Crafting An African Security Architecture

The humanitarian crises caused by civil conflicts and wars in Africa are too great in scope for an adequate and effective continental response. The founding of the African Union and the drafting of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, the basis for collective action against genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity makes this a critical time to reflect on how best to address regional conflicts. This book responds to new regional conflicts over health, water, land and food security in the world's poorest, most socially fragmented continent. The work assesses African regional security arrangements and provides new policy recommendations for the future.

The humanitarian crises caused by civil conflicts and wars in Africa are too great in scope for an adequate and effective continental response. The founding of the African Union and the drafting of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, the basis for collective action against genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity makes this a critical time to reflect on how best to address regional conflicts. This book responds to new regional conflicts over health, water, land and food security in the world's poorest, most socially fragmented continent. The work assesses African regional security arrangements and provides new policy recommendations for the future.

The humanitarian crises caused by civil conflicts and wars in Africa are too great in scope for an adequate and effective continental response. The founding of the African Union and the drafting of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, the basis for collective action against genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity makes this a critical time to reflect on how best to address regional conflicts. This book responds to new regional conflicts over health, water, land and food security in the world's poorest, most socially fragmented continent. The work assesses African regional security arrangements and provides new policy recommendations for the future.

This volume offers an informed and critical analysis of the operationalization and institutionalization of the peace and security architecture by the African Union and Africa's Regional Economic Communities (RECs). In creating this architecture, the African Union and the RECs tread new ground with potentially significant consequences to the lives and livelihoods of millions of Africans who are affected by war and armed conflict. In-depth, critical chapters inform, clarify and provide key points for reflection on the architecture as a whole as well as on each of the structures currently under implementation. The volume examines the institutions that will carry the mandate forward, raises pertinent research questions for the successful operationalization of the architecture and debates the medium and long-term challenges to implementation. Students and researchers of African approaches to peace building, conflict resolution and regional security will benefit from the deep and critical engagement of issues covered in this volume by world renowned scholars and practitioners.

The African Union has been a major factor in establishing peace, security and development in Africa. Today, however, the intranational body is struggling in the midst of a perceived dissipating appetite for supporting continental institutions. Previously seen as the panacea to Africa's continuing problems with violence and corruption in society, under the slogan "African Solutions to African Problems", the African Union, this book argues, seems to have run its course. Recognizing that the measured successes in political emancipation which have been recorded across the African continent do not seem to have translated into economic and social gains for its 1.2 billion citizens, the AU adopted a new development framework dubbed "Agenda 2063". The framework calls on African leaders to rediscover the `Pan African' spirit and to create the `Africa Africans want'. In practice this means a new focus and engagement with the African Diaspora, tapping into their strong track-record in economic development. As this book shows however, there remain deep differences over the meaning, timing and sequencing of pan-African integration. Indeed, different member states have different understandings of the role of the African Union itself. This essential handbook, from one of the leading research institutions on the continent, seeks to uncover what some of those understandings are and why the unification project has remained so elusive.

This book examines peacekeeping in Africa, exploring how the various actors are forming an African security regime complex. The changing dynamics of peacekeeping in today’s world have encouraged a more cooperative approach between international and regional actors. At the centre of this book is the analysis of how an African security regime complex could emerge in the area of cooperative peacekeeping. The African regime complex on peacekeeping includes a number of organizations at the regional and sub-regional African level, as well as global institutions such as the UN, interregional partners like the EU and individual lead nations. This book is the first in providing a systematic overview of peacekeeping doctrines, capacities and deployments of these key actors and single lead states. Theoretically, the book links up with regime complexity scholarship but connects it with dependency theory. Here inter-institutional relations are conceptualised as acts of resource exchange. The book explores how primarily international organizations are partnering by exchanging resources. Empirically, the study analyses the phenomenon of regime complexity in three prominent African crises covering Eastern Africa (Somalia), Central African (Central African Republic) and Western Africa (Mali). This book will be of much interest to students of peacekeeping, international organisations, African politics, security studies and IR in general.

This new Handbook examines the issues, challenges, and debates surrounding the problem of security in Africa. Africa is home to most of the world's current conflicts, and security is a key issue. However, African security can only be understood by employing different levels of analysis: the individual (human security), the state (national/state security), and the region (regional/international security). Each of these levels provides analytical tools for understanding what could be called the "African security predicament" and these debates are animated by the "new security" issues: immigration, small arms transfers, gangs and domestic crime, HIV/AIDS, transnational crime, poverty, and environmental degradation. African security therefore not only presents concrete challenges for international security but provides a real-world context for challenging conventional conceptions of security. Drawing together contributions from a wide range of key thinkers in the field, the Routledge Handbook of African Security engages with these debates, and is organized into four parts: Part I: The African security predicament in the twenty-first century; Part II: Understanding conflict in Africa; Part III: Regionalism and Africa; Part IV: External influences. This Handbook will be of great interest to students of African politics, human security, global security, war and conflict studies, peacebuilding, and IR in general.