Towards an African Peace and Security Regime: Continental embeddedness, transnational linkages, strategic relevance provides an informed and critical reflection on the adequacy of the emerging African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) to the medium- and long-term challenges and opportunities of conflict prevention, management and resolution in Africa. Complementary to the editors’ Africa’s New Peace and Security Architecture: Implementing norms, institutionalising solutions (Ashgate 2010), this volume revolves around three main areas of focus: the continental ’embeddedness’ of norms, values and processes required for the gradual coming into shape of the African peace and security regime; its transnational linkages as well as the wider collective security environment; and the empirical analysis of the connections between the continental level and the regional economic communities with case-studies on ECOWAS, SADC and COMESA.

The future of Africa will, in large measure, be determined by its ability to manage a range of difficult security challenges.

The notion of the "responsibility to protect" has made some progress in recent years, particularly in Africa. For example, the African Union's (AU) new peace and security agenda resonates with the prevention-reaction-rebuilding continuum outlined in the ICISS [International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty] report. This monograph draws on case studies of the AU and other international engagements in Burundi and Darfur, Sudan, to explore the opportunities and challenges operationalising the responsibility to protect in Africa.

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.

One of the fundamental changes that have come about with the transformation of the OAU into the AU is the establishment of a comprehensive peace and Security regime. The African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) is institutionalized within the framework of the AU Constitutive Act and the Protocol on the Peace and Security Council (PSC). APSA is a key mechanism for implementing the vision, objectives and principles of the AU. The AU has a vision of peace, integration and prosperity and APSA stands to benefit positively this pan-African vision through preventing and resolving conflicts in Africa effectively. Against this background, the book seeks to describe and analyze the importance and place of the APSA towards the Union Government of Africa and the challenges facing it as one of the most important mechanisms for the AU strategic response to conflicts and as a base ground for the Union Government of Africa.

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 study examines the African Union's peacekeeping role in managing African conflicts. Based on a qualitative research methodology, it analyses AU peace operations in Burundi and Somalia, and hybrid peacekeeping in Darfur, in order to identify the lessons learned and suggest how future outcomes may be improved.

This book utilizes a systems thinking perspective to propose a holistic framework of analysis and practice for the regional security community (“RSC”) arrangement in Africa. In responding to the challenge of improving effectiveness of response to peace and security threats, African states tend to rely on ad hoc mechanisms. However, this approach has been mired with a myriad of structural limitations. The holistic framework reconfigures the traditional “RSC” into a simplified tool kit of “resources”, making this text book ideal for students and advanced researchers in international relations, and all those concerned with regional security and strategic studies.

This book discusses the many legal aspects arising in relation to the maintenance of peace in Africa. Over the past twenty years, the majority of peace operations have been deployed on this continent, most of them established by the UN Security Council, sometimes in cooperation with the African Union and other African regional organizations, with contributions from the European Union and NATO. In some cases, the African Union has invoked its ‘primary responsibility for promoting peace, security and stability in Africa’, thus questioning the legal partnership between UN and regional organizations provided for in Chapter VIII of the UN Charter. The peace operations deployed in Africa have sometimes received a very robust mandate, which also includes the use of force and the protection of civilians’ human rights. The implementation of this broad mandate, which goes well beyond the traditional ‘peacekeeping approach’, requires considerable human and economic resources. Moreover, it raises several issues of concern with regard to the impact on the economic and political systems of the states in which the operations are deployed and, more generally, on the exercise of sovereignty over their territorial communities by these states. Offering an update for lawyers in practice and in academia interested in the field of international law, the book also contributes to the theoretical studies concerning the activities of international organizations, focusing on one of the most challenging issues to emerge in recent times.