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New Regionalisms and the African Union: Reflections on the Rise of Africrats, Regional Economic Integration, and Inter-Regional Relations
... Scholars can thus uncover important theoretical insights on what normative factors drive organizational dynamics and decision-making processes from the study of the AU. For instance, Canadian IR scholars have paid particular attention to the AU's increasing role in regional peacekeeping missions and have focused on understanding important but oft-overlooked strategies, motivations, and interests of bureaucrats and how these influence and mediate the actions of member-states in this preeminent human security issue-area (Grant and Tieku 2012;Bouka 2016;Bareebe 2018). This is not to say that Canadian IR scholars have been uncritical of how human security norms have translated into practice, such as the R2P doctrine across Africa and globally (cf. ...
Observers of the evolution of international relations (IR) theory often point to an American hegemony in the discipline on a global level. However, more recent analyses show that there has been a systematic and increasing Canadianization of IR scholarship in Canada since the 1990s, facilitated by government policies that fostered the hiring of domestic candidates and the creation of Canadian foreign policy research centers. This process has by no means been a cohesive one, yet it reflects a tendency in Canadian IR to make room for a pluralism in ontological as well as epistemological and methodological terms. This opening up of space for diversity is an important yet underappreciated characteristic of Canadian IR's contribution to the discipline, which has not been seriously examined beyond the study of Canadian foreign policy. This article assesses the impact of Canadian IR scholarship on the development of a “Global IR” through an examination of its contributions to Asia-Pacific and African IR. We argue that despite its heterogeneity, Canadian IR scholarship in both areas is characterized by a common set of elements that, taken together, reflect a distinctly Canadian way of studying and practicing IR in relation to the Global South: pluralism and reflexivism.
Over the past few decades, regions and regional institutions have gained increased attention in both scholarly literature and policy debates. A fundamental weakness in both debates, however, is the simplified focus on state actors and the official goals and policies of regional international organizations and inter-state frameworks. This article addresses this extant weakness by opening up for a more diverse empirical reality. By drawing on the new regionalism approach and two illustrative, comparative case studies from West Africa and East Africa, we offer new insights about how state and non-state actors interact in both formal and informal domains in order to produce variegated logics of regionalism that are poorly described by other theoretical perspectives. The article concludes by assessing the implications for theory and future research on regionalism in Africa and in other regions.
While both formal and informal regionalisms examine the political ramifications of economic flows of capital, goods, and people, there is a blurring of such conceptual dichotomies in practice. Hence, in order to offer a more accurate account of the distinctions and overlap between the formal and informal – and to rectify the tendency to overlook the agency of African state actors and non-state actors – this article offers an agential constructivist approach that seeks to advance a praxis – or praxes – of the region. To that end, the article advances the concept of bifurcated interregionalisms as a means of analyzing cases of regional dynamics and regionalisms in Southern Africa and East Africa. The article concludes by offering some reflections on the future of regionalisms in an emerging global order in flux whereby illiberal and xenophobic variants of regionalisms compete with the liberal and cosmopolitan versions.
Over the past two decades, South Africa has sought to perform several roles on the world stage, such as the economic dynamo of Southern Africa, a diplomatic heavyweight representing the African continent, and a norm leader on the world stage as a so-called ‘middle-power’. Although South Africa's evolution and rise as an important player in global affairs has generated a welcome body of critical scholarly literature, comparatively little analysis has been allocated to understanding how norm dynamics and the country's ever-evolving international identities have enabled it to construct and reconstruct its ‘interests’. Social constructivism is best suited for such an analysis because it can operationalise norms, commitments, identities, and interests, and it provides the epistemological tools to map the increasingly multilateral connections between global, regional, and domestic forums. By employing a rationalist approach to constructivism, this paper remedies the aforementioned gap in the literature by illustrating how South Africa constructs and reconstructs its identities and interests in relation to membership in international organisations (IOs). To that end, the paper examines the evolution of South Africa's participation in the African Union (especially ‘peacekeeping’ contributions) and the International Criminal Court. The paper concludes by assessing the theoretical implications and practical ramifications of the norm dynamics involved in South Africa's commitment to these two IOs.
One of the central challenges for scholars of global governance is that the published charters, guidelines, rules, and final documents of global governance frameworks provide an incomplete understanding of how decisions are actually made within such international forums. Much of what is considered global governance occurs behind closed doors during teleconferences, official meetings, and informal side-meetings. This challenge is magnified in global governance frameworks that are driven by consensus-based decision-making. This article tackles this challenge by providing insights into the consensus-based decision-making processes of the Kimberley Process on conflict diamonds. In so doing, the article advances the debates on global governance in two ways. First, it draws upon participant observations, interviews with state and non-state actors, and privileged access to key documents in order to illustrate and assess how governance ‘crises’ concerning two Kimberley Process Participants – Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe – are addressed by this global governance framework. Second, the article discusses future governance challenges for the Kimberley Process as well as highlights the promise and limitations of consensus-based decision-making within global governance frameworks.
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