The Organization Of African Unity

PART I - THE INSTITUTIONS

Originally published in 1999, this book was the first study to provide a systematic reconstruction of the OAU's ideological ground-work. It is based on OAU documents; a corpus of African perceptions of OAU functioning collected from governmental and non-governmental newspapers and publications from more than thirty African countries; and on interviews held with African diplomats and OAU officials. It was also the first study to pay attention to the OAU's role in the political psychology of state elites, which comes to the fore in the areas of OAU co-operation discussed in this book: the OAU's internal functioning; the former struggle against apartheid and colonialism; conflict management; and the OAU's role in representing collective African viewpoints in global fora. This study was originally a Ph.D. thesis, which was considered to be among the best three dissertations in political science in The Netherlands in 1997.

This work is an introduction into the origins, law and institutions of the African Union (AU). It examines the evolution, structures, legal standards and operational activities of this Pan-African organization, which replaced the Organization of African Unity (OAU) ten years ago.