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Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how African Union and ECOWAS meeting and document practices in the area of peace and security can be mapped across time and space. It emphasizes agency of these organizations in intervention processes by highlighting productive challenges arising from data gathering.

Paper long abstract:

A central part of African Union (AU) and ECOWAS intervention politics are regular meetings to discuss, comment, and elaborate on conflict situations oftentimes followed by press statements and (final) communiqués. A constantly growing body of qualitative and quantitative research takes interest in conflict management of international and regional organizations (IOs/ROs) before/during/after conflict intervention processes. Here, most emphasis has been placed on the United Nations and military operations (peace support operations/peacekeeping). Few projects, however, take a closer look at African ROs and specifically their meeting and document practices in intervention processes and reconstruct these from a large-scale perspective. This gap is addressed in the present paper by focusing on the central institutional bodies deciding over matters of peace and security of the AU and ECOWAS. I investigate how their document and meeting practices can be mapped/reconstructed across time and space and introduce initial data that covers the period 2000-2020. I contribute to the panel discussion by providing empirical data demonstrating the inter-relatedness and differences between AU and ECOWAS document and meeting practices, which I conceptualize as non-military conflict intervention practices. Based on the mapping, I emphasize agency of African ROs in conflict intervention processes. I do so particularly by highlighting the productive challenges in knowledge production through gathering data. The contribution forms part of the research network “African Non-military Conflict Intervention Practices” (ANCIP), which will output further data on non-military intervention practices.