Department of Political Studies

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Browsing by Subject "African Union"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    African peacekeeping and African integration: Current challenges
    (RUDN University, 2020) Gottschalk, Keith
    Peacekeeping and economic union are the two most important dimensions of African integration. The first section of this article aims to analyse some current challenges to African peacekeeping, peacemaking, and African integration. The continuing Libyan civil war epitomizes the diplomatic stalemates and military stalemates which form the limits of current African peacekeeping. It exposes the North African Regional Capability and North African Standby Brigade as paper structures which do not exist operationally, and so limit the capacity of the African Union’s Peace and Security Council. The military intervention of states outside Africa can polarize conflicts and escalate civil wars. Africa’s colonial epoch serves as a warning of the potential dangers of foreign military bases in Africa. In parts of West Africa, states sub-contract peacemaking and anti-terrorist operations to unsupervised local militias, which are lawless at best, and commit ethnic killings at worst. African integration fares better in the economic dimension.
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    The African Union and its sub-regional structures
    (Adonis & Abbey Publishers, 2012) Gottschalk, Keith
    After seven decades of episodic existence through conferences, the Pan-African project became permanently institutionalised with the founding of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963, with a qualitative upgrade into the African Union in 2002. Much academic literature on African integration and the OAU-AU is pessimistic. Most media commentary is dismissive of the AU, and derogatory of the Pan-African Parliament. This article seeks to trace the on-going evolution of the OAU-AU, and enquire how the AU stands up to contemporary regional organisations. This makes it focus on operationalised ground truth, rather than entities which exist mostly on paper. The African Union and its regional communities have achieved significantly more - and attempted vastly more - than a score of contemporaries such as the Organisation of American States, the League of Arab States, the Association of South-East Asian Nations, and the Southern Common Market. Among regional communities, the African Union is arguably second in accomplishments to only the European Union, which has a three orders of magnitude larger budget and personnel establishment. The African Union's operations focus on peace-making, while its institution-building focuses on economic integration and development.
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    Implementing accountability and transparency in supranational organisations: a comparison of the European Union and the African Union, 2001-2020
    (Journal of African Union Studies (JoAUS), 2021) Baba, Awonke; Mngomezulu, Bheki R.
    Despite discernible efforts by African political leaders to serve their people since the demise of colonialism and apartheid, African institutions are generally claimed to be ineffective. This indictment is partly due to their reliance on foreign donors and multilateral institutions for their financial survival. Another reason is failure by African leaders to implement their cogently thought through policy decisions as well as lack of unity which comes from the colonial legacy. The aim of this paper is to interrogate these perceptions using the African Union (AU) as a case study. To achieve this goal, the paper traces the history of the AU and juxtaposes it with the European Union (EU) to establish points of divergence. The paper uses institutionalismas its grounding theory. There is a general tendency in the scholarship to summarily dismiss African institutions without providing a closer analysis of what is at play. This paper aims to fill this lacuna by enumerating factors that weaken the AU as an institution. The key argument is that the lack of transparency and accountability in the AU cannot be understood in a vacuum. Thus, context is deemed critical in the analysis. The paper then proffers ideas on the way forward
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    Implementing the New Parnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD): a study of the Economic and Corporate Governance Initiative (ECGI)
    (University of the Western Cape, 2009) Carolissen, Monita; Pretorius, Joelien; Dept. of Political Studies; Faculty of Arts
    In this mini-thesis, I explore the New Partnership for Africa's Development's (NEPAD) Economic and Corporate Governance Initiative (ECGI). I argue that although this initiative is not the only means to, nor the end of determining whether the NEPAD is being implemented, the ECGI can be used as a good indicator of whether one important dimension of the NEPAD is implemented. I establish whether, through an analysis of the ECGI, that dimension of the NEPAD is being implemented by looking at the countries where the ECGI was implemented. I maintain the position that through the NEPAD, good governance in African countries is promoted and that is why the authors of the NEPAD document created the ECGI.
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    Pan-African initiatives in global governance
    (2013) Gottschalk, Keith
    As recently as 2009, a five hundred page textbook on international relations did not even mention the African Union in its index. The same applied to the Wikipedia entry on international organizations until a colleague of this author corrected that omission in 2011. The mainstream international relations literature has the perspective that our continent is marginal, the AU invisible, and Africa is a problem, that is spoken to, or spoken for. African agency in global governance is a perspective whose time has come. Drawing on constructivist and transformational theories, this paper explores how the African Union family or organizations, including its regional communities such as COMESA, EAC, ECOWAS, and SADC, seek to engage with and negotiate Africa’s positioning in global governance. These Pan-African initiatives go far beyond anything that ASEAN, the Arab League, or the OAS have succeeded in. This paper draws upon research by the author and Kiki Edozie for their forthcoming book The African Union’s Africa. (Michigan State University Press, 2014)
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    Some aspects of South Africa’s foreign policy on the civil wars in Côte D’Ivoire, Libya, and Mali
    (2013) Gottschalk, Keith
    During the 1960s, intervention in Africa by both the UNO and former colonial powers such as France was imposed on Africans. After half a century, Pan-Africanists have started to challenge, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully, the dominant powers in global governance. Pan-Africanism has been the political driver for these counter-hegemonic attempts. Today African agency seeks to negotiate interventions in Africa to ensure they are at least partly by Africans and with Africans instead of external intervention in Africa. There was complex dynamics between the AU, ECOWAS, NATO, the Arab League, and France during interventions in the civil wars in Côte D’Ivoire, Libya, and Mali. This paper argues that when the Pan-African agenda diverged from NATO preferences, South Africa and other African Union members faced major challenges in asserting African agency. When there was consensus between western and Pan-African actors, the African Union took the leading role.