Content uploaded by Thomas Kwasi Tieku
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Thomas Kwasi Tieku on Sep 25, 2014
Content may be subject to copyright.
| International Journal | Spring 2012 | 373 |
Thomas Kwasi Tieku is assistant professor of political science at the University of
Toronto.
What positions would African governments take if a proposal for a new
agenda for peace were tabled at the United Nations for discussion and
possible adoption in 2012? This article posits that most African states would
work collectively through African Union (AU) channels for the inclusion
of a number of new peace and security ideas. Their demands would
revolve around four peace and security pillars: an ubuntu understanding of
sovereignty; an acceptance of elements of the responsibility to protect (R2P);
a shift towards a human-security-oriented view of peace; and, finally, a new
set of doctrines on postwar reconstruction. These suggestions are within the
realm of possibility in part because they form the basis of shared African
Union members’ understanding of peace and security in Africa and because,
since the turn of the century, African governments have handled major UN-
related subjects through the institutional mechanism of the AU. The four
peacebuilding innovations that have emerged at the interstate level in Africa
since the publication of “An agenda for peace” in 1992 are the backbone of a
new continental African peace and security architecture.
Thomas Kwasi Tieku
A pan-African view
of a new agenda for
peace
| 374 | Spring 2012 | International Journal |
| Thomas Kwasi Tieku |
In this essay I will examine the ubuntu view of sovereignty and the
institutional and legal changes AU members have made as a result of the
adoption of the ubuntu concept. I then unpack R2P ideas AU member states
have legalized and institutionalized in the African international system. In
the third section, I explore the evolution of AU members’ view of security,
suggesting that it has shifted from state-centric and military security towards
human security. I use the last section to examine the postwar reconstruction
ideas that have emerged in Africa since the publication of “An agenda
for peace” in 1992. Each section suggests specific positions and possible
requests African governments might advance if a new agenda for peace were
discussed in 2012.
THE UBUNTU UNDERSTANDING OF SOVEREIGNTY
One of the things African states as a collective might put forward in any
negotiation of new UN doctrines on peace and security will be a new definition
of sovereignty to replace the state-centric and conservative way sovereignty
is conceptualized in the “Agenda for peace.” The original document was
absolutely clear that the “foundation-stone of this work is and must remain
the State.”1 It urged the international community “to respect the sovereignty
of the State” in “situations of internal crisis.” In a new document, however,
African governments may introduce a new understanding of sovereignty and
intervention that seeks to protect African states from military intervention
by non-African states while leaving room for African states to intervene
collectively in each others’ internal affairs with or without the consent of
the target country. The intervention can take different forms, including
mediation, as in the case of Kenya in 2008; suspension from participation in
activities of African international organizations, as in the case of Mauritania
in 2009; rebuke and suspension of AU membership, as in the case of Cote
d’Ivoire in 2011; and, as a last resort, military intervention, as in the case of
Comoros Island in 2008. Conditions for military intervention are detailed
in article 4(h) of the constitutive act of the AU. It gives the AU the right to
intervene in the affairs of a member-state in order to “prevent war crimes,
genocide and crimes against humanity.” These threshold conditions provided
by the AU, as Maxi Schoeman pointed out, “go ‘beyond’ the provision made
for intervention in the internal affairs of a country in the UN Charter.”2
1 Boutros Boutros-Ghali, “An agenda for peace: Preventive diplomacy, peacemaking
and peacekeeping,” United Nations, New York, 1992, www.un.org.
2 Maxi Schoeman, “The African Union after the Durban 2002 summit,” Centre of
African Studies, University of Copenhagen, 16 July 2004, www.teol.ku.dk.
| International Journal | Spring 2012 | 375 |
| A pan-African view of a new agenda for peace |
Indeed, Thomas G. Weiss has suggested that the AU has set thresholds for
intervention lower than those outlined in any other international legal code.3
The acceptance of conditional sovereignty in Africa’s international
subsystem is predicated on ubuntu’s view of persons, states, and sovereignty.4
Ubuntu, defined as a world view or philosophy that sees entities in relational
terms, is considered the connecting thread of the people of the Bantu
language group, one of the four main linguistic groups in Africa. Most
of the ethnic groups spread throughout sub-Saharan Africa belong to the
Bantu cultural and linguistic group.5 The ubuntu idea of the person, or
what Archbishop Desmond Tutu described as the very essence of Africans’
understanding of humanity, is wittily expressed in the saying that “humans
are humans because of other humans.”6 This collectivist understanding of
the individual, in which “a person is a person through persons,” provided the
normative frame for African leaders to reconceptualize state sovereignty in a
way different from that of the Weberian and “Westphalian commonsense.”7
The Weberian and Westphalian commonsense, promoted through the
institutions of the Organization of African Unity (OAU)—the predecessor
to the AU—focused primarily on legitimizing colonial boundaries and
institutionalizing respective regimes’ control over these territories.
Protection of these borders and governing regimes in Africa became the
referent of the OAU. As part of the efforts to protect and consolidate the
3 Thomas G. Weiss, “The sunset of humanitarian intervention? The responsibility to
protect in a unipolar era,” Security Dialogue 35, no. 2 (2004): 135-53.
4 Thomas Kwasi Tieku, “Collectivist worldview: Its challenge to international
relations,” in Scarlett Cornelissen, Fantu Cheru, and Timothy M. Shaw, eds., Africa and
International Relations in the 21st Century (London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012): 36-50. Also see Karen Smith, “Africa as an agent of international relations
knowledge,” in Ibid., 21-35.
5 Robert O. Collins and James M. Burns, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007); John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
6 Karen Smith, “Africa as an agent,” 33; William Zartman, “Africa as a subordinate
state system in international relations,” International Organization 21, no. 4 (1967):
545-64; Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual
Scheme (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu,
“Ubuntu in South Africa: A sociolinguistic perspective to a pan-African concept,”
Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 13, no. 2 (1999): 24-41.
7 Siba Grovogui, “Regimes of sovereignty: International morality and the African
condition,” European Journal of International Relations 8, no.3 (2002): 315–38.
| 376 | Spring 2012 | International Journal |
| Thomas Kwasi Tieku |
African state, the charter of the OAU committed African governments to a
treaty that contained the strongest international legal principles that support
juridical sovereign statehood and strengthen sovereign prerogatives of
African governments.
The traditional notion of sovereignty, with its emphasis on territorial
integrity and noninterference in internal affairs and the practices that
consequently followed, came under serious attack in the 1990s. Large-scale
atrocities such as the Rwandan genocide, the end of the Cold War, and the
insecurity that engulfed a number of African states created the conditions
for the evolution of state sovereignty within the African subsystem. The
former United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, led the assault on
the ideational foundation of the Westphalian temple.8 He undermined the
principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of states by insisting
during meetings with African leaders that the principle was un-African.9 He
thought the principle was un-African inasmuch as it was at odds with both
ubuntu and the African way of solving problems summed up by the African
proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” It contradicted the conventional
view held in many African societies that the resolution of a problem in any
African society is the responsibility of the entire community. Annan used
various African proverbs and historical experiences to tell African leaders,
at both formal and informal gatherings, that no one in Africa stands idly by
while a neighbour’s house burns.10 He wondered aloud why African leaders
often neglect this fundamental cultural principle and practice when dealing
with each other. Annan’s position and public stand on sovereignty played
8 The description of sovereignty as the Westphalian temple originated with
Mark Zacher, “The decaying pillars of the Westphalian temple: Implications for
international order and governance,” in James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel,
eds., Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 58–101.
9 Kofi Annan, “Address on receiving the MacArthur international justice award,”
http://kofiannanfoundation.org. See also Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, “The
responsibility to protect,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 6 (2002): 99-110; Evarist Baimu and
Kathryn Sturman, “Amendment to the African Union’s right to intervene: A shift from
human security to regime security,” African Security Review, 12, no. 2, (2003): 37-45.
10 Ben Kioko, “The right of intervention under the African Union’s constitutive act:
Non-interference to non-intervention,” International Review of the Red Cross, no. 85
(2003): 807-25; Baimu and Sturman, “Amendment to the African Union’s right to
intervene”; William Zartman, and Francis Deng, eds., A Strategic Vision for Africa: the
Kampala Movement (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2002).
| International Journal | Spring 2012 | 377 |
| A pan-African view of a new agenda for peace |
a role in African leaders’ introduction of conditional sovereignty in the
African subsystem.11
MAINSTREAMING R2P PRINCIPLES IN AFRICA
African Union members are likely to call on other UN members to accept
the principle of conditional sovereignty as it is consistent with R2P, which
is often seen as originating in Africa.12 As Okeke pointed out, many
governments in Africa consider the formation of the AU and the legalization
of language similar to R2P in the AU constitutive act as milestones in the
development and conceptualization of R2P at the global level.13 Given the
number of uses of R2P-like language that punctuate various decisions,
declarations, and legal instruments of the AU, it will come as no surprise if
African leaders collectively demand that a new agenda for peace be based on
pillars of R2P.
The clearest support for the view that African leaders will collectively seek
to frame a new agenda for peace in R2P terms can be found in the Ezulwini
consensus, in which AU member states endorsed R2P and submitted
a common position on it to the 2005 world summit outcome where R2P
was put on the international negotiating table.14 The Ezulwini consensus
reiterated the three pillars of R2P, namely the responsibility of states to
protect their citizens; the responsibility of the international community to
help states protect their citizens; and the responsibility of the international
community to protect citizens of states that are unable or unwilling to
protect their citizens. There are, however, three important caveats in the
Ezulwini consensus that showed a slightly different understanding of R2P
than the conventional view outlined in either the report of the international
11 Kioko, “The right of intervention.”
12 Kristiana Powell and Thomas Kwasi Tieku, “The African Union and the responsibility
to protect: Towards a protection regime for Africa?” International Insight, 20, nos. 1 &
2 (2005): 215-35; Jennifer Welsh, “Implementing the ‘responsibility to protect’: Where
expectations meet reality,” Ethics and International Affairs 24, no.4 (2010): 415-30.
13 Martyns Okeke Jide, “African Union and the challenges of implementing
‘responsibility to protect’ in Africa,” paper presented at the 13th CODESRIA general
assembly, http://general.assembly.codesria.org.
14 “The Ezulwini consensus: The common African position on the proposed reform of
the United Nations,” African Union, www.africa-union.org; “Report on the elaboration
of a framework document on postconflict reconstruction and development,” African
Union, Banjul, 2006.
| 378 | Spring 2012 | International Journal |
| Thomas Kwasi Tieku |
commission on intervention and state sovereignty or the report of the 2005
UN world summit outcome.
First, the Ezulwini consensus sought to shift the power to decide
when, where, and how to intervene to regional organizations, contrary
to the argument put forth by the original R2P report. The international
commission and UN reports, in contrast, unequivocally argued that the
UN is the best-placed institution to authorize intervention. The Ezulwini
document, however, maintained that “the General Assembly and the
Security Council are often far from the scenes of conflicts and may not be
in a position to undertake effectively a proper appreciation of the nature
and development of conflict situations.” The collective wisdom of members
of the AU is that regional organizations are the institutions best placed to
make the appropriate assessment and should be “empowered to take actions
in this regard.” Second, the Ezulwini consensus warned powerful states in
the international system not to use R2P as an excuse to embark on regime
change, noting that even though “it is important to reiterate the obligation
of states to protect their citizens...this should not be used as a pretext to
undermine the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of states.”
Third, though the Ezulwini consensus and the original R2P reports
agreed on the idea that intervention by regional organizations “should be
with the approval of the Security Council,” a subtle qualification was inserted
into the Ezulwini consensus that effectively makes it possible for regional
organizations to dictate to the UN, instead of the other way around. The
Ezulwini consensus is emphatic that the approval of the security council for
intervention “could be granted ‘after the fact’ in circumstances requiring
urgent action.” The consensus suggested that “the UN should assume
responsibility for financing such operations.” The language used in the
document is meant to encourage the UN to accept and even institutionalize
a practice started by the economic community of west African states
(ECOWAS), and later copied by the AU, whereby a regional organization
intervenes in conflicts without security council approval, but later seeks
not only the UN’s approval, but to force the UN to keep the peace that the
regional organization has imposed. The tactic was employed by ECOWAS in
Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the AU adopted the same strategy in Burundi,
Sudan, and Somalia.
Moreover, the language in the Ezulwini consensus is a subtle attempt
by AU member-states to make the UN share with regional organizations the
primary responsibility for maintaining peace in a region, though the UN
charter is unambiguous on the UN’s primacy in peace and security matters
| International Journal | Spring 2012 | 379 |
| A pan-African view of a new agenda for peace |
throughout the world, including the African continent. A blunter case for
making regional organizations such as the AU take the lead in peace and
security matters on the African continent was made in a communiqué issued
by the African Union’s peace and security council on AU-UN cooperation
and the report of the chairperson of the AU on the same issue, released prior
to the January 2012 UN’s security council debate on AU-UN cooperation.
The move to challenge the UN as the sole international organization
with authority to promote and maintain peace in the world has angered some
powerful members of the UN security council. As Susan Rice put it during the
January 2012 security council debate, UN-regional organization “cooperation
cannot be on the basis that the regional organization independently decides
the policy and United Nations member states simply bless it and pay for
it. There can be no blank check, politically or financially.”15 Her opening
remarks went to greater lengths to indicate that the UN is not, and should
not be made, “subordinate to other bodies or to regional groups, schedules
or capacities.” As a direct result of concerns expressed by the United States,
Britain, and France that the AU is trying to rewrite chapter 8 of the UN
charter, the security council passed resolution 2033 requiring regional and
subregional organizations to keep the security council fully informed before
they undertake any major peace and security-related activities in their region.
This turf battle will encourage African states to introduce language that will
allow regional organizations to take lead roles in peace and security issues
in their regions should a new agenda for peace be negotiated. At the very
least, they will seek policy clarity in the area, especially as the AU continues
to develop the capacity to promote peace on the African continent and as the
AU increasingly adopts structural and human security-centred approaches
to peace and security.
LEGALIZATION OF HUMAN SECURITY
The AU is already showing signs that its understanding of security is evolving
to include structural and human security issues. A number of articles in
the AU constitutive act, including article 4, opened the space for the AU
to promote human security in the African continent by providing the legal
cover for it to intervene in the affairs of a member-state for humanitarian
purposes. As article 4(i) put it, every African has the “right to live in peace.”
15 Susan E. Rice, “Remarks by ambassador Susan E. Rice, US permanent representative
to the United Nations, at a security council open debate on UN-AU cooperation,”
http://usun.state.gov.
| 380 | Spring 2012 | International Journal |
| Thomas Kwasi Tieku |
And, as a number of informed writers have eloquently argued, article 4
clauses were introduced with a view to protecting ordinary people in Africa
from abusive governments.16 The specification of war crimes, genocide, and
crimes against humanity as grounds for intervention has created a clearer
set of criteria by which the union can decide to intervene in a state for
human security purposes. Unlike other international organizations, the AU
does not require the consent of a state to intervene in its internal affairs in
situations where populations are at risk. Under the AU rules, a decision by
two thirds of the assembly is required for intervention purposes.
The AU’s approach to economic development and political governance
seems to reflect human security ideas. Articles 3(j) and (n) and 4(l) and (n)
of the constitutive act urge its member states to ensure balanced economic
development, promote gender equality and good health, and work towards
eradicating preventable diseases. The constitutive act commits member-
states of the AU to “respect the sanctity of human life.” Article 4(o) and
article 3(h) seek to put AU member-states on a path to “promote and protect
human and peoples’ rights in accordance with the African Charter on
Human and Peoples’ Rights and other relevant human rights instruments.”
It is also significant that 3(g) enjoins member governments to promote
democratic principles and institutions, popular participation, and good
governance. This provision in the constitutive act is important for the AU
human security agenda because in the human security research community
it is generally understood that democratic development is a critical aspect
of human security. The decision to exclude from the AU states such as
Mauritania, Togo, and Madagascar, whose governments came to power
through unconstitutional means therefore advances the human security
agenda.
The human security ideas were the first of the three new security
innovations to be embedded in the African subsystem. They were introduced
to the OAU leadership by the Kampala movement, an initiative of civil
society groups that met in Kampala in Uganda in the early 1990s to develop
16 Mark Malan, New Tools in the Box? Towards A Standby Force for the African Union
(Pretoria: Institute of Security Studies, 2002); Jackie Cilliers and Katharine Sturman,
“The right intervention: Enforcement challenges for the African Union,” African
Security Review 11, no. 3 (2002), www.issafrica.org. The article has been amended to
include intervention to “restore peace and stability” in response to “a serious threat
to legitimate order.”
| International Journal | Spring 2012 | 381 |
| A pan-African view of a new agenda for peace |
a set of principles regarding security, stability, development, and cooperation
for Africa.17 At the heart of the principles was a conscious effort to redefine
security and sovereignty and to demand certain “standards of behaviour...
from every government [in Africa] in the interest of common humanity.” The
movement demanded that African leaders redefine their states’ security as
a multidimensional phenomenon extending beyond military considerations
to include economic, political, and social aspects of the individual, the family,
and the society. In the view of the movement, “[t]he concept of security must
embrace all aspects of society…[and the] security of a nation must be based
on the security of the life of the individual citizens to live in peace and to
satisfy basic needs.”
The human security document was submitted and adopted by the OAU
summit in Lomé in July 2000. A refined and slightly watered-down version
was accepted as the guiding norms and principles of security, stability,
development, and cooperation in a memorandum of understanding that
was adopted by the AU in July 2002 in Pretoria, South Africa. It is no
exaggeration to say that African leaders would actually try to frame a debate
on a new agenda for peace in terms of these principles, especially as the
concept of human security enjoys tremendous support in the foreign policy
establishments of influential South Africa and Nigeria. Many members of
the AU will support a human-security-centred approach to any new agenda
for peace because of the belief, widespread in Africa, that the Kampala
movement provided the platform for the language of R2P to emerge.
Contextualizing the debate in R2P and in human security language will
provide a platform for the leadership of the African international system to
introduce the African consensus on postwar reconstruction to the rest of the
international community.
POSTWAR RECONSTRUCTION DOCTRINES
The African consensus position on peacebuilding is contained in the AU
policy on postconflict reconstruction adopted by the AU executive council
at its meeting in Banjul in 2006.18 The policy is meant to help local
17 This section draws on Thomas Kwasi Tieku, “Explaining the clash and
accommodation of interests of major actors in the creation of the African Union,”
African Affairs 103, no. 411 (2004): 249-67. See also Olusengun Obasanjo and Felix
G.N. Mosha, eds., “Africa rise to the challenge: Conference report on the Kampala
forum,” Africa Leadership Forum, Abeokuta and New York, 1992.
18 “Report on postconflict reconstruction and development,” African Union, Banjul,
2006, www.africa-union.org.
| 382 | Spring 2012 | International Journal |
| Thomas Kwasi Tieku |
actors negotiate with foreign peacebuilders, enhance local ownership and
leadership, improve coordination and peacebuilding processes, and put the
AU commission in a good position to engage with donors on peacebuilding
issues. African Union member-states moved to define boundaries, ideas,
processes, and institutions of postwar reconstruction because they think
peacebuilding is “a political rather than a technical process.” They think
peacebuilding blueprints in use in different parts of Africa are “borrowed
from outside Africa,” are grounded in civilizing logic, and are based on the
assumption that external actors, rather than local people, know exactly what
is needed to rebuild African states emerging from war.
The AU leadership believes, perhaps naively, that the postwar
reconstruction policy can empower local Africans to bargain effectively with
external actors. They claim that too often current foreign peacebuilders
engage in what can be called “consulformations,” that is, a series of talks
on an already-finalized plan, in order to make it appear as if stakeholders
and, in particular, those who will be affected by the plan, contributed to
its development. The executive council is of the view that African citizens
in postwar societies are seldom consulted, in the true sense of the word,
on peacebuilding projects. The consensus position is therefore meant
to offer local actors options and a context within which to engage with
external interveners to develop what Roland Paris and Timothy Sisk call a
“peacebuilding contract.”19 To counter accusations that its state-building
ideas are equally based on a top-down approach, the AU commission adopted
fairly consultative processes in developing the postwar reconstruction policy.
Those processes included a brainstorming retreat for members of the peace
and security council and the permanent representative council on 4-5
September 2005 in Durban, South Africa; a technical experts meeting for
AU members, held 7-8 February 2006 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; an AU
and civil society dialogue, 5-7 April 2006 in Abuja, Nigeria; a validation
workshop for the AU commission, 31 May 2006 in Addis Ababa; and,
finally, a governmental experts meeting, 8-9 June 2006 in Addis Ababa. In
September 2006, the AU commission discussed with civil society groups
the best ways to promote the postwar policy. The AU leadership believes
these processes, used to develop the postwar policy, gave a broad spectrum
of Africans the chance not only to shape peacebuilding ideas in Africa, but
to stop the dumping of foreign ideas on Africans.
19 Roland Paris and Timothy D. Sisk, eds., The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting
the Contradictions of Post-war Peace Operations (New York: Routledge, 2009).
| International Journal | Spring 2012 | 383 |
| A pan-African view of a new agenda for peace |
Another reason why AU developed the postwar policy was to discourage
peacebuilders from trying to civilize citizens of postwar states, by directing
peacebuilders’ attention to local needs and to respecting local cultures.
Leading figures at the AU commission think current peacebuilding projects
carry too much residue from the European civilizing missions and projects
of the 18th and 19th centuries.20 They claim current peacebuilding projects
are driven by the ideas of civilizing missions because they try to replicate
donor state representative government in the form of a presidential or
parliamentary system of government (read democratization); replace
traditional and customary rules with formal written laws similar to those
in donor states (read promotion of the rule of law); spread values and ideas
held by external interveners and their donors (read promotion of good
governance); and stimulate local people’s taste for goods produced in donor
countries (read economic reforms). The AU leadership thinks while these
may be well-intentioned, they are likely to have a disastrous long-term
impact on postwar societies. The AU commission attached to the postwar
reconstruction policy a “flexible template” to help peacebuilders move
beyond civilizing goals to “pave the way for growth and regeneration in
countries and regions emerging from conflict.”
The template is also designed to dissuade peacebuilders from prioritizing
some aspects of the reconstruction processes at the expense of others. A major
complaint from civil society groups during AU-civil society consultations
on postwar reconstruction was that many donors and practitioners tend
to favour aspects of reconstruction that will generate publicity and media
attention to the exclusion of other important but less visible areas. Often
the ones that are neglected, such as psychological healing, retraining of
former combatants, and creation of sustainable jobs, are precisely those that
are most needed by the people recovering from the war. The AU hopes to
end discriminatory practices by producing a menu of items essential for
peacebuilders to accomplish in war-ravaged African countries. Given AU
complaints that current peacebuilding ideas are borrowed from outside
of Africa, it is ironic that the template draws heavily from liberal capitalist
democratic principles such as the rule of law. Indeed, the democracy
ideals they listed appear identical to the conventional liberal peacebuilding
exercises the policy seeks to replace. Perhaps these ideas somehow lose
their civilizing significance when they are articulated by African elites. The
hypocrisy notwithstanding, the AU consensus position has the potential to
20 Interview by author, Addis Ababa, 24 February 2012.
| 384 | Spring 2012 | International Journal |
| Thomas Kwasi Tieku |
minimize conflicts over the political objectives of postwar reconstruction in
the African context.
The postwar reconstruction policy provided benchmarks for measuring
the successes and failures of peacebuilding. Given the attraction of human
security discourses in AU circles, it is perhaps expected that the then-
chairperson of the AU commission claimed that every postwar peacebuilding
process in Africa must strive to free the so-called ordinary Africans from
“want and fear.”21 On the question of freeing people from want, the AU
expects peacebuilding to create conditions for people affected by war to
improve their living conditions; meet basic needs, such as health, education,
and food; and enhance their capacity to realize their potential. On freeing
people from fear, the AU borrowed ideas from conventional disarmament,
demobilization, and reintegration programs. Thus, at the end of the postwar
reconstruction, the AU expects peacebuilders to complete the demanding
task of establishing conditions for social, political, economic, and physical
transformation of affected areas, societies, and states.
The postwar reconstruction policy attempted to address the obvious
question of how African these ideas are, because the document reads like
a poorly attributed paper or even a plagiarized review of peacebuilding
literature. The template and the broader policy documents claimed the
state-building ideas are not African ideas per se, but they can be adapted
and embedded in certain principles to suit local African conditions.
The AU has consequently developed six principles—African leadership,
national and local ownership, inclusiveness, equity and nondiscrimination,
cooperation and cohesion, and capacity-building for sustainability—to guide
peacebuilding exercises. Though many of these principles lack specifics,
the AU leadership hopes the principles of national and local ownership will
empower local actors to domesticate peacebuilding projects and to exercise
oversight in the reconstruction processes. The AU commission thinks local
Africans will use the ideas to set the terms of peacebuilding engagements
with external actors.
African Union members recognize that peacebuilding can easily be
used to reconstruct the identities of people in societies emerging from war.
The principles of African leadership are meant to help Africans determine
the content of peacebuilding projects. Rather than turning wartorn
societies into photocopies of outside cultures, AU members hope national
21 Jean Ping, “Opening remarks on the occasion of the first annual US-African Union
high level meeting,” Washington, DC, 21 April 2010, www.africa-union.org.
| International Journal | Spring 2012 | 385 |
| A pan-African view of a new agenda for peace |
bureaucrats and local authorities will use the template to design, assess,
implement, monitor, and evaluate peacebuilding projects in such a way that
they reinforce core local identities and values. The AU is acutely aware that
it is not enough to make Africans take leadership positions. It is equally
vital that ordinary Africans get involved, in order to ensure local acceptance
of the peacebuilding projects. The principles of inclusiveness, equity, and
nondiscrimination, with their emphasis on equitable distribution of power,
wealth, and the organic links between peacebuilders and the local population,
are designed to ensure that ordinary people are involved in reconstruction
exercises.
Coordination and cooperation are problems of legendary severity in
the current aid system, and peacebuilding projects that depend heavily on
donor support carry this baggage as well. The principles of cooperation and
coherence are meant to promote synergy among different peacebuilding
activities, encourage genuine partnership among actors involved in
reconstruction, and promote donor cooperation and coordination. As a pan-
African organization, the AU would ideally like Africans based in Africa to
manage every aspect of peacebuilding projects, but it knows that the expertise
is unavailable. The AU developed the principles of capacity-building for
sustainability to encourage peace builders and donors to prioritize capacity-
building of locals so that local people will make the necessary efforts to
consolidate and sustain peacebuilding projects.
African Union members are acutely aware that intermediaries can
sometimes be spoilers in peacebuilding processes.22 Intermediaries such as
peacebuilding consultants, nongovernmental organizations, and donors are
not necessarily altruistic, however morally superior the outlook they project.
Intermediaries are quick to tell those who will listen that their main goal is
to help wartorn states resolve the root causes of conflicts, but in practice, as
the volume edited by Dayton and Kriesberg shows, few have pursued this
objective in a meaningful way.23 It is not uncommon to find intermediaries
putting their interests above those of the people they are supposed to be
helping. The AU’s aim is to minimize the incentive for self-seeking donors
22 Desirée Nilsson and Mimmi Söderberg Kovacs, “Revisiting an elusive concept: A
review of the debate on spoilers in peace processes,” International Studies Review 13,
no.4, (2011): 606-26; Stephen John Stedman, “Spoiler problems in peace processes,”
International Security 22, no. 2 (1997): 5-53.
23 Bruce W. Dayton and Louis Kriesberg, Conflict Transformation and Peace-Building:
Moving from Violence to Sustainable Peace (New York: Routledge, 2009).
| 386 | Spring 2012 | International Journal |
| Thomas Kwasi Tieku |
to turn peacebuilding exercises into a lucrative industry. The benchmarks
and principles are meant to discourage intermediaries from treating their
work as mere jobs or careers.
Though AU peacebuilding ideas are general and imprecise, and at
times contradictory and incoherent, their drafters made an excellent move
by establishing linkages between postwar reconstruction ideas and existing
AU policies. The security elements were thus embedded in human security
ideas outlined in the African nonaggression and common defence and
security pact. The political governance element draws extensively from
the AU declaration on political, economic, and corporate governance of
2002, which contains the textbook conception of political governance.
Thus, the drafters of the postwar reconstruction policy attempt to prevent
illegal seizure of power in countries emerging from war by drawing on the
1999 OAU declaration against unconstitutional change of governments in
Africa. The clear definition of unconstitutional change of government in
the declaration—as a replacement of a democratically elected government
through a military coup d’état, mercenary intervention, or armed rebellion,
or by the refusal by an incumbent government to relinquish power to
the winning party after free, fair, and regular elections—together with
the mechanical way the anti-coup principles in the declaration have been
applied, have provided an effective mechanism to address a loophole in the
current peacebuilding system. The current system has no systematic means,
except the court of public opinion, to prevent unconstitutional changes of
governments during a state-building period.
The postwar reconstruction policy seeks to prevent postwar states
from sliding into an electoral dictatorship. It is easy for postwar societies
to practice electoral politics or to at least hold an election with international
support. However, consolidation of postwar democracies has become one
of the most difficult activities in peacebuilding exercises. Governments that
emerge from postwar electoral processes often try to use legal means to
undermine democratic institutions. The recent history of Africa is replete
with examples, and studies also show that authoritarian tendencies have
crept into the administrations of a number of ostensibly democratic postwar
states.24 Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Rwanda, for example, have
all become victims of democratic backsliding. To deal with the problem,
24 Michael Bratton, Robert Mattes, and Emmanuel Gyimah-Boadi, eds., Public
Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005).
| International Journal | Spring 2012 | 387 |
| A pan-African view of a new agenda for peace |
the postwar reconstruction commits the AU to defending and protecting
African democracies by linking peacebuilding exercises to the African
charter on democracy, elections, and governance (the African democratic
charter), which entered into force on 15 February 2012.25
The AU seeks to introduce third-party oversight into peacebuilding
processes in order to deal with the current system, which has no institutional
mechanisms for international and African peacebuilders alike to render
accounts of their performance on key aspects of their work. African Union
members want to make the AU commission the overarching institution to
which peacebuilders and postwar societies can submit reports showing how
they are performing in such key areas as democratization. That would be a
major corrective measure to the current system, which is based on the belief
that international pressure will be enough to nurture critical projects, such
as democracy, once elections are organized and elected leaders take office in
war-ravaged states. Without a third-party obligation, it has become too easy
for elected leaders to use legal and constitutional means to erode democratic
gains, as the cases of Burundi and Rwanda show. The AU instrument
introduces third-party oversight by empowering the AU commission to
monitor progress made by postwar states in areas such as good governance,
respect for the rule of law, consolidation of peace agreements, disarmament
and reintegration of former combatants, and the return of refugees and
internally displaced persons.
Finally, the postwar reconstruction policy tries to offer institutional
mechanisms for parties in postwar societies to resolve electoral disputes.
Electoral disputes are major challenges in countries emerging from war,
and the current postwar reconstruction system has few institutionalized
mechanisms to resolve disagreements over electoral results. The policy links
reconstruction to other rules, regulations, and norms the AU has developed
to minimize postelection disputes. These include requiring member states
to inform the AU commission of any scheduled elections and to invite
the AU electoral assistant unit to send an electoral observer mission and
to give detailed rules for elections in member states. The AU commission
has the power to conduct election monitoring without the express consent
of member states. The AU commission’s ability to monitor elections has
thus been enhanced, as clever governments often use the “by invitation
25 See Solomon Eborah, “The African charter on democracy, elections and governance:
A new dawn for the enthronement of legitimate governance in Africa?” Open Society
Institute, 2007, www.afrimap.org.
| 388 | Spring 2012 | International Journal |
| Thomas Kwasi Tieku |
only” prerogative to negotiate the terms of the observation mission. This
prerogative has been used by incumbent governments in places such as
Latin America to issue an invitation so close to an election that it gives the
observers little time to prepare.26 Other governments have used the “by
invitation” principle to negotiate for a sympathetic mission, to limit access to
electoral institutions, and to shape the election observation mission to their
liking. African governments would seek to mainstream and globalize these
ideas if a new agenda for peace were discussed and adopted in 2012.
CONCLUSION
The article sought to draw on the consensus on peace and security that
African leaders have reached at the continental level in order to outline
reform proposals that African states would likely make if a new agenda for
peace were developed in 2012. First, it suggested that African governments
would call for a redefinition of sovereignty along the lines stipulated in
the constitutive act of the AU. The new conception allows members of a
particular region acting as a collective group to intervene in the internal
affairs of a member of the region under certain circumstances. It forbids
military intervention by a nonmember of the region. This in-group-versus-
out-group conception of sovereignty is based on the ubuntu view, in which
group membership trumps almost everything. Second, they might also seek
to frame the discourse on a new agenda for peace in R2P language, as they
have already accepted some elements of R2P, and many governments in
Africa consider the formation of the AU a critical juncture in the development
and conceptualization of R2P at the global level. An R2P-inspired agenda
for peace would make African governments feel they have contributed to
the development of ideas and norms in an international system that often
relegates them to peripheral roles. African states may request new language
with which to define UN-regional organization relations that will pave the
way for African regional institutions to play a leading role in the maintenance
of peace and security in areas under their jurisdictions.
Third, at the same time they might request the institutionalization of a
practice whereby a regional organization can seek security council approval
after intervening, make the UN deploy peacekeeping forces to keep the
peace that the regional organization will establish, and, if possible, have
26 Thomas Legler and Thomas Tieku, “What difference can a path make? Regional
regimes for democracy promotion and defense in the Americas and Africa,”
Democratization 18, no. 3 (2010): 465-91.
| International Journal | Spring 2012 | 389 |
| A pan-African view of a new agenda for peace |
the UN pay the costs of the mission. Finally, a discussion of a new agenda
for peace would give African states the opportunity to draw on the AU
consensus position on peacebuilding contained in the AU policy on postwar
reconstruction to enrich UN peacebuilding ideas. African governments
will likely draw on the peacebuilding ideas in the postwar reconstruction
document to enrich discussions in the areas of peacebuilding contracts,
enhancing local leadership and ownership of peacebuilding programs,
strengthening coordination, managing donors, dealing with spoilers,
preventing democratic backsliding in states emerging from war, building
institutions to prevent and resolve postelectoral violence, and developing
mechanisms to ensure the accountability and legitimacy of peacebuilding
exercises. These ideas not only outline peacebuilding innovations on the
African continent, but also underline how much the original agenda for
peace needs an update.
