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- Convenors:
-
Christof Hartmann
(University Duisburg-Essen)
Emma Birikorang (Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre)
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- Discussant:
-
Peter Alexander Albrecht
(Danish Institute for International Studies)
- Format:
- Panel
- Disciplinary streams:
- Politics and International Relations
Short Abstract
AU and RECs developed conflict intervention architectures with international support. As global power dynamics shift, new external partners might reshape these practices, raising questions about African agency and the future of non-military intervention in an increasingly contested global order.
Long Abstract
Since the early 2000s, the African Union (AU) and RECs like the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) established an institutional and normative architecture concerned with conflict prevention, management, and peacebuilding, relying on a set of military but also non-military intervention practices, such as early warning, mediation, dialogue, sanctions, and suspension. International development partners supported the construction of this architecture, both ideally and materially, and also shaped the dominant peacebuilding paradigms during this period.
Over the last decade, the international environment has changed considerably, with multiple new external actors and partners gaining in relevance. The panel brings together papers asking how this changing international environment has shaped intervention practices by African regional organizations. It asks how AU and RECs are adapting their non-military conflict interventions in light of shifting global power dynamics and an increasingly contested geopolitical environment, therefore contributing to a better understanding of the many facets of African Agency and African intervention practices within a changing global order.
The panel will be interested in empirically-based contributions that center the role of the AU or RECs and either highlight discursive shifts regarding regional order, peace, and security, analyze changing patterns of partnerships, or address concrete regional intervention practices and how they are affected by a changing environment. In line with the conference topic of African Prism, the panel will be open to different methodological approaches and a diverse set of analytical and disciplinary lenses.
Confirmed additional panel participants: Jamie Pring (UNU-CRIS), Sophia Birchinger (PRIF Frankfurt).