This new book analyses the African Union's (AU) peace operations and what lessons can be distilled from them to produce better operations in the future. Although the book's title focuses on ‘peacekeeping’, the AU's approach is much broader: it uses the umbrella term ‘peace support operations’ to describe its activities in this sphere, which range from small-scale observation and monitoring missions through to counter-insurgency and war-fighting campaigns. This point is important when it comes to thinking about the scale, ambition and limits of AU peace operations but also how it differentiates its philosophy from that of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping.

After a short introductory overview, Badmus's book begins with an analysis of key conceptual issues, specifically the evolution of UN peacekeeping and its missions in Africa as well the main challenges these missions faced. Here Badmus concludes that the norms of traditional peacekeeping were often challenged by the messy realities of African civil wars and suffered from a host of operational challenges. He then looks, in Chapter 2, at regionalisation debates, starting with a historical overview of ‘assertive regionalism’ (p. 53) in Africa followed by how the Organization of African Unity (OAU) developed its first peace and security mechanisms. His subsequent narrative on the emergence of the AU is generally persuasive although some details are inaccurate. For example, not all the amendments to the AU Constitutive Act have come into force and there was not such a neat break between OAU and AU practice when responding to military coups, as the cases of Burundi (1996) and Sierra Leone (1997) make clear.

Chapter 3 provides an assessment of the institutions that form the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). Here Badmus provides a reasonable overview but paints a rather rosy picture of Africa's Regional Economic Communities and their advantages for conducting peace operations while almost completely glossing over their many weaknesses. On financial issues, however, Badmus is entirely correct and he repeatedly emphasises the lack of indigenous funds devoted to the APSA. For example, between 2004 and 2011, contributions of AU member states to their Peace Fund amounted to an average of 1·95% of the total resources mobilised (pp. 100–1). This has created a situation where the AU is dependent on external donors and hence cannot exercise ownership of its missions (p. 109).

Chapters 4–6 provide three case studies of the AU Missions in Burundi, Somalia, and, finally, Sudan, which transitioned into the AU-UN hybrid operation in Darfur. These chapters highlight the recurrent theme that the AU usually expects to handover the peacekeeping baton to the UN because it cannot sustain its own operations. In addition, each mission suffered from a long list of operational challenges and major gaps appeared between expectations and capabilities.

In the concluding chapter, Badmus suggests that ‘the APSA offers a hypothetical but as yet unfunded solution to African security problems’ (p. 219). In contrast, ‘the UN is better placed, due to its resources and experience, to conduct credible and effective peace operations in Africa’ (p. 222). But the UN cannot always do so quickly, which opens up a theoretical window of opportunity for African institutions to act as rapid first responders. Unfortunately, the AU has not been able to seize this opportunity.

Overall, Badmus’ book does a few things very well. It hammers home the important points that despite the AU's ambitious declarations and communiqués, the Union's member states have refused to provide the necessary funds and other resources to conduct effective peace operations in the field. As Badmus puts it, ‘while the AU has demonstrated strong commitment towards implementing the APSA, it is overshadowed by its capacity limitations and the lack of political will among AU member states’ (p. 11).

In contrast, some areas and themes were left relatively under-explored. For example, given Badmus’ emphasis on the importance of learning lessons, it would have been useful to know more about why the AU still has no formal lessons learned unit, fails to conduct routine assessments of its missions, and has not developed a methodology for doing so. Indeed, the AU has struggled to generate basic institutional memory on its peace operations let alone systematically distil lessons from them.

Second, although Badmus concludes that the APSA generally makes sense on paper, more time could have been spent highlighting the problems and limits of the APSA as currently conceived. The African Standby Force framework scenarios, for example, make no mention of missions related to natural disasters or counterinsurgency or counterterrorism. More generally, the APSA's original framework was completely silent on important security challenges such as those related to environmental degradation, organised crime, health pandemics and maritime insecurity.

Third, there arguably should have been more attention devoted to the multiple international partnerships, which lie at the heart of the APSA. Badmus is correct that the AU cannot yet stand alone. But this means it is crucial to understand the evolving partnerships between the AU, UN and other actors, notably the European Union, the USA and France, to explain how the APSA has functioned thus far. So far, the APSA is not an African solution to African problems but rather a messy set of hybrid, international responses to some transnational security challenges facing the continent.