questions about the cascade of justice regime and Africa’s marginal global status in relation to its own efforts to provide justice to continental victims of conflict. We ask, Are states, individuals, or regions the arbiters of transnational justice? How has the transnational justice cascade movement influenced Africa’s new global politics? How does Africa’s regional criminal court— we refer to it as the RCC—initiative square up against the ICC? Does Africa’s court have the requisite level of universal appeal? How do African norms and models of justice influence the continent’s global power and development? In responding to these questions, we will show how Africa’s contemporary international law making is positioned between two theoretical standpoints on the global governance of transnational justice. There are the statists, who argue that international justice takes states to be the main agents of justice, and there are the globalists, who rely on persons, regardless of their political membership anywhere in the world, as the primary focus of justice. To this end, we will learn what the implications of Africa’s regional response to global justice are, as the AU navigates between the statist and globalist dimensions of transnational justice regimes and norms. Underpinning transnational justice events such as the ones that we chronicle in the current chapter is Kathryn Sikkink’s cascades of justice theory, which classically popularized the globalist approach to transnational justice that informs the bedrock of a liberal international system. Sikkink’s justice cascade is a theoretical metaphor that captures the “dramatic new trend in world politics toward holding individual state officials, including heads of state, criminally accountable for human rights violations” (Sikkink 2011, 13). Laid out this way, the justice cascade proposes that International Criminal Law (ICL) develop international adjudication measures to hold accountable and even punish those who mastermind these atrocities. The result of Sikkink’s global justice ICL movement has been the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), where the court’s deliverance of transnational justice, in which mass atrocities such as forced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial execution, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide have occurred and yielded strong demands for justice and accountability. On the other hand, to understand the continent’s growing global engagement with transnational justice and ICL, we draw theoretical insights from more recent constructivist transnational justice scholars who

Africanizing Transnational Justice

95

examine cascades of justice and ICL in Africa differently from Sikkink’s globalist and universalist theory. The chapter relies on scholarship that reveals how African global development in transnational justice has challenged the narrative of Sikkink’s theory of a unidirectional cascade (Sirleaf 2017). In her own book on the subject, Kamari Clarke examines transnational justice cascades as negotiated assemblages of feelings about inequality and power. Her approach recognizes how narratives about the ICC in Africa reflect spheres of global power, as well as capture African feelings of justice or injustice that are complex and that emerge within an awareness of Africa’s political and economic challenges (Clarke 2019). Clarke’s lenses help us to understand the way that Africans engage transnational justice tropes through structures of power, history, and contingencies. For example, when Rwanda’s leader, Paul Kagame, implies that the ICC enables colonialism, slavery, and imperialism in Africa, we can see how Clarke’s affective transnational justice approach captures Kagame’s statements about the ICC as an embodied response constituting Africa’s agency and identity and linking it to a domain of practice (Clarke 2019). In subsequent sections of this chapter we begin by positioning Africa theoretically and historically within Sikkink’s and Clarke’s contending theories of cascades of justice. We then present empirical cases to show how African states have cooperated with cascades of transnational justice regimes and norms in modeling hybrid international courts such as the special courts for Sierra Leone (Charles Taylor), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the AU’s Extraordinary African Court prosecuting Chad’s Hissène Habré. Next, in a section on resistance, we present Africa’s criticism of norms of transnational justice, especially through the AU’s opposition to the ICC. To this effect, we focus on the issues of servingleader immunity in the Sudan-Bashir case, post-atrocity prosecution for victims in the Ivory Coast’s Gbagbo-Goudé case, and sovereign responsibility in Kenya’s Uhuru-Ruto case. We follow the unraveling of these events by demonstrating that what we see has been the fullest expression of African global actor agency in global justice in the continent’s development of the Afrocentric, African regional criminal court (RCC)—the Malabo Protocol. We conclude the chapter by revealing the continent’s attempts to achieve collective sovereign responsibility through the nurturing of the principles of African universality and self-determined international post-atrocity norms that exposit the continent’s contributions to transnational justice cascades, global development, and a new global politics. Table 5.1 provides a snapshot of cases and African Union responses to transnational justice events and cases covered in the chapter. Our evidence draws from eight cases of accused African justice cascade perpetrators from six AU countries. We examine each’s alleged crime, the international court that adjudicated the crime, the adjudication decisions reached, and the African Union response.

96

Africa’s New Global Politics

Table 5.1 African Cascades of Transnational Justice and Africa’s Responses

Accused Justice Cascade Perpetrator

Hissène Habré, former president of Chad Jean-Pierre Bemba, co–vice president and leader of the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia Omar al-Bashir, former president of Sudan Uhuru Kenyatta, president of Kenya William Ruto, vice president of Kenya Laurent Gbagbo, former president of Côte D’Ivoire Charles Blé Goudé, youth minister, Côte D’Ivoire Rose Kabuye, major of Kigali, member of parliament Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Uganda

Country Chad

Status

African Union Response

Acquitted

Observed

War crimes in Special Court of Sentenced Sierra Leone Sierra Leone, ICJ

Observed, resisted

Alleged Crime

Extraordinary African Court in Dakar, Senegal Democratic War crimes in International Republic Central Criminal Court of the African Congo Republic Liberia Sudan Kenya Kenya Côte D’Ivoire

Côte D’Ivoire Rwanda Uganda

War crimes in Chad

International Court Adjudicated

War crimes in International Darfur, Sudan Criminal Court

Sentenced

Warrant issued

Prosecuted

Resisted, defended

Crimes against International humanity in Criminal Court Kenya Crimes against International humanity in Criminal Court Kenya War crimes in International Côte D’Ivoire Criminal Court

Indicted, declined to prosecute Indicted, declined to prosecute Acquitted

War crimes in French National Rwanda Court

Warrant Observed, issued and protected dropped

War crimes in International Côte D’Ivoire Criminal Court

Acquitted

War crimes in International Uganda Criminal Court

Warrant issued

Resisted, protected, defended Resisted, protected, defended Resisted, defended Resisted, defended

Collaborated, resisted

Conceptualizing and Historicizing: Africa in Transnational Justice Defined by Kathryn Sikkink’s metaphor for the spread of accountability systems for state human rights war crimes throughout the globe, the justice cascade emerged from European conflict history latent in Europe’s wars in the 1800s. Then, various Hague and Geneva conventions developed the Law of Wars, criminalizing the mistreatment of wounded soldiers (1864), sailors (1907), prisoners of war (1929), and civilians in times of war (1949).

Africanizing Transnational Justice

97

These events provided the path toward the transnational justice movement that has now come to refer to the ways that countries emerging from periods of conflict and repression address large-scale or systematic human rights violations that the normal justice system would not be able to handle. Post-atrocity justice ensures that state perpetrators are held accountable for mass trauma that they have caused in post-conflict communities because of their war crimes. Transnational justice cascaded around the world after World War II, and its principles and norms for human rights accountability for victims of mass human rights crimes such as the Holocaust served as the inspiration for the founding of the United Nations by the end of World War II. Transnational justice norms were inspired by a tortuous but dynamic history that produced a substantial increase in criminal prosecution of offenders against human rights norms. After World War II, a globalist approach to international justice began to emerge that would reverse the norm of state sovereignty that had previously prevented international bodies from intervening into the internal affairs of foreign countries where rulers had been granted impunity for atrocities committed against their own peoples. After World War II, the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, a trial against leading Nazi perpetrators, spearheaded the spread of anti-atrocity norms and presented a founding model for war crime trials. Other criminalizing initiatives included the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the 1987 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (Savelsberg 2017). By the 1990s, international justice cascades expanded international prosecutions to international ad hoc courts such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the equivalent for Rwanda, the ICTR. Atrocity crimes of the 1990s encompassed genocide, crimes against humanity (including ethnic cleansing), and war crimes. In addition, hybrid models emerged, involving domestic and international features, in countries such as Cambodia, Sierra Leone, and the former East Timor that inspired the establishment of the globalist approach to international justice, making the way for the establishment of a new international adjudicating body, the International Criminal Court. In 1998, the Rome Statute was drafted, granting new ICC jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. While the Geneva Conventions constitute laws for international wars, or humanitarian law, the Rome Statute partially merged humanitarian law with human rights law. The ICC’s focus on human rights in Africa has positioned the continent to be at the center of the global justice cascade. Sikkink’s justice cascades have contributed to a globalist, values-based trend in international criminal law that is premised on two core themes in

98

Africa’s New Global Politics

international relations: the principle of responsible sovereignty (a state’s obligations and duties to one’s own citizens and other sovereign states) and the principle of universality (promoted as a common legal order for humankind as a whole whose features include the establishment of a hierarchy of norms, a value-oriented approach, a de-emphasis on national consent in the international law making process, and the creation of a body of international criminal law). Justice cascades human rights theory does, however, favor a skewed Western perspective in theorizing and governing transnational justice. After all, only three African countries were among the fiftyfive signatory nations that agreed to the principles of the UN Charter. While African countries subsequently joined the UN and subscribed to its charter’s values and principles upon independence, the reality that they did not participate in formulating, deliberating, or ratifying ICL principles is a significant factor that explains the continent’s evolving contestation of UN norms. Alternatively, within a colonial international system, justice for Africans meant self-determination and freedom from colonial rule as well as prosecution of perpetrators of enslavement and of the colonization of Africa. Africans developed alternative institutions such as the OAU’s African Court of Justice, to achieve their own notions of transnational justice. In doing so, the African experience with transnational justice mechanisms has sought to challenge the narrative of a unidirectional global justice cascade, particularly concerning its externalist interventionist focus. Further, by the millennium, African states began to put forth collective efforts to appropriate the cascade of transnational justice and thwart what John Mearsheimer (2019) has compellingly argued is the reality that international institutions, such as the ICC, are dominated and instrumentalized by the leading states. This is why African states use the African Union to reverse what they have considered to be encroaching interventionism into the continent in the name of governing transnational justice. Africa’s alternative global engagement in transnational justice has simultaneously fostered the growth of alternative scholarly approaches to the topic. Kamari Clarke presents a critical legal studies approach to ICL more closely adhering to the Third World Approaches to International Law model seeking to unpack and deconstruct the colonial legacies of international law and decolonize the lived realities of the peoples of the global South. This approach reveals how African states have contributed to the development of international law since the 1960s, when many states became independent and established the OAU. Since then, African states have been involved in the creation of new norms and reinterpreted or refashioned old ones through the adoption of multilateral lawmaking treaties and resolutions. In practice, the OAU/AU sought to build its regional justice institutions and principles on existing general international law although by pur-

Africanizing Transnational Justice

99

posefully giving certain rules and principles a specifically regional African orientation (Maluwa 2004, 232–238). Examples of African ICL treaties are the African Charter on Human People’s Rights established in 1981, which represented the first time an international instrument explicitly recognized a human right to a satisfactory environment. The charter is the first to articulate the notion of “people’s” rights as opposed to “human” rights. It also represents a first to import into the lexicon of human rights—the notion of third-generation rights and more controversially individual “duties” (Maluwa 2004). African states’ highest expression of the recreation of ICL was in 2017 when the AU adopted a communiqué that provided a detailed legal justification and a political strategy to encourage African states’ withdrawal from the ICC. The AU used the communiqué to relay to the world that African states would relentlessly sustain their undertaking of collective African political action as a means for exerting leverage over international institutions and deepening their global engagement. They would do so by navigating dirigisme global geopolitics (lobbying ICC actors), as well as launching their own recommendations to revise legal jurisprudence. To this end, the AU achieved its first accomplishment in contributing to an alternative model of ICL and transnational justice when it established its own international court in 2014 that would go head-to-head with the ICC. Referred to as the Malabo Protocol, the African Court sought to not only promote an African alternative to transnational distributive justice but also offer a regional model of ICL. The principle of Malabo sought to limit the utilization of international criminal law to advance the interests of Western states and to counteract perceived biases against Africa. It would allow the global governance of transnational justice to think more creatively about what the justice cascade could look like in its diversity— the types of claims, actors covered, as well as the appropriate levels of adjudication. Cooperating: Africa as a Model for Hybrid Courts— Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and Chad The African continent’s long history of engagement with the international system has produced an international relations cultural practice that has been referred to as hybrid—a closely interdependent (and many times codependent) cooperative relationship with the continent’s former colonizers, the United States, and international organizations, especially the UN. Both individual countries and the regional and subregional organizations have over decades since independence forged cooperative relations with international powers around global issues.

100

Africa’s New Global Politics

In the realm of transnational justice and international criminal law, it wasn’t until around 2011 that African states began to collectively reflect upon this long-standing cooperation that would help them to resist ICL policies and decisions. Before that, the continent—through select states, NGOs, and regional and subregional organizations—represented perhaps one of the most cooperative regions of the world in ICL. For example, in the 1990s, the UN’s “hybrid court” experimentation found its laboratory as a conflict resolution model for Africa’s 1990s post–Cold War wars. The socalled hybrid or mixed tribunals involved the combined effort of the international community and the national institutions of the country where the subject crimes had been committed. They typically employed both national and international judicial actors and incorporated both domestic and international law in their statutes. Three high-profile hybrid international courts that were established to resolve African conflicts reflect the continent’s cooperation in the governance of transnational justice: the Special Court of Sierra Leone (SCSL), the ICTR, and finally the most African-dominant hybrid court, the Extraordinary African Chambers of Senegal (EAC). These three courts represented the genre of hybrid international courts and international law pragmatism, defined as where foreign states (operating outside of the perpetrators’ and victims’ national territorial jurisdictions), international justice organizations (such as the UN’s ICJ), and African regional organizations (OAU, AU, ECOWAS, EAC, SADC) have cooperated with each other within the continent around the principle of universal jurisdiction, to prosecute governmental and military leaders of a country (perpetrators) for mass and high war crimes on behalf of Africa’s civilian victims. The International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda

The ICTR was established by the UN Security Council in 1994 in response to the war crimes committed by the government of Rwanda during the Rwandan genocide. The hybrid international court was set up to prosecute and hold persons responsible for genocide and other serious violations of international humanitarian law committed during the 1994 genocide. Located in Arusha, Tanzania, the ICTR operated for eighteen years, and its judges convicted and sentenced sixty-one individuals, primarily the architects, leaders, and orchestrators of the genocidal campaign. The ICTR has contributed to three distinguishing features of transnational justice and international law. First, procedurally the court was the first of its kind to prosecute a member nation through the political jurisdiction of the United Nations since the 1948 International Convention on Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. The UN created the ICTR as a judicial organ under its Security Council powers granted through Chapter

Africanizing Transnational Justice

101

VII of the UN Charter to take “action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression.” The purpose for the creation of the ICTR was to punish “serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of Rwanda and Rwandan citizens responsible for genocide and other such violations committed in the territory of neighboring states.” Second, the ICTR was established as a precedent, being the very first time an international judicial organ was given competence for judging violations of international humanitarian law committed in the context of an internal country conflict. According to Article 28 of the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, “States shall cooperate with the [ICTR] in the investigation and prosecution of persons accused of committing serious violations of international humanitarian law.” As such, African states, including Rwanda, Kenya, DRC, and Uganda especially, had a duty to cooperate with the ICTR, including with its requests for arrest and surrender (Yombo Nyako 2011). Third, the ICTR pioneered substantive and procedural international criminal law, especially on the topic of genocide, and acted as a precursor for the ICC. The tribunal represented the first international judgment to interpret the definition of genocide, including affirming rape as a genocidal act. On September 2, 1998, the tribunal found Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of Rwanda’s Taba commune, guilty of nine of the fifteen counts proffered against him, including genocide and genocidal rape. The Akayesu judgment represented the first interpretation and application by an international court of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The court defined rape as “a physical invasion of a sexual nature committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive,” and sexual assault was defined as constituting acts of genocide insofar as they were committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a targeted group. As such, the tribunal found that sexual assault formed an integral part of the process of destroying the Tutsi ethnic group and that the rape was systematic and had been perpetrated against Tutsi women only, manifesting the specific intent required for those acts to constitute genocide (Prosecutor v. JeanPaul Akayesu 1996). Fourth, with the Jean Kambanda case, involving the Rwandan prime minister in charge during the genocide, the court was the first international judgment against a head of government (Strauss 2006). As prime minister and head of government of Rwanda from April 8, 1994, to July 17, 1994, Kambanda had pled guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment by the ICTR in 1998 for presiding over meetings of the Council of Ministers at which the massacres committed against the Tutsi civilian population were discussed and failing to take action to stop them.

102

Africa’s New Global Politics

While the Rwandan genocide began and ended within three months (100 days) in 1994, Sierra Leone and Liberia’s civil wars began in 1991 and would not be declared officially ended until 2002 (in the case of Sierra Leone). As such, the hybrid international court established to prosecute the high crimes of Sierra Leone’s accountable leader–perpetrators of the war was not established until June 12, 2000, when Sierra Leone’s president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah wrote a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan asking the international community to try those responsible for crimes during the conflict. Subsequently in August of the same year, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1315 requesting that the Secretary-General start negotiations with the Sierra Leonean government to create a special court. Established by the government of Sierra Leone, the UN Secretariat, and the UN Security Council, the SCSL had the jurisdiction to try any persons who committed crimes against humanity against civilians that included murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, or any other form of sexual violence; persecution based on politics, race, ethnicity, or religion; and other “inhumane acts.” The Special Court of Sierra Leone, referred to as the Special Court, remained dogged by controversy and illegitimacy despite its most highprofile success in prosecuting those who bore the greatest responsibility for serious violations of international humanitarian law in the acts of former Liberian president Charles Taylor for his role in perpetrating mass crimes in support of the Revolutionary United Front during the Sierra Leonean War after November 1996. The Special Court has been heralded for bringing post-conflict “closure” in the form of “transitional justice” mechanisms in Sierra Leone. The court sought to punish the leadership or command positions, people who were in a position to have “planned, instigated, ordered, committed or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of” war crimes. Among the judges were two Sierra Leoneans and others from African states, Europe, and North America. David Crane, a British lawyer, was appointed as the court’s chief prosecutor. The court indicted Foday Sankoh and a popular member of Kabbah’s government, Hinga Norman, the commander of the Civil Defense Forces and the former deputy minister of defense, as well as the former Armed Forces Ruling Council junta leader, Johnny Paul Koroma. The SCSL established two significant legacies for transnational justice and international criminal law. For universal justice and ICL, however, the court pioneered a first procedural significance in that it was constituted as a hybrid body—part international, part national. To this end, it functioned distinctively from the ICTR in providing a cheaper and more expeditious alternative to the fully international tribunal of the type used for Rwanda. States The Special Court of Sierra Leone

Africanizing Transnational Justice

103

had been somewhat disillusioned by the existing war crimes tribunals for Rwanda (ICTR) due to its burgeoning budgets, slow progress, and perceived agency slack and were thus reluctant to create another. Then, UN SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan, who championed the idea of a Sierra Leone tribunal, convinced a reluctant Security Council to set up the Special Court, seen as an independent third-party court that would uphold willing states’ and international organizations’ committed norm of universal jurisdiction. For African states, the Special Court initiated their concerns to stop cooperating with the UN around transnational justice and perhaps precipitated a precursor to African resistance to the ICC by 2010. This spoke to a second significance of the Special Court regarding its modicum of achieving transnational justice as a tool for conflict resolution. Shortly after Liberian president Charles Taylor arrived in Accra, Ghana, for peace talks to end his country’s civil war—the talks were sponsored by the African Union and the UN—the Special Court unveiled an indictment that accused Taylor of bearing “the greatest responsibility” for the decade-long war in Sierra Leone, and calling on the Ghanaian authorities to have him arrested and sent to Sierra Leone. However, the Ghanaian government, embarrassed at this request, ignored the indictment and sent Taylor back to Monrovia in a Ghanaian government plane. African leaders sponsoring the talks were also embarrassed by the call for indictment with many of them viewing the indictment as an overzealous prosecutor’s (O’Campo’s) “slight” to African leadership in its own peace efforts that would jeopardize an important peace initiative intended to end Liberia’s carnage. The court’s initial attempt to arrest Charles Taylor at a 1996 peace and reconciliation conference organized in Accra, Ghana, organized by ECOWAS, the AU, and the UN to resolve the war in Liberia, invoked an early debate about the viability of international impunity courts as preferable conflict resolution mechanisms for civil wars in deeply divided and politicized state-societies. The “peace versus justice” debate began as a deliberation over how societies emerging from political violence and repressive rule would address human rights abuses committed during those repressive regimes and conflicts. On the side of the international human rights community, proponents expressed a moral and legal duty to prosecute the perpetrators of the gravest international crimes as defined by international law and that acting on this duty was necessary to deter the recurrence of those crimes and consolidate post-conflict peace. The Special Court’s prosecution of Charles Taylor would be seen to achieve this goal. On the other hand, the conveners of the Accra Peace Agreement Ceasefire and the Lomé Agreement attempting to reconcile warring parties, especially state perpetrators and violent, nonstate rebel groups in both the Sierra Leonean and Liberian civil wars, warned of the potentially destabilizing consequences of insisting on prosecution when peace negotiations appeared

104

Africa’s New Global Politics

to be the most viable means of political change. Retributive approaches to post-conflict justice would exacerbate continuing political divisions thereby impeding reconciliation and peace (Rodman 2011). Taylor’s high-profile prosecution, seen as a victory for the cascades of justice and anti-impunity human rights movement by the Special Court, revealed the court’s pioneering significance as a hybrid international court and an African contribution to ICL. This significance speaks to the international legitimacy of the Special Court especially in its successful prosecution of Taylor as on the one hand a non-native (to the Hague) from Sierra Leone and thus a foreigner to the court’s jurisdictional scope. During his trial, Taylor accused the international community of selectively targeting African heads of state with prosecutions while ignoring offenses committed by US forces in Iraq. In Taylor’s defense, his lawyer, Courtney Griffiths, complained that Africans were being sent for trial and detention thousands of miles away from their homes to Europe “in handcuffs and chains,” a judicial intervention, which he said amounted to “a 21st-century form of colonialism” in the name of the lofty ideals of international criminal law. Griffith’s clarion call would become a precursor to the later resistance by African states to the ICC. The Taylor saga reminded them of the court’s international overreach and neocolonialism. The Extraordinary African Chambers

For African states, the Extraordinary African Chambers (EAC) ad hoc court would leverage the aspirations as well as avoid the pitfalls of the continent’s cooperation with hybrid models of transnational anti-impunity justice cascades and international criminal law. While the court was established within the Senegalese courts, it was a truly international court established in conjunction with the African Union and the International Court of Justice. The EAC was established in 2013 in Senegal with the mandate of prosecuting the former Chadian dictator, Hissène Habré, for international crimes committed in his country between 1982 and 1990, the period of Habré’s presidency, during which an estimated 40,000 people were killed or disappeared. The hybrid court consisted of three distinctive features as an international court whose background was fully regional, unrelated to the United Nations’ post-conflict peacebuilding activities, as were the models of the ICTR and the SLSC. A first is the revelation that as a nascent model for a regional-international court, the EAC fulfilled a global partnership among several international organizations, including the AU, the Court of Justice of the ECOWAS, the International Court of Justice, the Government of Belgium, and the European Union. The EAC could be viewed as a measure taken by Senegal to comply with certain international obligations

Africanizing Transnational Justice

105

enshrined in the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment. In this international collaboration, as a national state, Senegal acted as the custodial state, where Habré had spent several decades in exile from Chad. The EAC rendered Senegal’s acts the power of universal jurisdiction to prosecute Habré instead of Chad, his native country. In this regard, the EAC constituted a novel body as a mixed criminal tribunal proper meant to pursue new uses and purposes. Unlike the ICTR and other international criminal tribunals, the EAC tribunal’s activities had legal effect between individuals rather than between states, making the EAC the first of its kind of a new criminal tribunal, reflecting a process of the regionalization of international criminal justice (Cimiotta 2015). A second distinction revealed a nascent expression of agency by AU member states—Senegal and Chad—and an emerging African Union. While cooperating with international criminal law and anti-impunity justice cascades litigation, advocating for Senegal and Chad, the AU would also begin to assert its own jurisdictional control over the process of prosecuting African perpetrators. To this end, the EAC would be seen for its contribution to the advancement of innovation in institution-making in the area of international criminal law. The judicial and diplomatic path leading to the prosecution of Habré involved various states, international courts, regional organizations, and expert bodies working under human rights treaties (Cimiotta 2015). As such, the complicated interplay of negotiations among local, national, regional, and global actors, states, and institutions amassed to prosecute Habré, through the EAC platform, is worth understanding for its distinctive contributions to the global governance of transnational justice. The first request for Habré’s prosecution was in May 1992 by the Chadian National Commission of Inquiry established by Habré’s successor, Idriss Déby, who accused Habré’s regime of instances of mass enforced disappearances, political killings, arbitrary detentions, and systematic tortures. In 2000, some Chadian nationals filed a criminal complaint alleging international crimes in the Regional Tribunal of Dakar where Habré had self-exiled. Habré was indicted by this process for aiding and abetting crimes of torture and crimes against humanity and was placed under house arrest. However, the Dakar Appeals Court quashed the indictment, finding that its national penal code did not apply to the charges brought against Habré and that Senegalese judges could not assert jurisdiction over acts of torture committed by a foreigner abroad. As a result, Habré was released from detention and kept under surveillance (Cimiotta 2015). Simultaneously in 2000 and 2001, some Chadian citizens and Belgian nationals of Chadian origin brought Habré’s alleged crimes before a Belgian court causing Belgium to file an extradition request for Habré from Senegal in 2005, following an issuance of an international arrest warrant by the Tribunal of Brussels. However, the Dakar

106

Africa’s New Global Politics

Appeals Court refused to adjudicate the Belgian extradition request, countering that, as a former head of state, Habré should be granted jurisdictional immunity pursuant to customary international law for acts allegedly carried out in the exercise of his functions (Cimiotta 2015). To this end, an association of victims of Habré’s dictatorship sought redress directly from the UN’s Committee Against Torture (CAT). The association complained of Senegal’s failure to perform its obligation to take legal action against an alleged torturer, given Habré’s presence on its territory. The association also complained of Senegal’s failure to extradite Habré to Belgium, pursuant to the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment. CAT granted the motion on May 19, 2006, charging Senegal with a breach of compliance with Article 7 of CAT’s constitution, citing Senegal’s refusal to accept an extradition request originating from a party to the CAT (Belgium). As such, CAT recommended that Senegal take appropriate measures to implement the convention in its domestic legal order and to comply with its obligation to prosecute or extradite Habré. In an unprecedented move, refusing extradition, the Senegalese government referred the problem of prosecuting the former Chadian president to the African Union (Cimiotta 2015). The AU’s involvement would prove a decisive step toward the EAC’s establishment in July 2006 as the AU Assembly of heads of state and government tasked Senegal with bringing Habré to trial “on behalf of Africa” before a competent Senegalese court. Nonetheless, Habré’s trial still could not proceed because of insufficient financial resources. In 2010, the AU, the EU, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and a group of Western states made financial commitments in the amount of $8.6 million to the proposed prosecution. The AU Assembly thereby proceeded to advise Senegal on the creation of an ad hoc tribunal, in collaboration with the AU, and tasked the AU Commission to consult “with the Government of Senegal in order to finalize the modalities for the expeditious trial of Hissene Habre through a special tribunal with an international character consistent with the ECOWAS Court” (Cimiotta 2015, 183). A final agreement was reached on August 24, 2012, requiring Senegal to incorporate the EAC into its judicial system and to vest it with jurisdiction over the international crimes committed in Chad during the period in which Habré was in power. Essentially, the agreement implemented the AU’s plan as shaped by the judgments issued by the ECOWAS Court and the ICJ to bring Habré before a special tribunal, composed of Senegalese and foreign judges, which was to be incorporated into the Senegalese judiciary. To this end, the ICJ found that Senegal had engaged its international responsibility (Cimiotta 2015). The EAC was a first in many areas of transnational justice. It was the first time an African head of state faced justice in another African country. The court represented the first time that an

Africanizing Transnational Justice

107

African court operated under the principle of universal jurisdiction. It was the first international court in which victims played an important role in bringing the case to trial as well as participated significantly in proceedings. Most importantly, the EAC has been branded as a first for its successful prosecution of Hissène Habré, who was found guilty and sentenced to a fifty-year imprisonment term in 2016. To this end, African states have heralded the EAC trial as an “African solution to African problems” that could be built upon (Elone 2015). Resisting: Africa’s Challenge and the ICC— Sudan, Kenya, and Ivory Coast African states were still cooperating with transnational justice global governance bodies when they joined in the establishment of the ICC in 2002 by way of the Rome Statute, a multilateral treaty signed by 123 member countries. Nevertheless, differently from the hybrid international courts established by a collaboration of international actors, including individuals, states, regional organizations, and international organizations, the ICC was established as a permanent international court structured as an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal mandated with the jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. To this end, the ICC would be a truly international court with a globalist mission, though paradoxically intended to complement existing national judicial systems. The ICC’s jurisdiction would be exercised only when national courts were unwilling or unable to prosecute criminals or when the United Nations Security Council or individual states referred situations to the court. Despite the reality that members of the African Union consist of the largest bloc of countries that are signatories to the Rome Statute, through the regional organization African states have raised significant criticisms of the ICC that can be grouped into five concerns: (1) the politicization of the court, (2) its interventionism into African regional and national sovereignty, (3) its nonuniversality and illegitimacy in promoting transnational justice norms, (4) its ill suitability in prosecuting local/national crimes, and (5) its almost sole focus on the African continent. Each criticism stems from the others and underscores African states’ frustration with the court’s seemingly singular focus on the continent. In the court’s early establishment, African states, as well as the then newly reconfigured AU, continued their cooperation with the international community’s leadership in advancing international criminal law and antiimpunity transnational justice. About a dozen African states were influential players in the drafting process leading to the Rome Statute, and they

108

Africa’s New Global Politics

generally advanced progressive positions in support of the court, including Botswana, Zambia, South Africa, and Kenya, who were prominent norm entrepreneurs (advocates) of the anti-atrocity and -impunity human rights advocacy (Mills and Bloomfield 2018). Indeed, Uganda in 2003 and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2004 referred the first two cases to the ICC prosecutor, and they attracted little adverse comment in Africa, although both cases remain controversial. With the case of Uganda, President Museveni referred the Joseph Kony case (head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, considered a terrorist group) to the ICC, which issued an indictment and a warrant of arrest. However, unable to find Kony, who remains in hiding, the government of Uganda has since set up its own criminal court and has signed a peace agreement with the LRA thereby rescinding its request to the ICC, asking it to withdraw the Kony warrant so that the country can pursue its own peace through its own state and national reconciliation measures. The ICC’s case against the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Jean-Pierre Bemba, leader of the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo rebel group and former co–vice president of the 2003–2006 transitional government, was much more controversial than the Ugandan case. On May 23, 2008, a pretrial chamber of the ICC found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Bemba bore individual criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Central African Republic between October 26, 2002, and March 15, 2003. Bemba was arrested in Belgium in 2008 after the ICC issued an international arrest warrant for him for failing to stop his rebel forces from killing and raping people in neighboring Central African Republic in 2002 and 2003. Bemba was convicted in 2016 and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. However, Bemba won a long legal battle to overturn his conviction, compelling ICC judges to agree with his appeal that he could not be held criminally responsible for crimes committed by his troops. He was released in 2018. The Bemba case and the growing penchant by Western governments and the ICC to issue arrest warrants for African leaders and politicians in the name of anti-impunity atrocities, strengthened discontent among African states, who began to resist the principle of transnational justice cascades and universal jurisdiction (Mills and Bloomfield 2018). African states would view universal jurisdiction as a penchant for foreign domestic courts (mostly European ones) trying “alien” (African) citizens for crimes deemed so terrible that they warranted being treated as “international” crimes despite that the Rome Statute provided for national courts to try citizens, and failing this, for an international court to do so. Rwanda emerged as one of the strongest resisters to the ICC’s universal jurisdiction mandate when Brussels arrested the chief of protocol to President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Rose Kabuye, in Germany, who extradited

Africanizing Transnational Justice

109

her to Belgium for trial for crimes she was alleged to have committed in Rwanda (Mills and Bloomfield 2018). The arrest was not well-received in Africa, and it began to sour relations between Africa and Europe over the issue of sovereign immunity. Kagame took up the issue at the UN, framing it as an abuse of universal jurisdiction by European states aimed at humiliating African political leaders. African states complained that European states relied on universal jurisdiction to harass African leaders (du Plessis, Maluwa, and O’Reilly 2013). Kabuye’s arrest warrant was dropped by French officials in 2009. The ICC’s indictment of Sudan’s former leader Omar al-Bashir, and later Kenya’s elected president Uhuru Kenyatta and vice president William Ruto, as well as Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo and youth minister Blé Goudé, all sitting African leaders at the time of their indictment, galvanized full-throated African resistance to the ICC and to the universal jurisdiction principle of international criminal law. The AU criticism of the ICC evolved into the adoption of a number of resolutions reflecting the resistance to the ICC by AU member states. In 2008, the AU reacted to the increased use of universal jurisdiction in European states against African states by adopting a resolution denouncing certain Western governments and courts for abusing the doctrine of universal jurisdiction. The resolution urged AU member states not to cooperate with any Western governments that issued warrants of arrest against African officials and personalities in its name. Sudan, Bashir, Against Universal Jurisdiction and for Sovereign Immunity

The watershed moment for the AU’s deteriorating relationship with the ICC came in March 2009, following the issuance of the first arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan. The arrest warrant caused the relationship between the ICC and the AU to severely deteriorate as members of the AU felt that the issuance of the arrest warrant was an impediment to the organization’s regional efforts to foster peace and reconciliation processes in Sudan. The AU also questioned the legality of the ICC’s indictment of a sitting head of state and whether the Rome Statute could legitimately extinguish diplomatic immunity in states that are not parties to it, such as Sudan. To this end, on July 1, 2008, the AU passed a resolution alleging the ICC’s abuse of the universal principle arguing that it had violated the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the states that had been issued arrest warrants of its leaders and military personnel. The AU’s Peace and Security Council had requested a deferral of the Bashir arrest to be pursued after peace agreements had been completed and after Bashir left office; the ICC denied this request. Subsequently, in retaliation, the AU Assembly recommended that AU members withdraw from the ICC as a final form of resistance. It

110

Africa’s New Global Politics

should be noted that the withdrawal proposal was defeated by a majority of AU members and was never adopted. The AU Assembly tried to have the Bashir warrant withdrawn again in July 2009. In doing so, the AU embarked on several decisions that would structure and strengthen African resistance to the ICC among its members. It called for an African court to be created to try mass atrocity crimes. It called on African state parties not to cooperate with ICC arrest and surrender orders. Furthermore, the AU’s High-Level Panel on Darfur, established by its PSC, called for the establishment of a hybrid court with Sudanese and non-Sudanese African judges to be created to “Africanize” international criminal justice. While these resistance measures calling for the Rome Statute’s amendment were presented before the United Nations Security Council, by the middle of 2009, the AU had shifted its resistance to the ICC’s Assembly of States Parties, demanding four levels of reform (Mills and Bloomfield 2018). The reform demands were as follows: (1) the interests of peace should be considered alongside the interests of justice in prosecutorial guidelines for when to investigate, or not; (2) the power of the UNSC to refer cases should remain; (3) the UN General Assembly should be empowered to defer ICC proceedings when the UNSC fails to make a decision; and (4) there should be a discussion regarding whether the leaders of nonparties had their immunity removed by the Rome Statute. Kenya, Uhuru, Ruto, Politicizing Transnational Justice, and Pan-Africanizing Resistance

When the ICC indicted Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta and Vice President William Ruto while they were running for office in January 2012, both Kenya and African states collectively launched their fullest scale of resistance against the ICC brand of justice in Africa. Kenyatta vociferously lobbied the African Union to challenge the ICC’s arrest warrants, arguing that the court was not merely “race hunting” (as stated by Prime Minister Desalegn of Ethiopia) but had become a politicized tool of Western postcolonial imperialism in Africa whose goal in indicting and attempting to prosecute sitting leaders like him and his vice president sought to exercise regime change. Initially, the ICC was resilient in maintaining charges against the Kenyan rulers, causing Kenyatta to make history as the first sitting president of a nation to appear before the court on charges of crimes against humanity for his alleged direct involvement in the violence that followed the elections of 2007–2008, when more than 1,000 people were killed and more than 500,000 were displaced. Kenyatta and Ruto ferociously denied the validity of the charges laid against them, and instead rallied African states to oppose the ICC for being a “neo-colonial organization” guilty of

Africanizing Transnational Justice

111

overzealous “Western intervention” into Kenya’s domestic affairs. As head of state, and thus country member of the AU Assembly of heads of state, Kenyatta became an AU ambassador for a cause that the AU had already been embroiled in against the ICC’s biased African case selection and its unfairly targeting Africans and African leaders for prosecution. The indictments of Kenya’s leaders occurred while the African Union was embroiled in a standoff with the ICC over Bashir. To this end, Kenyatta found a willing interlocutor among his peers at the AU. On October 12, 2013, the AU Assembly issued a declaration on the need to safeguard the constitutional order, stability, and integrity of member states against the ICC by ensuring that “no charges shall be commenced or continued before any International Court or Tribunal against any serving AU Head of State or Government or anybody acting or entitled to act in such a capacity during their terms of office” (African Union 2013 ). Furthermore, the AU Assembly called for suspension of the trials of Kenyatta and Ruto until they had completed their terms of office. The AU Assembly also stipulated that any AU member state that wished to refer a case to the ICC may inform and seek the advice of the African Union first (African Union 2013, para. 10[viii]). In a direct challenge to a case before the International Criminal Court, the AU Assembly decided “that President Uhuru Kenyatta would not appear before the ICC until such time as the concerns raised by the AU and its member states have been adequately addressed by the UN Security Council and the ICC” (African Union 2013, para. 10[xi]).This in effect confirmed that Kenyatta had found a willing partner in the AU in terms of taking on and amplifying the criticisms of the ICC’s interventions on the African continent, just as Bashir had achieved before him. On November 15, 2013, at the 7,060th meeting of the UN Security Council, a resolution seeking to request the ICC under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to defer the investigation and prosecution of President Kenyatta and Deputy President Ruto for twelve months, in accordance with Article 16 of the Rome Statute, failed to win a majority (Murithi 2015, 73–97). Kenya’s and the AU’s resistance tactics appeared to put pressure on the court, causing the ICC to formally withdraw all charges against President Uhuru Kenyatta, and in 2015 charges were dropped against Vice President Ruto, citing in both cases an inability by the court to compile evidence to support their cases. Ivory Coast, Gbagbo and Blé Goudé, and the Politicization of War Crimes

In 2011 when Laurent Gbagbo and Blé Goudé were first arrested by the ICC, the AU’s resistance to the ICC had become somewhat normative as African states became more confident of their opposition to the court and

112

Africa’s New Global Politics

especially charging it openly with politicization. In criticizing the sitting president of Cote D’Ivoire’s capture by French troops and extradition to the Hague to the ICC for trial for crimes against humanity, a spokesperson for the AU stated, We are witnessing a deeper sense of divergence between the AU and the Court [ICC]. Legal and political differences are increasing and we believe that this can only be mended if the Court will revisit some of its legal arguments that disregard other branches of international law. Coming to this particular case of the trial of Gbagbo and Blé Goudé, as much as the AU strongly believes that perpetrators should be held accountable for their crimes, it also firmly believes that due process of the law and the right of the accused should be respected and protected. (AU 2013)

The ICC charges against Laurent Gbagbo and his deputy Blé Goudé emerged as a result of an electoral conflict and a second civil war between Gbagbo as incumbent president and Alassane Ouattara, the opposition candidate, that began in Ivory Coast in early 2011. The conflict cost over 3,000 lives and ended when French troops helped Ouattara’s forces capture Abidjan, and with it, Gbagbo. In October 2011, the ICC’s then prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, opened an investigation into the violence in the Ivory Coast amid reports that both sides—forces loyal to Gbagbo and to Ouattara—were committing atrocities against civilians. Only former president Gbagbo, his wife Simone Gbagbo, and his deputy Blé Goudé were charged with counts of crimes against humanity. The arrests culminated with Gbagbo and eventually Blé being transferred to the ICC to stand trial until their acquittal in 2019. The Ivorian leaders’ trial exposed the now classic concerns with the nature and inherent limitations of international criminal trials, particularly in terms of the unevenness in the accountability that they offer (Rosenberg 2017b). The very nature of Gbagbo’s trial by an international court accused by many of serving the interests of dominant states fit perfectly with the AU’s African bias criticism of the ICC as being a tool used by the international community (in this case France and the UN) to achieve its political interests in the region. To this end, Gbagbo became a hero in the eyes of his many Ivorian supporters who called him a “hostage” of the ICC rather than a prisoner. As such, the trial especially underscored the disjuncture between the legal categories of victim/perpetrator/enforcer and the messy social reality of collective political violence. The acquittal also underscored the discrepancy in narrowly determining individual criminal responsibility for particular acts. The politicized context surrounding the trial, whereby Gbagbo, a sitting African president, is deemed a warlord and terrorist by French and UN forces and captured and transferred to the ICC, reduced the court’s legitimacy as being not only unable to establish the truth but unable to establish

Africanizing Transnational Justice

113

a record of criminal responsibility for Gbagbo and Blé. The truth of the crisis was obscured when the ICC exonerated other types of responsibility and targeted the Gbagbo political side for atrocity crimes. As such, the ICC was accused of ignoring the crimes committed by the Alassane Ouattara camp. For Gbagbo supporters, who through his Ivorian Popular Front party, defended the president throughout the eight-year detention, argued that Gbagbo’s alleged crimes could only be properly judged based on a reading of history that highlighted the political responsibility held by pro-Ouattara forces, France, and the United Nations for the decade-long crisis and ultimately for Gbagbo’s arrest (Rosenberg 2017a). The February 2019 acquittal and ordered release of Laurent Gbagbo and Blé Goudé by the ICC judges during the prechambers trial dealt a final blow to the credibility of the ICC’s prospects of prosecuting African leaders for mass atrocity crimes. The judges gave four summary reasons for their decision to acquit: (1) The prosecution did not demonstrate that there was a “common plan” to keep Gbagbo in power or commission crimes against civilians. (2) The prosecution did not substantiate the alleged existence of a policy aimed at attacking a civilian population. (3) The prosecution did not show that the crimes as alleged in the charges were committed in accordance with or pursuant to the policy of a state or organization aimed at attacking the civilian population. (4) The prosecution did not show that public speeches by Gbagbo or Blé Goudé ordered, solicited, or encouraged the commission of the alleged crimes, or that any of the accused knowingly or intentionally contributed to the commission of such crimes (Rosenberg 2017b). For the AU, the ICC’s failure to prosecute Gbagbo and Goudé was vindication of its resistance and full-fledged opposition to the international justice body. African states would now promote and lobby for ICC reform. The African Union’s legal counsel, Dr. Namira Negm, stated that cases like Gbagbo and Blé Goudé’s that ended in acquittal for lack of evidence tarnish the credibility of the court. She said it is an important lesson that before issuing arrest warrants against political leaders that may result in their incarceration for many years, lengthy trials, huge costs, and high expectations on the part of victims, prosecutors must be satisfied that their cases against the defendants, in the absence of rebuttal evidence, establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt (Davies 2019). The AU used the acquittal to reinforce its own preferred mechanism for bringing justice to the postelection violence in 2010. The AU criticized the court’s deficiencies in not being able to compile evidence for its case despite eight years of preparation. Negm inquired of the ICC, “Shouldn’t the Courtroom be far more prudent in indicting political leaders without strong proof?” (Davies 2019). Calling for the court’s reform, the AU maintained its stance that the ICC was biased against Africa, claiming that the

114

Africa’s New Global Politics

court had dropped its decision to prosecute US war crimes in Afghanistan because of the political implications such a trial would entail in inhibiting the collection of evidence and proof and witness testimony, and yet not giving the same consideration to its mostly African indictments. Negm noted that after eight years of imprisonment of Gbagbo and Blé, to acquit for absence of proof tarnishes the trustworthiness of the court. The court ought to have never indicted the leaders without evidence. Negm also noted that the fact that the ICC’s ruling that Laurent Gbagbo had no case to answer, and that there was inadequate evidence to convict him of crimes toward humanity underpinned a deeply rooted dilemma for the courtroom and prosecution with regard to Africans. She added, Therefore, it is an important lesson that just before issuing arrest warrants from leaders that may possibly result in their incarceration for lots of several years, lengthy trials, enormous charges and superior expectations on the element of victims, prosecutors have to be glad that their circumstances in opposition to the defendants, in the absence of rebutting proof, build guilt over and above an affordable doubt. (Davies 2019)

Representing: Promoting Afrocentric ICL Through the African Regional Criminal Court The culmination of African states’ variegated though evolving attempts to engage in transnational justice movements resulted in the establishment of a counter to the ICC—the African Regional Criminal Court (RCC). Those efforts led to both a new dirigisme form of compliance with and contribution to the advancement of international criminal law. The AU foresaw “an alternative to the International Criminal Court (ICC) that consists of extending and strengthening the jurisdiction of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), to deal with international crimes committed in Africa” (AU 2003). In October 2013, the AU had begun to move forward on creating its alternative international criminal court in the form of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights (ACJHR), which would be a merging of the existing African Court of Justice and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Significantly, in June 2014, an AU summit voted to amend the ACJHR protocol, referring to it as the Malabo Protocol, which would expand the jurisdiction of the court to include international crimes, such as genocide and crimes against humanity. The AU Assembly also voted to exclude sitting heads of state and government from the new court’s jurisdiction. The AU developed the Malabo Protocol to provide for the expansion of the jurisdiction of the African Court of Human Rights and Justice to deal with criminal jurisdiction over the international crimes of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that were also under the preserve of the ICC.

Africanizing Transnational Justice

115

To this end, the AU had clearly become a creative resister of the ICC. It sought to protect sitting African leaders from the anti-impunity norm and establish African regional jurisdiction for transnational justice in direct opposition to the ICC’s universal jurisdiction. Rooted in the African Charter’s (Banjul Charter’s) African values and norms about rights—particularly stipulating collective rights and individual duties—the Malabo Protocol would assert a challenge to the ICC’s universality of international human rights law. The AU’s African Court established a regional court in Africa with criminal jurisdiction, which would give immunity from criminal prosecution to serving AU heads of state and senior state officials, while strengthening national criminal jurisdictions to enable Africans to prosecute international crimes in Africa (Ssenyonjo and Nakitto 2016). Norm localization was taking place: African actors were adapting the anti-impunity norm to fit “local normative priors.” Adopted in 2014 at its Heads of State and Government meeting in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, the AU’s Amendments to the Protocol of the ACHPR Statute, otherwise known as the Malabo Protocol, interject African states’ now full-blown expression of African agency in global politics and international relations. Malabo represents the continent’s increasing confidence to engage its interests globally on behalf of Africa. The protocol functioned as the African region’s own version of the universality principle and was named as the Model Law on Universal Jurisdiction or AU Model Law (Matias 2018). The AU Model Law offered to African states a malleable template for developing universal jurisdiction legislation to adapt to their domestic peculiarities. The law ensured that African laws on universal jurisdiction were harmonized in content to minimize potential clashes similar to those brought about by the universality laws of Western states (Dube 2015). In producing its own model law on universality jurisdiction, which African states could adapt to their own sociopolitical circumstances and legal contexts, the AU institutionally positioned its members to be in control of the development of international criminal law. Instead of leaving the subject of universality to a group of Western states, the AU was now using its agency to actively influence the growth of its own branch of law (Dube 2015). Conclusion: Contributing to Global Justice and Criminal Law By the millennium, in many respects, the African region had become an international region that bore the face of the transnational justice movement in significant but variable ways. The Rwandan genocide, the Sierra Leonean and Liberian civil wars, ethnic conflict in Darfur, Sudan, and in

116

Africa’s New Global Politics

the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as electoral violence in Kenya, all constituted conflicts that had global governance, humanitarian, and transnational implications. There have been a range of international responses to these global events, ranging from African states, African civil society justice movements, European regional policies, international governmental organization treaty agreements, international adjudication conflict management policies, and, increasingly in the twenty-first century, African regional responses. The African regional response to transnational justice movements and events in the continent has been one of the most significant internationalist interventions by the collective action and institutionalism of African states under the rubric of the African Union. While normative global governance institutions are developed upon principles, philosophies, and histories that still interweave liberal statist versus liberal globalist tropes, the AU’s expansion of its African Court for Human Rights and Justice to include international criminal law and transnational justice is as well an important African contribution to regional internationalism. In this chapter, we have seen how African states have engaged and transformed international criminal law and transnational justice through various modes of affective embodiments, emotional regimes, and geopolitical strategies (Clarke 2019). The states’ representative regional internationalist body, the African Union, has recognized how to amass global power through the conjunctions among a series of events that have engaged international criminal law and embodied imaginaries that have included claims of neocolonialism and racial bias (Clarke 2019). To this end, in advancing its own efforts to contribute to the conflict resolution of mass atrocity crimes and leadership impunity for African victims, the AU has led African states in cooperative, resistant, and alternative institutions and policies in transnational and global justice. As such, the African regional response to its own justice cascades has not been solely resistant and oppositional as some scholars have cited in depicting the African Union as anti-norm entrepreneurs because of the Union’s visible and aggressive critique of the ICC in the second decade of the new millennium. With the current chapter, we have seen how that response has been multilayered and diverse, characteristic of what we have presented as cooperative, resistant, contestant, and alternatively representative. The continent’s multilayered engagement, especially in consideration of its role in strengthening Africa’s regional internationalism and increased visibility in global politics, confirms Clarke’s (2019) constructivist approach used to understand transnational justice and international criminal law. Africa’s cooperative, resistant, and inventive engagement with the ICJ, ICC, EAC, SCSL, European states, and African states and regions has been viewed through various modes of affective embodiments, emotional regimes, and geopolitical strate-

Africanizing Transnational Justice

117

gies represented by the African Union (Clarke 2019). In doing so, we see a fuller picture of the continent’s global engagement in ICL. African states’ contestation with the International Criminal Court has been an important internationalist accomplishment for the continent that has further propelled it to new visibilities in geopolitics. African transnational justice has developed as a counterpoint to what is seen as hegemonic structures of Western approaches to international justice (Clarke 2019). Africans have exposed the limitations and legitimacy of ICC liberal universalism. The ICC’s acquittal of Laurent Gbagbo and Blé Goude, as well as Jean-Pierre Bemba on appeal, the complete withdrawal from the Kenyatta/Ruto prosecutions, the evasion of Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir from prosecution, the expansion of its cases to other regions including Western Europe and Asia, the strengthening of its prosecution and evidencegathering capacity under its new African prosecutor Fatima Bensouda, and finally its—and other international community organs’—adjustments to its discourses around universality and transnational justice, have all occurred as a result of the AU’s contestation. The ICC’s demise need not be seen as a reversal in global democracy and human rights but an acknowledgment of global diversity and deep cultural pluralism, which may also foster global peacebuilding in the world as well. For example, the AU-ICC contestation has precipitated the development of alternative justice norms. Through the AU, African actors have been motivated by their principled conviction to alter existing international norms. They have asserted African autonomy and resisted the encroachment of non-African actors, especially Western actors, into African politics (Coleman and Tieku 2018). Self-determination and anti-African racism are also important human rights norms for the world to consider. In promoting norms such as “peace first, and then justice,” “reconciliation and forgiveness,” “people’s and community rights and individual duties,” the African Union’s transnational justice cascade is characterized by a proactive and activist practice of agenda setting and norm entrepreneurship to promote new global norms while challenging existing ones. Through the African Union, African states’ multilayered internationalist engagements and interventions in twenty-first-century transnational justice encounters propelled the continent by 2021 to be seen to exhibit formidable global actor agency that it used to seek pragmatic solutions to international justice norms while advancing a new form of African geopolitics.

6 The Pan-African Global Economy

In participating in the launching of Africa’s Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) in July 2019, the coordinator of the African Trade Policy Center at the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), David Luke, captured yet another significant dimension of the continent’s new role in global politics that will be analyzed in this chapter when he said, “Gone are the days when larger economies pick us off individually; now they will have to deal with us all equally or not at all” (Arosanyin 2018). Luke was referring to Africa’s powerful global partners—the EU, the United States, the WTO, the UN, and China—whose previous “multilateral” and “bilateral” diplomatic transactions with individual African countries have aptly been described as neocolonial, unequal in trade, and patronizingly fostering dependency. However, the newly launched regional trade agreement was predicted to put an end to this genre of unequal global political-economic power relations by Western states with African states. AfCFTA would provide a platform for African states to work collectively to promote a revitalization of their long-standing Pan-African economic agenda using new strategies of collective, global economic diplomacy. African states would use the African Union to combine member states’ diplomatic skills with economic tools to advance their continent’s economic, political, and strategic goals regionally and globally. In observing the prospective power of the AfCFTA, Luke rightly recognizes a new international economic turn for the African region. Normatively, AfCFTA is an expression of African states’ collective agency as a new global economic actor that in the current book we argue is both a product of as well as a contributor to a new genre of African internationalism in a deeply plural, plurilateral global political economy. African states have

119

120

Africa’s New Global Politics

launched the AfCFTA in a twenty-first-century international politicaleconomic system that is undergoing tremendous change and transformation. Neoliberal crises and de-globalization are reorganizing the international political-economic system into new growth poles of the world economy that have emerged from Asia and the global South. The features of this new global economy include new geographies of international trade, new international economic and political combinations, and new global financial actors, investors, and donors. Differently from multilateralism, plurilateralism reveals a new global political economic architecture in which subgroups of global economic actors, including countries, regional organizations, and international organizations, work together to create new rules of the global economy. From an African perspective, there are two contending narratives and worldviews that impact continental transformations in this new global economy. They are the neoliberal Africa Rising narrative and the PanAfricanist integration economics narrative (Edozie 2017). The former— Africa Rising—is a term coined to explain Africa’s rapid economic growth after 2000 and the inevitability of its continuation. The term became popularized in a global era of neoliberal economic crisis where in spite of the crisis, Africa was seen as a continent that continued to experience substantial economic growth after centuries of underdevelopment (Beresford 2016). Nonetheless, according to Patrick Bond, Africa Rising’s focus on rhetorical dialectics of wealth creation that reproduce export-led, primary product–dependent, and extractive orientation continues to insert the African region into a volatile, neoliberal world economy on adverse terms (Bond 2016). Bond’s critique of the Africa Rising phenomenon paved the way for critical new questions about the neoliberal stranglehold on the African economy and the resuscitation of the economic ideology of Pan-Africanism. “Pan” Africa Rising (Edozie 2017) promoted a newly revitalized version of Pan-African economics that went beyond projecting the successes of African economies based on minimalist, neoliberal GDP growth indicators. The new Pan-African economic narrative was used as a counternarrative to mobilize the greatest number of ordinary Africans to control and become empowered by their own economic practices and imaginaries. Capitalizing on what had become a critique of neoliberalism during the aftermath of the 2008 global recession, a revitalized Pan-Africanism sought to reposition the continent as a single, integrated economic sovereign that through its own efforts as a self-determined global economic actor would achieve inclusive development and prosperity for Africans across the continent. To this end, PanAfricanist economics promoted Africa’s industrialization, an integrated African free trade area, and the facilitation of the African region’s productive capacities in ways that would achieve greater global economic parity.

The Pan-African Global Economy

121

As a flagship project of the AU and an extension of the regional organization’s long-standing African Economic Community (AEC), AfCFTA was established as a product of African states’ new Pan-African economics emerging in 2019. AfCFTA was to be a new global economic actor representing for the African region the creative autonomy to navigate the changing configurations of a multipolar, plural global world. In promoting the ideals of regional economic integration in the continent, AfCFTA would function as a strategic framework that aimed to put the continent on a path of development to become a global force over the next fifty years. To this end, in its normative functions, AfCFTA is a Pan-African economic institution through which Africans engage the international political economy and conduct political economic relations with their major global actors, including the UN, the WTO, the EU, China, and the United States. In this normative capacity, by 2019, the AfCFTA emerged as the ideal economic diplomacy instrument that African states would use to exercise their agency and engagement in the context of new geographies of global South trade in order to position the continent to leverage new global supply chains and plurilateral trading agreements. In this regard, the AfCFTA would be used as a form of new global engagement and a collective foreign policy instrument employed by African states to achieve a form of regional developmentalism. In this chapter, we extend the book’s overall thesis to illustrate an argument about Africa’s new role in the international political economy. Through the AfCFTA, African states have attempted to exercise agency and control over international trade by striving to equalize the region’s terms of trade with the Western world given its historically structured peripheral ranking in the global economy. To achieve this goal, with the implementation of the AfCFTA, African states would advance the twenty-year-old AEC regional integration initiative. They delegated their international and intraregional trade facilitation policies to the AU’s dirigisme economic diplomatic engagement with the continent’s key global trading partners. In this chapter, we support such a thesis. We reveal how it is that through its objectives to industrialize, as well as to strengthen global and regional trade and economic development, through the AU, African states deploy plurilateral tools such as AfCFTA to achieve the region’s twofold goals—in global political economics as well as in the continental political economy. In this respect, we argue that Africa’s twenty-first-century economic internationalism occurs in the context of paradoxical tension between regional integration and global integration in a postneoliberal, deglobalized, polycentric international political economy. This is because the manner that guides the way the AU formulates and enacts its new economic global politics, on the one hand, reflects the distinctive agency of African states acting collectively to balance long-standing global politicaleconomic engagements with former colonial and donor global partners, and

122

Africa’s New Global Politics

on the other hand, reflects the continent’s commitment to advance the economic integration of the continent. As such, we will show how it is that in a postliberal, global world, African states collectively advance equitable and mutually beneficial partnerships and continental-wide regional economic initiatives through institutions like the AU’s AfCFTA to address new global challenges and structures of inequality. In doing so, we will illustrate the ways in which AfCFTA functions as a global engagement strategy used by African states to reverse the continent’s peripheral positioning in the global political economy. David Luke’s comments are prescient in this regard as they indicate that African states will no longer stand by as their global partners engage the continent using obsolete, neocolonial strategies focused on bilateral Western interests instead of Africa’s regional interests. Alternatively, African states are advancing the continent’s own socially constructed economic imaginaries, aspirations, and capacities to coproduce global development with global actors in plurilateral networks for the benefit of continental African peoples and communities. What concerns our analysis of the African international political economy in this chapter are the mechanisms, strategies, initiatives, policies, and global engagement instruments that the continent’s states collectively use to achieve their global economic goals. Subsequent sections of the chapter will support and elaborate on the theme of Africa’s new role in global political economics. We will begin by presenting the continent’s most recent economic indicators in the context of “the rise of the rest” phenomenon while contrasting “Africa Rising” against “Pan-Africa Rising” tropes to understand new African international political economies. Next, to reveal the evolution of Pan-African economics that puts the AfCFTA in context, we reveal economic transformations and agency occurring in the African region since the millennium in the context of the long-standing history in the advancement of the Pan-African economic agenda dating back to the founding of the OAU and the AEC. In a third section we examine the AfCFTA as a flagship initiative of the African Union, an extension of the continent’s renewed Pan-African economic agenda, and as an economic diplomacy tool to achieve Africa’s global political-economic objectives. This section is followed by a discussion of the challenges and opportunities that AfCFTA experiences in exercising its global economic diplomacy with the African region’s global partners—the WTO, the UN, the United States, the EU, and China. We reveal several themes that support our thesis, including the challenges of navigating power differentials between African states and their more powerful international actors. Final sections conclude with a discussion about the international political economy of Africa in the twenty-first century, especially reaffirming the role of the continent’s regional institutionalism, global actor agency,

The Pan-African Global Economy

123

and economic diplomacy in their role of repositioning the continent to achieve global goods on the region’s own terms. (Pan-)Africa Rising in an Era of Postneoliberalism: From the African Economic Community to AfCFTA In 2011, The Economist ran a front-page cover titled, “Africa Rising,” noting that in the millennium decade, six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African and that from 2001 to 2010, Africa had grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. This was a sharp contrast from a decade earlier when The Economist ran the cover title “Hopeless Continent.” The idea of “Africa Rising” had first gained popularity globally through the publication of a McKinsey Global Institute report in 2010 titled “Lions on the Move” (McKinsey Global Institute 2010). The report commended the African region’s economic prospects in the millennium and reported that the continent’s economic growth was creating substantial new global business investment opportunities that had been too often overlooked by multinational companies. “Africa Rising” captured a narrative about Africa’s global economic prospects as the concept would come to represent a frontal look at the continent as a place of emerging markets with explosive growth and opportunity (Mahajan 2008). Several reasons have been offered to explain the African region’s economic boom during the “rising” period. Some explained it by the commodities boom attributed to higher revenues from natural resources. Others suggested that favorable demography was causing an African population boom. There were also those who pointed to the continent’s increase in manufacturing and service economies. Six hundred million mobile phone users, a fast-growing middle class, and foreign investment from China all directed global optimism toward Africa, captured by the Africa Rising narrative. The Africa Rising idea emerged at the height of a pivotal turn for the neoliberal global economy. As a result, the idea’s association with neoliberalism caused some Africans to view the trope as a marketing ploy for the strengthened capitalist integration of Africa into a neoliberal global economy. This view criticized the Africa Rising neoliberal policy mantra of widening the investment appeal of the continent’s economies positing them as “emerging markets” (Kuo 2016). That is why the Great Recession of 2008 triggered a debunking of the Africa Rising descriptor as a postneoliberal order emerged. The trope’s underbelly would begin to expose decades of failed neoliberal policies such as structural adjustment programs imposed on the African region while criticizing the triumphalism of neoliberal economic policies that had once been promoted as universally successful for the continent.

124

Africa’s New Global Politics

Critics of Africa Rising further argued that the narrative played into the hegemonic, exploitative, and extractive rules of neoliberal capitalism and the Washington Consensus of free markets (Biney 2013). The narrative was seen to be a neoliberal tool to push the continent further into underdevelopment and dependency. It was believed that neoliberal Africa Rising policies advanced an external-oriented, neoliberal growth agenda that served to displace African-led economic development and integration initiatives such as the continent’s agenda of industrialization that served to foster African states’ more equal contribution to global production (Khisa 2019; Taylor 2016). After the Great Recession of 2008, neoliberal narratives began to give way to postneoliberal ones such as theories of de-globalization and new geographies of trade. At its best, Walden Bello would describe de-globalization as a process of restructuring the world economic and political system to bolster the capacity of local and national economies instead of degrading them (Bello 2014). Neoliberal globalization was in crisis, and for developing world regions, a report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD 2004, 2) declared that “a new geography of trade is emerging and reshaping the global economic landscape” by allowing for a much more central role for the global South. The changing geography of economic strength that skewed toward Asia, Latin America, and the emerging markets prompted the World Bank to refer to a “shift toward multipolarity” (Horner 2016). Large emerging markets such as China, India, and Brazil became the new sources of global demand and sites of production that were in turn playing key roles in driving what has today become known as South-South economic globalization, replacing the old West as drivers of global change (Pieterse 2011, 2). While much of the GDP share of the world economy emerging from these new drivers of South-South global development is Asian, largely Chinese, the African continent is both contributing to and has been positively impacted by these new global reconfigurations. One significant result of these new geographies for the continent is Africa’s trading pivot from the West to the East. African trade began to reorient from the global North to the global East as a result of largely Chinese oil investment and demand for minerals in the continent (Clapham 2005). By 2017, Chinese market socialism also known as Chinese state capitalism, Russian sovereign democracy, and Latin America’s postneoliberal social democracy populism all seemed to mark the ushering in of the possibilities of different nation-states in the global political economy to embark upon economic “third ways” in response to runaway neoliberal economic globalization that has had a grip all around the world. New geographies of trade and multipolar globalization were not simply unidirectional from China/Asia to Africa; they were reversed—from Africa

The Pan-African Global Economy

125

to the world as South-South global transformations fostered renewed and strengthened political-economic drivers of change emerging from the African continent. These transformations inspired a new phenomenon of Pan-African regional economics described as Pan-Africa Rising, an African socially constructed narrative describing African economic progress and aspirations that reflects distinctively African identities and interests to coproduce global development for Africa (Edozie 2017). While individual African countries did appropriate the can-do celebratory dimensions of the Africa Rising rhetoric, they also expanded and reconfigured the narrative to Pan-Africa Rising to reflect the voice and agency of the African region’s changing positionality in new geographies of trade. A result has been a range of Pan-African economic global actions exercised by African states’ participation in the African Union. For example, the AU’s Agenda 2063 made a commitment to draw on Pan-Africanism as a driving force for the transformation and modernization of African economies in order to end the unequal and exploitative economic relations that placed the African region at the periphery of the global political economy. As global neoliberalism wanes, Pan-Africanism has become an important tool for resistance against the effects of neoliberalism on the continent and has fostered a reimagining of alternative pathways for the region’s socioeconomic transformation. Pan-African economics served as an important alternative for African international political economy as it fostered for African states three main goals: pan-unity and identity, access to Africanowned production and trade in the continent through continental intratrade integration via access to free trade areas, and the prospects for uplifting the African masses through inclusive and equitable development projects. For four years of his leadership, for example, the former secretary-general of the Addis Ababa–based UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Carlos Lopez, pushed an “Africa First” new Pan-Africanist agenda that advocated for the development of the continent through structural transformation, industrialization, and regional integration. Africa’s new Pan-Africanism of the global era would foster the enactment of a renewed style of dirigisme politics for African states to navigate what was considered in a hyperneoliberal era runaway globalization and that would attempt to reverse African marginalization. The mission of UNECA’s African Charter for Popular Participation articulated the salience of the Pan-Africanist mission by stating that African sociopolitical and economic institutions should be grassroots-based, voluntary, democratically administered, self-reliant, community-embedded, and rooted in the tradition and culture of the society. The charter declared that Pan-African economics would reflect a convergence of interests, a sufficient degree of trust, and the collective capacity to establish a strategic partnership between Africa and the world (Brigety 2016).

126

Africa’s New Global Politics

Notably, Pan-Africanist regional integration has been a top priority for the continent since the formation of the OAU in 1963. For six decades, African states have sustained their collective efforts to use Kwame Nkrumah’s ideas of Pan-African regionalism as an instrument of economic diplomacy to achieve political-economic cooperation, integration, and mutual development. These practices have connected AU member states to dense and increasingly complex global networks that have sought to help them reach cooperative solutions to economic problems while simultaneously using their ideas and persuasion to promote African-derived economic norms, aspirations, imaginaries, and identities. As such, with a view to reviving the continental integration project, the OAU’s Abuja Treaty launched the AEC in June 1991. The AEC established the grounds for mutual African economic development through the creation of free trade areas, customs unions, a single market, a central bank, and a common currency. The treaty articulated the formation of a continental free trade area to serve as a stepping-stone toward the realization of the continent’s economic integration. Momentum toward implementing this objective gathered speed with the formation of the AU in 2002, which in Article 3 of its Constitutive Act establishes the AU to “accelerate the political and socioeconomic integration of the continent.” To this end, rather than a starting point, the AEC would be the final objective toward which not only the African region through the AU but also various small Regional Economic Communities (RECs) have been working as well. These RECs form the pillars or building blocks for the eventual continental community. The active pillars of the AEC are the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East Africa Community (EAC), Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), ECOWAS, and the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC). The AEC’s regional formation strategy represented a very African approach: “Walk the walk together, and focus on the process” (Ariño 2015). Doing so set about a strategic plan in regional diplomacy for the African region to achieve its goals to consolidate the tripartite subregional free trade areas (COMESA, EAC, and SADC) and other regional free trade areas into a continent-wide, Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) initiative between 2015 and 2016. The Abuja Treaty (AEC) continues to set the overall framework and ambition for African regional integration serving as the platform that the AU Assembly of Heads of State and Governments in 2012 decreed to boost intra-African trade and fast-track the CFTA. As such, the AU decided to emphasize the creation of the continental free trade area to be operationalized by 2019. The eventual African CFTA-AfCFTA arrived on schedule in July 2019 at the AU annual summit in Niamey, Niger, where it was ratified by all fifty-five African countries.

The Pan-African Global Economy

127

The Global Economic Diplomacy of AfCFTA AfCFTA is touted as the world’s largest free trade area since the formation of the WTO. The regional and global trade agreement brings together all fifty-five members of the African Union covering a market of more than 1.2 billion people, including a growing middle class and a combined GDP of more than US$3.4 trillion. Given the high enrollment of participating countries, the AfCFTA has the potential both to boost intra-African trade by 52.3 percent by eliminating import duties, and to double trade if nontariff barriers are also reduced (Tralac 2019). Significantly, however, unlike the regional AEC, the AfCFTA rearranges the African continental integration construct by both employing a continentalwide leadership approach to integration and combining it with global engagement. This is a departure from the bottom-up structure that the AEC had promoted through Regional Economic Communities (RECs). The more plurilateral, global approach used to design and launch the AfCFTA has emerged from the continent’s long-standing practice of global developmental regionalism. This practice describes Africa’s cooperation with global powers in a broader range of areas than just trade and trade facilitation to include, for example, investment, research and development, and policies aimed at accelerating regional industrial development and regional infrastructure provision, such as the building of a better network of roads and railways (UNCTAD 2004). African states have had a long-standing relationship with international organizations in this regard. The AfCFTA itself, for example, was designed as a tripartite collaboration among the AU, UNECA, and to a lesser extent UNCTAD, whose goals have always been to achieve development for the continent through regional integration. The AU-UNECA collaboration represents AfCFTA within four interconnected pillars that include trade integration; industrial transformation; cross-border infrastructure; and democracy, governance, peace, and security. At its face value, AfCFTA has functional goals in that it is a continental free trade agreement that proposes to establish a single continental market for goods and services as well as a customs union with the free movement of capital and business travelers. It is believed that removal of tariffs that prevent trade among and between African countries will foster a more competitive manufacturing sector for the continent, promote economic diversification, and accelerate industrial development for African countries. The African region’s trade integration agenda hopes to accelerate continental integration and boost African economies by harmonizing trade liberalization across subregions and at the continental level (Signé 2017, 2018a). At a normative level, African states use the AfCFTA as a tool for economic diplomacy and dirigisme economic statecraft to advance the continent’s

128

Africa’s New Global Politics

economic, political, and strategic goals around integration and development. AfCFTA consolidates uniform norms, values, and policies to guide the African trade negotiators by providing them the opportunity to take ownership of their economic agendas, while also positioning the continent to accrue meaningful power and influence in the international arena. However, it is also important to examine the challenges that AfCFTA faces in achieving its global initiatives in this regard. After all, African economic history is replete with pledges and pronouncements to foster the continent’s economic integration; as such, AfCFTA will not be successful without the global negotiation of key dimensions of the agreement. The reality is that the new African trading initiative operates in a world economic order in which most African resources are tied to the economic and strategic interests of the developed world and are dependent on the direction of external decisionmakers. This situation has only been compounded by new rising powers like China and India, whose economic interests in the continent may not always align with those of African citizens and governments either. Navigating global inequality and African marginalization has been in the forefront of AfCFTA’s structural international trade policy design and diplomatic strategic dirigisme. African Union Ministers of Trade (AMOT) were the architects of AfCFTA. They relied on the advice of the AUUNECA-UNCTAD co-designers on how to address the modalities of the global trade negotiations that would achieve AfCFTA’s success in the face of global political-economic challenges. The biggest challenge for making AfCFTA successful would be the organization of the negotiating process. This is because the complexities associated with ratifying an agreement among fifty-five participating countries with unequal and different political economic capabilities and divergent productive and competitive strengths would present a challenge for implementation. Priority guidelines to address these challenges included (1) the content and pacing of the agreement’s phased rollout, (2) attention to the trade and trade-related issues to be included in the agreement, (3) the need to harmonize and coordinate the various trade agreements and negotiations to which African countries are parties, and (4) the technical and financial support needed to move the agreement forward. The focus on the latter two modalities— AfCFTA’s efforts to harmonize the continent’s spaghetti bowl of bilateral trade agreements and its efforts to garner the technical and financial support to foster trade facilitation for small, underdeveloped African economies—have been the specific focus of the AU’s engagements with African states’ major global partners. Regional and international organizations, working closely with the African Union Commission (AUC), also assisted the AMOT negotiators and policymakers to move the AfCFTA process forward, and they did so efficiently by cooperating among themselves and coordinating their differ-

The Pan-African Global Economy

129

ent country contributions to the AfCFTA negotiations. The AU has sought to capitalize on two strategies to achieve its goals. A first strategy is to develop strategic, dirigisme partnerships with global actors to achieve AfCFTA’s economic integration as well as the African region’s industrialization goals. The other is in developing a strategy to engage African states’ global partners in strategic aid-for-trade development assistance to facilitate success for weak members of AfCFTA’s international trade. Regarding AfCFTA’s industrialization goals, when African countries trade with themselves, they exchange more manufactured and processed goods, have more knowledge transfer, and create more value for their economies. Since independence, African states have yearned for a robust manufacturing sector to chart a path to economic growth and development whose potential impact would be to boost intra-Africa trade, manufacturing exports, and job creation for youth. Given that most African countries are import-dependent, AfCFTA provides a unique opportunity for African countries to become more industrialized, thus creating jobs for a large portion of the continent’s unemployed young population. Manufactured goods make up a much higher proportion of regional imports than those leaving the continent—41.9 (imports) compared to 14.8 (exports) percent in 2014. To this end, AfCFTA’s industrial goals were designed to align with the Accelerated Industrial Development of Africa plan (AIDA) to develop and implement an industrial policy for the continent with priority accorded to maximizing the use of local productive capacities and inputs. AIDA’s goal is to add value to the local processing of abundant natural resources across the continent, and to advance the development of small-scale and rural industries, including the informal sectors as well as intermediate and capital goods industries with high linkages to other sectors of the economy. All these initiatives are potential sources of employment creation. In addition, AfCFTA seeks to accelerate export diversification and product sophistication and make trade more inclusive. That is why the agreement’s industrial policy focuses on increasing impact on productivity, competition, diversification, and economic complexity. In emphasizing trade diversification for African countries, AfCFTA supports a shift in production and international trade strategy from an overdependence on commodities to higher-value-added products and services. Doing so would allow for more inclusion of small and medium-sized enterprises and help encourage innovation in the continent as more markets open. Economic diversification is seen to be productivity-enhancing, a measure that hopes to improve export sophistication across the continent by enabling more African countries to integrate regional and global value chains and consequently increase the quality of their exports. Moreover, developing aid-for-trade modalities and economic diplomacy strategies has also become an important policy dimension for AfCFTA

130

Africa’s New Global Politics

negotiators and diplomats as the policy represents a different set of strategies from industrialization policies. Aid-for-trade is an AU regionalinternational initiative with the UN, EU, and other international economic organizations that has focused on eradicating nontariff barriers (NTBs), investing in regional soft and hard infrastructure, fostering regional cooperation, reducing investment-related costs, harmonizing regional trade arrangements, furthering institutional and human development, and supporting operations of the continent’s RECs. Aid-for-trade is an initiative that leverages official development assistance (ODA) resources to the AfCFTA’s poorest members launched by Europe’s Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2006. For Africa’s lower-income countries, ODA remains important to achieve the capacity for regional trade integration proposed by AfCFTA. Given its primary mandate to directly target development, improve welfare, and reduce poverty, ODA remains essential in supporting many developing countries, especially the poorest in the African region, with little access to private finance and low levels of domestic resources. Thirty-seven African countries have per capita GNI incomes below $2,000. To this end, aid-fortrade ODA can become an important source of funding to help the African region’s less developed countries implement AfCFTA and take advantage of the trade agreement’s policies. Reshaping Global Trading Partnerships At a 2019 United Nations General Assembly meeting, world heads of state, high-level representatives of governments, development financing institutions, and UN agencies, together with representatives of the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and academia, met to discuss how inclusive and sustainable industrial development could support the implementation of Africa’s AfCFTA. Such global pronouncements support the notion that AfCFTA’s impact will not be restricted to the continent but will also impact African states’ existing international trading agreements with China, the United States, and Europe, as well as their multilateral trade agreements within the WTO. At the same time, because African states use AfCFTA strategically to pursue their own interests and aspirations in international trade, the African region’s global partners are also being challenged to experience critical shifts and adjustments that have emerged because of African states’ new agency manifest through institutions like the AfCFTA. For example, the mix of the AfCFTA’s challenge and promise is paving the way for its leaders to pursue a variety of global partnerships that contribute to the meshing of the regional and multilateral economic diplomatic roles of AfCFTA. This complex interactionism is producing new plurilateral

The Pan-African Global Economy

131

arrangements that are manifest in several economic relationships between the African region and its major global economic actors. For example, with the United States, the AU would like to see a post–Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) agreement that focuses less on a relationship that limits trade preferences for African exports to the United States in select products, to favor instead a more equal and mutually beneficial trading relationship between AGOA and AfCFTA. What’s more, both Africans and Europeans are intricately involved in trade policy debate about whether the EU’s many Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with Africa’s RECs can coexist with AfCFTA, and whether with the final consolidation of AfCFTA, the EU’s organization of African-Caribbean-Pacific states’ (ACP) long-standing trading agreement is obsolete. Finally, despite growing accusations that China’s real trade intentions in the African region represent a neocolonial relationship, given that the China-Africa relationship emerges in a postcolonial, postliberal world, the AU feels that it is positioned to negotiate extensive benefits from China for the new African continental free trade agreement. In the form of joint international organization (IO) and international nongovernmental organization (INGO) collaborations and partnerships, and through advocacy and opposition, the AU is engaged in multiple policy negotiations that will affect AfCFTA’s impact on international trading initiatives that serve long-standing structural neocolonial or unequal economic relations established by the major global powers and institutions. Key relationships include the WTO, the EU EPAs and ACP, China-Africa’s Forum of China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), and the US AGOA. The WTO

The WTO expressed its support for AfCFTA as soon as the agreement launched, claiming that the initiative will catalyze intra-African trade in a way that also strengthens world trade. Addressing the African Group of WTO members, the director-general of the WTO, Roberto Azevêdo, stressed his commitment to supporting the African region’s continued economic integration, through AfCFTA, and through the WTO, to further fuel the continent’s growth and development. Azevêdo addressed the African Group and noted that AfCFTA was an opportunity to make the market in the region bigger, utilize economies of scale to a greater extent, and widen the possibility of establishing value chains in the continent (WTO 2019). Azevêdo charged the African Group of forty-eight states, all also members of the AfCFTA, to remain at the forefront of critical debates about trade facilitation. The WTO committed to cooperation and collaboration with the African Union and committed to exploring ways in which both trade institutions could work more closely together and provide greater technical support.

132

Africa’s New Global Politics

The WTO also recognized challenges that the continent would encounter in fully implementing AfCFTA given that African states did not have the same concentration of global value chains as other parts of the world. Even though the region’s continental reach is the same in population as India’s 1.3 billion, rather than one market like India’s, the African region has fifty-five different national markets. Africa’s continental national diversity could foster fragmentation, making it difficult to do business for local value chains. However, this very challenge is the reason why African states all ratified AfCFTA so quickly. Doing so would provide for them the collective political commitment to address the region’s decentralized markets and thereby foster economic integration of African economies. According to a WTO spokesperson, “If you can have the agreement, you can generate a dynamic market that would help a lot of entrepreneurs to increase their scope and reach a wide number of people and that can mean jobs, growth and development” (WTO 2019). AfCFTA leaders have been encouraged to use the WTO’s Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) to advance the continental trading agreement’s success since there are several trade-related transaction costs across African countries that hamper not only the African region’s integration with the rest of the world, but more fundamentally the continent’s internal regional integration agenda as well (Valensisi et al. 2016). The WTO-TFA program has been structured into the design of the AfCFTA agreement. To this end, AfCFTA includes annexes on customs cooperation and mutual administrative assistance and trade facilitation from the WTO. As well, AfCFTA enjoins aspects of the TFA’s legally binding multilateral agreement rules for expediting the movement, release, and clearance of goods, including goods in transit, to facilitate international trade. Doing so also sets out measures for effective cooperation between the two trade agreements’ customs compliance and other appropriate authorities on trade facilitation issues. The European Union

For its trading relationship with Europe, African states realize that AfCFTA’s potential for success lies in the agreement’s ability to restructure trading relations between the two regions. To achieve its goals African states are relying on the dirigisme of Africa-Europe economic diplomatic relations that are constantly negotiated by the two regional organizations—the AU and the EU. AMOT officials believe that if the EU is to seize on the new opportunities that the African region offers in a way that is mutually beneficial, the European continent will need to work with the African regional leaders to build a new kind of partnership that treats African states as equals. According to an AfCFTA AU economist, Carlos Lopes, “Simply put, the new EUAfrica relationship must be based on trade, not aid” (Lopes 2018).

The Pan-African Global Economy

133

Given Europe’s role in the colonization of Africa, the EU and African trade partnerships have a long history and come in many forms. The establishment of the AfCFTA has already triggered a range of critical realignment challenges that are impacting trade between the two regions. For example, the trade agreement between EU and ACP countries was designed to facilitate Europe’s former colonized regions’ integration into the world economy through gradual trade liberalization and improved trade-related cooperation. Known as the Cotonou or Lomé Agreement, the EU-ACP agreement is the largest of several EU EPAs. Under EPA agreements with Africa, EU markets are immediately and fully opened, while the recipient ACP countries are given fifteen years to open up their own markets to EU imports in reciprocation, and up to twenty-five years in exceptional cases. The EU has expressed its support (politically, technically, and financially) toward African continental integration, and notably committed resources to help implement the AfCFTA by administering a number of aidfor-trade programs to African countries to support their trade facilitation. For example, through the EU’s Pan-African Program, the EU committed up to €62.5 million to support AfCFTA in key areas in its launch year in 2019. The EU has also supported AfCFTA with technical expertise on how to conduct trade negotiations. Furthermore, in cooperation with the World Customs Organization, the EU launched a program for African customs administrations to help modernize and harmonize the classification of goods coming from the continent. Together with UNECA, the EU has provided support to AfCFTA’s advocacy and ratification process by contributing to its development of national implementation strategies programs. Despite these commitments, however, due to Europe and Africa’s deepseated historical relationship with colonialism and neocolonialism, AMOT’s AfCFTA diplomats and negotiators believe that restructuring trading relations between the two regions will require the magnanimous goodwill of Europe and the assertive dirigisme of Africa. Liberal aid-for-trade mechanisms are not enough. AfCFTA will need to be the sole African trading actor representing the continent that will face a single EU actor. Multiple EU EPAs and the AfCFTA may not be able to coexist if AfCFTA is to succeed in its bold structural transformation goals. The reality of a spaghetti bowl problem of plurilateral trade agreements with multiple African states and regions (RECs) presents a problem for AfCFTA’s global relations as well as for its success in incorporating its RECs who have several subregional FTAs with the EU. AfCFTA’s leading economist argues that the best way for the African region to strengthen the capacity and effectiveness of AfCFTA is to let the EPAs die (Lopes 2019). AfCFTA’s deep regional integration goals established prior to the full implementation of the EU’s EPAs could offset the negative effects of those agreements on intra-African trade. Without being crowded out by EU EPAs

134

Africa’s New Global Politics

in the region, not only would the AfCFTA offset the negative impacts on regional trade, but also the African regional trade initiative would be able to strategically boost regional trade in industrial sectors. On the other hand, in a plurilateral arrangement where EU EPAs, African RECs, and the AfCFTA all exist in a collaborative arrangement, the AfCFTA could be complemented by EU EPA trade facilitation measures that would also further boost the positive effects and improve the competitiveness of African products exported regionally or internationally. Nonetheless, if it turns out that EU EPAs and AfCFTA can coexist, the sequencing of each agreement’s implementation matters to ensure that benefits from both can be maximized. Strategic economic diplomacy efforts to position AfCFTA within a sea of EU EPAs operating in the continent will be important in engaging political-economic relations with external partners such as the EU. Other challenges about EU EPA and AfCFTA coexistence concern the way that EPAs may subvert AfCFTA’s industrial development goals. This concern is high among those who argue that despite EU claims that the EPAs will buttress AfCFTA’s trade facilitation more broadly, research indicates that the trade gains projected because of the EPAs are likely to be concentrated in a few agricultural products that will exclude the continent’s least-developed countries. To this end, EPAs may hurt AfCFTA’s intraAfrican trade goals by weakening trade revenues and undermining tradedriven industrialization in the African region. It is little wonder that many African states and civil society organizations have voiced objections to bilateral EPAs in the African region proposed by the EU. The relationship between the EU-ACP trade agreement and the AUAfCFTA’s efforts to achieve continental regional integration also presents significant challenges for achieving the success of AfCFTA. The ACP group includes forty-eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa (as well as sixteen in the Caribbean and fifteen in the Pacific), while the African Union’s AfCFTA consists of all countries in Africa including the forty-eight members of the ACP group. The expiration of the Cotonou Agreement in February 2020 provided an opportunity to address overlaps between Africa and Europe’s trade policies and legal frameworks and rethink trade relations between the EU and the African region more generally. AMOT AfCFTA leaders have portrayed the EU-ACP partnership as a traditional NorthSouth, donor-recipient cooperation framework, “which has not made a real difference in practice” to African trade growth, and that should be replaced by the AfCFTA (Carbone 2018). Respectively, the African and European regions have taken two contending positions on a post-Cotonou agreement. The African Union had adopted a decision indicating its intention to use the post-Cotonou process to conclude a completely new framework for cooperation with the EU on a union-to-union, continent-to-continent basis, outside of the ACP context.

The Pan-African Global Economy

135

The African Union’s common position on post-Cotonou ACP asserted that Africa is united and eager to speak with one voice, insisting that any new cooperation agreement with the EU should be an equal partnership, with the AU conforming to its principles in the Agenda 2063 blueprint. The United States

In the United States, the prospects of AfCFTA’s transformative potential in trade relations and impact with the world’s largest economy are more ambiguous. The United States, partly as directed by the US Congress, has aided the expansion of Africa’s intraregional and global trade facilitation through various initiatives. The Trump administration broadly supported the AfCFTA when it was launched and pledged US assistance for its implementation. However, the administration also stated an interest in negotiating one or more alternative bilateral trade agreements with the region, such as the Africa Growth and Opportunity Agreement (AGOA), which could potentially complicate AfCFTA negotiations and implementation (Williams and Cook 2020). Since its launch in 2000, Washington’s AGOA has forged a free trading relationship with the African region that has been defined by a unilateral scheme of preferences dictated by US interests. However, with AfCFTA, African states would look to transform the US-Africa trading relationship by pressing for a more mutually beneficial version of the AGOA agreement. AGOA passed in 2000 and was extended in 2015 to 2025; yet, in 2019, the Trump administration set up an AGOA forum to see whether it could forge a common vision to structure a post-AGOA trade relationship with AfCFTA. Nonetheless, the outcome of initial discussion revealed that the United States and the AU had contending visions about how to restructure AGOA. As a global hegemonic leader, the United States has more power to set the tone for its preferences in a trading partnership with Africa. In the past with AGOA, both the Obama and Trump administrations had relied on bilateral trading partnerships with individual African countries and not with the AU. The United States relied on these reciprocitybased trade agreements with individual (or groups of) African countries. Ideologically, for the United States, preferential access to select African country markets remained an important part of its partnership proposals. AMOT AfCFTA trade negotiators and diplomats see limitations of the US AGOA’s trade-preferences-only approach. In considering how to construct a new US-Africa trade partnership, the reality of the African region’s structural weaknesses has informed a purposeful shift in defining development cooperation between the two regions (van der Ven 2015). Pro-AfCFTA critics of AGOA hope that in a post-AGOA agreement era, emphasis on a unilateral, US-selected trade preferences approach will

136

Africa’s New Global Politics

need to be evaluated; otherwise, the trade agreement will not produce the needed momentum for the African region’s development. For example, AGOA does well in securing market access for the sale of African products in the United States; however, AGOA’s limitations leave the core question of the continent’s prospects to economically develop through trade unanswered. This is the challenge that the AU hopes that AfCFTA will address to establish a new model of US-Africa relations. To this end, the AU has advocated for a new partnership for US-Africa trade and development relations that strikes a balance between focusing sufficiently on supporting economic structural transformation and strengthening the scope, breadth, and depth of the trade component. The strategic importance of AfCFTA’s potential to support the continent’s prosperity agenda to achieve market integration, industrialization, and infrastructure development and their efforts to boost intra-Africa trade can’t be emphasized more. While acknowledging the critical role that AGOA has played in creating new export opportunities for qualifying African countries, many believe AfCFTA’s core strength lies in what it can potentially do to expand Africa’s export consumption to the United States. For example, AGOA plays a critical role in developing regional value chains that are beginning to emerge in the continent, especially as the core objective of African countries has been to move away from exports of primary products and move up the value chain into manufactured products. With such new developments, the United States and the AU are drawing up a variety of new initiatives for a close trade and investment partnership between AGOA and AfCFTA that strives to maximize the potential developmental impact for the African region. The United States and Africa have signed a joint statement committing to share a goal that enhances the AU’s efforts to increase continental trade and investment under the African Continental Free Trade Agreement. China

Albert Muchanga, the AU commissioner for trade and industry, has heralded China-Africa collaborative initiatives used to realize the promises of AfCFTA. AfCFTA is expected to boost trade between the two regions by creating a huge market for China in Africa that expands African domestic demand and creates market space and more trade opportunities between them. The African trade agreement expects to attract more Chinese enterprises, especially labor-intensive ones, to the continent that in turn would bring capital, technology, jobs, tax revenue, and entrepreneurial spirit to boost African economic growth (see Chapter 7). Liu Yuxi, head of the Chinese Mission to the AU, agrees that the African free trade pact will help forge closer economic and trade ties with

The Pan-African Global Economy

137

China while making progress in building the free trade area, in supporting the African region to advance interconnectivity, and in promoting the penultimate free trade regime. The AU also began to work with the government of China to facilitate trade on continental, regional, and subregional levels by financing projects like the Chinese-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI-Africa would act as a catalyst to spur ChinaAfrica cooperation and accelerate the AU’s ambitious infrastructure connectivity drive. Chinese manufacturing firms that export to the African region leveraged the opportunity to relocate to the continent under the auspices of AfCFTA. Chinese manufacturing sectors such as rubber processing, textile manufacturers, oil palm mills, and furniture that had tended to source their raw materials from the continent would see an opportunity to relocate to take advantage of cheaper raw materials. There is criticism of this strategy, however, by those who argue that inexpensive Chinese products dumped on the African market will damage local manufacturers. Others counterargue that this criticism does not hold since Chinese products already flood African markets through importation, creating trade deficits for African countries that structurally have weak manufacturing systems. AfCFTA may present an opportunity to reverse this trend. They argue that with a rapidly growing internal market of 1.2 billion consumers, African manufacturing companies partnering with China through AfCFTA will become more competitive regionally and globally. The International Political Economy of Pan-African Regionalism These economic diplomatic measures with the African region’s global economic partners—the WTO, the EU, the United States, and China—support the reality that AfCFTA represents a twenty-first-century international political economy brand for the African region. AfCFTA presents a platform through which the continent’s new economic global politics is being reimagined and pursued from within the continent. The AU’s economic diplomacy initiatives operate in, and dialectically engage, the contemporary dynamics that position the African region favorably in new geographies of the global economy. In 2018, AU Commission chair Moussa Faki Mahamat declared to the United States, via Twitter, “We choose our partnerships and create conditions based on mutual interest and benefit. Do not infantilize an entire continent.” Mahamat had been speaking about the competition between Europe, the United States, and Asia for trade dominance in the African region because of China’s rise. Condemning this “new scramble for Africa” in the

138

Africa’s New Global Politics

strongest terms, Mahamat told the Europeans and Americans seeking to maintain their hegemony over the continent that the African region was not a commodity to be won by the highest bidder. He warned the so-called global multipolar powers to stop battling over the continent because, according to him, the region would no longer be “infantilized” in global economic relations. Mahamat’s assertions reveal the way that African states are using the African Union’s AfCFTA to interject a different kind of African agency to effect their own self-determined and self-interested impacts within a transformative global economy. African states have designed AfCFTA to be used as an economic diplomacy tool to actively direct new forms of economic innovation that address the continent’s bottom-tier economic indicators and uneven development. As Mahamat’s protestations appropriately reveal, the AU is strategically choosing its economic partners in a multipolar world, be it with the West or with China or with international organizations. The twenty-first-century relationships that African states pursue are seemingly very different from the old neocolonialist dependent partnerships of the Cold War era. In a deeply plural global economy, the AU insists on equitable and mutually beneficial global trading partnerships that benefit Africans first (Ebatamehe 2018). AfCFTA’s establishment supports the reality that relationships between the African region and its more powerful partners are changing. Using its own capacities, agencies, and self-determined will to transcend its bottom-tier peripheral ranking in the global economy has historically presented the continent with its greatest global challenge. Up until the launch of AfCFTA, the region’s paltry engagement with the international political economy had remained a low point in the continent’s multilateral internationalism. Plurilateralism changes that as the AU’s AfCFTA stands to structurally reverse the continent’s positioning in what is increasingly becoming a postneoliberal global economy. We have seen how several liberal international organizations have jumped on the AfCFTA bandwagon and pledged support for the initiative. The magnanimous global response from international institutions and global actors for AfCFTA can be attributed to the success that African states have had in deploying AfCFTA as an economic diplomacy tool aimed at advancing the continent’s vision to be self-sufficient and become an important player in the international community. AfCFTA promotes African economic imaginaries as solutions to the continent’s structural economic challenges. For example, AfCFTA is headquartered in Accra, Ghana, and in opening AfCFTA’s secretariat in the country’s capital, Ghana’s president, Nana Addo Dankwa AkufoAddo, used the occasion to mark a historic milestone to resuscitate the idea of Pan-African trade integration that had first dated back to the inau-

The Pan-African Global Economy

139

gural session of the OAU in 1963, articulated most strongly by then President Kwame Nkrumah. Addo said, “Africa is now the world’s largest free trade area since the formation of the World Trade Organization, and we must make it count” (Signé 2018c). This is how AfCFTA emerged as an agent of Pan-Africa Rising defined as a socially constructed narrative of African economic progress and aspirations that reflects distinctively African identities and interests to coproduce global development for the African region. AfCFTA exhibits the continent’s internationalist aspirations to boost the African region’s trading position in the global market, thereby accelerating the growth of intra-African trade. The institution’s underlying principles of Pan-African self-determination, identity, and agency are used to promote the continent’s industrialization, integrated free trade, and the facilitation of each country’s productive capacities in ways that strive to achieve greater global economic parity for the continent. With Pan-Africanism driving the initiative, AfCFTA fosters greater continental unity of purpose by cultivating a collective identity for African states in the face of an overarching, declining neoliberal globalization. AfCFTA’s regional-international economic diplomacy also serves as a building block for multilateral trade liberalization negotiations. It helps small African countries to establish external FTA agreements with the world’s largest economic communities—the WTO, the EU, China, and the United States. As well, AfCFTA is used to facilitate the structural economic transformation of African economies by advancing trade integration while also serving as a vehicle for African economies of scale to navigate the contemporary international political economy. Through AfCFTA, African states can pool together their own global resource mobilization to fund their global objectives. Doing so presents them with immense investment opportunities to receive foreign direct investment (FDI) from Europe, the United States, and China. These negotiations provide a much needed injection of capital to boost industrialization for the continent. The AU’s delicate navigation and maneuvering of global powers using liberal economic policies are replete with challenges in its efforts at achieving the continent’s Pan-African economic goals. The power relations between the developed regions and the African region permeate the international trade regime and influence the fate of AfCFTA, itself ironically a neoliberal document despite the Pan-Africanist strategies used to advance the agreement’s facilitation and implementation. If African states are to achieve structural global transformation through AfCFTA, they will need to navigate the deep structures of the global economy using the regional internationalism of the AU. In speaking about AU members’ trade agreements with powerful Western nations, according to AfCFTA’s secretary-general, Wamkele Mene,

140

Africa’s New Global Politics Under the agreement, countries can enter into agreements with third parties provided they give African countries similar or better treatment than they are giving to the third party. So, in terms of AfCFTA’s law, it is allowed. But as a political objective of integrating and consolidating our market first, it is obviously desirable that countries desist from doing so. (Africa Renewal 2020)

It is not fully apparent how AfCFTA’s leaders will more assertively promote the trade agreement’s structural policies to persuade African states’ global trading partners to address global system factors that inhibit African competition in global trade. They may rely on a long history of negotiating agency among multilateral trading organizations at international levels such as the African Group of the WTO, which crafted a common policy position to represent Africa’s world trading interests in 2001. The group is credited with developing the Doha Round “Development” position. While reaffirming the continent’s commitment to a rules-based multilateral trading system, the African Group (AG) at the WTO supported the AU African Economic Community’s regional integration policy position. It called for the WTO and its members to respond to trade negotiations at Doha in a manner that supported the African region’s development and integration into the multilateral trading system. The AG also advocated for the continent’s regional development objectives. In an age of postneoliberalism and challenges to contemporary globalization, AfCFTA will be an effective tool for creating policy space while negotiating plurilateral international trade and investment agreements to achieve the structural transformation efforts on the continent. This strategy is especially relevant when African states negotiate bilateral and regional agreements with developed countries. AfCFTA functions as an AU negotiating template in this regard. For example, to advance its integration and industrialization goals to the top of the Pan-African economic agenda, the AU strives to build a new economic internationalism from the regional level. What appears to its global partners as an international trade agreement in reality is a continental intraregional trade and nationalistic production agenda meant to facilitate the African region’s global economic competition. This is how AfCFTA serves as an economic foreign policy measure for African states in international trade negotiations at interactive regional and plurilateral levels of global engagement. AfCFTA is a positive product of multipolarity and deep global pluralism. African states are using AfCFTA to navigate global power relations that have underlain relations among low-income African economies and advanced industrial powers. When seen as a foreign policy instrument and platform for plurilateral global action, the new African trade agreement cultivates incentives among African economic agencies and produces modalities for African states to collectively co-shape new global-economic rela-

The Pan-African Global Economy

141

tionships. To this end, regional and emerging global players like the AU’s AfCFTA are not only challenging global power constellations, but they are also reconfiguring power constellations while contributing to new transnational configurations in the global political economy that facilitate the continent’s development and prosperity. Conclusion AfCFTA has been presented in this chapter as a Pan-African economic institution and regional international organization through which African states are collectively navigating geopolitical trade relations and negotiating new international political-economic terms with major global actors. If the AU’s economic diplomacy of AfCFTA is successful, the continent would cease to be at the margins of international affairs but rather play a major role in determining issues of regional and global political economy while making the African region credible in the eyes of Western partners that link aid and assistance. We have analyzed how AfCFTA embarks upon economic diplomacy on behalf of African states to engage a plethora of international partnerships with former colonial powers and hegemonic global actors that have previously kept Africa’s economies in a resource-extraction trap. To this end, we have revealed the reality of AfCFTA’s surmountable challenges, whereas structural global transformation for Africa’s low-income, unevenly developed commodity-producing economies faces complex roadblocks for AfCFTA’s successful implementation. We have also seen how reversing the continent’s peripheral positioning in the global political economy takes humungous effort to transform the deep structures of the global economy that even the AU may not have the capacity to reach. Nevertheless, that African states have delegated the foreign policy strategies to change the regional internationalism of the AU is an important step for the continent in reversing its peripheral bottom-tier ranking. Finally, we have presented the AU-AfCFTA’s global engagement initiatives as they inform part of the continent’s larger dirigisme used to navigate and impact a new global politics of regional plurilateralism and internationalism in a multipolar, plural world. As a flagship project of the African Union’s Agenda 2063, AfCFTA has been presented as a case study exemplar to demonstrate how Africa’s regionalism is used as a tool for economic diplomacy that serves to enhance the continent’s standing in the international political-economic system. We have revealed the many ways that the AfCFTA attempts to formulate economic foreign policy strategies for African nations in international trade negotiations at interactive regional and plurilateral levels of global engagement.

142

Africa’s New Global Politics

In the next chapter, we take up the specific case of China’s relations with African states within this broader context of new African internationalism in the areas of economic engagement as well as multilateral diplomacy and global governance. China is currently by far the biggest external actor on the African continent, and the way that African states negotiate and navigate relations with China, primarily through the collective agency of the African Union, will have long-term implications for the China and Africa relationship, but also for the wider global landscape.

7 Engaging China as Partner or Patron?

In her 2019 speech to present the critical importance of the Forum of China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) partnership, Professor Sarah Anyang Agbor, the commissioner for Human Resources, Science, and Technology at the African Union Commission at the time, underscored the nascent premise of an emerging African foreign policy toward China. She did so by noting that a strategic partnership with China formed an important part of the AU’s framework for achieving its regional-international vision and aspirations for the African region through to 2063 (Agbor 2019). In her speech, Professor Agbor stated that Africa and China would learn from one another and strengthen mutually beneficial collaboration in addressing common global challenges. Agbor also noted that China’s internationalist experience and best practices would help African states collectively create platforms for interaction with the rest of the world to the extent that both regions could define global futures (Lammich 2019). A full understanding of Africa’s new global politics is incomplete without an analysis of China’s millennium rise in the world and its imposing presence in the African region. Yet, the international relations literature is replete with scholarship that documents China’s dominant role in the contemporary political economy of Africa. Moreover, much of the scholarship and media portrayals of China are about the exploitation of the region’s natural resource wealth and the fact that China ostensibly has little regard for democracy and human rights in the continent. This dominant view paints a picture of a China with an insatiable appetite for mineral resources and the Chinese presence in Africa as “nothing more than a neocolonial grab for raw materials that perpetuates African countries’ underdevelopment” (Hanauer and Morris 2014, 11).

143

144

Africa’s New Global Politics

Nonetheless, accounts like this do not capture other dimensions of the China-Africa story. Submerged in narratives about China’s alleged neocolonial relationship with the African region is the continent’s own perspective and standpoint on the China phenomenon and that country’s actual agenda in the continent. As such, rather than simplistic tropes that present China’s engagement in Africa as neocolonial and exploitative, in this chapter, we present China-Africa relations as representative of an evolving complex relationship between the two world regions and their respective peoples, emanating in part from broader transformations in global political economies while also informed by historical solidarities. After all, historically, China’s relationship with the African region draws on a relatively long engagement dating back to at least the era of the independence wave across the continent—during the 1950s and 1960s—when African leaders and governments saw China as an alternative to Soviet influence on the newly independent nations. But even that historical relationship is changing, as in the new millennium, new geographies of trade have made China an emerging global power that is in turn driving South-South economic globalization and reshaping the global economic landscape in fundamental ways. To this end, the old EuroAmerican international relations scholarly tradition is out of sync with the new global pluralistic political and economic terrain that defies the straitjackets of Western hegemony. Among other forces, the Asian drivers of global development and the China model primarily are spearheading new geographies that include the “China in Africa” phenomenon, which has become an important dimension of Africa’s new global politics. This new terrain provides an entry point for our objective in this chapter, in which we closely examine China’s deepening global involvement in the African region in the context of African states’ own collective global actor agency and the struggle to overcome the continent’s marginalization. To this end, we analyze the engagements and transformations between Africa and China happening as they are in a patently plural, multipolar world order in which, as we have underscored throughout this book, Africa is no longer to be construed as a passive bystander. We see the ChinaAfrica relationship as one of, on the one hand, asymmetrical global power relations that vary between partnership and patronship, and on the other, it is a relationship that entails agency on both sides of the equation. For the African region, as a partner, China’s increasing bilateral involvement with African countries beginning in the early millennium represents an opportunity for the African Union to extend and stamp its regional imprint on the continent and establish itself as the singular envoy for the African region’s external relations with China. For China, however, currently by far the most important external patron on the continent, the African region presents a key diplomatic,

Engaging China as Partner or Patron?

145

strategic, and geopolitical platform upon which the emerging superpower can rely to raise its own international influence. In doing so, China engages Africa with the purpose of building what it declares is a more “just international order” that advances peace, prosperity, and equality worldwide (Hanauer and Morris 2014; Shelton and Paruk 2008). This China model that defines a superpower rising peacefully and serving as an alternative to Western hegemony is pivotal to the shifting landscape of twenty-firstcentury international relations. Moreover, as a developmental-state model for the global South, China is viewed as an indispensable partner in terms of supporting the AU and its member states to carry out developmental and continental integration goals. Our approach in the current chapter will seek to move the China in Africa debate beyond this binary of optimistic versus pessimistic, helpful versus harmful representations of Africa-China relations. We move beyond the view that China is a resource-thirsty and aggressive power out to shortchange the continent as it pursues its own energy security needs. Likewise, the assertion that China is the alternative to the West that the African continent desires for its economic transformation too requires some tempering. A great part of our interest in this book is to recover and reposition African agency, particularly situated in the active role of the African Union as an aggregator of continental interests, to understand Chinese-African engagements. In pursuing this line of inquiry, we investigate how relations between these two global actors have a bearing on the broader international relations of Africa, occurring in the context of the current era of multiplex and fastpaced world transformations. In much of the scholarly literature and media commentaries on China in Africa, African agency gets short shrift (Gadzala 2015). Often what we have are generalized condemnations of China in ways that leave African states, African publics, and the African Union with no agency other than as passive victims of selfish Chinese activities and rapacious economic interests. The point here, and indeed our goal, is not to downplay or explain away China’s malign actions and exploitative practices, real or imagined. Nor is it our intention to foreground China in the image of a benevolent power. It is also not so much about whether China’s presence in Africa plays a positive development role as some analysts have suggested. Rather, our goal is to provide a constructivist evaluation of Sino-African relations that positions African agency, context, and complexity. As such, in this chapter, we argue that Africa’s new role in global politics is one that engages China to assert the continent’s own independent authority, engagement, and exercise of a sustainable development path in a new deeply plural global setting. We examine China’s deepening involvement in Africa in the context of the continent’s own global actor agency, strategic contribution to transformations, and dirigisme engagement in a pluralist world order while

146

Africa’s New Global Politics

also analyzing the relationship between the two sets of actors as one of asymmetrical global power relations that vary between partnership and patronship. To this end, China is also widely seen as an indispensable partner in terms of capacitating the AU to carry out its responsibility. As the continent’s patron, for China, we show how the African region represents a key diplomatic, strategic, and geopolitical platform upon which China can raise its own international influence to build a more just international order that advances peace, prosperity, and equality worldwide. We demonstrate how the China-Africa international relations agenda has become pivotal to understanding Africa’s new positionality in global politics, revealing African agency and the continent’s self-directed global engagement with China from an African perspective. We show how China’s increasing bilateral involvement with African states beginning in the early millennium represents an opportunity for them to use AU regional organizing and governance mechanisms to extend their continent-wide influence while also establishing the regional organization as an envoy for collectiveinterest external relations. In doing so, we examine the China-Africa relationship captured within the broader strategic interests of African states visà-vis their representation by the AU to reveal the continent’s emergent foreign policy of China. In subsequent sections of this chapter we unravel these different dimensions and drivers of the still evolving China-Africa relationship to underline how African states collectively through the AU leverage the China engagement to achieve their interests at the continental and global levels even as China pursues its own regional and international agendas in Africa. We begin by examining the evolution of China-Africa relations since the 1990s, revealing the interdependent South-South new geographies of trade emerging to transform the relationship. In doing so, we emphasize the development of global value chains and global production networks that may indeed represent the power relations between the two as asymmetrical but mutually beneficial all the same. We examine the relationship between China and Africa in the context of global transformations in the twenty-first century defined for both regions as the “Asia Rising” and “Africa Rising” phenomena. This emerging-markets or “Global South Rising” framework is used to inform the bedrock of the evolving China-Africa relationship and explain the upliftment of both regions. Next, we examine the China-Africa relationship institutionally through the operations and dynamics of the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation. One way to view FOCAC is in its provision as an omnibus organizational umbrella, which anchors China’s engagement with Africa. China launched the FOCAC in October 2000 preceding the establishment of the AU. However, it took the AU a decade to appropriate FOCAC for its own policy goals on behalf of African states. In 2011, the status of the AU changed

Engaging China as Partner or Patron?

147

from that of a FOCAC observer to full membership that would align ChinaAfrica cooperation with that of the AU’s strategic objectives and priorities. Today, the FOCAC platform has become an ideal opportunity for the African region to strategize for enhanced benefits from its engagement with China, and especially to channel resources toward continent-wide integration priorities. In this respect, we present the evolving dynamics through which China-AU relations are captured and given practical expression within that multilateral institutional framework. In the third section, we examine the effect of China-Africa relations on the geopolitics of twenty-first-century globalization from the African region’s standpoint. To do so, we briefly discuss the emerging African foreign policy toward China deployed on behalf of African states via the African Union. In this regard, we argue that the AU struggles to reverse its patronage relationship with China as it attempts sometimes successfully and many times unsuccessfully to achieve a more robust and equal partnership that is mutually beneficial. We conclude by demonstrating how the China-Africa relationship will augment the prospects for the consolidation of African efforts to decolonize and present an important challenge to European and US global hegemony. As one of many global partners that the African region engages in a polycentric world order, we show how the China-Africa relationship has the potential to contribute to real long-term and durable transformations toward freedom and development for the continent and the world at large. Chinese Drivers of Africa Rising In a twenty-first-century postneoliberal, deeply plural, multipolar world order, both China and Africa are described as on the rise. Nonetheless, as a preeminent global power, since the turn of the millennium, China has been a driver of both the Asian and African emerging markets and economic booms that are leading to sustained economic growth and prosperity. Yet, China’s Silk Road in Africa projects can be traced back to histories that began as early as 138–126 BC prior to the Chinese Qin Dynasty, which was one of China’s earliest dynastic regimes. Imperial documents show that during these early times, private contacts between China and Africa already coexisted with a small number of official contacts and cultural and commodity exchanges. To understand contemporary relations between the two regions, it is the modern relationship between China and Africa, that emerged in the 1950s, that matters most. The modern China-Africa relationship developed during the African region’s decolonization period, occurring at the height of the Cold War when the continent represented a region upon which the former Soviet

148

Africa’s New Global Politics

Union, the United States, and China formed a tripartite collusion of geopolitics and proxy wars. In siding with the developing world and declaring both the former Soviet Union and US and Western powers as neocolonialist, China presented itself to African states as an alternative ideological partner that shared the continent’s experience of colonial domination and exploitation. To this end, the African region became an important repertoire for Chinese military intelligence, weapons, and training for African freedom fighters in the continent’s numerous liberation movements, especially in Southern Africa as well as Algeria. China promoted a campaign of Maoist-Socialist revolution, anticolonialism, and third world solidarity that inspired the hallmarks of China’s early Africa policy enshrined in the Five Principles Governing the Development of Relations with Arab and African Countries. The principles declared that relations between the two regions would be governed by “equality, mutual interest and non-interference,” while characterized by “friendly relationships” devoid of political conditions or interference in the internal affairs of African countries (Hanauer and Morris 2014). China-Africa relations transitioned again as the Cold War ended, and by the 1990s, the United States and the former Soviet Union withdrew their interest in Africa, abandoning their former clients in the continent. China on the other hand reinforced its relations with African states and even filled the vacuum left by the United States and the Soviet Union with new African allies. However, in the post–Cold War era, China’s ideological foreign policy in Africa shifted from a nonaligned, pro-socialist internationalist agenda to a more instrumental agenda based on neoliberal economics. In the twenty-first century, China emerged as the African region’s most important external power. The country made a large economic footprint that by 2021 became conspicuous in just about every corner of the continent. As such, the ubiquity of Chinese aid, trade, and investment entities in the African region has become striking and unmatched by previous powers. China’s investment in the continent includes a long portfolio list from companies mining oil in Angola and Sudan, to building mega highways in Ethiopia, to working in the electricity sector in Kenya and Uganda, to building infrastructure and developing the tourism industry in Sierra Leone, and to servicing mobile phone networks in Kenya and Nigeria (Zafar 2007, 105). In effect, since 2019, China is recorded as Africa’s number one trading partner accounting for upwards of 15 percent of the continent’s total trade flows (Lopes 2016b, 56). Two-way trade between Africa and China was estimated at $4 billion in 1995 but had more than doubled to over $11 billion in 2000. It rose to $40 billion by 2005 and was estimated to have accelerated to a record $185 billion in 2018. Energy production and trade shaped the relationship between the two regions as China moved from one of the world’s largest exporters to an oil

Engaging China as Partner or Patron?

149

importer, and as of 2007, China was importing about one-third of its oil from the African continent, about 13 percent of the continent’s oil exports. China’s pivot to African oil occurred because of the crisis in the Middle East when the country’s demand for energy to feed its booming economy led it to seek oil supplies from Sudan, Chad, Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Republic of Congo, including a purchase of a 45 percent stake in an offshore oil field in Nigeria for $2.27 billion (Kobo 2013). China-Africa economic relations have become underpinned by China’s massive economic profile as a rising power with enormous influence yet in need of markets and sources of raw materials, on the one hand, and Africa’s own economic needs and vast material endowments on the other hand (Ademola, Bankole, and Adewuyi 2016). This is to say that in the twentyfirst century, the African region is the last major frontier of global capitalist expansion with a burgeoning young population and enormous natural resource wealth despite centuries of exploitation. Thus, the region could no longer be seen as a backwater region of the past, thanks in part to China’s rapid penetration of the continent over the past two decades as it raises the stakes and propels Africa’s global profile at the same time. This has attendant market implications for the continent, considering the current global cultures of consumption, and the enormous resources urgently needed by a rapidly rising economic power like China. China has been constructing what Howard French called “China’s second continent” in Africa given the more than a million Chinese nationals spread across the continent building complex trade links, networks, and value chains (French 2014; see also Alden, Large, and de Oliveira 2008; Amoah, Hodzi, and Castillo 2020; Lan 2017; Li 2018; Lopes 2016b). The compositional configuration of China’s footprint in Africa ranges from temporary migrants working largely for Chinese state-owned construction companies and private corporations to long-term migrants seeking economic opportunities, who have taken up permanent residence in many countries across the continent (Park 2009, 2). These networks are transnational, informing the activities of Chinese migrants and businesspeople to Africa, on the one hand, and African migrants and business actors in China, on the other. Both sets of migrants have created dynamic interactions and interpenetrative flows happening outside of the state sphere, involving ordinary citizens at both ends of the interface. While migration from Africa to China has not happened at the same rate and pace, increasingly Africans have moved and settled in China, especially in the Guangdong province. Lan (2017), for example, shows that the presence of many Africans, some staying illegally, in the regional city of Guangzhou, a popular destination for African migrants and businesses, heavily depends on their connections and social networks with their Chinese business partners and the social relations that they have cultivated.

150

Africa’s New Global Politics

These relations and engagements that entail business, struggle, and survival are marked by African residents who serve as linguistic, cultural, and business connectors between their Chinese hosts and their home countries (Lopes 2016b, 54). The deepening of ties in business through migration and reciprocal trade relations have fostered complementary but also contradictory processes, which, for good or bad, draws China closer to Africa and vice versa (Amoah, Hodzi, and Castillo 2020). The forging of connections between Chinese at home and those in Africa, the growing linkages between the Chinese economy and China’s economic presence on the African continent, and Chinese state corporations at home and their affiliates across Africa have all transformed China into Africa’s most important external business actor. The penetration of Chinese migrants deep into rural regions of Africa has entailed adaptation and cultural immersion as well as social ties through marriages that have helped Chinese to navigate local barriers (Park 2009, 16). There has been a substantial investment in commercial agriculture, the flooding of cheap consumer goods, and dominance of Chinese companies in electric dam, road, and railway construction especially as China uses concessional loans, some tied to China’s access to oil or other natural resources. The pervasive and extensive business engagements of Chinese immigrants involved in agriculture and retail trade and the presence of construction companies, manufacturing firms, and financial institutions all add up to large-scale Chinese economic presence in the African region that African states and peoples have in different ways embraced but also contested. While it may appear that African states have granted Chinese actors the latitude to pursue their interests unfettered, to the contrary, African states do mediate China’s investment activities as Mohan and Lampert (2013) show in the case of Angola, where state institutions have a bearing on Chinese business activities. In Ghana and Nigeria, local business and social actors significantly shape the activities of Chinese migrants, which suggests that the question of African agency is central to any understanding of ChinaAfrica relations. The perception of China as running roughshod over African governments and having unfettered access to the business landscape is belied by the many instances of pushback and consequential African agency, be they by organized local business groups or civil society activists against Chinese ventures. While China continues to pursue its own economic and geopolitical interests in the continent, African businesses and individual actors have engaged the Chinese presence in advancing their own goals. Strategies used by Africans to rein in Chinese business dominance range from implementing local production of value-added goods and services policies, as well as taking advantage of Chinese skilled labor and leveraging Chinese business credit to expand local African business operations. In pursuing their business

Engaging China as Partner or Patron?

151

interests and the long-term strategic objectives of their government, Chinese migrants in Africa and those working in different sectors on a temporary basis must engage in protracted negotiations and compromises with their African allies and partners while navigating constraints germane to their alien statuses. Whether migrants in rural communities, contractors in suburban areas, or business executives in cities, Chinese actors must deal with an uncertain environment and unfamiliar sociocultural landscapes, and thus must rely on local agents, allies, and interlocutors. Additionally, local resistance and activism in some countries have produced tangible effects such as disrupting and/or constraining Chinese enterprise and forcing Chinese actors to adapt their strategies and activities (Mohan and Lampert 2013, 107). The more the China phenomenon has become entangled and enmeshed in African social spaces, cultures, and markets, the more the Chinese relationship with the African region has evolved in a dynamic, reciprocal, contingent form. This is a very different picture than the stylized representations of the relationship that ignore African agency. While it is true that the resource extractive imperative, seen as driving and motivating Chinese investments in Africa, supposedly emanates from China’s quest for long-term resource security that assures its national economic interests, this assertion is overly simplistic (Davies 2011). China’s investments in Africa have grown in leaps and bounds over the years, which means that as these investments both broaden geographically and deepen in financial commitments, China itself will increasingly have a vested interest in Africa’s long-term development success (Davies 2011, 18). On the balance of things and seen from a range of variables and with the long view, it appears that China needs Africa as much as Africa needs China (Lopes 2016b, 64). What is significant, however, is the reality that during a relatively short time span, China has shaped the African economic terrain and changed the narrative about Africa’s standing in the world. This is more pertinent considering that in the immediate post–world war global order, as we noted earlier in this chapter, Africa had somewhat taken the backseat of geopolitics, cast aside as a lesser priority region of the world with US and European interests largely positioned in the Middle East and Asia. It has largely been China’s aggressive entry into the continent that has thrust Africa’s international relations more forcefully, which also means that Africa’s economic fortunes and futures are increasingly intricately tied to China’s own interests. And the reverse is true. Export processing zones (EPZs) and special economic zones (SEZs) in countries like Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, and others have adopted aspects of China’s capitalist model of export-oriented production though stateowned enterprises. They utilize Chinese human and financial resources in partnership with domestic governmental interventions as part of renewed efforts to propel manufacturing that has lagged behind in Africa’s quest for

152

Africa’s New Global Politics

economic transformation. The Ethiopian government, for one, embraced the Chinese development model of low-cost mass manufacturing in SEZs focused on exports, and with Chinese funding. The Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, attracted Chinese companies to invest in the EPZs, especially in the garment and shoe sectors, with a focus not on the African market but rather on low-cost manufacturing for the European market (Van Staden, Alden, and Wu 2018, 23). Africa’s push for upping the value chain and ramping up export processing has drawn inspiration and Chinese FDI to the continent. As several African countries (e.g., Angola, Ethiopia, Tanzania) have attempted to emulate the Chinese capitalist model of export-powered growth by investing in value-added production, they have relied heavily on Chinese capital and skills. China has been at the center of facilitating a new African push in the value chains through its FDI but especially by transforming Africa’s poor physical infrastructure through Chinese-constructed dams, roads, and railways. Therefore, as both a capitalist model and a source of financial and human resources, China is breaking new ground and influencing African economies, sometimes in contradictory but also progressive ways. On their part, African states and the African citizenry too have had a critical strategic bearing on China’s economic pursuits and will likely continue to do so in the future by extracting concessions from China and engaging in bargains that render China not the all-powerful and selfish actor often portrayed in some scholarly and media circles. This reality is more compelling when viewed from a platform of collective African agency through the African Union and its Agenda 63 strategic blueprint about which we shall say more below. China-Africa Multilateralism Given its role in reshaping the international political economy of Africa, at the turn of the century, the China-Africa relationship remained very much asymmetrical and bilateral between select African states. This worked well for China as the region began to refine and establish a common foreign policy for Africa. In January 2006, China wrote a white paper, titled “China’s African Policy,” that outlined four overarching principles in its engagement with Africa. The four principles (equality and mutual benefit, emphasis on practical results, diversity in form, and pursuit of common development) leveraged the 1963–1964 pillars of Africa-China relations: sincerity, friendship, and equality. China’s policy matched African states’ collective unity pact under the rubric of the new African Union as it pledged to respect African states’ independent choices about the road of development the con-

Engaging China as Partner or Patron?

153

tinent would pursue while supporting the region’s efforts to grow stronger through unity, mutual benefit, reciprocity, and common prosperity. To this end, China pledged support for the African region’s own goals to strive for regional integration and economic development and agreed to carry out cooperation in various forms in economic and social development to achieve common prosperity for both regions. The policy agreed to strengthen cooperation with Africa in the United Nations and other multilateral systems by supporting each other’s just demands and reasonable propositions that would continue to appeal to the international community to give more attention to questions concerning peace and development in Africa. Learning from each other and seeking common development, China and Africa would draw upon each other’s experiences in governance and development to strengthen exchanges and cooperation in education, science, culture, and health between the two regions. Supporting African countries’ efforts to enhance capacity building, the policy pledged to work together with the African region in the exploration on the road to sustainable development. The creation of FOCAC would formalize and institutionalize these mutually arrived at principles and provide an organizing mechanism for Chinese foreign policy toward Africa. FOCAC’s establishment marked the beginning of a period of unprecedented multilateral engagement between the two regions. Initiated by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in October 2000, FOCAC was established to coordinate China’s activities in Africa, and it became the institutional vehicle for managing cooperation with Africa across a range of technical, economic, and political areas. Seeing the rise of the AU by 2002, China pivoted away from its bilateral trading relations with individual African states to develop a burgeoning partnership with the AU in several areas of economic diplomacy as well as peace and security. FOCAC represented a new type of China-Africa relations, and it increased attention to Africa in the global market while introducing viable alternatives for African states seeking a development path different than the one ascribed to them through international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Patterned after Japan’s Tokyo International Conference on African Development, FOCAC emerged at the turn of the century as the platform and framework for the evolving relationship between the two regions. Under its auspices, a series of multilateral economic and diplomatic engagements and negotiations have taken place that have contributed to the deepening of relations between China and Africa. Through the FOCAC framework, African states and China have pursued a wide range of initiatives and commitments of immediate and long-term mutual interest. From its inception in 2000, FOCAC developed into the foremost institutional mechanism for China-Africa multilateral engagement providing “a unique

154

Africa’s New Global Politics

diplomatic mechanism to promote dialogue between China and Africa, while at the same time it facilitates the development of a common political and economic agenda that will advance constructive South-South cooperation for mutual benefit” (Shelton and Paruk 2008, 2). A unique setup that stands out in global multilateral diplomacy, FOCAC’s framework of engagement took center stage when China embarked on its “go global” agenda at the turn of the century. This came against the backdrop of the country’s “rediscovery” of the African region with which it had previous strong historic ties of international solidarity, especially at the United Nations and in its support of independence struggles on the continent. Back then, in the late 1990s, China’s status as an emerging global economic power necessitated winning over the African diplomatic bloc, particularly when viewed from the lens of collective power under the renewed unified continental banner of the African Union. Bringing together into a structured and institutionalized engagement of, on the one hand, a very important continent and, on the other, for the African region, the most powerful nation outside of Europe and North America, FOCAC was billed as a platform for “collective consultation, dialogue and cooperation in the context of South-South interaction” (Shelton and Paruk 2008, 16). As arguably the most noticeable institution in multilateral engagements in the global South, the FOCAC framework remains a dynamic and evolving forum, its rules, norms, and terms of engagement wide open to regular renegotiation and reform even as it served as a formidable forum for achieving policy agreements between the two regions. China has emphasized the spirit of partnership with the African region borne of a shared global South identity and common struggles against imperialistic incursions and excesses. African states have appreciated China’s pledge to play by a different set of rules that converge on mutual respect and shared goals. Yet there is little doubt as to the power asymmetry between Africa and China within FOCAC. For example, the disjuncture between close to fifty states negotiating and bargaining with China as a single actor and the sharp contrasts in material interests and long-term goals cannot be underemphasized. Here, it is easy to cast China as the alldomineering and powerful actor that has its way in setting the agenda and driving processes of negotiations under FOCAC. There is some truth in this, but to take it at face value is to deny African agency and the leverage that African states have over China. As noted above, FOCAC is an evolving and changing institutional framework. In its evolution, we can read African agency at work despite the power asymmetry and the imbalance that separates the two regions. Changes to FOCAC procedures and mechanisms for engagement have had a great deal of African influence and driving force. In fact, there have been suggestions that the FOCAC idea itself came more from the African than

Engaging China as Partner or Patron?

155

the Chinese side. While China commands vast bargaining power by dint of its financial muscle, African states and the African Union have gradually learned how to shape China’s behavior and decisionmaking through processes of socialization (Alden and Alves 2017). To this end, China’s Africa policy quickly morphed into China’s African Union policy, and by 2015, the country established a diplomatic mission to the AU, becoming the third to do so after the United States and the EU. China used the AU to develop foreign policies with the region that went beyond its traditional economic relations to include joint security relations. In its work with the AU, China and Africa began to propose policy options to enhance the future of Africa-China cooperation in peace and security. In 2006, China identified four major areas of engagement in China-Africa peace and security cooperation: military cooperation, conflict settlement and peacekeeping operations, judicial and police cooperation, and nontraditional security cooperation. In terms of financial support, President Xi announced in 2015 that China would provide US$100 million to the AU to support the building and operation of the African Standby Force and the African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises. In gearing away from its noninterference policy, China pledged a strategic and reliable partnership between the African Union and the People’s Republic of China in supporting efforts to enhance AU Peace Support Operations capabilities. According to the AU, the Chinese government has provided continuous support to AMISOM since 2011, through the donation of equipment, and funding support of approximately US$1.2 million annually. China provided support to the African Standby Force through the provision of equipment to the tune of US$100 million. At a China-Africa Peace and Security Forum held by China’s Ministry of National Defense, the two agreed to build a China-Africa community with a shared future and focus on topics of China-Africa cooperation in peace and security, including regional maritime security. While the China-Africa foreign policy power relationship remains asymmetrical, the African Union has been attempting to change that by pushing for more equity in the partnership. To this end, the AU sought to strategically plan Africa-China cooperation at the continental level. It did so to ensure the African region’s maximum benefit extraction from China, but also to make African and Chinese ties more mutually beneficial in terms of the continent’s regional integration efforts. The African Union began to engage China in African state collective negotiation so that the continent would boost its bargaining power as a collective entity representing the continent as a single suprastate on behalf of the multiple bilateral, state-to-state relationships that China had with several African nations. To this effect, to counterbalance the Chinese foreign office at the African Union, the AU established an African representational office in

156

Africa’s New Global Politics

Beijing in September 2018. The purpose of the office was to heighten the cooperation between the African Union and China. The AUC commissioner, Mahamat Faki, declared that the AU office in China would ensure effective and timely follow-up of the China-Africa partnership while especially supporting the work of the African Group of ambassadors in Beijing, to ensure their alignment with African Union positions. The African Union sought to use its relationship with China to proactively achieve better representation of the African region in the international system, including in the United Nations Security Council, and as such, become part of a new global governance system. The multilateral engagements under FOCAC also evolved to inject more assertive African leadership in light of new demands, interests, and goals on the part of both Africa and China (Wekesa 2017, 4). One of the most significant changes for FOCAC over the last two decades was the admission of the African Union, which initially had observer status, to full membership on the forum. The AU’s singular status was different from the earlier establishment of FOCAC when individual African states had to push for changes and reforms to their diplomatic relations bilaterally with China. As such, in 2017 under the stewardship of the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, the AU proposed reforms and changes to the FOCAC. In a report at the twenty-eighth African Union Summit in January 2017, Kagame proposed amendments to the structure of African partnership summits like those under FOCAC. In essence, Kagame’s report proposed a harmonized and collective African approach where a few leaders representing the entire continent would meet and negotiate with China on behalf of the entire continent. Rather than leaders of all African nations attending and negotiating with China, the Kagame report proposed a more unified African voice—an acknowledgment that a lack of consistency and continuity has hampered external negotiations (Van Staden, Alden, and Wu 2018). Kagame’s proposals sought to address flaws and weaknesses germane to Africa’s engagements as a world region in the new plural era of global relations. The Rwandan leader emphasized that engagement with China would inform the central focus if the African continent were to succeed in reversing its status in global marginality. Like many initiatives that take place at the structural levels of global relations, the FOCAC framework also represents grave contradictions for its members and has to contend with the complexities of managing myriad interests and agendas involving diverse actors. For example, while FOCAC is a multilateral forum bringing together an overwhelming majority of African states into conversation, cooperation, and constructive engagement with China, at the same time China has negotiated on a bilateral basis with individual African states, the African Union, and the different RECs from across the continent (Alden 2007; Li et al. 2012).

Engaging China as Partner or Patron?

157

The simultaneous engagement at bilateral and multilateral levels creates complications and potentially imperils the needs and aspirations of African states. Engaging with China at bilateral and subregional levels through Regional Economic Communities is problematic as it inhibits coordination and harmonization—partly the reason that the Kagame report had originally sought to create a unified and all-encompassing foreign policy for China as a continent. The AU’s emerging China foreign policy standpoint and modus operandi comports with the general theme of this book on rethinking and refocusing African agency in a new global, multiplex international relations landscape. Our focus on the African Union as the institutional site for collective African agency is precisely the undertaking that leaders like Paul Kagame have presented and pursued as the viable vehicle for advancing African interests on the global stage. This is not to present the African Union as some kind of panacea but to underline the power in collective action and a unified approach for African states in engaging a powerful actor like China, which itself is highly centralized and coordinated in its foreign policies and in pursuing its strategic interests abroad. No other African institution is as qualified and well positioned to consolidate and coordinate the African region’s strategic interests as the African Union, rooted as it is in the old and venerable traditions of PanAfricanism, emancipatory struggles, and a shared continental identity. A collective, coherent, and consistent African voice has both compelling normative value and practical implications for the continent’s international relations, particularly when engaging with an actor as powerful as China. Enter the Dragon: Displacing the EU and United States, and Repositioning Africa At an international partnership forum they cohosted to foster a stronger partnership with the EU, African state leaders were shocked when the United States released its new Africa Strategy, which attacked China’s and Russia’s influence in the continent, describing it as “predatory” and “corrupt.” According to John Bolton, the then US national security adviser, China uses bribes, opaque agreements, and the strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive to Beijing’s wishes and demands. Its investment ventures are riddled with corruption, and do not meet the same environmental or ethical standards as U.S. developmental programs. Such predatory actions are sub-components of broader Chinese strategic initiatives, including “One Belt, One Road”—a plan to develop a series of trade routes leading to and from China with the ultimate goal of advancing Chinese global dominance. (Bolton 2018)

158

Africa’s New Global Politics

The impact of the China-Africa relationship on global affairs couldn’t be more prescient as evidenced by AUC commissioner Mahamat Faki’s response to the US critique of China’s relations with Africa in a tweet that went viral in December 2018: “Stop this stereotypical idea of Africa as a hapless terrain where Europe, China or others have free rein to battle for influence! We choose our partnerships, and create conditions based on mutual interest and benefit. Do not infantilize an entire continent! #africaeurope2018.” Co-chair of the forum, the African Union chairman at the time, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda also criticized Europe and the United States’ focus on criticizing China at a forum that both the EU and the United States used to broker stronger partnerships with the African region. Kagame emphasized mutual partnerships with Europe, the United States, and China that would create a win-win situation for everyone and end the old order of giving assistance as a form of generous contribution. More than half a dozen European powers, most of them erstwhile former colonial powers, and the United States, long kept a grip on the African region, often working in cooperation but also in conflict with the continent. On its part, China has acted as a lone rising global power and succeeded in penetrating the continent ever more in such a short period. China has done so with remarkable swiftness and finesse to the chagrin and dismay of the traditional Western powers. To this end, is China constructively displacing and rendering Western powers less visible or, at a minimum, unable to dictate terms for Africa’s international relations that determine the course for the African region? Only time will tell. For now, and going forward, what is observable is the reality that the African economic and political landscape has been fundamentally reshaped and reconfigured in large part because of the power and presence of China, a rising global power, active on a rising continent asserting its place as a world region with invaluable geostrategic relevance. China’s rise has greatly disturbed the extant global political structure of power and dominance in large part because the rise has happened quite rapidly and in peacetime (Hanauer and Morris 2014; Hodzi 2019; Shelton and Paruk 2008). As a rising economic power, China has taken full advantage of the benefits of economic globalization, becoming the foremost “factory” for the entire world and the leading destination of foreign direct investment from the developed Western world to the global South. China’s relations and engagements with the West, moving between cooperation and conflict, have largely been in the realm of investment, trade, and production and not so much in diplomatic or military processes. Instead, it is with respect to the global South, particularly across the Asian continent and in Africa, that China has wrapped together economic, diplomatic, and military engagements in one fold and in ways that have caused destabiliza-

Engaging China as Partner or Patron?

159

tion and displacement in the extant global balance of influence. While not seen as an existential threat to Western economies except for the movement of low-skill manufacturing jobs and China’s competitive edge in the production of consumer goods, the West nevertheless views China as threatening Western hegemony around the world. This is particularly pronounced with regard to the African region, arguably the most important strategic world region where China is rapidly outpacing and replacing the West. Much has been written about what China wants from Africa, but what does Africa want from China? In a multipolar world, African states want multipolar partners beyond former colonizers. They look to China to provide political recognition and legitimacy to contribute to their economic development. In a postneoliberal world, the China development model has presented itself as a more viable route to African development than the West’s democratic neoliberalism fraught with inequality and socioeconomic conflict. Moreover, the China-Africa relationship is buoyed by South-South historical solidarity where China is seen as a more authentic development partner interested in African capacity building rather than exploitative capitalism. China’s approach to forging relations with African nations has taken the line of a shared geopolitical status as developing world regions that previously were victims of external aggression and the imperialism of the West. This narrative has a long history and can be traced back to the 1950s and ’60s when China was in solidarity with African nations pushing for independence from Western colonial powers. Although it was not until the late 1990s that China engaged Africa more aggressively and systematically, China had remained conscious of sustaining the diplomatic partnership of the African Bloc at key international forums, particularly at the United Nations, an imperative that became even more acute and urgent in the wake of Tiananmen. On their part, African states prefer China as a partner because China goes out of its way to treat African leaders with respect on the international stage and to emphasize that its African partners are equal (Hanauer and Morris 2014). China’s special envoy to the AU, Zhong Jianhua, in 2013, acknowledged this important aspect of the China-Africa relationship: “Africa wants to be treated as an equal, and this is what many Western countries do not understand or at least are not willing to do. China at least knows that we have to treat people in Africa as equals” (Hanauer and Morris 2014). African leaders have confirmed this point. At the 2012 FOCAC meeting, South African president Jacob Zuma noted Africans’ pleasure that the China-Africa relationship was accorded with equality and mutual gain. Zuma noted that China’s intention in Africa was different from Europe’s instrumentalist and exploitative goals in the continent (Hanauer and Morris 2014). It is not lost on African states the investment role that China plays in re-capitalizing the world given its economic prowess. A foremost advantage

160

Africa’s New Global Politics

to the relationship, therefore, is to attract Chinese investment. African states also prefer the no-ties, no-conditionality investment initiatives by the Chinese, and they especially agree with China’s inclination to assist in the development of Africa’s infrastructure through its global infrastructure initiative, Belt and Road or One Belt, One Road. In China’s evolving global presence, its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive modernist attempt at circling the globe, in which Africa was initially not included. This has changed in recent years as several major Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa have entered the BRI, pointing to the upward revision of Africa’s strategic significance in the new global geostrategic architecture. China’s responsiveness to criticism has entailed tempering its material interests with offers to the African region that at least on paper represent a long-term commitment to the continent rather than a short-term rush for spoils. It has also entailed embedding China’s interests in collaborative and cooperative ventures including participation in African peacekeeping missions, promotion of healthcare systems, and intercultural exchanges. All in all, China has been revising and recalibrating its foreign policies toward Africa as its economic and strategic calculations evolve, shifting away from its previous noninterventionist policy posture (Hodzi 2019; Xuejun 2018). With initiatives like the BRI and One Belt, One Road, Chinese diplomacy has provided space for maneuver by African states to lay the basis for an alternative international system. Acting like Truman and Pax Americana in the aftermath of World War II, in the post–Cold War era in 1990, Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng presented his own blueprint for engaging Africa and the developing world: The new order of international politics means that all countries are equal and must mutually respect each other regardless of their differences in political systems and ideology. No country is allowed to impose its will on other countries, seek hegemony in any regions, or pursue power politics to deal with other countries. They are not allowed to interfere in the internal affairs of the developing countries or pursue power politics in the name of ‘‘human rights, freedom and democracy.’’ (Cheng and Taylor 2017, 41)

In this regard, the strength of the China-Africa relationship has especially complicated the tussle between the EU and the United States over a revived debate about “who controls Africa” and the continent as the last frontier of global capitalism. This state of affairs exposes the geopolitical repositioning that the China-Africa relationship has opened up for the African region, to engage and navigate the world differently using megamultilateral dirigisme. More importantly, by asserting a role in bilateral BRI projects, the African Union exercises regional internationalist agency on behalf of

Engaging China as Partner or Patron?

161

African actors who are critical of Chinese global engagement in the continent. For example, the AU’s proposal to streamline reforms is meant to impact the legitimate concerns that African civil societal actors have had of some of the BRI projects in African nations that are too small to oppose China alone. In bodies like FOCAC under the auspices of the AU, African states assert their power of negotiating collectively with China. In subjecting China’s policies in Africa to regional as well as local pressures, on behalf of African states and peoples, the African Union exercises important internationalist action. The AU’s deliberate and strategic injection of African agency into the China-Africa relationship has been gradually and subtly paying off. For example, drawing from its Agenda 2063 goal to foster a fourth industrialization effort for Africa, there has been an uptick in how many times the issue was mentioned by China (Wu, van Staden, and Alden 2018). Prior to the AU’s establishment of Agenda 2063, China used its global power to promote African industrialization to the world. However, by 2018, the AU began to set the agenda, and the industrialization-of-Africa agenda had become integrated into the continental planning processes. This suggested that there occurred a shift from declarations of intent to more specific engagement toward industrialization, demonstrating that China was beginning to respond to African agenda setting (Wu, van Staden, and Alden 2018). The China-Africa relationship has reawakened the continent in quite fundamental ways and remobilized national and regional economic and diplomatic resurgences. There is little doubt that the continent has been on the march with China’s unmistakable role. Most of the leading African economies that have posted impressive growth rates and contributed to driving down poverty rates have had a heavy Chinese presence in the primary commodities sector, oil and minerals extraction, but also increasingly in manufacturing, the latter being Africa’s long missing link in the quest for meaningful socioeconomic transformation. In forging and maintaining diplomatic and economic relations, through the African Union, African states have grappled to steer the relationship toward a more equal partnership away from the patronship that is so typical of the unnecessary meddling in the internal political matters of sovereign states in the manner that Western powers are wont to do. What remains missing and needs articulation from the African side of the emerging partnership is a coherent and common Africa policy toward China. Toward an African Foreign Policy of China For good or bad, Africa’s present and future are tied to China in ways that are unprecedented and a major departure from the way the continent has

162

Africa’s New Global Politics

related with the traditional external powers of the West. For the foreseeable future, China is likely to maintain its superior march as a global economic powerhouse just as Africa will remain a sought-after continent given its surging young population and enormous natural resource wealth: minerals, metals, oil, and soils for agricultural production. There is a mutuality of interests and symbiotic relationship between Africa and China despite the obvious power asymmetries between the two regions as already underlined in this chapter. Yet, while China has operated on a somewhat unified and systematic foreign policy directed at the African continent, although tailored to individual African countries in bilateral dealings, the African region by contrast has not built a robust and harmonized policy with which to engage China. We noted earlier the contradictory coexistence of the FOCAC multilateral framework along with individualized bilateral relations, negotiations, and agreements that China has pursued with specific African states. Getting to an Africa-China foreign policy will require that African states address this contradiction, which, as matters stand now, benefits China but does not optimally serve Africa’s long-term strategic interests. A robust and viable African policy toward China must recognize China’s strategy of engaging for the long haul, prepared to invest now with an eye on tomorrow, and playing a game different from the traditional Western powers. In many of its undertakings in Africa, the Chinese government and its state-owned businesses have demonstrated a long-time-horizon modus operandi, whether in terms of investing in projects that have a long time span for returns to accrue or granting loans with a very long maturity duration. In one sense, China seeks to “lock-in” Africa and secure long-term commitments that will ensure a controlling stake across economic sectors in a manner that has alarmed Europe and America, who are wary of losing their traditional grip on the continent. Viewed at another level, however, the locking-in strategy necessarily means China too locks itself into a partnership with the African region and must, therefore, be prepared to negotiate the long-term vicissitudes of the relationship. From the African side of things, China’s approach gives African states the latitude to craft an equally long-term strategy and take full advantage of China’s inclination to a long-time-horizon type of engagement. Thinking long-term and pursuing policies that anticipate future trends and trajectories would in all likelihood favor and serve the best interests of African states. There is leverage here and African states can collectively exercise agency to pursue a policy posture that makes the best out of a China partnership, quite different from the old relations with the West. The long-term Chinese investments and commitments mean that China has to contend with strategic vulnerabilities of its own and, therefore, has the incentive to be responsive and flexible, and willing to make concessions

Engaging China as Partner or Patron?

163

and compromises often to salvage its interests, especially where sunk costs are involved. This means that African states, if well organized and coordinated, can marshal agency in the pursuit of collective and common goals for the continent as a whole. There has been progress in that direction with growth in China’s willingness to accede to reforms in the FOCAC and taking on board the full participation of the African Union, expanding Chinese investments in value-added manufacturing. Also notable is China’s increasing interest in dealing with governance issues on the continent, including regional peace, security, and stability (Lammich 2019; Ukeje and Tariku 2018; Xuejun 2018). We cannot interpret this merely and strictly as China’s selfish and rational action to secure its vast economic interests in the continent; rather, we have to see this also as demonstrating China’s conscious acknowledgment that its own interests could be in peril and not guaranteed unless the long-term well-being and transformation of the African continent are addressed. We also must view this through the lens of learning and socializing informed by shared ideals, norms, and language, which go beyond the easy reductionism of rationalist and material calculations. In the final analysis, however, the onus will be on African leaders, their governments, and the wider public to strike the right balance between national and continental agendas in engaging with China and in a way that strengthens the world regional significance of the African continental bloc. A consolidated and coherent Africa policy toward China has to necessarily take a Pan-African texture and be anchored in the shared history and heritage of African states and peoples but also the concrete needs and aspirations that cut across the width and breadth of the continent. In 2013, the African Union put out a bold and ambitious Agenda 63 blueprint to address the range of problems and constraints holding back the continent’s socioeconomic standing. The blueprint is a fifty-year strategic plan, an all-round and encompassing framework for repositioning and repurposing Africa on a clear path for socioeconomic transformation. Its design and implementation entail a coordinated subregional and continental collective effort, within the Pan-African spirit and as the most important mandate for the continental multilateral body, the African Union. However, given the political and economic fragmentation that characterizes the African continent, the competing national and territorial sovereign interests, such an agenda is bound to remain a white elephant document unless there are corresponding concrete policy directives agreed upon at the subregional and continental levels. One of these, perhaps by far the most important, is a collective policy on China that binds AU member states and aggregates the interests of the continent while eschewing potential duplicity on the part of China. Knowing that China is in Africa for the long haul, a prudent African foreign policy posture must seek to

164

Africa’s New Global Politics

maximize the leverage the continent has over China bearing in mind the latter’s economic muscle. For long, relations between the two regions have entailed calculations and political contestations at the international level, in multilateral bodies, particularly the United Nations and at the World Trade Organization, where China relies on the support of the African diplomatic bloc on issues ranging from human rights and controversy over Taiwan, among others (Shelton and Paruk 2008, 56). This remains an important arena and area of focus, but the African continent can get the best out of engagement with China, and other external actors, by pushing an aggressive and coherent policy framework aimed at building Africa’s internal continental strength through robust economic transformation and assuring human security. These are areas where China is both a critical partner and a model that has instructive lessons (Lopes 2016b). One lesson that China provides in the realm of global presence and influence is the power of internal reform and solid economic prowess that forms the basis for exacting an imposing mark on the world stage. China long concentrated on internal reorganization, with a great focus especially on education to create a trained and skilled human resource while simultaneously controlling population explosion (Shelton and Paruk 2008, 42). Internal reforms were critical in building a massive economic engine on which China launched itself into the world at the turn of the century. As such, an African China policy, while not inward looking, as this is untenable in the current age of global integrations and deep interconnectivity, would nevertheless focus on building and deepening the continent’s levers of power and pillars of sovereignty, asserting policy sovereignty and crossborder coordination and harmonization, not just material but ideational and cultural as well. In this approach of focusing on socioeconomic transformation rooted in African needs, aspirations, and agency, China has not only demonstrated willingness to play ball with Africa and adjust accordingly but also offers important templates that African states can appropriate and domesticate (Lopes 2016b; Davies 2011). The Chinese model of rapid economic growth and poverty reduction through a multipronged strategy that combines a market-based economy with centralized economic management provides an alternative approach from Western economic orthodoxy that Africa can emulate. What is more, the African region can take China seriously on the latter’s declared inclination to a shared global South solidarity and pursue a policy orientation that draws from China’s expressed goodwill to advance African interests through partnership and not paternalism. Without internal organization and regional and subregional coordination to generate a unified voice and a harmonized strategy, African states acting individually cannot hold China to its word in terms of being a true global South partner and not just another for-

Engaging China as Partner or Patron?

165

eign power thirsting for the continent’s vast endowments. To this end, the AU’s reform proposal for FOCAC strengthens a platform for the evolution of an African China policy. Building from Africa’s subregions to the continent, the RECs, such as the East African Community and ECOWAS, working with the African Union can promote a harmonized approach that subjects China to a standard set of requirements. There has to be convergence and syndication to maximize and optimize relations with China. This can range from requiring the channeling of Chinese investments toward manufacturing and not just natural resource extraction, a shift that China has already taken seriously and embraced in recent years. African states working in coordination under the AU and RECs can take full advantage of the FOCAC framework to transfer tools, knowledge, and resources from China for Africa’s growth and prosperity (Shelton and Paruk 2008, 46). Conclusion Consistent with the central thesis of this book on African actor-centered agency in advancing global development and fostering international relations, we conclude by noting that another African contribution to shaping new global politics has indeed been the China-Africa phenomenon. Despite the asymmetrical power relationship characteristic of ChinaAfrica engagements in the post–Cold War era, there have been important transformations over the past thirty years with the African region asserting more agency and self-determination at the continent level. Africa’s new role in global politics centers China strategically. The relationship seeks, among other things, to engage China in a way that asserts Africa’s own independent authority, engagement, and pursuit of a sustainable development path in a pluralized global world. This is playing out in a new global setting that is complex and characterized by multiple powers and supranational actors like the African Union. More than any other global actor, strategically, China has recognized the status of the AU in Africa’s international relations as the premier Pan-African institutional actor in relations covering a range of issues including socioeconomic development, peace, stability, and human security. This stance bodes well with African states’ millennium goal to exercise African agency, as well as its leadership in determining the priorities of the continent. Significantly, the African region is an important partner in China’s alternative to international liberalism. The Chinese model, invariably, supports notions of regional pan-nationalism such as “African ownership” and that of “African solutions to African problems” on matters related to peace and security. For example, the Initiative on China-Africa Cooperative

166

Africa’s New Global Politics

Partnership for Peace and Security is another multilateral China-Africa institution that represents China’s strategic recognition of African agency. Different from the liberal peace approach used by Africa’s Western global partners, China’s policy uses a “development first” or “sovereignty plus development” approach to determine its support for the continent in peace and security. The approach presumes that social economic development is the most important precondition of sustainable internal peace. This is why China supports African countries with national development rather than hasty democratization so as to build the basis of long-term, durable, and stable peace. To this effect, the China-Africa international relations agenda is pivotal to understanding Africa’s new global politics. It is important to recognize African agency and the continent’s self-directed internationalism with China from an African perspective. We have examined the China-Africa relationship captured within broader strategic interests of African states visà-vis their representation by the AU. We traced African states’ collective foreign policy prescriptions toward China, articulated and defined within the broader framework of China and Africa’s emergent relationship to reveal the AU’s emergent foreign policy toward China. This approach uncovers the contours of a foreign policy relationship that is a vibrant, twoway dynamic in which both regions adjust to policy initiatives and popular perceptions emanating from the other and within.

8 Africa’s New Global Politics

In April 2020 at the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, Antonia Witt captured the essence of Africa’s new role in global politics this way: Although corona is a global health threat, immediate reactions to contain its spread have mainly followed [the] logic of national sovereignty, threatening many of the hard-won achievements of decades of international cooperation. In this situation, the African Union (AU) is a rare case of internationalism: it has played an important role in providing coordination, expertise, and technical support to its member states, engaging in advocacy, and mobilizing resources. It is imperative to applaud, but more so to support, the AU in continuing to play its vital role as one of the few islands of internationalism these days. (Witt 2020)

To project it as an island of internationalism is exactly the temperament our new narrative about the African region’s engagement in global issues has attempted to unravel. In her statement, Witt refers to a neglected story about African regional institutions, such as the AU and their proactive global engagement. Witt’s reference rightly contrasted, at the stage of the early pandemic, Africa’s AU to its European counterpart the EU to positively exposit the ways that African states—unlike their European counterparts— are working together in the provision of expertise, information, and coordination with their respective governments and citizens around Covid. At a time when the coronavirus global public health crisis threatened the sustained viability of globalization, as EU states’ first responses were to protect national sovereignty, Witt describes the African region’s response as a rare case of internationalism (Witt 2020).

167

168

Africa’s New Global Politics

Theoretically and parallel to Witt’s “island of internationalism” metaphor is our own thesis for Africa’s New Global Politics, arguing that Africa’s new regional internationalism is both a product and driver of a new transformative global politics in the twenty-first century. From this thesis, we derive a nascent theory of African international relations that falsifies mainstream accounts. Our rendition of a deep history of African international relations proves wrong Hans Morgenthau’s thesis that Africa did not have a history before World War I (Morgenthau 1985, 369). It is just not true that the African region is incapable of influencing international politics. Moreover, neither is the region an agency-less victim of great power/core manipulations as international structuralists contend (Chipaike and Knowledge 2018). As well, our thesis contrasts with Bayart and Ellis’s (2000) extraversion theory, which acknowledges African agency in international relations but posits that agency negatively as the active participation of African elites in the creation and sustenance of the continent’s marginal global position. Our own theory of African international relations begins by centering the African continent as an international entity and world region that has experienced long-standing historical global junctures, encounters, and transformations exercised through the activities of a variegated assemblage of African actors at the community, national, regional, and global levels. To this end, we have presented the complexity of Africa’s world-region historical context and transformations by presenting African global actors as agents rather than subjective dependents of these histories. Additionally, we capture this agent-centric historicity of the African international region, showing how since its incorporation into the modern world system in the fifteenth century, the continent has been the hub of an array of sites of transnational encounters for global actors, including imperialism, transatlantic slavery, racial colonialism, and contemporary neocolonialism. In our second chapter, we demonstrated how these historical encounters have produced an “Africa” today that is a historically situated geopolitical construct forged by European geographers and used to designate groups of peoples who were not immediately aware of the new spatial category to which they were supposed to belong. Nonetheless, we also revealed how it is that while the idea of Africa has been invented and reinvented for centuries by international actors, it has also been created and shaped by Africans inside the continent (Mazrui 2005). Thus it is no surprise that in the twenty-first century, in a multipolar world, Africa is being reinvented by its own global actors, who we have argued are independent African states constituted collectively through the strategic regional internationalism of their own designed institution, the African Union. It is in this context that we see how Africa’s new politics is emerging as a theoretical as well as empirical dimension of international relations studies and practices. Theoretically, Africa’s new politics is pedestaled by

Africa’s New Global Politics

169

the new theories of transnationalism, new regionalisms, and subregionalisms that are revealing how African states, communities, and citizens are still inventing the continent. These African actors have embodied a new practice of international engagement that is repositioning the continent from its marginalized status in a rapidly shifting domestic and global political environment. This new brand of politics for the region reveals how African states collectively cultivate polity-building and geopolitical identity construction around the new political notion of “Africa.” To this end, the theory of Africa’s international relations presented here contextualizes Africa as a historically international region that is leveraged by the continent’s new regional internationalism. Our thesis explains the uptick in the evolving increased participation by contemporary African states in collectively attempting to reverse the continent’s marginal global position through international political dirigisme. Furthermore, this theory is empirically supported by our presentation throughout the book of a select series of interconnective national-regionalglobal events that help to inform meaning about the impact and critical importance of our theory of Africa’s new global politics and international relations. We have shown the region’s contributions to racial human development at the global level. We examined the continent’s changing capacity to exercise power, actor agency, and capacity impact within the global system. Moreover, we presented the strengthening of the African Union as an international institution that is becoming a formidable global governance actor relaying African states’ collective foreign policy standpoints to the rest of the world. Taken together, by exploring and analyzing global issues of African encounters, we have revealed the growing influence that the region’s engagement with global racial identity, global governance, international law, international security, transnational justice, and international political economy has had on the continent’s ability to produce a new genre of international politics. This is politics manifest as an impactful, collective foreign policy for the continent. Each encounter has been used to underscore a thesis about the African region’s transformation into a significant global actor that is exercising renewed and distinctive agency in its attempt to reshape and reposition African international affairs on the contemporary world stage. In this concluding chapter, we restate our answer to several questions that we asked in our opening chapter and treated in the course of the book. What does Africa’s new global politics look like? What role is international regionalism playing in shaping it? What will it mean for Africa’s politicaleconomic development in the twenty-first century? What does it mean for the theory and practice of the international relations of Africa? Finally, to what extent is it advancing and impacting an increasingly transformative international political economy? To answer these questions, we will draw

170

Africa’s New Global Politics

from the global issues and encounters that we have presented in Chapters 2–7 and use them as further evidence to reinforce the book’s thesis about Africa’s new internationalism and global politics. To make sense of these issues, we restate them here to inform a penultimate theory about Africa’s twenty-first-century internationalism, characterized as a phenomenon by which African states use their regional organization, the AU, to assertively navigate and engage contemporary, deeply plural geopolitics. We examine how African-constructed internationalist ideas and executed actions affect the ways that African states, peoples, and communities are self-determinedly formulating their own notions of place and politics in a changing international system. Our concluding illustration reconfirms the evidence that there exists a more visible, engaged, and activist regional-internationalist actor agency expressed by African states achieved through African Union institutionalism. In subsequent sections of the chapter we will reemphasize this thesis as follows. First we will review the empirical content presented in previous chapters to reinforce support for our thesis, presenting four areas of impact on Africa’s new global politics. Then we will apply new regionalism theory to an empirical case study—the African region’s response to the coronavirus pandemic—illustrating further the role of African Union institutionalism as the driver of the continent’s internationalism and new role in global politics. Finally we discuss what Africa’s new role in global politics means for the theory and practice of the international relations of Africa— speaking as one, global diversity, global inclusion, and representation—and for IR theory—agency, global South development, and global inequality. African Internationality in a Twenty-First-Century Global Order: Agency, Capacity, Alterity, and Power We have already recognized how Africa’s regionalism draws from a longstanding history upon which European power politics has been transacted. Since the end of World War I, the independent African states that emerged from this history have transformed a continent that was long an object of external transaction to its contemporary status as an autonomous regional internationalist actor that while remaining relatively a subject of international interventionism is at the same time an agent of its own internationalism. Because this twenty-first-century genre of African regional internationalism is still laced with underlying principles and contours that defined African internationality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, African state agency continues to be manifested as a series of global struggles. There is the struggle against peripheral and bottom-tier ranking in the

Africa’s New Global Politics

171

global order; the struggle for agency, autonomy, and self-determination; and the struggle that navigates a contested power play with former colonizers against global subjugation. Despite these struggles, since the early millennium, African internationality has never been more engaged, strong, and visible in contributing to significant global impact in the areas of race relations, international security and justice, global economy and trade, and global governance. Paralleling the preceding chapters, we will now turn to a discussion of four areas of impact in which African states are reshaping global politics. First is the observation that African internationalism’s impact has been foremost on worldwide imaginaries and practices of race and identity, given the region’s place in the historicity of the origins of modern racism. Contemporary race relations and inequalities in the United States and other parts of the West including in Latin America have their roots in the European-African encounter in the fifteenth century. The encounter set off the current legacies of racism, white supremacy, and white privilege when the first Europeans—Portuguese—in their travels to the Western and Eastern coastlands of Africa, kidnapped Africans and established the transatlantic slave trade. With the 1885 Scramble for Africa, racial colonialism followed, whose act incorporated the African region into the modern world system as an extreme-peripheral subjugated region under the supremacy of European nations. To this end, Black Africans (coined by European missionaries and colonialists as sub-Saharan Africans) especially remain subjected to the harmful effects of global anti-Black racism, which much of global society, regardless of how long since it has dismantled the legal structures of slavery or colonialism, still actively maintains, treating African-heritage people as inferior. Given this context, through resistance to slavery, abolitionist movements, anticolonial movements, and currently antiglobalist and decolonial protests, Africans have expressed their global anti-racism. These legacies explain why and how African states, peoples, and communities continue to exercise their struggles against racism globally in the twenty-first century. After all, African grievances against globalization emphasize economic exploitation and racism simultaneously, not only in relation to transnational financial institutions but in terms of how these institutions are also linked to persisting forms of colonialism and imperialism. Reflected at the 2002 World Conference Against Racism, there was a consensus among African participants and delegates that the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, and colonialism are crimes against humanity that demand reparations, and that there remains an economic basis of racism. These ideas have not been carried forth by international community organizations like the International Criminal Court; however, they are ideas that are important to African states expressed through African Union actions.

172

Africa’s New Global Politics

We have argued in this book that through the agency of the African Union, African states and peoples project these dimensions of racial identity as a distinctive value of their strengthened agency and internationality in a deeply plural world. We have seen how the AU uses anti-racism discourses to influence change in contemporary geopolitics. In 2018, when the US president, Donald Trump, allegedly referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole” countries; through the African Union, African states fought back by accusing Trump of dishonoring the celebrated American creed and respect for diversity and human dignity. They demanded that Trump formally retract the statement and deliver an apology not only to Africans but to all people of African descent around the globe. Additionally, with the 2020 police shooting of George Floyd, the African Union Commission chairperson, Moussa Faki Mahamat, revived the Organization of African Unity resolution of 1964 condemning racial discrimination in the United States. Africa’s anti-racist posturing goes beyond rhetoric. The African Group, a bloc of seventeen African countries on the UN Human Rights Council that works in coordination with the African Union in formulating common positions, called for a debate on racism in the council as a result of the George Floyd shooting in the United States in 2020. The call for the debate launched by Floyd’s brother, Philonise Floyd, and the fifty-four African states, compelled the UNHRC to respond by establishing a yearlong formal inquiry to investigate systemic racism against people of African descent. The call by African Union states led the former Chilean president and current UN Human Rights high commissioner Michelle Bachelet to urge countries throughout the world to confront legacies of structural racism, slavery, and colonization through the process of formal apologies, truth telling, and reparations (Cannito 2020). A second global impact can be observed in the way African internationality and new global politics are deeply pronounced in the international security world despite the continent’s position as a bottom-tier actor in the global security arena. Nonetheless, the militarily colonized and neocolonized continent of the nineteenth and mostly twentieth centuries giving way to its conflict-prone image especially in the 1990s is gradually changing. This has occurred because of the African region’s own purposeful regional securitization that has led to the successful development of a regional security complex in form of the African Peace and Security Architecture. Given that most African conflicts are global (de Coning 2017) in the sense that they are heavily influenced by external factors such as the global war on terror; fallout and spillover from the interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria; the exploitation of natural resources by multinational companies; capital flight facilitated and solicited by the international financial system; and transnational organized crime (Africa

Africa’s New Global Politics

173

Progress Report 2013), Africa’s regional security complex represents a significant contribution to the global common good. It is the AU-UN security relationship that provides a model for the international relations debate about subsidiarity between the UN and regional organizations. At differing times, the AU has resisted a globalregional relationship with the UN where that institution merely delegates tasks to the AU as a subordinate regional institution. The AU’s APSA has resisted a UN role that reduces African states’ security interests to local activity while attributing a superior role for the UN at the global multilateral level. Instead, the African regional-security complex protects the African region’s role as a security regime that is at once regional while also being international. Alternatively, through the APSA, African states work in complementarity with the UN as an exemplar for regional internationalism. In this respect, APSA provides a model and universal aspiration for other regions in striving for “sovereign regional supranationalism” in staving off the international interventionism of global security powers such as the United States and the EU on the one hand, while also cultivating a partnered intervention with the UN in a manner that fosters a more balanced regional-global security relationship on the other. To this end, Africa’s regional security regime is transforming the conventional hierarchical relationship between UN-based multilateralism and regionalism. For example, the AU Constitutive Act asserts a right to militarily intervene in a member state of the AU without endorsement from the UNSC even though the Charter of the United Nations (under Chapter VII) gives the UNSC the right to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken . . . to maintain or restore international peace and security” (AU 2000). As we showed in Chapter 4, the AU-UN partnership in Somalia underscores this delicate regional-global security relationship and balancing. For example, the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) is an African security initiative. However, the UN also operates two missions in Somalia: UNSOM (the UN Political Mission) and UNSOS, a UN support mission. The AU and UN missions work closely together in symbiotic ways. For example, in Somalia, because of its peace enforcement stabilization missions, the AU acts as both peace enforcer and peacekeeper in its strategic operations to stabilize the outbreak of violent conflict throughout the country. In this way, the AU conducts a regional response to global problems (de Coning 2017), ensuring that the cooperation arrangement between the UN and the AU is not only based on subsidiarity but also on a functional division of labor where the AU takes responsibility for early stabilization or peace enforcement, while the UN takes responsibility for peace consolidation, by deploying UN peacekeeping

174

Africa’s New Global Politics

operations, once sufficient stability has been established (de Coning 2017). This role that the AU has performed in Africa is shaping the way we understand the global peace and security architecture. Inspired by collaborations like this, in 2017, the African Union and the UN signed the Joint UN-AU Framework for Enhancing Partnership in Peace and Security. The framework provides a basis for collaboration through joint mechanisms and regular consultations, with an emphasis on prevention of conflict. The partnership develops a shared understanding of the root causes of conflict, collaborates closely in preventive diplomacy and inclusive mediation efforts, protects human rights, and enhances coordination and effective utilization of early warning systems to reduce the impact of disasters. The framework was endorsed by both organizations in accordance, respectively, with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations as well as the Constitutive Act of the African Union. Through the joint framework, African states (via the AU) and the UN (aka the international community) would recognize the imperative for close cooperation and coordination, based on their respective comparative advantages and complementarity in peace and security, and burden sharing on the basis of a collective responsibility to respond early, coherently, and decisively to prevent, manage, and resolve violent conflict in the world. Significantly, in this regard, the framework reiterated that African Union peace support operations are a vital tool in the international peace and security architecture, including in peace enforcement and counterterrorism, for which the African Union, Regional Economic Communities, regional mechanisms, and member states have demonstrated a comparative advantage in leading response efforts on behalf of the international community (Joint UN-AU Framework for Enhancing Partnership in Peace and Security 2017). A third impact is observed in African internationalism’s new role in the transnational justice domain (see Chapter 5), which has been recently manifest by an evolving contentious relationship between African states via African Union and Western powers via the International Criminal Court. In this case, complementarity and subsidiarity between a presumed global justice institution (ICC) and a regional one (the AU) would not suffice to shape a distinctive genre of internationalism as has occurred in the African regional security complex. Rather, the AU and the ICC relationship has become increasingly competitive rather than collaborative, causing the AU to shape a new albeit controversial role for African global politics through transnational justice events and interactions. Nonetheless, in revealing the duplicity and hypocrisy of the ICC and the West’s transactional inequality vis-à-vis African states and leaders, the African region has been successful in contributing a new practice of transnational justice internationalism that has resulted in the establishment of alternative norms of international criminal law.

Africa’s New Global Politics

175

To this end, African states have articulated alternative histories of injustice beyond the Jewish Holocaust and Nuremberg Trials by presenting experiences of mass atrocity violence produced by racial slavery and legacies of racialized colonialism. Moreover, for African states, modern neocolonial tragedies such as apartheid in Southern Africa and the Rwandan genocide have contributed as counters to the liberal justice norms presented by ICC norm entrepreneurs. The 2013 chairman of the African Union, and the then prime minister of Ethiopia, Hailemariam Desalegn, famously likened the ICC’s exclusive prosecution of alleged impunity and mass atrocity by African leaders as “race hunting” (Clarke 2020, 31). In resisting liberal cascade norms, the AU has been proactive in presenting counter norms steeped in Pan-Africanist histories (Clarke 2020, 31). The effect of an array of transnational justice events that have convened a series of emotional assemblages characterized similarly by Desalegn’s race hunting accusations to former colonizers of the African region, has been the ability of the region to reconfigure transnational justice cascades by connecting them to the continent’s deeply sentimental histories of subjugation. As such, in mobilizing contemporary Pan-Africanist imaginaries of justice, the AU is creating geopolitics of feeling that successfully positions African leaders as continuing victims of ICC and the West’s injustice. Importantly, however, in establishing an alternative to the ICC, the African Court, aiding it with alternative criminal jurisdiction rules to adjudicate African regional cases, the continent contributes to global structural transformation and the reconceptualization of transnational justice (Clarke 2020). The AU-ICC encounter has also contributed important insights for international criminal law and revealed its imperfections. One example is the Omar al-Bashir (Sudan) case, which raised the issue of whether a state should first agree before the ICC could assert its jurisdiction over its nationals when the indicted country is not a signatory of the Rome Statute. As such, once indictments had been issued against President Omar al-Bashir, other concerns arose regarding whether another country could arrest him or whether a leader is immune from arrest under current international law. The March 2005 referral of Bashir’s case to the ICC prosecutor by the UN Security Council raised other legal challenges for transnational justice. For the African states, the Bashir referral raised questions of how best to sequence peace and justice. Through Bashir, Sudan had been a willing partner-negotiator of peace to end the country’s armed conflict in Darfur when the ICC issued its warrant of arrest to the African leader. To this effect, the AU succeeded in portraying the ICC as an obstacle to peace processes in the continent because of the international justice institution’s relentless pursuit of not “justice” for victims in Africa but “vengeance” for

176

Africa’s New Global Politics

them in ways that sought to strip Africans of their agency to prosecute and adjudicate justice by Africans on their own terms. Africa’s amnesty agreements for perpetrators of mass atrocities instead were criticized by the West. They were deemed by the international community as confirmation that the region’s leaders did not want to address state responsibility and authoritarian leader responsibility for mass crimes and human rights abuses during civil wars. The “peace versus justice” debate that mediated this ideological conflict between the AU and the ICC has now become a central theme of international criminal justice law and theory. Through the AU-ICC encounter, African states have underscored the reality that the ICC operates in the larger international legal order of Eurocentrism and Western hegemony, and like other international institutions and norms, its cascade of justice underlying values reflect the standpoints of the Western world. African states revealed the ICC’s display of double standards, operating through the lens of Western conceptions of justice that overlook the West’s own long history of human rights abuse while casting the gaze on the developing world, particularly on Africa. To this end, the African region contributed to the global development of transnational criminal justice by being able to contest the ICC to the degree that the international organization’s Eurocentrism has emerged on full display as a dimension of global inequality. The AU’s ability to expose the ICC as a political tool at the service of Western powers on the UN Security Council to force interventionism into Africa and what it terms as neocolonial control perhaps has been Africa’s most effective impact and role in the new geopolitics of the twenty-first century. Many AU member states have described the ICC engagement in Africa as judicial imperialism as they view the ICC as having been deployed as a political tool by global powers through the manipulation of the UNSC, by its permanent member states (the United States, France, the UK, Russia, and China), as an instrument to discipline, punish, control, and dominate countries they deem to be aligned against them. In doing so, at the national level in states like Kenya, African leaders successfully framed the ICC as a tool to marginalize and dominate their political opponents in the developing world (Murithi 2019). The politicization of the ICC debate came in different narratives, including judging the hypocrisy and double standards of the ICC in pursuing African cases because of the continent’s weak, bottom-tier status in the global order. Africans deemed it a problem that the ICC was inclined to deliver justice from a distance, given that the physical location of the ICC is removed from the sites where the court investigates its crimes and extracts suspects and witnesses in Africa. The philosophical underpinnings of the ICC’s model of “neutral and impartial” justice and the court’s predominantly non-African staff, many of whom had limited previous experi-

Africa’s New Global Politics

177

ence of the people and places with which they worked, while prosecuting African alleged war crimes, were also identified as a problem (Clarke 2019). These complaints became highly salient and yielded a threat for various members of the AU, who considered withdrawing their ratifications of the Rome Statute. The impact of the African region manifested in other substantive ways as well. For example, in successfully prosecuting the mass atrocities of former Chadian leader Hissène Habré through the hybrid AU-Senegal court, and with the establishment of the African Court of Justice in direct contradistinction to the ICC, the continent became a visible global entity and actor that attracted substantial attention around the world. The Malabo Protocol establishing the African Court would produce the world’s first regional court to address international crimes; the court made at least two controversial contributions to international criminal law. First was its provision of immunity for sitting African heads of state and senior government officials, a rule that could effectively paralyze the ICC’s ability to prosecute such African leaders accused of mass atrocities. A second ruled that, unlike the ICC, the African Court would have wide jurisdiction as it covered fourteen categories of “grave” crimes including genocide; crimes against humanity; war crimes; unconstitutional change of government; piracy; terrorism; mercenarism; corruption; money laundering; trafficking in persons, drugs, and hazardous waste; illicit exploitation of natural resources; and aggression, all of which would provide the African region an opportunity to set a precedent for prosecuting these crimes at a regional level rather than externally. In the realm of transnational justice and international law, African states have exercised their foremost self-determined actor agency and global visibility. They have both questioned the existing hegemonic structures and pushed the frontiers of transnational criminal justice. A fourth impact, navigating actor agency in the international political economy, has been a much harder, uphill battle for African states to achieve strident discernible change. Ever since Portuguese sailors imperialized the continent’s trading routes, established the first slave transactions, and colonized Africa’s variably configured precolonial political communities as early as the sixteenth century, the African region has been a subjugated international economic region, subject to foreign pillaging and rapacious exploitation. Five centuries later in the twenty-first century, while the continent’s peripheral and marginalized condition of global inequality and underdevelopment has slowly evolved and transformed even in 2020 and despite much economic progress especially since 2012, the continent remains the least developed world region comparatively. While the economic indicators of many African states surged between 2012 and 2018, earning the continent the Goldman-Sachs brand name

178

Africa’s New Global Politics

“Lions on the Run” and “Africa Rising” (see Chapters 6 and 7), one of the African Union’s major achievements has been to strengthen the prospects of an African global economy by gradually positioning the continent to compete in a complex and changing global political economy. The AU’s African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), launched in July 2019, represents the closest exemplar of Africa’s twenty-first-century emerging internationalism in the realm of the economy. AfCFTA is a best practice product of the continent’s twentieth-century regionalism and is in itself an outcome that has occurred as a result of decades of building the African Economic Community (AEC). Regional integration has been a long-standing goal for African states since the 1980s when the OAU first established the building blocks for continental integration. Yet compared to the rest of the world, the continent’s regional integration agenda had not achieved the same successes as other world regions. Intra-African exports were 16.6 percent of total exports in 2017, compared with 68 percent in Europe and 59 percent in Asia. The AfCFTA agreement is an African state collective initiative borne in a global economy characterized by plurilateralism and deep economic pluralism. If successful in reversing the African region’s meager intraregional trade contribution, it would lead to a transformation of the continent’s bottom-tier economic ranking in the international political economy. While AfCFTA’s potential success appears to be expressed through its “region-ness” defined by African states’ abilities to pool together their national economies regionally and effect greater economic integration, economies of scale, and collective prosperity, the institution’s success is really dependent on the ability of Africa to reinvent its capacity to successfully navigate the power relations of a changing global political economy. The good news is that AfCFTA underscores the continent’s international regionalism in a global economy that is defined by plurilateral networks rather than merely bilateral and multilateral ones in several significant ways. This structure works to the continent’s favor in three significant ways. First, AfCFTA reappropriates Africans’ agency over their positioning of the African economy in the world. Africa Rising, for example, is a Western economic initiative for funneling investments to Africa as a last frontier for the global capitalist economy. However, AfCFTA is an African economic initiative for attracting and directing investments to continental economic goals with the purpose of strengthening an integrated African economy. The scramble for Africa since the end of the Cold War has made the continent a hub for investment as global powers like the United States, the EU, China, Russia, and even India have pushed billions of dollars into Africa. The AU-AfCFTA hopes not only to consolidate these relationships, making them more equalized, but also to push for more of its own self-determined investments in infrastructure connectivity, trade facilities, and industrial promotion.

Africa’s New Global Politics

179

Second, and related to this first role, is the way that the continent navigates while reappropriating agency through AfCFTA. In this regard, AfCFTA hopes to undo centuries of entangled, intricate global trading relationships that were forged during imperial, colonial, and dependent phases of global economic transformation. For example, while the eco currency adoption by the former West African CFA currency nations is a major step toward untangling French neocolonial economic structures in the continent and a win for an African subregional economic community, ECOWAS, it is indeed these types of global entanglements that the AU-AfCFTA has also targeted for long-term regional integration success. This is also true with US-African trading relationships where AfCFTA has compelled the AGOA framework to acknowledge the need to replace the nonreciprocal structure of the current AGOA-Africa relationship with the reciprocity embodied in the AfCFTA. In the same vein, AfCFTA equips African nations with the collective power to counter the EU’s Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), seen by critics as tools for furthering the economic exploitation and marginalization of Africa. A third phenomenon that explains Africa’s AfCFTA’s global importance is its role in leveraging new geographies of trade. In this light, AfCFTA reinvents the China in Africa syndrome to forge a new economic partnership where the African region hopes to become the new low-cost manufacturing hub with China’s help. This move has been heralded by China as a good thing as that country constantly needs to buy cheap and quality finished goods. It is hoped that the merger of African states as a single trade bloc under AfCFTA will largely expedite unified trade bargains, which are preferred in the place of negotiation arrangements with countries on an individual basis within the continent. AfCFTA has spearheaded the new China-Africa comprehensive strategic and cooperative partnership that is heralded in its potential to provide the African region with a transformational and multidimensional model of cooperation based on five major pillars to help achieve AfCFTA’s international ambitions. The pillars include mutually beneficial economic cooperation; solidarity and coordination in international affairs; political equality and mutual trust; security cooperation and mutual assistance; and cultural exchanges. African economic institutions like the AfCFTA drive the continent’s new internationalism, allowing Africans to engage the world relatively autonomously from the Western gaze and control. Africa’s new global impacts in cultural identity, security, transnational justice, and trade are producing a reconsideration of Africa’s role in global affairs and in particular its representation within international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the UN Security Council, and international forums such as the G-20. Emerging as a global governance institution, the region’s fifth impact is in African states’ building

180

Africa’s New Global Politics

and strengthening of the African Union’s regional and global governance infrastructure. The African Union has come to provide African states and peoples an opportunity to participate in the global political economy differently, and certainly through an infusion of their own majoritarian economic interests, goals, and imaginaries. Prior to the African Union’s strengthening, the region’s ability to play an active role in determining its future on the global stage was limited by its ability to be represented in global governance organizations. While African states continue to caucus together within these organizations with the aim to project a common standpoint and voice of African interests in the world, they have increasingly turned to the African Union as a preferable forum for projecting African power in the contemporary world. The African Union provides an avenue for African states to participate in global governance on their own terms. The Africa CDC and Covid-19 The impact of Africa’s new global politics and regional internationalism couldn’t be substantiated and further illustrated more than in the emergence and performance of the new African Union institution, the Africa Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The Africa CDC is a product of the continent’s new regionalism, and the institution serves as a factor that drives Africa’s new genre of global politics. Since the 1990s AIDS crisis, the African region has been a central hub for global health encounters and operations. The AIDS crisis framed the African continent pathologically as both a perpetrator of the global spread of AIDS and a hapless victim in need of AIDS global governance interventionism. With more than two-thirds of all people living with HIV globally in 2020, the African region remains the hardest hit in the world. Earlier, in 2014, the continent experienced another global health crisis when a microbial pandemic known as Ebola broke out in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia in West Africa. Africans viewed Ebola as more than a health issue but also as a humanitarian challenge that threatened to destabilize the hard-won peace and security and economic growth of the affected nation-states who were just beginning to stabilize. Fearful of its worldwide spread, the Ebola health crisis again propelled the African region into international headlines in ways that regurgitated age-old racialist tropes about the continent as a harbinger of disease and misery. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa was documented as the most severe in history and was declared a public health emergency by the World Health Organization, which predicted the crisis to be a risk to the entire Global Village. Like a familiar prescient playbook to today’s coronavirus crisis, narratives describing control of the out-

Africa’s New Global Politics

181

break recommended treatment and interventions; early, aggressive supportive care with rehydration; contact tracing; preventive initiatives; active surveillance; effective isolation and quarantine procedures and timely response to patients; public health education; point-of-care diagnostics; promising new vaccines and pharmaceutical efforts; and coordinated efforts of the international community (Kalra et al. 2014). What didn’t make global headlines at the time of these previous global health crises is the African region’s own responses and interventions. With the Ebola crisis, in collaboration with the WHO, the African Union first established the African Union Support to the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa (ASEOWA) as a military and civilian humanitarian mission comprising medical doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel, as well as military personnel. ASEOWA contributed to the international community’s ongoing efforts to stop the Ebola transmission in the affected West African states. Its goal was to prevent international spread and rebuild African health systems. Through the platform of the African Union, African states came together in solidarity to fight the Ebola challenge to its region (Musabayana 2016). Despite the successes of ASEOWA in fighting Ebola, African states did not stop there. At an African Heads of State and Government meeting in January 2015, they went on to establish the Africa CDC as a new African Union institution with an aim to improve prevention, detection, and response to public health threats in the continent. The AU Assembly approved the statute of the Africa CDC on January 31, 2016 (Musabayana 2016), and the CDC was established in 2017. In its Agenda 2063 blueprint for the development of the continent, African states justified the need for yet another regional-international public health institution. The founding document cited as goals the equipping of the CDC with tools to combat the increased potential for new or reemerging pathogens to turn into pandemics that would eradicate existing pandemic and emerging infectious diseases and other threats posed by environmental toxins (Nkengasong, Maiyegun, and Moeti 2017). The Africa CDC pledged a five-year plan to work with African states, the WHO, and other global partners to strengthen the continent’s capacity in health-related surveillance and innovative information systems, to expand functional and linked clinical and public health laboratory networks in African regions, to support member states’ public health emergency preparedness and response plans, and to strengthen public health science for improved decisionmaking and practice (Nkengasong, Maiyegun, and Moeti 2017). The institution was designed to engage on three fronts: the national, the regional, and the international. At the national level, the CDC would provide strategic direction and promote public health practice within member states through capacity building, minimization of health inequalities, and promotion of continuous quality improvement in the delivery of public

182

Africa’s New Global Politics

health services. At the regional level, the CDC would operate close linkages with five regional collaborating centers in Egypt, Nigeria, Gabon, Zambia, and Kenya, where each center would be equipped with the capacity to rapidly detect unknown pathogens. Internationally, the Africa CDC would forge a close collaboration with the WHO and other UN health agencies to coordinate and create synergies to better respond to disease threats in the African region. It is no wonder that by January 2020, three years after the African CDC was established, the African regional institution had embodied its own brand of global politics and international regionalism. Early during the Covid-19 global pandemic in August 2020 with 1 million cases and 23,000 deaths, world media expressed surprise that previous predictions announcing the continent’s apocalypse from Covid (see Melinda Gates) had not come true (Nordling 2020). The African Covid-19 apocalypse storyline in Western media suggesting that the continent wouldn’t be able to cope with the pandemic, resuscitated lazy and familiar pathological narratives about Africans as incapable, a worry to the world, and in dire need of foreign assistance (Witt 2020). ASEOWA’s successful combating of Ebola five years earlier and the continent’s successful establishment of the Africa CDC were either unknown or ignored by the Western press, despite the significant role that they played in tempering the pandemic’s deleterious effects on the continent. Alternatively, Africa’s CDC response to the pandemic was described as a refreshing exemplar of internationalism when contrasted with the rest of the world, which had followed a logic of national sovereignty. At the beginning of the pandemic, the Africa CDC immediately started working with the World Health Organization; its subregional centers in Egypt, Nigeria, Gabon, Zambia, and Kenya; and its member states, to support AU member states in their responses to the spread of the virus. Performing like an international organization, Africa CDC’s response practiced coordination and standard setting, expertise, technical support, public agenda setting, as well as mobilization of resources (Witt 2020). In its coordinating and standard setting role, the Africa CDC convened member states and provided joint platforms for action. African health ministers met to establish a continental strategy to respond to the pandemic while African finance ministers met to discuss the virus’s fiscal consequences and ways to tackle them, which led to the establishment of an African Coronavirus Fund (Witt 2020). Through the CDC, the AU also set up a platform to pool global, regional, and national expertise to member states and their citizens by establishing the Africa Taskforce for Coronavirus (AFTCOR). AFTCOR provided technical support to member states especially leading to the expansion of testing capacities (forty-eight testing labs) throughout the continent where there had previously been none.

Africa’s New Global Politics

183

The Africa CDC fulfilled an important public agenda role where it launched a region-wide outreach campaign promoting Covid-19 awareness. Additionally, the AU’s role in mobilizing resources through the AU Bureau and the African Coronavirus Fund perhaps emphasized the Africa CDC’s most critical internationalist function. This is because through its engagement with the international community and philanthropic organizations, on behalf of its member states, the AU used its convening power to send a united message to other international institutions, the G-20, and individual donors appealing for the need to release additional funds, defer interest payments, and support the acquisition of much needed medical supplies (Witt 2020). Africa’s internationalism in fighting the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic through its Africa CDC has not been without controversy, and initially, the region was the easy first-go region to conduct vaccine clinical trials despite the continent’s lowest infection and death rates. The scandal of #AfricaIsNotALabRat sparked the racialist tropes and emphasized the global political-economy peripheral margins in which the continent and its peoples still reside. During a debate on a French TV channel interview, a French researcher was questioned whether a Covid-19 vaccine study would work as planned on healthcare workers in Australia and Europe because they had access to personal protective equipment while working. The interviewer remarked, “If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation? A bit like it is done elsewhere for some studies on AIDS. In prostitutes, we try things because we know that they are highly exposed and that they do not protect themselves” (BBC 2020). The French researcher responded, “You are right. We are in the process of thinking about a study in parallel in Africa.” The incident sparked accusations of racism against Africans causing even the WHO and the African Union to condemn the French doctor’s comments as racist. The Africa CDC condemned the doctor’s comments as “disgusting,” “condescending,” and racially targeted at Africans at a time when the Covid-19 response required humanitarian actions of global solidarity (Nkengasong 2020). Framing African populations as guinea pigs in Covid-19 vaccine trials resulted in a second controversy that produced a period of vaccine trial aversion in the continent whereby for the first four months of the pandemic (March–July), aside from Egypt and South Africa, there were no vaccine trials conducted in the continent. To this end, the Africa CDC director, Dr. John Nkengasong, pledged to continue to work very closely with the World Health Organization to ensure that only ethically and scientifically sound clinical trials for vaccines and therapies were conducted in Africa, using the same standards and principles as those employed elsewhere in the world.

184

Africa’s New Global Politics

Through the Africa CDC, African states collaborated on finding a solution to the problem of vaccine shortages in the continent. For example, the AU CDC launched the Consortium for Covid-19 Vaccine Clinical Trial (CONCVACT), aimed at bringing together global vaccine developers, funders, and African organizations that conduct clinical trials. CONCVACT launched ten late-stage trials for Covid-19 in Africa to ensure that there is enough data gathered on the safety and efficacy of vaccine candidates among African populations. Leveraging the crisis of legitimacy of #AfricaIsNotALabRat, while strengthening its own response to a global pandemic through CONCVACT, African states sought to ensure that vaccine trials conducted in Africa were scientifically valid. The CDC ensured that Africans consented to participate in trials without duress or coercion, and that if multi-country clinical trials in Africa were conducted, they held the promise of direct, tangible, and significant benefit to the continent (Nkengasong 2020). By mid-2021, the Delta variant phase of the coronavirus pandemic had launched a third wave of Covid contagion, hospitalizations, and death in Africa and only 3 percent of the population vaccinated. However, through the African CDC, African states remained at the forefront of global policy debate about the international political economy of global public health engendered by Covid-19. In opposing booster vaccines for wealthy Western countries at the expense of poorer developing countries, especially those in the African region, Dr. John Nkengasong made international headlines in an interview with the New York Times opposing the Biden administration’s support for booster shots for Americans. Nkengasong said wealthy nations should first come through on their commitments to donate hundreds of millions of doses, to help end the acute phase of the pandemic. Booster shots caused fewer doses to go to the developing world in part because of the prioritization of bilateral deals over international solidarity. The African CDC’s response to the pandemic can be positioned in the broader debate about Africa in international relations, particularly the tension between African actors as victims of exogenous forces or players in global processes (Brown and Harman 2013; Patterson and Balogun 2021). Clearly the CDC is a player used by African states to become more effective in initiating innovative, bold, visionary, but implementable African-owned solutions to address global disease threats and challenges in the twenty-first century. Demonstrating the continent’s new regional-international agency, according to Nkengasong (2021), “We need people-centered health systems that are very inclusive and begin to disrupt the tendency of dependence of the global south on the global north. We have to disrupt that by regionalizing our health security architectures.”

Africa’s New Global Politics

185

Africa in International Relations Theory and Practice Throughout this book, and especially in the closing chapter, we have observed Africa’s new global politics and its implications for and impact on international relations practice. We have seen how in practice, the continent has transformed over centuries from an international region to a regional international, supragoverning identity. We are now able to ask what the African region’s history and current international engagement means for international relations theory and study. Is there a theory of African international relations to relay here? Can we discern an African continental contribution to international relations theory given our observations and insights? In our opening chapter, we centered our thesis in the context of Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan’s The Making of Global International Relations (2019). In their criticism of what they considered a Western-dominated, Eurocentric study of international relations, the authors coined the term “global” international relations to reflect both the need for the inclusion of the historical international relations practice of the non-West as well as the vast regions’ international relations thinking—expressed in IR theories such as postcolonialism, dependency theory, and area studies. The authors are right to point out that the rise of non-Western countries in the 1990s’ wake of globalization served to erode the boundary between the core West and the periphery (much of the developing world including China—then) in both international relations practice as well as its theoretical study. These dual movements in international relations study have fostered greater calls for the pluralization of the study of international relations and further fueled the demand for a truly global study that incorporates greater representation and understanding of the international relations of the developing world. While the dependency theories of Latin America, the postcolonial theories originally emanating from India, and more recently Chinese international relations theory are all products of these transformations, there remains ambivalence as to whether IR theory derivation and development apply to Africa at all. Theories of African internationality continued to emerge from the West (Africa Rising) or lazily reinforced tropes about Africa’s sustained neocoloniality (see China in Africa theories). Acharya and Buzan write, In Africa, the development of academic international relations remained relatively weak and poorly resourced. There was no serious effort to create an “African School of International Relations.” Instead, the main effort was to establish African perspectives [including] agency and voice in the emerging Global IR theory-based belief that African voices and contributions should have a global resonance and can be brought to the core of the discipline of IR. (2019, 250)

186

Africa’s New Global Politics

Acharya and Buzan acknowledge that a major contribution by African scholars to international relations study has been their challenge of the relevance of Western IR concepts and theories for the African region. For example, instead of focusing on the artificial nation-state as is critical to normative international relations theory, Africanist IR scholars have instead focused on the question of African agency and African regionalism (Acharya and Buzan 2019). Like we have done in this book, they too acknowledge that through the AU, regionalism has been a major facet of African agency that has propelled the continent’s global leadership in contributing to select global norms such as R2P (Acharya and Buzan 2019, 252). Our study certainly draws from Acharya and Buzan’s insights about the African region’s limited progress made in developing an international relations theoretical school of its own; nevertheless, our analysis of the same phenomenon takes Acharya and Buzan’s modest conclusions much further than they do. We agree that regionalism and agency are good places to begin to construct a theory of African international relations, and our thesis on regional internationalism may be examined as an African theory of international relations in its own right. Our thesis about African Unionism’s phenomenon explaining African states’ growing capacity to exercise collective agency, global action, and power to engage internationalism on its own terms for its own interests, may be examined as a theoretical framework used to examine the region’s international relations historically and in the contemporary arena. After all, while much of our book has documented this genre of African international engagement and impact on global politics since the millennium, one can also examine the continent’s regional and global engagement in historical context. When one does this, we see how the notion of modern Africa has been and remains an island continent borne in the constructed modernity of an international region. The transatlantic slave trade, the scramble for Africa, the European colonization of Africa, the decolonization of Africa, globalization, and de-globalization all represent epochs in the continent’s global transformation. To see a theory of African internationalism then is to see the millennial emergence of African regional internationalism via the platform of the African Union as an innovation by African states and leaders that is revealing an unfolding next phase of the region’s longue durée engagement in the modern world system. Our theory of African international relations reveals a practice of African global politics that finds its agency and action through regionalism by engaging in new spaces of international political opportunity thereby providing new ways for African states to engage, navigate, and especially challenge global power hierarchies. Africa’s African Union is driving this political action. Founded in 2002 in an era when globalization had begun to restructure the international system, the African Union positioned itself as

Africa’s New Global Politics

187

a new genre of regionalism that sought to shape the continent’s interests in the context of paradoxical forces that were advancing global transformation in the early millennium. To this end, Africa’s new regionalism has emerged as a promoter of globalization given its efforts to externalize continental relations around the world while also acting as a resister to globalization, given its role in promoting regional intracontinental, institutional integration. To this end, whether as an international region of the past where African communities were victims of a colonized regional international territory or in the contemporary where the continent is an agent of a complex though transformational region, African global actors continue to negotiate against exogenous world orders that have been imposed on the continent through brutal or more benign forms of Western and Eastern power politics (Postel-Vinay 2007). Regional geopolitical forces are pushing African states, subregions, and communities toward cooperation within new types of regionalist and global frameworks and networks. For example, at one level, African Union regionalism is internationalist, reflecting the deeper interdependence of the contemporary global economy taking place in a multipolar global order and a deeply plural global international system. At another level, however, this new regionalism is contextual and historically rooted in the local, national, and regional needs and aspirations of African states and peoples in their struggles for humanity, freedom, and self-determination. The continent’s manifestation of regionalism is used to deal with various global problems while the issues that the AU engages are simultaneously conditioned by the nature of these problems. By reinventing Pan-Africanism and strengthening African Unionism, Africa’s new regionalism reflects the political imaginings and lived experiences in a variety of political settings that are interconnected locally, nationally, regionally, and globally. Africa’s new regionalism has become an important feature that shapes its new global politics. It is also being shaped by African states’ collective action, dirigisme, and recrafting within the institutional platform of the African Union. Through the AU, African states have been able to use the new regionalism to recreate a collective Pan-African worldview to forge and impact new, deeply plural geopolitical norms. Importantly, African states use this genre of regional internationalism to respond to a world order that engages, confronts—and sometimes contests—an increasingly complexifying global governance. The diverse dimensions of the theory can be seen when we examine the different ways that the continent has developed its international engagement as an international region throughout these global epochs. To this end, one sees a pattern of global behavior and practice since the turn of the twentieth century when the seeds of African nationalism and Pan-Africanism were planted to the current era of deep pluralism and hyperglobalization in which

188

Africa’s New Global Politics

free African states are exercising their agency through a strategy of regionalized global engagement. This pattern of behavior can hardly be reduced exclusively to a condition of extraversion characterized in Bayart and Ellis’s “Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion” (2000) as a theory of Africa’s dependency on the external world. Their theory is described by the ways in which African leaders have actively participated in the processes that have created and maintained the continent’s dependent position within the global system. Alternatively, we have presented African states’ leadership’s reactions to the continent’s global pillage, imperialization, colonization, peripheralization, and neocolonial inequality as having been met with widely variable, complex, and transformative global dirigisme and agency over time despite asymmetrical global power hierarchies that limit African agency. Nonetheless, African global agency has always been exercised through modes of resistance, resilience, survival, adjustment, codependency, cooperation, and even counter dominance at times by a range of continental global actors. This history has culminated in the contemporary enmeshed networks embodied and leveraged by African states’ exercise of regional internationalism under the rubric of the AU in the twenty-first century. Agency threads the needle of this theoretical construct as it constitutes the building blocks of this long-standing action by African actors navigating the broad and deep contours of the African international region. Such action has been manifested through international prisms of anti-racialism, anticolonialism, Pan-African solidarity, and can-do and self-help tropes like the African solutions for African problems and Agenda 2063. While this nascent theory may help in understanding why and how the African region has engaged in the world over time, it also helps us understand a pattern. Participation by African actors in the international region defined as “Africa” is the fodder of an international relations of Africa theory. Such a theory is not based on realism—when individual nation-states engage the world militarily for dominance and global power control. Instead, African state militarism is emerging as intracontinental, used to stabilize the region not the world. Neither is African international relations theory necessarily liberalist even though Africans have cooperated with liberal institutions; they have not built global institutions for global cooperation. In fact, African liberal institutions such as the African Court are established to counter global liberal institutions and to alternatively forge intra-African cooperation and norms. As well, even though the continent remains the most peripheralized, marginalized, unequal region of the world, African international relations is not necessarily structuralist either as African global engagement combines antiglobalism with cooperative globalism. When we see from these theories what African international relations is not, we can discern what it is. It is a regionally internationalist movement

Africa’s New Global Politics

189

driven by solidarity of African state actors. In its early fifteenth-century emergence, because the region was not conscious of its pan-regional identity, the African region was imperialized through European slave raiding and trading to the Americas. This process of external transnationalism into Africa opened the continent to its weakest subjugation and ultimate conquest in the scramble for Africa, an event that led to the almost total colonization of the continent for almost a century. The 1950s anticolonial struggles—at once also internationalist in their resistance to European powers—established a first phase of African regionalism, which in its second phase in a global era has transformed from reactive defense against all forms of continuing colonialism, including neocolonialism, to a proactive global posture that is currently regionally internationalist, contributing to alternative dimensions of global development. An African theory of international relations is captured by African states’ engagement with international regionalism where the continent’s fifty-four sovereign nation-states pool together in Pan-African solidarity to speak and act as a regional entity in global affairs. The theory is best captured in the concept of a regional world where African states are driving a practice of regionalism that is complementary with internationalism. The African regional world collaborates and engages the international world to shape global order. As a result of the increasing complexity of postcolonial global pluralism occurring as globalization unfolds, through their regional organization (the AU), African states are collectively exercising their imprint in governing the world. This phenomenon is an aspiration that is evolving and unfolding as the world changes and as new issues shape the global landscape. Africa’s twenty-first-century engagement in global politics takes the theory of international regionalism to another level. The continent’s regional internationalism has had an important role in reinforcing the continent’s global capacity to achieve desirable world order goals while also containing negative global impact on the continent. This way of examining African internationalism infuses dynamism into an understanding of both Africa’s international relations and the IR study as we see how in the twenty-first century, the African world region is emerging because of the social interactions of African states and their intersubjective dynamics expressed through the activities of the African Union. To this end, Africa’s regional internationalism is shaped by the sociopolitical interactions of the AU, which functions as a regional political builder, and AU leaders like Moussa Faki, Dlamini Zuma, David Luke, Paul Kagame, John Nkengasong, and other regional actors documented in this book assume the mantle of leading the African region in a changing world. Africa’s new international regionalism is being forged and shaped as a style and strategy of global politics in the context of a changing global world order (Barbieri 2019).

190

Africa’s New Global Politics

Conclusion With this book we hope to have contributed to new insights to the study of international relations offering a global IR perspective while also reinforcing the growing relevance of postcolonial international relations theory. In doing so we present the experiences of international engagement and practice from the perspective of African states and institutions thus bypassing the conventional wisdom of the IR disciplines that still focus on liberalism, realism, and structuralism. African regional worldism presents African global actors as active, articulate, formidable agents with alternative visions and distinct aspirations. In doing so, this approach offers a more expansive and fuller study of IR that can account for the diversity of perspectives and worldviews on world politics. Africa’s New Global Politics underscores Edward Said’s notion of contrapuntality as a method for crafting an understanding of global politics as composed of multiple and overlapping worlds. African regional worldism shows historical awareness of the complex interdependence through which the global has been constituted, which includes both Western histories as well as African histories. The modern world is co-constitutive, including an array of diverse worldwide institutions and processes that underlie the conduct and study of international relations (Sankaran Krishna). Our approach represents the inclusion of non-Western ways of thought into international relations theory at a time when Western countries are losing their primacy in world politics. This approach will both guide us to an understanding of Africa’s new role in global politics and predict a path for Africa’s future role in global geopolitics. It will also help in charting new normative frameworks and alternative visions for global orders of the twenty-first century. Finally, then, with respect to this contribution, as African scholars based in the global North, it is befitting to conclude our case study by emphasizing the post-positivist approach to international relations knowledge production that we have strived to use throughout the book. In presenting the expressions of global actors and processes of African states and regional institutions, we have tried to be attentive to the social embeddedness of our own social contexts as African IR scholars playing their part to decolonize international relations. We hope that our case study has drawn attention to some of the absences and erasures in the IR narrative while providing evidence that the African region has shaped and structured the infrastructure of world politics and the international system on its own terms too.

References

Abrahamsen, Rita. 2020. “Internationalists, Sovereigntists, Nativists: Contending Visions of World Order in Pan-Africanism.” Review of International Studies 46 (1): 56–74. Acharya, Amitav. 2004. “How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional Change in Asian Regionalism.” International Organization 58 (2): 239–275. Acharya, Amitav. 2011. “Norm Subsidiarity and Regional Orders: Sovereignty, Regionalism, and Rule-Making in the Third World.” International Studies Quarterly 55 (1): 95–123. Acharya, Amitav. 2014. “Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds: A New Agenda for International Studies.” International Studies Quarterly 58 (4): 647–659. Acharya, Amitav. 2017. After Liberal Hegemony: The Advent of a Multiplex World Order Ethics and International Affairs. Cambridge University Press. Acharya, Amitav. 2018. The End of American World Order, 2nd ed. Polity. Acharya, Amitav, and Barry Buzan. 2019. The Making of Global International Relations. Cambridge University Press. Achieng, Roseline M. 2014. “Can We Speak of African Agency? APRM and Africa’s Agenda 2063.” African Sociological Review 18 (1): 49–64. Ademola, Oyejide Titiloye, Abiodun S. Bankole, and Adeolu O. Adewuyi. 2016. “China-Africa Trade Relations: Insights from AERC Scoping Studies.” In Spencer Henson and O. Fiona Yap, eds., The Power of the Chinese Dragon: Implications for African Development and Economic Growth, 69–97. Palgrave Macmillan. Adi, Hakim. 2018. Pan-Africanism: A History. Bloomsbury Publishing. Adi, Hakim, and Marika Sherwood. 2003. Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora Since 1787. Routledge. Adom, Getachew. 2019. World Making After Empire: The Rise and Fall of SelfDetermination. Princeton University Press. “African Common Position on Security Council Reform.” 1994. Extract from Organization of African Unity document, September 29, 1994. https://www

191

192

References

.globalpolicy.org/un-reform/un-reform-topics/reform-of-the-security-council-9 -16/41141.html. African Union. 2000. The Constitutive Act. Addis Ababa. African Union. 2003. Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. Maputo.African Union. 2009. “Report of the 2nd Ministerial Meeting on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).” November 6. African Union. 2013. “Decision on Africa’s Relationship with the International Criminal Court (ICC).” Extraordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union, October 12. https://au.int/sites/default/files/decisions/9655-ext_assembly_au_dec_decl _e_0.pdf. African Union. 2014. “Common African Position (CAP) on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.” January 31. http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA /FIELD/Dakar/pdf/AfricanCommonPositionFINAL.pdf. African Union. 2015. Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want. African Union Commission. African Union. 2017. Withdrawal Strategy Document. January 22–31. African Union. 2021. African Ministers Adopt Common African Position for More Women in Leadership Positions. March 1. https://au.int/en/pressreleases/20210301 /african-ministers-adopt-common-african-position-more-women-leadership. Africa Progress Report. 2013. Equity in Extractives: Stewarding Africa’s Natural Resources for All. Africa Progress Panel. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int /files/resources/relatorio-africa-progress-report-2013-pdf-20130511-125153.pdf. Africa Renewal. 2020. “AfCFTA: Implementing Africa’s Free Trade Pact the Best Stimulus for Post-COVID-19 Economies.” May. Agbor, Sarah Anyang. 2019. “Speech on the Occasion of Inauguration of ChinaAfrica Institute and the International Symposium on Africa-China Cooperation and People-to-People Exchange.” April 9–10, Beijing, China. https://au.int /sites/default/files/speeches/36378-sp-final_speech_beijing_china-1.pdf. Agence France-Presse. 2013. “African Union Accuses International Criminal Court of Racial Bias.” South China Morning Post, May 29. https://www.scmp.com /news/world/article/1248325/african-union-accuses-international-criminal -court-racial-bias. Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want. 2015. African Union Commission. Aidi, Hisham. 2019. “The ICC and the African Union: Engaging African Youth in International Justice.” Africa Portal, February 1. https://www.africaportal.org /publications/icc-and-african-union-engaging-african-youth-international-justice/. Akuffo, E. A. 2010. “Cooperating for Peace and Security or Competing for Legitimacy in Africa? The Case of the African Union in Darfur.” African Security Review 19 (4): 74–89. Alden, Chris. 2007. “Emerging Countries as New ODA Players in LDCs: The Case of China and Africa.” Idées pour le débat (IDDRI). https://www.iddri.org/sites /default/files/import/publications/id_0701_alden_bei-ec_chinafrica1.pdf. Alden, Chris, and Ana Cristina Alves. 2017. “China’s Regional Forum Diplomacy in the Developing World: Socialisation and the ‘Sinosphere.” Journal of Contemporary China 26 (103): 151–165. Alden, Chris, Dan Large, and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira. 2008. “China Returns to Africa: Anatomy of an Expansive Engagement.” Real Instituto Elcano Working Paper no. 51/2008. November 12. Amin, Samir. 2004. The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World. Pluto. Amoah, Padmore Adusei, Obert Hodzi, and Roberto Castillo. 2020. “Africans in China and Chinese in Africa: Inequalities, Social Identities, and Wellbeing.” Asian Ethnicity 21 (4): 457–463.

References

193

Angelo, Dube. 2015. “The AU Model Law on Universal Jurisdiction: An African Response to Western Persecutions Based on the Universality Principle.” Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal 18 (3). Annan, Kofi. 2005. “In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All.” United Nations. https://undocs.org/A/59/2005, accessed April 21, 2020. Apecu, Joan. 2013. “The Level of African Engagement at the World Trade Organization from 1995 to 2010.” Revue internationale de politique de développement 4(2): 29–67. Ariño, África M. 2015. “The African Economic Community.” Africa from Africa [blog], July 1. https://blog.iese.edu/africa/2015/07/01/the-african-economic -community/. Arosanyin, Kemi. 2018. “Understanding the African Continental Free Trade Area: Its Implications for Other Global Markets.” Global Trade, August 27th, 2018. https://www.globaltrademag.com/understanding-the-african-continental-free -trade-area/. Arosanyin, Kemi. 2019. “Understanding the African Free Trade Area.” Global Trade, August 27. https://www.globaltrademag.com/understanding-the-african -continental-free-trade-area/. Asante, Molefi Kete. 2007. An Afrocentric manifesto: Toward an African renaissance. Polity. Austin, W. Chadwick, and Michael Thieme. 2016. “Is the International Criminal Court Anti-African?” Peace Review 28, no. 3 (2016): 342–350. Axtmann, Roland. 1996. Liberal Democracy into the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Integration and the Nation-State. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bahru, Z., and S. Pausewang. 2002. “Ethiopia: The Challenge of Democracy from Below.” Nordic Africa Institute; Forum for Social Studies. Bandele, Ramla M. 2010. Black Star: African American Activism in the International Political Economy. University of Illinois Press. Barbieri, Giovanni. 2019. “Regionalism, Globalism and Complexity: A Stimulus Towards Global IR?” Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal 4 (6): 424–441. Bayart, J. F. 1991. “La Problématique de la Démocratie en Afrique Noire: La Baule, et Puis Après?” Politique africaine (43): 5–20. Bayart, Jean-François, and Stephen Ellis. 2000. “Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion.” African Affairs 99 (395): 217–267. BBC. 2020. “Coronavirus: Africa Will Not Be a Testing Ground for Vaccines, Says WHO.” Coronavirus Pandemic. April 6. https://www.bbc.com/news/world -africa-52192184. Bello, Akeem Olajide. 2014. “United Nations and African Union Conventions on Corruption and Anti-Corruption Legislations in Nigeria: A Comparative Analysis.” African Journal of International and Comparative Law 22 (2): 308–333. Bello, Walden. 2008. Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy. Zed Books. Bello, Walden. 2013. Capitalism’s Last Stand? Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity. Zed Books. Bello, Walden. 2014. “What Is to Be Done? The Six Pillars of Deglobalization.” Systemic Alternatives. https://systemicalternatives.org/2014/05/09/what-is-to -be-done-the-six-pillars-of-deglobalization/. Bello, Walden. 2017. “The End of Globalization.” In Henry Veltmeyer and Paul Bowles, eds., The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies, 153–163. Routledge. Beresford, Alexander. 2016. “Africa Rising?” Review of African Political Economy 43 (147): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2016.1149369.

194

References

Biney, Ama. 2013. “Is Africa Really Rising?” Pambazuka News. https://www .pambazuka.org/governance/africa-really-rising. Biney, Drama. 2016. “The Neo-liberal Agenda Versus the Pan-Africanist Agenda: Towards the Way Forward.” In Charles Quist-Adade and Wendy Royal, eds., Re-engaging the African Diasporas: Pan-Africanism in the Age of Globalization, 138. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bischoff, Paul-Henri, Kwesi Aning, and Amitav Acharya. 2015. Africa in Global International Relations: Emerging approaches to theory and practice. Routledge. Biswas, Shampa. 2013. “Post-Colonial Security Studies.” In Laura J. Shepherd, ed. Critical Approaches to Security, 104–114, Routledge. Biswas, Shampa. 2016. “Postcolonialism.” In Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith, eds., International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity. 4th ed. Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/hepl/9780198707561.003.0013. Black Panther. 2018. Directed by Ryan Coogler. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Boahen, Adu. 1989. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Johns Hopkins University Press. Boffey, Daniel. 2019. “African Union Seeks to Kill EU Plan to Process Migrants in Africa.” The Guardian, February 24, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019 /feb/24/african-union-seeks-to-kill-eu-plan-to-process-migrants-in-africa. Bolton, John R. 2018. “Remarks by National Security Advisor Ambassador John R. Bolton on the Trump Administration’s New Africa Strategy.” Foreign Policy, December 13. Bond, Patrick. 2016. “Protests Grow Against WEF’s ‘Africa Keeps Rising’ Fallacy.” Green Left Weekly (1095): 20. https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary ;dn=098268734641344;res=IELHSS. Bornkamm, Paul Christophe. 2012. Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: Between Retribution and Reparation. Oxford University Press. Boyle, Katie. 2016. “Reconceptualizing Socio-Economic Rights in the Transitional Justice Discipline.” Law, Social Justice and Global Development Journal 20 (2): 1–11. Brigety, Reuben E., II. 2016. “The New Pan-Africanism: Implications for US Africa Policy.” Survival 58 (4): 159–176. Brock, R. Williams, and Nicolas Cook. 2020. “Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).” In Focus, Congressional Research Service, February 7. https:// crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11423. Brown, William. 2012. “A Question of Agency: Africa in International Politics.” Third World Quarterly 33 (10): 1889–1908. Brown, William. 2016. “Time to Rethink Africa’s Role in International Relations.” Paper presented at Beyond Periphery, Paris, December. Brown, William. 2019. “Labor, International Development and Africa: Policy Rethinking in Opposition.” In Danielle Beswick, Jonathan Fisher, and Stephen R. Hurt, eds., Britain and Africa in the Twenty-First Century. Manchester University Press. Brown, William, and Sophie Harman. 2013. “African Agency in International Politics.” In William Brown and Sophie Harman, eds., African Agency in International Politics, 15–30. Routledge. Bull, Hedley, and Adam Watson, eds. 1984. The Expansion of International Society. Oxford University Press. Buzan, Barry. 2011. “The South Asian Security Complex in a Decentering World Order: Reconsidering Regions and Powers Ten Years On.” International Studies 48 (1): 1–19.

References

195

Buzan, B., C. Jones, and R. Little. 1993. The Logic of Anarchy: Neorealism to Structural Realism. Columbia University Press. Buzan, Barry, and Ole Wæver. 2003. Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security. Cambridge University Press. Callimachi, Rukmini. 2018. “The ISIS Files.” New York Times, April 4. Cannito, Chris. 2020. “Study Finds Police in 20 of Top 20 US Cities Violate Human Rights.” Nonprofit Quarterly on the International Human Rights Clinic’s Report on Police Use of Force, University of Chicago Law School, June 29. https:// www.law.uchicago.edu/news/nonprofit-quarterly-international-human-rights -clinics-report-police-use-force. Carbone, Maurizio. 2018. “Caught Between the ACP and the AU: Africa’s Relations with the European Union in a Post-Cotonou Agreement Context.” South African Journal of International Affairs 25 (4): 481–496. Carmody, Pádraig. 2016. The New Scramble for Africa. 2nd ed. Polity Press. Cerny, Philip G. 1993. “Plurilateralism: Structural Differentiation and Functional Conflict in the Post–Cold War World Order.” Millennium 22 (1): 27–51. Cheng, Zhangxi, and Ian Taylor. 2017. China’s Aid to Africa: Does Friendship Really Matter? Vol. 11. Taylor and Francis. Chipaike, Ronald, and Matarutse H. Knowledge. 2018. “The Question of African Agency in International Relations.” Cogent Social Sciences 4(1). doi: 10.1080 /23311886.2018.1487257. Cimiotta, Emanuele. 2015. “The First Steps of the Extraordinary African Chambers: A New Mixed Criminal Tribunal?” Journal of International Criminal Justice 13 (1): 177–197. Clapham, Christopher. 1996. Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival. Vol. 50. Cambridge University Press. Clapham, Christopher. 2005. “The Evolution of Africa’s International Relations.” In Ulf Engel and Gorm Rye Olsen, eds., Africa and the North: Beyond Globalization and Marginalization, 20–37. Routledge. Clark, Gracia. 2019. Traders Versus the State: Anthropological Approaches to Unofficial Economies. Routledge. Clark, Phil. 2010. The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice Without Lawyers. Cambridge University Press. Clark, Phil. 2019. “The International Criminal Court in Africa and the Politics of International Justice.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Oxford University Press. Clarke, Kamari Maxine. 2019. Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback. Duke University Press. Clarke, Kamari Maxine. 2020. “African Withdrawals and Structural Inequities.” In Richard H. Steinberg, ed., The International Criminal Court: Contemporary Challenges and Reform Proposals, 120–124. Brill Nijhoff. Coleman, Katharina Pichler, and Thomas Kwasi Tieku, eds. 2018. African Actors in International Security: Shaping Contemporary Norms. Lynne Rienner Publishers. Corey, Allison, and Sandra F. Joireman. 2004. “Retributive Justice: The Gacaca Courts in Rwanda.” African Affairs 103 (410): 73–89. Cosgrove, Carol Ann, and Kenneth Twitchett. 1970. The New International Actors: The United Nations and the European Economic Community. Macmillan. Dagnini, Jérémie Kroubo. 2008. “Marcus Garvey: A Controversial Figure in the History of Pan- Africanism.” Journal of Pan African Studies 2 (3): 198–208. Da Silva, Barreto Leite, and Marina Magalhães. 2015. “United Nations Security Council Reform: An African perspective.” Conflict Trends (3): 12–19.

196

References

Davies, Desmond. 2019. “AU ‘Concerned’ About ‘Politicization’ of War Crimes Court.” Africa Legal Aid, September 17. http://www.africalegalaid.com/wp-content /uploads/2019/09/AU-%E2%80%98concerned%E2%80%99-about-%E2%80 %98politicisation%E2%80%99-of-war-crimes-court.pdf. Davies, Martyn. 2011. “How China Is Influencing Africa’s Development.” In Benjamin Barton and Jing Men, eds., China and the European Union in Africa: Partners or Competitors?, 187–207. Routledge. Davies, Rebecca, and Ian Taylor. 2015. “‘Africa Rising’ and the Rising Powers.” In Jamie Gaskarth, ed., Rising Powers, Global Governance and Global Ethics, 152–172. Routledge. Davis, Chris. 2016. “Before They Were Haitians: Examining Evidence for Kongolese Influence on the Haitian Revolution.” Journal of Haitian Studies 22 (2). Day, Christopher, Moses Khisa, and William Reno. 2020. “Introduction: Revisiting the Civil-Military Conundrum in Africa.” Civil Wars, forthcoming. De Coning, Cedric. 2017. “Peace Enforcement in Africa: Doctrinal Distinctions Between the African Union and United Nations.” Contemporary Security Policy 38 (1): 145–160. De Coning, Cedric. 2019. “Africa and UN Peace Operations: Implications for the Future Role of Regional Organizations.” In Cedric de Coning and Peter Mateja, eds., United Nations Peace Operations in a Changing Global Order. Springer Nature. De Coning, Cedric, and Peter Mateja, eds. 2019. United Nations Peace Operations in a Changing Global Order. Springer Nature. Der Derian, J. 2003. “The Question of Information Technology in International Relations.” Millennium 32 (3): 441–456. Dersso, Solomon Ayele. 2016. “Unconstitutional Changes of Government and Unconstitutional Practices in Africa.” Summary paper from the program on African Peace Missions, World Peace Foundation, Paper 2. Diop, Cheikh Anta. 2000. Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in African Culture and Development, 1946–1960. Red Sea Press. Du Plessis, Max, Tiyanjana Maluwa, and Annie O’Reilly. 2013. “Africa and the International Criminal Court.” International Law 2013/01 (Chatham House). Dunne, Tim, Lene Hansen, and Colin Wight. 2013. “The End of International Relations Theory?” European Journal of International Relations 19 (3): 405–425. Ebatamehe, Sebastiane. 2018. “‘We Choose Our Partners’: African Union Chair Warns Europe.” African Exponent, December 20. Eden, Matiyas. 2018. “What Prospects for an African Court Under the Malabo Protocol?” JusticeInfo.Net, May 31. https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/other/37633 -what-prospects-for-an-african-court-under-the-malabo-protocol.html. Edozie, Rita Kiki. 2009. Reconstructing the Third Wave of Democracy: Comparative African Democratic Politics. Rowman and Littlefield. Edozie, Rita Kiki. 2017. “Pan” Africa Rising: The Cultural Political Economy of Nigeria’s Afri-Capitalism and South Africa’s Ubuntu Business. Springer. Edozie, Rita Kiki, with Keith Gottschalk. 2014. The African Union’s Africa: New Pan-African Initiatives in Global Governance. Michigan State University Press. El-Affendi, Abdelwahab. 2009. “The Perils of Regionalism: Regional Integration as a Source of Instability in the Horn of Africa?” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 3 (1): 1–19. Elone, Jeanne. 2015. “The Extraordinary African Chambers: A New Approach to Victim Participation in International Criminal Tribunals?” International Justice Monitor, October 28. Elster, Jon. 1989. “Social Norms and Economic Theory.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 3 (4): 99–117.

References

197

Endeley, Isaac N. 2009. Bloc Politics in the United Nations: The African Group. University of America Press. Engel, Ulf, and João Gomes Porto, eds. 2010. Africa’s New Peace and Security Architecture: Promoting Norms, Institutionalizing Solutions. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Englebert, Pierre. 2009. Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow. Lynne Rienner Publishers. Englebert, Pierre, and Rebecca Hummel. 2005. “Let’s Stick Together: Understanding Africa’s Secessionist Deficit.” African Affairs 104 (416): 399–427. Falk, Richard A. 1999. Predatory Globalization: A Critique. Polity. Fisher, Jonathan. 2019. “AMISOM and the Regional Construction of a Failed State in Somalia.” African Affairs 118 (471): 285–306. Flockhart, Trine. 2016. “The Coming Multiorder World.” Contemporary Security Policy 37 (1): 3–30. Franke, Benedikt. 2009. Security Cooperation in Africa: A Reappraisal. First Forum Press. Franke, Benedikt. 2010. “Précis of Security Cooperation in Africa: A Reappraisal.” African Security Review 19 (2): 84–96. French, H. W. 2014. China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa. Vintage. Fücks, Ralf. 2006. “Security in Our One World.” In Rethinking Global Security: An African Perspective?, 12–20. Heinrich Boll Foundation. Gadzala, A. W., ed. 2015. Africa and China: How Africans and Their Governments Are Shaping Relations with China. Rowman and Littlefield. Getachew, Adom. 2019. Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of SelfDetermination. Princeton University Press. Ghica, Luciana. A. 2013. “Beyond Regional Integration? Social Constructivism, Regional Cohesiveness, and the Regionalism Puzzle.” Studia Politica: Romanian Political Science Review 13 (4): 733–752. Gomez, Michael A. 2005. Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas. Cambridge University Press. Gomez, Michael A. 2020. Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press. Gould, L. Wesley. 1971. “Review of The New International Actors: The United Nations and the European Economic Community.” Edited by Ann Carol Cosgrove and Kenneth J. Twitchett, American Journal of International Law 65 (3): 661–662. Hammes, Thomas X. 2019. Deglobalization: The Fragmenting World Economy and the Impact on International Security. Naval Institute Press. Hanauer, Larry, and Lyle J. Morris. 2014. “How China-Africa Relations Have Developed.” In Larry Hanauer and Lyle J. Morris, eds. Chinese Engagement in Africa: Drivers, Reactions, and Implications for US Policy. Rand Corporation. Harman, Sophie, and William Brown. 2013. “In from the Margins? The Changing Place of Africa in International Relations.” International Affairs 89 (1): 69–87. Harris, Cheryl I. 1993. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106 (8): 1707–1791. Hengari, Alfredo Tjiurimo. 2007. “Africa, Security Council Reform, and the Ezulwini Consensus.” The Namibian, October 5. AllAfrica, https://allafrica.com /stories/200710050611.html. Herbst, Jeffrey. 1990. “War and the State in Africa.” International Security 14 (4): 117–139. Herbst, Jeffrey. 2000. States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control. Princeton University Press.

198

References

Hettne, Björn. 1999. “Globalization and the New Regionalism: The Second Great Transformation.” In Björn Hettne, András Inotai, and Osvaldo Sunkel, eds., Globalism and the New Regionalism, 1–24. Macmillan. Hettne, Björn. 2005. “Beyond the ‘New’ Regionalism.” New Political Economy 10 (4): 543–572. Hettne, Björn, András Inotai, and Osvaldo Sunkel, eds. 1999. Globalism and the New Regionalism. Vol. 5. Macmillan. Hillebrand, Rainer. 2019. “Germany and the New Global Order: The Country’s Power Resources Reassessed.” E-International Relations Studies 2 (3): 1–17. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1994. “Barbarism: A User’s Guide.” New Left Review 206 (1): 44–54. Hodzi, O. 2019. The End of China’s Non-intervention Policy in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan. Horner, Rory. 2016. “A New Economic Geography of Trade and Development? Governing South-South, Value Chains and Production Networks.” Territory, Politics, Governance 4 (4): 400–420. Ingelaere, B. 2009. “‘Does the Truth Pass Across the Fire Without Burning?’ Locating the Short Circuit in Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts.” Journal of Modern African Studies 47 (4): 507–528. Ingelaere, B. 2016. Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice After Genocide. University of Wisconsin Press. International Justice Monitor. 2015. “The Extraordinary African Chambers: A New Approach to Victim Participation?” October 28. https://www.ijmonitor.org/2015/10 /the-extraordinary-african-chambers-a-new-approach-to-victim-participation-in -international-criminal-tribunals/. Iroulo, Lynda. 2017. “Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance Through the APRM.” South African Institute of International Affairs, July 2017. https://saiia .org.za/research/pan-africanism-and-the-african-renaissance-through-the-aprm/. Jackson, Robert H. 1987. “Quasi-States, Dual Regimes, and Neoclassical Theory: International Jurisprudence and the Third World.” International Organization 41 (4): 519–549. James, C. L. R. 1989. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Random House. Jeanne, Elone. 2015. “The Extraordinary African Chambers: A New Approach to Victim Participation in International Criminal Tribunals.” International Justice Monitor, October 28. Jilberto, Alex E. Fernández, and Andre Mommen. 2017. Regionalization and Globalization in the Modern World Economy: Perspectives on the Third World and Transitional Economies. Routledge. Joint UN-AU Framework for Enhancing Partnership in Peace and Security. 2017. https://unoau.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/jount_unau_framework_for_an _enhanced_partnership_in_peace_and_security.pdf. Kalra, Sarathi, Dhanashree Kelkar, Sagar C. Galwankar, Thomas J. Papadimos, Stanislaw P. Stawicki, Bonnie Arquilla, Brian A. Hoey, Richard P. Sharpe, Donna Sabol, and Jeffrey A. Jahre. 2014. “The Emergence of Ebola as a Global Health Security Threat: From ‘Lessons Learned’ to Coordinated Multilateral Containment Efforts.” Journal of Global Infectious Diseases 6 (4): 164. Kasaija, Phillip Apuuli. 2012. “The African Union’s Notion of ‘African Solutions to African Problems’ and the Crises in Côte d’Ivoire (2010–2011) and Libya (2011).” African Journal on Conflict Resolution 12 (2): 135–160. Kasaija, Phillip Apuuli. 2013. “The African Union (AU), the Libya Crisis and the Notion of ‘African Solutions to African Problems.’” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 31 (1): 117–138.

References

199

Kasaija, Phillip Apuuli. 2014. “Explaining the (Il)legality of Uganda’s Intervention in the Current South Sudan Conflict.” African Security Review 23 (4): 352–369. Kasaija, Phillip Apuuli. 2015. “IGAD’s Mediation in the Current South Sudan Conflict: Prospects and Challenges.” African Security 8 (2): 120–145. Katzenstein, Peter J. 2012. “Many Wests and Polymorphic Globalism.” In Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Anglo-America and Its Discontents: Civilizational Identities Beyond West and East, 207–247. Taylor and Francis. Khisa, M. 2019. “Whose Africa Is Rising?” Review of African Political Economy 46 (160): 304–316. Kingsley, Ighobor. 2020. “AfCFTA: Implementing Africa’s Free Trade Pact the Best Stimulus for Post COVID19 Economics.” Africa Renewal, May15. https://www .un.org/africarenewal/magazine/may-2020/coronavirus/implementing-africa %E2%80%99s-free-trade-pact-best-stimulus-post-covid-19-economies. Kobo, Ouzmane Murzik. 2013. “A New World Order? Africa and China.” Origins. Krishna, Sankaran. 2001. “Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations.” Alternatives 26 (4): 401–424. Kuo, Lily. 2016. “Africa Wasn’t ‘Rising’ Before and It’s Not ‘Reeling’ Now.” Quartz Africa, October 26. https://qz.com/africa/816006/africa-wasnt-rising -before-and-its-not-reeling-now/. Kupchan, Charles. 2012. No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn. Oxford University Press. Lala, Fridon. 2018. “Africa in the Changing Global Order: Does African Agency Matter in Global Politics?” UNU-CRIS Working Papers, UNU Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies. Lammich, Georg. 2019. “China and Regional Security in Africa.” In Christof Hartmann and Nele Noesselt, eds., China’s New Role in African Politics: From NonIntervention Towards Stabilization? Routledge. Lan, S. 2017. Mapping the New African Diaspora in China: Race and the Cultural Politics of Belonging. Taylor and Francis. Landsberg, Chris. 2013. “Continuity and Change in the Foreign Policies of South Africa’s De Klerk and Mandela Governments, 1989–1999.” Africa Review 5 (1): 61–72. Lee, Donna. 2013. “African Agency in Global Trade Governance.” In William R. A. Brown and Sophie Harman, eds., African Agency in International Politics, 34– 48. Routledge Studies in African Politics and International Relations. Routledge. Li, Anshan, Haifang Liu, Huaqiong Pan, Aiping Zeng, and Wenping He. 2012. FOCAC Twelve Years Later: Achievements, Challenges and the Way Forward. Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Li, X. 2018. “China Is Offering ‘No Strings Attached’ Aid to Africa. Here’s What That Means.” Washington Post, September 27. Longman, Timothy. 2009. Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda. Vol. 112. Cambridge University Press. Lopes, Carlos. 2016a. “Contextualizing Sino-Africa Relations.” Waterlines 35 (1): 6–11. Lopes, Carlos. 2016b. “Reinserting African Agency into Sino-Africa Relations.” The Strategic Review for Southern Africa 38 (1): 50–68. Lopes, Carlos. 2018. “The Untapped Potential of EU-Africa Trade.” Project Syndicate, October 22. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/europe-africa -economic-partnership-potential-by-carlos-lopes-4-2018-10?barrier=accesspaylog. Lopes, Carlos. 2019. “Free Trade Areas Can Break Old Europe Dependency.” Africa Nordic Institute, May 29. https://nai.uu.se/news-and-events/news/2019 -05-21-carlos-lopes-free-trade-area-can-break-old-europe-dependency.html.

200

References

Mahajan, Vijay. 2008. Africa Rising: How 900 Million African Consumers Offer More Than You Think. Pearson Education. Maluwa, Tiyanjana. 2004. “The OAU/African Union and International Law: Mapping New Boundaries or Revising Old Terrain?” In Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting. Vol. 98, 232–238. Cambridge University Press. Matiyas, Eden. 2018. “What Prospects for an African Court Under the Malabo Protocol?” JusticeInfo.net. May 31. https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/37633-what -prospects-for-an-african-court-under-the-malabo-protocol.html. Mazrui, Ali A. 2005. “The Re-invention of Africa: Edward Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond.” Research in African Literatures, 36 (3): 68–82. Mbeki, Thabo. 2007. “Address at the 62nd Session of the United Nations.” September 18. https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/address-president-south-africa-thabo -mbeki-62nd-session-united-nations-general-assembly-new. McGowan, Patrick J. 2003. “African Military Coups d’État, 1956–2001: Frequency, Trends and Distribution.” Journal of Modern African Studies 41 (3): 339–370. McKinsey Global Institute. 2010. “Lions on the Move: The Potential and Progress of African Economies.” June 1. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights /middle-east-and-africa/lions-on-the-move. Mearsheimer, John, J. 2019. “Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order.” International Security 43 (4): 7–50. Meredith, Martin. 2005. The State of Africa: A History of Fifty of Years Independence. Gardners Books. Mills, Kurt, and Alan Bloomfield. 2018. “African Resistance to the International Criminal Court: Halting the Advance of the Anti-impunity Norm.” Review of International Studies 44 (1): 101–127. Mohan, Giles, and Ben Lampert. 2013. “Negotiating China: Reinserting African Agency into China-Africa Relations.” African Affairs 112 (446): 92–110. Morgenthau, H. J., K. W. Thompson, and W. D. Clinton. 1985. Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. Knopf. Murithi, Timothy. 2012. “Peacemaking and African Traditions of Justice and Reconciliation.” In Susan Allen Nan, Zachariah Cherian Mampilly, and Andrea Bartoli, ed., Peacemaking: From Practice to Theory, 1: 275–294. Praeger. Murithi, Tim. 2015. “Ensuring Peace and Reconciliation While Holding Leaders Accountable: The Politics of ICC Cases in Kenya and Sudan.” Africa Development 40 (2): 73–97. Murithi, Tim. 2019. Judicial Imperialism: Politicisation of the International Criminal Justice in Africa. Fanele. Murphy, Alexander B. 1991. “Regions as Social Constructs: The Gap Between Theory and Practice.” Progress in Human Geography 15 (1): 23–35. Musabayana, Wynne. 2016. “The African Union’s Intervention in the Ebola Crisis Was a Game Changer.” African Union, February 11. https://au.int/sites/default /files/pressreleases/27055-other-article_for_au_staff_members.pdf. Mylonas, Harris, and Yorulmazlar, Emirhan. 2012. “Regional Multilateralism: The Next Paradigm in Global Affairs.” CNN, January 14.I Nabudere, Dani W. 2001. “The African Renaissance in the Age of Globalization.” African Journal of Political Science/Revue Africaine De Science Politique 6 (2): 11–28. Ndayi, Zoleka. 2009. “Contextualizing NEPAD: Regionalism, Plurilateralism and Multilateralism.” South African Journal of International Affairs 16 (3): 371– 387. Nhlapo, Lebohang. 2012. “The Evaluation of Cultural Diversity in the Institutionalization of the African Union.” PhD diss., Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.

References

201

Nkengasong, John. 2020. “China’s Response to a Novel Coronavirus Stands in Stark Contrast to the 2002 SARS Outbreak Response.” Nature Medicine 26 (3): 310–311. Nkengasong, John N. 2021. “COVID-19: Unprecedented but Expected.” Nature Medicine 27 (3). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01269-x. Nkengasong, John N., Olawale Maiyegun, and Matshidiso Moeti. 2017. “Establishing the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention: Responding to Africa’s Health Threats.” The Lancet Global Health 5 (3): e246–e247. Nordling, Linda. 2020. “Africa’s Pandemic Puzzle: Why So Few Cases and Deaths?” Science 369 (6505): 756–757. doi: 10.1126/science.369.6505.756. Nugent, Paul. 2004. Africa Since Independence. Palgrave Macmillan. Obinna, Chima. 2018. “WTO Lists Benefits of AfCFTA for Nigeria, Others.” This Day, December14. https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2018/12/14/wto-lists -benefits-of-afcfta-for-nigeria-others/. Oloo, Adams. 2016. “The Place of Africa in the International Community: Prospects and Obstacles.” Open Access Library Journal 3 (4): 1. Omotola, J. Shola. 2011. “Unconstitutional Changes of Government in Africa. What Implications for Democratic Consolidation?” Discussion Paper 70, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Ousman, Murzik Kobo. 2013. “A New World Order? Africa and China.” Origins, May. https://origins.osu.edu/article/new-world-order-africa-and-china. Pande, Rukmini. 2018. Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race. University of Iowa Press. Park, Yoon Jung. 2009. “Chinese Migration in Africa.” South African Institute of International Affairs Occasional Paper no. 24, 1–20. Patrick, Stewart. 2014. “The Unruled World: The Case for Good Enough Global Governance.” Foreign Affairs, January/February. Patterson, Amy S., and Emmanuel Balogun. 2021. “African Responses to COVID19: The Reckoning of Agency?” African Studies Review 64 (1): 144–167. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. 1994. “Globalization as Hybridization.” International Sociology 9 (2): 161–184. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. 2011. “Global Rebalancing: Crisis and the East-South Turn.” Development and Change 42 (1): 22–48. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. 2017. Multipolar Globalization: Emerging Economies and Development. Routledge. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. 2018. Globalization as Hybridization. Routledge. Postel-Vinay, Karoline. 2007. “The Historicity of the International Region: Revisiting the ‘Europe and the Rest’ Divide.” Geopolitics 12 (4): 555–569. Prosecutor vs. Jean-Paul Akayesu. 1996. ICTR Case No. ICTR-96-4-T. Prunier, Gérard. 2004. “Rebel Movements and Proxy Warfare: Uganda, Sudan and the Congo (1986–99).” African Affairs 103 (412): 359–383. Prunier, Gérard. 2008. Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe. Oxford University Press. Reyntjens, Filip. 2009. The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996–2006. Cambridge University Press. Rodman, Kenneth A. 2011. “Peace Versus Justice.” In Deen K. Chatterjee, ed., Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-14020-9160-5_716. Roessler, Philip, and Harry Verhoeven. 2016. Why Comrades Go to War: Liberation Politics and the Outbreak of Africa’s Deadliest Conflict. Oxford University Press. Rosenberg, Sophie T. 2017a. “The Gbagbo–Blé Goudé Trial for Crimes Against Humanity: Contesting the Ivorian Crisis from the Hague.” Afrique contemporaine 263–264 (3–4): 268–270.

202

References

Rosenberg, Sophie T. 2017b. “The International Criminal Court in Côte d’Ivoire: Impartiality at Stake?” Journal of International Criminal Justice 15 (3): 471–490. Rukmini, Bhaya Nair. 2018. “Outsourcing Postcolonialism.” In Nicoletta Pireddu, ed., Reframing Critical, Literary, and Cultural Theories: Thought on the Edge, 299–325. Springer Verlag. Sapire, Hilary, and Chris Saunders. 2012. Southern African Liberation Struggles: New Local, Regional and Global Perspectives. University of Cape Town Press. Savelsberg, Joachim J. 2017. “Punitive Turn and Justice Cascade: Mutual Inspiration from Punishment and Society and Human Rights Literatures.” Punishment and Society 20 (1): 73–91. Selassie, Haile I. 1963. “Towards African Unity.” Journal of Modern African Studies 1 (3): 281–291. Shelton, Garth, and Farhana Paruk. 2008. “The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation: A Strategic Opportunity.” Institute for Security Studies, December 1. Signé, Landry. 2017. Innovating Development Strategies in Africa: The Role of International, Regional and National Actors. Cambridge University Press. Signé, Landry. 2018a. “Africa’s Big New Free Trade Agreement, Explained.” Washington Post, March 29. Signé, Landry. 2018b. The Potential of Manufacturing and Industrialization in Africa: Trends, Opportunities, and Strategies. Brookings. Signé, Landry. 2018c. “African Leaders Have Created the World’s Largest Free Trade Area Since the WTO—Here’s Its Potential.” Washington International Trade Association, March 27. Sikkink, Kathryn. 2011. The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics. Norton Series in World Politics. W. W. Norton. Sirleaf, Matiangai. 2017. “The African Justice Cascade and the Malabo Protocol.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 11 (1): 71–91. Söderbaum, Fredrik. 2003. “Introduction: Theories of New Regionalism.” In Fredrik Söderbaum and Timothy M. Shaw, eds., Theories of New Regionalism. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403938794_1. Söderbaum, Fredrik, and Björn Hettne. 2010. “Regional Security in Global Perspective.” In Ulf Engel and João Gomes Porto, eds., Africa’s New Peace and Security Architecture: Promoting Norms, Institutionalizing Solutions. Ashgate. Soderberg, Nancy. 2015. “Time to Bring the United Nations Security Council into the 21st Century.” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 16 (2): 39–46. Souaré, Issaka K. 2014. “The African Union as a Norm Entrepreneur on Military Coups d’État in Africa (1952–2012): An Empirical Assessment.” Journal of Modern African Studies 52 (1): 69–94. Ssenyonjo, M., and S. Nakitto. 2016. “The African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights ‘International Criminal Law Section’: Promoting Impunity for African Union Heads of State and Senior State Officials?” International Criminal Law Review 16 (1): 71–102. Strauss, Scott. 2006. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Cornell University Press. Stremlau, John. 1999. “African Renaissance and International Relations.” South African Journal of International Affairs 6 (2): 61–80. Sturman, Kathryn. 2011. “Unconstitutional Changes of Government: The Democrat’s Dilemma in Africa.” Governance of Africa Resources Program, Policy Briefing 30. South African Institute of International Affairs. Taylor, Ian. 2014. “Is Africa Rising?” The Brown Journal of World Affairs 21 (1): 143–161. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24591037.

References

203

Taylor, Ian. 2016. “Dependency Redux: Why Africa Is Not Rising.” Review of African Political Economy 43 (147): 8–25. Taylor, Ian, and Paul Williams, eds. 2004. Africa in International Politics: External Involvement on the Continent. Routledge. Tella, Oluwaseun. 2018a. “Boko Haram Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: The Soft Power Context.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 53 (6): 815–829. Tella, Oluwaseun. 2018b. “Agenda 2063 and Its Implications for Africa’s Soft Power.” Journal of Black Studies 49 (7): 714–730. Thérien, Jean-Philippe, and Vincent Pouliot. 2006. “The Global Compact: Shifting the Politics of International Development?” Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations 12 (1): 55–76. Thornton, John. 1998. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press. Tillery, Alvin B., Jr. 2011. Between Homeland and Motherland: Africa, US Foreign Policy, and Black Leadership in America. Cornell University Press. Time Magazine. 1936. “Haile Selassie: Man of the Year.” http://content.time.com /time/covers/0,16641,19360106,00.html. Tralac. 2019. “African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA).” Legal Texts and Policy Documents, March. Ukeje, Charles, and Yonas Tariku. 2018. “Beyond Symbolism: China and the African Union in African Peace and Security.” In Chris Alden, Abiodun Alao, Zhang Chun, and Laura Barber, eds., China and Africa: Building Peace and Security Cooperation on the Continent, 289–309. Palgrave Macmillan. UN News. 2018. “UN–African Union Partnership ‘Not a Choice but a Necessity,’ Security Council Hears.” July 18. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). 2004. “The New Geography of International Economic Relations.” United Nations Publications. Valensisi, Giovanni, Robert Lisinge, and Stephen Karingi. 2016. “The Trade Facilitation Agreement and Africa’s Regional Integration.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies 37 (2): 239–259. doi: 10.1080/02255189.2016.1131672. Van der Ven, C. 2015. “Where Trade and Industrial Policy Converge: How Developing Countries Can Utilize Trade Preferences to Generate Sustainable, Local Growth in the Garment Sector.” International Lawyer 49 (1): 49–92. Van Staden, Cobus, Chris Alden, and Yu-Shan Wu. 2018. “In the Driver’s Seat? African Agency and Chinese Power at FOCAC, the AU and the BRI.” South African Institute of International Affairs Occasional Paper no. 286. Vhumbunu, Clayton Hazvinei. 2019. “Reflecting on the Role of Regional and International Interventions in Resolving the Post-Coup Crisis in Sudan.” ACCORD Conflict Trends 2019/4. https://www.accord.org.za/conflict-trends/reflecting-on -the-role-of-regional-and-international-interventions-in-resolving-the-post-coup -crisis-in-sudan/. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1961. Africa: The Politics of Independence. Vintage. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origin of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Academic Press. Wekesa, Bob. 2017. “FOCAC, African Agency and Africa’s China Policy.” Global Dialogue 16 (1): 2. West, Michael Oliver, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds. 2009. From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution. University of North Carolina Press. Whitaker, B. E., and J. F. Clark. 2018. Africa’s International Relations: Balancing Domestic and Global Interests. Lynne Rienner Publishers.

204

References

Wilén Nina, and Paul D. Williams. 2018. “The African Union and Coercive Diplomacy: The Case of Burundi.” Journal of Modern African Studies 56 (4): 673– 696. Williams, Brock R., and Nicolas Cook. 2020. “Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).” In Focus, Congressional Research Service, February 7. https:// crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11423. Williams, Paul D. 2007. “From Non-Intervention to Non-Indifference: The Origins and Development of the African Union’s Security Culture.” African Affairs 106 (423): 253–279. Williams, Paul D. 2008. “Regional Arrangements and Transnational Security Challenges: The African Union and the Limits of Securitization Theory.” African Security 1 (1): 2–23. Williams, Paul D. 2009. “The Peace and Security Council of the African Union: Evaluating an Embryonic International Institution.” Journal of Modern African Studies 47 (4): 603–626. Williams, Paul D. 2014. “Reflections on the Evolving African Peace and Security Architecture.” African Security 7 (3): 147–162. Williams, Paul D. 2016. War and Conflict in Africa. 2nd ed. Polity Press. Williams, Paul D. 2018. “Joining AMISOM: Why Six African States Contributed Troops to the African Union Mission in Somalia.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 12 (1): 172–192. Williams, Paul D., and Jürgen Haacke. 2011. “Regional Approaches to Conflict Management.” In Chester A Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela R. Aall, eds., Rewiring Regional Security in a Fragmented World, 49–74. US Institute of Peace Press. Witt, Antonia. 2020. “An Island of Internationalism: The African Union’s Fight Against Corona.” PRIF Blog, April 7. https://blog.prif.org/2020/04/07/an -island-of-internationalism-the-african-unions-fight-against-corona/. Wright, Erik Olin. 2014. “Compass Points: Towards a Socialist Alternative.” New Left Review 41 (93): 124. Wright, Lawrence. 2006. “The Agent: Did the CIA Stop an FBI Detective from Preventing 9/11?” New Yorker, July 10 and 17: 70–71. Wright, Sharon. 2012. “Welfare-to-Work, Agency and Personal Responsibility.” Journal of Social Policy 41 (2): 309–328. WTO. 2019. “DG Azevêdo Pledges Support for Africa’s Continued Economic Integration.” June 3. https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news19_e/dgra_03jun19_e.htm. Wu, Ya-Shan, Cobus van Staden, and Chris Alden. 2018. “Ties Between African Countries and China Are Complex: Understanding This Matters.” The Conversation, October 15. Xuejun, Wang. 2018. “Developmental Peace: Understanding China’s Africa Policy in Peace and Security.” In Chris Alden, Abiodun Alao, Zhang Chun, and Laura Barber, eds., China and Africa: Building Peace and Security Cooperation on the Continent, 67–82. Palgrave Macmillan. Yombo Nyako, Tamfuh Wilson. 2011. “Procedural Developments at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).” The Law and Practice of International Courts and Tribunals 10 (2): 351–380. Young, C. 2012. The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960–2010. University of Wisconsin Press. Zafar, A. 2007. “The Growing Relationship Between China and Sub-Saharan Africa: Macroeconomic, Trade, Investment, and Aid Links.” World Bank Research Observer 22 (1): 103–130.

References

205

Zandonini, Giacomo, 2019. “A United Africa May Give China Its Moment to Shine.” Al Jazeera, August 2. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2019/8/2/a -united-africa-may-give-china-its-moment-to-shine. Zondi, Siphamandla. 2013a. “Brazil and Africa: Cooperation for Endogenous Development.” Global Insight 101. Institute for Global Dialogue. Zondi, Siphamandla. 2013b. “Common Positions as African Agency in International Negotiations: An Appraisal.” In William Brown and Sophie Harman, eds., African Agency in International Politics, 33–47. Routledge. Zondi, Siphamandla. 2017. “African Union Approaches to Peacebuilding: Efforts at Shifting the Continent Towards Decolonial Peace.” African Journal on Conflict Resolution 17 (1): 105–131.

Index

Abidjan, Ivory Coast, 112 Abuja Treaty, 126 Accelerated Industrial Development of Africa plan (AIDA), 129 Accountability, of states to commitments, 57 Accra Peace Agreement Ceasefire, 103– 104 Acharya, Amitav, 3, 7, 9, 16, 26; on global international relations, 185– 186 ACJHR. See African Court of Justice and Human Rights ACP. See African-Caribbean-Pacific States Acquittal, of Gbago and Blé Goudé, 113 Activists, 31–32 Actor-centric regionalism, 7 Actorness, 6, 9, 15 Acts, of resistance, 26 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1, 25, 152 Address to League of Nations, of Selassie, 34–35 Adoption failure, of Ezulwini Consensus, 66 AEC. See African Economic Community AfCFTA. See African Continental Free Trade Agreement

Afghanistan, 113–114 Africa (Wallerstein), 32 “Africa, Security Council Reform, and the Ezulwini Consensus” (Hengari), 49 Africa as monolithic, treatment of, 2 Africa CDC, Response to Covid-19 of, 182 Africa Center for Disease Control (CDC), 180–184 Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), 131, 135–136 “Africa in the Changing Global Order” (Fridon), 52 “Africa in the World” (Bayart and Ellis), 188 Africa Rising, 120, 122, 123–124, 178 Africa Taskforce for Coronavirus (AFTCOR), 182 #AfricaIsNotALabRat, 183 African American community, African events and, 36 African Bloc, 50–52, 54–56, 63–65, 69, 87–88; China and, 163 African Cascades of Transnational Justice, 96tab African Charter for Popular Participation, 125

207

208

Index

African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance, 76–77 African Charter on Human People’s Rights, 99 African Common Position on Africa’s External Debt Crisis, 17 African Common Position on Security Council Reform 1994, 64–66 African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), 20–21, 119– 126, 128–133, 135–141; ACP contrasted with, 134; AEC contrasted with, 127; agency and, 179; success of, 178 African Coronavirus Fund, 182 African Court of Justice, 98, 177 African Court of Justice and Human Rights (ACJHR), 114 African Court on Human and People’s Rights, 114 African Economic Community (AEC), 21, 121–126, 178 “The African Economic Community” (Ariño), 126 African Foreign Policy, of China, 161– 164 African Group of the UN, 49, 54–55, 131–132, 172 African Group of the WTO, 140 African international political economy, 21 African internationalism, 6–7, 31, 40 African leaders, culpability of, 19, 106– 107 African Ministers Adopt Common African Position for More Women in Leadership Positions (African Union), 50 African ownership, principle of, 62 African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), 73, 76, 79, 172–173 African Perspectives on Colonialism (Boahen), 31 African Regional Criminal Court (RCC), 95, 114 African Renaissance, 15, 17, 45 African security architecture, bottom-up foundation of, 80 African solidarity, 46

“African Solutions for African Problems,” 53, 107, 165–166 African Standby Force, 84–85, 155 African states: autonomy of, 14, 15, 117; collective experience of, 2, 17; global policy actions of, 2; international encounters of, 2, 168 African Strategy on Climate Change, 17 African Studies approaches, to international relations, 9, 185–189 African Union (AU), 1, 4, 5, 15–16, 28; AfCFTA and, 122–123; African agency and, 43–44, 51–53; Agenda 2063 of, 46, 66–67; communiqué of, 99; Covid-19 and, 167–168, 170, 182; as driver of political action, 187; EU migration plan and, 59; FOCAC and, 147–157; founding of, 43; ICC and, 93–94, 107–112, 174–177; interventions of, 77–79, 80–83; multilateralism and, 54; partnership with UN of, 71, 83–87; referral of Habré to, 106 African Union Commission (AUC), 60, 128 African Union Ministers of Trade (AMOT), 128–129, 132–134 African Union Observer Mission, 54 “African Union Seeks to Kill EU Plan to Process Migrants in Africa” (Boffey), 58 African Union Support to the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa (ASEOWA), 181 African Unionism, 16, 54, 186–187 African-Caribbean-Pacific States (ACP), 131, 133–134 African-owned production, 125 Africa’s New Peace and Security Architecture (Engel and Porto), 75 AFTCOR. See Africa Taskforce for Coronavirus Agbor, Sarah Anyang, 143 Agency, 12, 24, 26, 38, 43–44, 51–53; AfCFTA and, 119–120; CAPs and, 68–69; China and, 145, 151, 165– 166; economic growth and, 121; evolution of, 45; historical challenges and, 168; international relations

Index theory and, 188; Malabo Protocol and, 115; partnerships and, 53–54 Agenda 63, of African Union, 163 Agenda 2063 (African Union), 66–68 Agenda 2063, of African Union, 66–68, 161 AGOA. See Africa Growth and Opportunity Act Ahmed, Abiy, 82, 90 AIDA. See Accelerated Industrial Development of Africa plan Aid-for-trade modalities, 129–130 AIDS Crisis, 181 Akayesu, Jean-Paul, 101 Akuffo, E. A., 77–78 Akufo-Addo, Nana Addo Dankwa, 138– 139 Algeria, 148 Alien rule, in South Africa, 33 All-African Peoples Conference, 33 Allied Powers, 25 American Colonization Society, 32 AMOT. See African Union Ministers of Trade Angola, 42 Aning, Kwesi, 3 Anjouan, 78 Annan, Kofi, 84, 102, 103 Anti-apartheid movement, 40 Anticolonial activism, 36 Anti-impunity justice cascades litigation, 105, 115 Anti-racism discourses, 172 Apartheid, 34, 40, 43, 74, 80; liberal justice norms and, 175 APSA. See African Peace and Security Architecture Ariño, África M., 126 Armed resistance, 31 Arosanyin, Kemi, 119 Articulation, of African voice, 5 Arusha, Tanzania, 100 ASEOWA. See African Union Support to the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union, 59, 60 Asymmetrical power relationship, of China and Africa, 165

209

AU. See African Union AU Assembly, 109–111, 114 “AU ‘Concerned’ About ‘Politicization’ of War Crimes Court.” (Davies), 113–114 AU Constitutive Act, 75, 78, 88, 173 AU Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), 18, 83–84, 88, 173 AU Model Law, 115 AU Peace and Security Council (PSC), 62, 78, 89, 109 AU representational office, in Beijing, 155–156 AUC. See African Union Commission Authoritarian consolidation, 79 Autonomy, of African states, 14, 15, 117 Axtmann, Roland, 11 Azevêdo, Roberto, 131

Bakongo, 28, 29, 30–31 al-Bashir, Omar, 82, 109–110, 111, 117, 175 Bashir case, 20, 109, 175 Battle of Adowa, 25 Bayart, Jean-François, 14, 168, 187 Belgium, 42, 105–106, 108–109 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), 137, 160–161 Bemba, Jean-Pierre, 93, 108 Bensouda, Fatima, 117 Berlin Conference, 31 Biafra, 39 Bias in transnational justice, toward West, 98, 99, 108–111, 176 Bilateral EPAs, 134, 135 Bischoff, Paul-Henri, 3 Bismarck, Otto von, 31 Black Star Shipping Line, 32 Blé Goudé, Charles, 19, 93, 109, 111– 114, 117 Boahen, Adu, 31 Boffey, Daniel, 58 Bolton, John, 157–158 Bond, Patrick, 120 Booster shots, shots for poorer countries contrasted with, 184 Boots-on-the-ground peacekeeping, 88– 89 Botswana, 81

210

Index

Bottom tier of world system, Africa at, 26, 72, 170–171 Bottom-up foundation, of African security architecture, 80 BRI. See Belt and Road Initiative Brown, William, 2–3 al-Burhan, Abdel Fattah, 82 Burkina Faso, 31, 78 Burundi, 78, 81 Business engagements, of Chinese immigrants, 150 Buzan, Barry, 8, 16, 18, 26, 71; on global international relations, 185– 186

Cairo Declaration, 38 Capacity, infrastructural, 4–5 CAPs. See Common African Positions Carbone, Maurizio, 134 Cascades of justice theory, 94–95, 96 CAT. See UN Committee Against Torture “Caught Between the ACP and the AU” (Carbone), 134 CDC. See Africa Center for Disease Control Central African Republic, 108 Chad, 95, 104–105 Chadian National Commission of Inquiry, 105 Chamberlin, Neville, 36 Charter of the United Nations, 37, 38, 63, 72–73 Cheap Chinese goods, problems with, 137 Cheng, Zhangxi, 160 China, as alternative to West, 148, 159, 164 China, as patron of Africa, 144–146, 147 China, investment from, 123 China, rise of, 143 China-Africa international relations agenda, 21–22, 90, 131, 136–137, 143–154, 179–180 China-Africa multilateralism, 152–153 “China’s African Policy” (white paper), 152–153 China’s Aid to Africa (Cheng and Taylor, I.), 160

Chinese displacement, of US and Europe, 158 Chinese manufacturing firms, 137 Chinese Mission to the AU, 136–137 Chinese response, to criticism, 161–163 Chinese strategy, for dealings with Africa, 160 Chipaike, Ronald, 3, 14 CIA sponsorship, of military putsches, 42 Cimiotta, Emanuele, 106 Civil War: in Greece, 37; in Liberia, 103–104; in Sierra Leone, 102–104 Clarke, Kamari, 19, 95, 98, 116–117 Cold War, 37, 40–41, 43, 81, 90; China and, 148 Cold War structure, of UN Security Council, 64 Collective action foreign policy, 58, 68, 83 Collective coordination, 55 Collective encounters, with West, 27, 168 Collective experience, of African states, 2, 17 Collective political actions, 27 Collective sovereign responsibility, 95 Colonialism, 28, 47, 74–75, 189; historical resistance to, 4, 31; influence on world politics of, 8 Colonization, 30–31 COMESA. See Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa Committee of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change, 57–58 Commodities boom, 123 Common African Position on the Post2015 Development Agenda, 60–62 Common African Positions (CAPs), 17, 49–52, 58–59, 60tab, 60–69 Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), 126 Common Position on UN Peace Operations Review, 62 communiqué, of AU, 99 Comoros, 78 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, 40, 75

Index Concentration, of global value chains, 132 CONCVACT. See Consortium for Covid-19 Vaccine Clinical Trial Conference of Independent African States, 33 Confidence as global actor, of Africa, 19–20 Consortium for Covid-19 Vaccine Clinical Trial (CONCVACT), 184 Constitutive Act of the African Union, 15 Constructivist perspective, 19, 26, 46– 47, 116–117 Contemporary global environment, 4 Contemporary world, as plural, 7 Contested pluralism, 8 Continent, identity of, 4 Contrapuntality, 190 Control over UN, of West, 87 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 97, 105 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 97, 101 “Cooperating for Peace and Security or Competing for Legitimacy in Africa?” (Akuffo), 77–78 Cooperation, regional, 2, 130 COP21, 57–58 Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change, 62–63 Cotonou Agreement, 134–135 Cotton subsidies, 57 Council of Ministers, of OAU, 76–77 Coup-makers, 43 Covid-19, 167, 170, 182 Crane, David, 102 Credibility, of ICC, 113 Criticisms, of ICC, 110–117 Cross-border handling, of security problems, 80–83, 91 Cuffe, Paul, 32 Cugoano, Ottobah, 30 Culpability, of African leaders, 19, 106– 107

Dakar Appeals Court, 105–106

211

Davies, Desmond, 113–114 DDA. See Doha Development Agenda Déby, Idriss, 105 Decentralization, 8, 132 “Decision on Africa’s Relationship with the International Criminal Court (ICC).” (African Union), 111–112 Decolonialization, of IR, 190 Deep pluralism, 8, 117 Defeat, of apartheid, 43 80–81 De-globalization, 120, 124 Democratic Republic of the Congo, 42, 74, 108 Desalegn, Hailemariam, 20 Developing-country coalitions, 55 Development first approach, 166 Diasporic Africa, 28, 29, 47 Diendéré, Gilbert, 78 Differentiation, economic, 11–12 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 45 Diplomacy, high-level, 23 Dirigisme, 73, 121, 125, 132 Disorder, in Bayart and Ellis theory, 14 Doha Development Agenda (DDA), 56– 57, 140 Du Bois, W. E. B., 33 Dynamic world region, Africa as, 5

EAC. See Extraordinary African Chambers of Senegal Ebola outbreak, 180–181 ECA. See UN Economic Commission for Africa ECOMOG. See ECOWAS Monitoring Group Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), 44, 75, 78, 81, 103 Economic differentiation, 11–112 Economic diplomacy, 21, 119–128, 141 Economic integration, 128–129 Economic justice, 40 Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), 131, 133–134 Economic profile, of China, 149 Economic structural transformation, 136, 164

212

Index

ECOWAS. See Economic Community of West African States ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), 80 Ellis, Stephen, 14, 168, 188 Embedded pluralism, 8 Emerging market, Africa labeled as, 123 Emigration, back to Africa, 32 Engel, Ulf, 75 EPAs. See Economic Partnership Agreements EPZs. See Export processing zones Equiano, Olaudah, 30 Eswatini, 63 Ethiopia, 17, 28, 71, 82, 90; China and, 151–152; Italian Invasion of, 34, 35, 36; solidarity with, 35–36 EU plan, to process migrants in Africa, 58–59 Euro-American capitalism, 29 Eurocentric models, 9 European colonizers, 5, 170–171 European conflict history, 96 European geographers, 23 European Union (EU), 73, 132–135 Exercise, of power, 4 Exogenous world orders, 5–6 Exploitation, of continent, 14 Export processing zones (EPZs), 151– 152 Expression, of regionalism, 7 External influence, on Africa, 72 Extraordinary African Chambers of Senegal (EAC), 100, 104–107 Extraordinary African Court, 95 Ezulwini Consensus, 17, 49, 59–60, 63– 66

FDI. See Foreign direct investment Firestone Company, 32 “The First Steps of the Extraordinary African Chambers” (Cimiotta), 106 Floyd, George, 172 Floyd, Philonise, 172 FOCAC. See Forum of China-Africa Cooperation Footprint, of China in Africa, 149 Forces of Freedom and Change, 82 Foreign direct investment (FDI), 139 Foreign policy, 6–7

Forum of China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), 60, 143, 146–147, 153– 155 “The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation” (Garth and Paruk), 154 Freetown, Sierra Leone, 32 French, Howard, 149 French Revolution, 29–30 French TV interview, 183 Frontline States, 40, 80–81 Functional networks, 11

Garvey, Marcus, 32 Garveyism, 32 Gbagbo, Laurent, 19, 93, 109, 111–114, 117 Gbagbo/Blé Goudé Case, 20, 93, 113, 117 Geneva, Switzerland, 55 Genocide, 101; in Rwanda, 85, 100 Geographical Conference on Central Africa, 31 Geopolitics, 1, 52, 55, 72, 160–161 German aggression, in Europe, 35 Germany, 34, 35 Getachew, Adom, 3 Ghana, 33, 36, 37, 74, 103; independence of, 38 Global, African conflicts as, 172–173 Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, 58 Global economic integration, 15, 119– 129, 138 Global engagement, 4, 45, 47, 65, 98, 141 Global focus, on narrow construct of region, 10 Global governance, 51 Global hegemony, 7, 47, 71–72 Global norms, 26 Global partnerships, between organizations, 104–105 Global Policy Actions, of African States, 2 Global politics, 4, 6, 9, 23, 73; China and, 145–146; economic growth and, 121–122; new role of Africa in, 190; regional internationalism and, 168; transnational justice and, 94 Global Power, Spheres of, 19

Index Global Social Actors, 12 Global South, 154, 158–159, 164 Global trading partnerships, 130–131 Global transactional area, view of Africa as, 5 Globalists, 94 Globalization, 6, 7, 17, 28, 49 Goals, of Africa from China, 159 Great Lakes region, 81 Great Recession, of 2008, 123–124 Griffiths, Courtney, 104

Habré, Hisséne, 95, 104–105, 107; referral to AU for trial of, 106, 177 Haiti, 29 Haitian Revolution, 29–30 Hanauer, Larry, 143, 159 Handling, of alleged war crimes by AU, 84 Harmonized strategy, for dealings with China, 164–165 Hegemony, global, 7, 47, 71–72 Hengari, Alfredo Tjiurimo, 49 High-level diplomacy, 23 Historical building blocks, 27 Historical resistance, to colonialism, 4, 31 Hitler, Adolf, 34 Hobsbawm, Eric, 41 the Holocaust, 97 Horn of Africa, 81, 82 “How China-Africa Relations Have Developed.” (Hanauer and Morris), 143, 159 Human rights, 96, 103, 105 Hybrid international courts, 95, 97, 99– 100, 177 Hyperglobal era, 8

“I am an African” (Mbeki), 45 ICC. See International Criminal Court ICC Assembly of States Parties, 110 ICJ. See International Commission of Jurists ICL. See International criminal law ICTR. See International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda Ideational forces, 26 Identity, of continent, 4

213

IGAD. See Intergovernmental Authority on Development Increased European exploration, of continent, 30 Independence, of Ghana, 38 Indochina, 37 Industrialization goals, 129, 134, 140, 161 Inequality, power and, 95 Infrastructural capacity, 4 Inhibitions, structural, 14 Initiative on China-Africa Cooperative Partnership for Peace and Security, 165–166 Institutionalism, regional, 7 Integration, regional, 7, 126 Interface, between AU member states, 18 Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), 75, 80, 82 Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing, 62 Intergovernmental organs, 50 Internal reforms, 164 International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), 106 International Convention on Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, 100– 101 International Criminal Court (ICC), 1, 19, 20, 93–95, 97; AU and, 98–99, 107–112, 174–177; Bashir and, 109– 110; credibility of, 113; criticisms of, 110–117; ICTR as precursor of, 101; problems with, 107–114; reform of, 110, 113, 116–117 International criminal law (ICL), 93–94, 98–101, 104, 116 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), 95, 97, 100–101 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, 97 International encounters, of African states, 2, 168 International engagement, 59 International humanitarian law, 101 International justice, 97 International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, 97 International norms, 16, 27

214

Index

International organizations, 10 International political economy, 137–138 International power, Western-dominated, 20 International relations (IR), 8–9, 24, 26, 185–186; peripheral role of Africa in, 2–3, 121, 138, 141, 169 International responses, to threats, 53 International security politics, 90 International trade, 121 Internationalism, 9, 16, 27, 28, 116; COVID-19 and, 167–168, 182–183 Internationalist movement, 2–4 Internationalist regionalism, 10 Internationality, 170 Interventionism, 19, 110–117 Intra-Africa trade, 129, 136, 178 Investment, from China, 123, 124, 148– 149, 159–160 IR. See International relations Irredentism, 39 “An Island of Internationalism” (Witt), 167 Issue-specific networks, 52 Italian invasion, of Ethiopia, 34, 35, 36 Ivory Coast (Côte D’Ivoire), 93, 111– 112

Jianhua, Zhong, 159 Jim Crow Era, 32 Joint UN-AU Framework for Enhanced Partnership in Peace and Security, 73, 174 Juba, South Sudan, 81–82 The Justice Cascade (Sikkink), 94–95

Kabbah, Ahmad Tejan, 77, 102 Kabuye, Rose, 108–109 Kagame, Paul, 95, 108–109, 156–157, 158 Kambanda, Jean, 101–102 Kenya, 42, 109–111 Kenyatta, Jomo, 42 Kenyatta, Uhuru, 93, 109, 110–111, 117 Knowledge, Matarutse H., 3, 14 Kony, Joseph, 108 Koroma, Johnny Paul, 102

Lala, Fridon, 52 Law, manipulation of, 77 Law of Wars, 96

League of Nations, 17, 25, 34 Legal effect between individuals, of EAC, 105 Leopold II (King), 31 Li, Peng, 160 Liberal universalist perspective, 19 Liberal world order, 29 Liberia, 17, 32, 81, 102–103 liberté, égalité, fraternité , 29–30 Lomé, Togo, 15 Lomé Agreement, 103–104, 133 Lomé Declaration, 76, 79 Long relationship, of China and Africa, 147–148 Long-time engagement, with China, 162–164 Lopes, Carlos, 132 the Lord’s Resistance Army, 108 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 29 Luke, David, 119, 122 Lumumba, Patrice, 42, 74

Machar, Riek, 81–82 Mahamat, Moussa Faki, 52, 137–138, 157 Makeba (Queen), 28 The Making of Global International Relations (Acharya and Buzan), 8, 16, 26, 185 Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, 115 Malabo Protocol, 1, 20, 95, 99, 114–115; establishment of, 177 Malian Empire, 28 Man of the Year (Time Magazine), 25 Management, of borders, 39 Mandela, Nelson, 40–41, 45 Manipulation, of law, 77 Maoist-Socialist revolution, 148 Marginalization, of Africa, 125 Masire, Ketumire, 81 Mass atrocity crimes, 116, 175 Material power, 26 Mbeki, Thabo, 45, 49 McKinsey Global Institute, 123 Mearsheimer, John, 98 Membership, of AU in FOCAC, 156 Mene, Wamkele, 139 Menelik II (emperor), 25 Middle Passage, 30 Migration, between China and Africa, 149–150

Index Military coups, 44, 76, 79, 81–82 Millennium Development Goals, 51 Mobutu, Joseph, 42 Modern China-Africa relationship, 147– 148 Modern racism, 171 Moreno Ocampo, Luis, 112 Morgenthau, Hans, 168 Morris, Lyle J., 143, 159 Mossi, 31 Movement, internationalist, 3–4 Movement for Liberation of the Congo, 108 Muchanga, Albert, 136–137 Multilateralism, 9–10, 43–44, 49–50, 51–53, 68; China and, 156; economics and, 140; transnational justice, 98–99 Multipolarity, 140 Musa, Mansa, 28 Mussolini, Benito, 25, 34 Mutual need, of China and Africa, 151 Mylonas, Harris, 10

NAM (Non-Aligned Movement), 41 National sovereignty, of new nationstates, 39 NATO, 37 N’djamena, Chad, 60–61 Negm, Namira, 113–114 Negotiation progress, of AfCFTA, 128 Neocolonialism, 110–111, 116, 133, 138 Neoliberal capitalism, 124, 148 Neoliberal crises, 120 Neoliberalism, 125 NEPAD. See New Partnership for Africa’s Development Networks, functional, 11 New nation-states, national sovereignty of, 39 New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), 60 New regionalism, 6–7, 87 “New scramble for Africa,” 137–138 Nigeria, 81 Nkengasong, John, 183, 185 Nkrumah, Kwame, 16, 18, 33, 37, 42; OAU and, 74 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 41–42 Nonindifference, principle of, 17, 44, 72, 77–78, 88

215

Noninterference, principle of, 44, 72–73, 75, 77–78 Noninterference policy, of China, 155 Nonparticipant in international politics, Africa as, 12 Norm, against unconstitutional changes of government, 44, 76–77 Norman, Hinga, 102 Nyerere, Julius, 42

OAU. See Organization of African Unity OAU Summit, 45 Obasanjo, Olusegun, 82 OCED. See Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Official development assistance (ODA), 130 Old regionalism, 6–7 One Belt, One Road, 160 Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals, 62 Operation Democracy, 44, 78 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 130 Organization of African Unity (OAU), 15, 17, 25, 28, 37; creation of, 39, 55, 74; end of apartheid and, 43; noninterference and, 72–73; transnational justice and, 98 Ouattara, Alassane, 112 Outlawing, of slavery, 30

Pan-Africa Rising, 122 Pan-African agency, 45, 119–120 Pan-African Congress, 33, 36 Pan-African economic agenda, 122–123 Pan-African identity, 12, 29, 77–78 Pan-African integration economics, 120, 139 Pan-African internationalism, 17, 27–28 Pan-Africanism, 28, 29, 31–32, 53, 72; economic growth and, 120–121, 125, 138–139 Paris Accords, 54 Partition, of Africa, 31, 38 Paruk, Farhana, 154 Pax Africana, 18, 73–74 Peace versus justice debate, 103, 176 Peacekeeping partnerships, 62, 84 People’s rights, 99

216

Index

Peripheral role, of Africa in international relations, 2–3, 121, 138, 141, 169 Permanent war, cold war as, 41 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 11 Plural, contemporary world as, 7, 9, 138 Pluralilateralism, 9, 12, 20, 50, 86; AfCFTA and, 122, 130–131, 138 Pluralism, political, 7 Plurality strength, 56 Political action, collective, 27 Political economy, 20, 119–122, 177 Political pluralism, 7 Politics, global, 4, 6 Population of Africa, India compared with, 132 Porto, João Gomes, 75 Portugal, 40, 177 Postapartheid South Africa, 45 Post–Cold War Era, 6, 50, 75, 86 Post–Cold War wars, 100 Postcolonial international relations, 8, 190 Postcolonial sovereignty, 14, 47 Postel-Vinay, Karoline, 5–6 Postindependence challenges, 74 Postindependence internationalism, 33– 34 Postneoliberal order, 123, 140 Power: asymmetrical relationship with China of, 165; exercising of, 4; global spheres of, 4; inequality and, 95; international as Westerndominated, 20; material, 26; politics constraints of AU, 85; refusal of incumbent to relinquish, 79; subtle ways of remaining in, 44–45; of universal jurisdiction, 105 Power politics constraints of AU, UN contrasted with, 85 Preferential access to African markets, for United States, 135 Pressing concerns, of African states, 17 Pre-World War II Era, 17 Principle of African ownership, priority setting and, 62 Principle of nonindifference, 17, 44, 72, 77–78, 88 Principle of noninterference, 44, 72–73, 75, 77–78 Principle of universality, 98 Problems, transnational, 9

Proxy Wars, 41 PSC. See AU Peace and Security Council Pushback: against China, 150–151; against military coups, 44

Race relations, 171 Racism, modern, 171 Ramping up, of export processing, 152 Rape, as genocidal act, 101 Reagan, Ronald, 40, 75 Rebellions, of slaves, 30 RECs. See Regional Economic Communities Reform, of ICC, 110, 113, 116–117 Reforms, internal, 164 Refusal to relinquish power, of incumbent, 79 Regimes, imposed from above, 6 Region, 10–11 Regional cooperation, 2, 130 Regional Economic Communities (RECs), 75, 80, 126–127, 133, 156– 157; China and, 164–166 Regional infrastructure, 127 Regional institutionalism, 7 Regional integration, 7, 126, 134, 153 Regional internationalism, 10, 12, 43, 49, 169 “Regional Multilateralism” (Harris and Yorulmazlar), 10 Regional security architecture, 18, 76, 172–173 Regional security complex theory (RSCT), 71–72, 73–74, 86 Regional security complexes, 18, 71–72, 87–88, 173 Regional Tribunal of Dakar, 105 Regional value chains, 136, 152 Regionalism, 4, 7, 9, 10, 16; AU and, 52, 68–69, 86, 187; international relations theory and, 188–189 Regionalization, 15 Regions and Power (Buzan and Wæaver), 18, 71 Reinvention, of Africa, 23 Relations: between Africa and China, 21–22, 143–166, 179; between races, 171 “Remarks by National Security Advisor Ambassador John R. Bolton on the

Index Trump Administration’s New Africa Strategy” (Bolton), 157 Representation, in UN, 52–54, 67–69, 98 Resistance, acts of, 26, 31 Resource wealth, of Africa, 162 Responsibility to protect (R2P), 78, 88 Responsible sovereignty norm, 72, 98 Revolutionary United Front, 102 Rise of China, 157–159 Rise of the rest, 122 Rome Statute, 97, 107–110 RSCT. See Regional security complex theory Ruto, William, 109, 110–111, 117 Rwanda, 95, 108–109; genocide in, 85, 100

Said, Edward, 190 Sankoh, Foday, 102 Savimbi, Jonas, 42 Scramble for Africa, 171, 178 SCSL. See Special Court of Sierra Leone Security community complex, 18 Security problems, cross-border handling of, 80–83, 91 Security regionalism, 79–80, 83–84, 90– 91 Selassie, Haile, 25–26, 34–35 Self-determination, 117 Self-governance, of Africa, 5 Senegal, 104–107 Serving-leader immunity, 95 SEZs. See Special economic zones Shelton, Garth, 154 “Shithole countries” remark, by Trump, 172 Sierra Leone, 76–77, 81, 95, 102 Sikkink, Kathryn, 19, 94–95, 96–97 Silk Road, 147 Sirte Declaration, 59–60 Slave rebellions, 30 Slave trading, 14, 26, 28, 29, 177 Slavery, 30, 171 Small-scale economies, development of, 129 Social constructivist framework, 10, 19, 26, 46–47, 116–117 Solidarity, with Ethiopia, 35–36 Solomon (King), 28 Sons of Africa, 30 South Africa, alien rule in, 33

217

South Asia, 37 South Sudan, 81–82 South-South economic globalization, 124, 144, 146 Sovereign responsibility, collective, 95 Soviet Union, 37, 41 Special Court of Sierra Leone (SCSL), 100, 104; ICTR contrasted with, 102– 103 Special economic zones (SEZs), 151– 152 Spheres, of global power, 19 Stability, of borders, 38 Statists, 94 Structural changes, in international relations, 51 Structural inhibitions, 14 Subregional member organizations, of AU, 84–85 Subsidiarity, complementarity and, 80 Subsidies, for cotton, 57 Subtle ways, of remaining in power, 44– 45 Sudan, 37, 82, 109–110 Sudan-Bashir case, 95 Suspension, of AU members, 79 Sustainable Development Goals, 51

Taiwan, 164 Taylor, Charles, 102, 103–104 Taylor, Ian, 160 Term limit removal, 77 Territorial borders, 38 Territorial integrity of, principle of, 38 TFA. See WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement Third wave, of democratization, 43 Third World Approaches to International Law model, 98 Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, 82 Tigrayan war, 90 Time (magazine), 25 “Time to Rethink Africa’s Role in International Relations” (Brown), 2–3 Towards the African Renaissance (Diop), 45 Trade, intra-Africa, 129 Trade, with United States, 135–136, 137–138 Trade diversification, 129

218

Index

Trade relationship, with China, 131 Trading, of slaves, 14, 26, 28, 29, 177 Transatlantic slave trade, 31 Transitional Military Council, 82 Transnational justice, 9, 19, 20, 93–118, 174–175 Transnational justice, Western bias in, 98, 99, 108–111 Transnational solidarity, 29 Tribunal of Brussels, 105 Trump, Donald, 172 Trump Administration, 135 Tutsi ethnic group, 101 2013 AU Summit, 45–46

Uganda, 108 Uhuru case, 20, 95 Ujamaa (brotherhood), 42 UN. See United Nations UN Agenda for Peace, 88 UN Committee Against Torture (CAT), 106 UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), 119, 125, 127, 133 UN General Assembly, 55–56 UN Human Rights Council, 172 UN Office to the African Union, 83–84 UN peacekeeping mission to Darfur, 85 UN peacekeeping model, problems with, 84 UN Security Council (UNSC), 18, 47, 53, 62–65, 72–73; ICTR and, 100– 101; lengthy processes of, 85; Sierra Leone and, 102 UN Special Representative to the African Union, 18 UN-AU partnership, 71, 83–86, 173–174 Unconstitutional changes of government: norm against, 44, 76–77; types of, 77 Unconstitutional changes of government, norm against, 44, 76–77 “Understanding the African Continental Free Trade Area” (Arosanyin), 119 UNDP. See United Nations Development Program UNECA. See UN Economic Commission for Africa Uneven Structure, of System, 4 UNIA. See Universal Negro Improvement Association

Unilateralism, 49 Union Mission in Somalia-UNSC relationship, 72 United Nations (UN), 17, 43, 50, 53, 79– 80; control of by West, 87; founding of, 97; principle of territorial integrity of, 38; representation in, 52–54, 67– 69, 98; Security Council of, 18, 47, 53, 62–65, 72–73, 85, 100–101, 102 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 124 United Nations Development Program (UNDP), 61 United States: apartheid and, 40, 75; trade with, 135–136, 137–138 United States of Africa, of Nkrumah, 39 Universal jurisdiction, 108–109 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 32 Universality, principle of, 98 UNSC. See UN Security Council “The Untapped Potential of EU-Africa Trade” (Lopes), 132 Urge to Merge, 6 Urgent troop deployment, UN peacekeeping and, 84 US Commitment, to Multilateralism, 34

Vaccine shortages, 183–184 Versailles Peace Conference, 33 Versailles Settlement, 34 victims, of portrayal of Africa as, 23, 157–158, 168

Wæver, Ole, 18, 71 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 32 War crimes, 97–104 War on terror, 41 West Africa, 35, 81 Western bias, in transnational justice, 98, 99, 108–111, 176 Western hegemony, 144 Western liberal modernity, 7 Western-dominated international power, 20 WHO. See World Health Organization Williams, Henry Sylvester, 32 Witt, Antonia, 167 World Bank, 124 World Customs Organization, 133

Index World economic order, 128 World Health Organization (WHO), 180–182 World orders, as politically decentered, 8 World orders, exogenous, 5–6 World Trade Organization (WTO), 17, 50, 56–57, 130–132 World War II, 97 World-making, 3 Worldmaking After Empire (Getachew, Adom), 3 Worldwide African community, 36

219

WTO. See World Trade Organization WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), 132

Xi (president), 155

Yorulmazlar, Emirhan, 10 Yuxi, Liu, 136–137

Zewde, Sahle-Work, 71 Zondi, Siphamandla, 89–90 Zuma, Jacob, 81, 159

About the Book

The African Union’s threat to lead African states’ mass withdrawal from the International Criminal Court in 2008 marked just one of many encounters that demonstrate African leaders’ growing confidence and activism in international relations. Rita Kiki Edozie and Moses Khisa explore the myriad ways in which the continent’s diplomatic engagement and influence in the global arena has been expanding in recent decades. Focusing in particular on collective action through the institutional platform of the AU—while acknowledging the internal challenges involved—the authors show how Africa’s role as a dynamic world region is both shaping and being shaped by current trends in global development and geopolitics.

Rita Kiki Edozie is professor of international relations and interim dean in

the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts–Boston. Moses Khisa is associate professor of both political science and Africana studies at North Carolina State University.

221