The security challenges facing Africa are diverse and pose great challenges for a continental security regime. For most of its post-colonial history, African states have failed to find lasting solutions to these problems. Instead, African leaders have for many years looked to the international community to resolve conflicts on the continent, despite its repeated failure to do so successfully. However, the long overdue 2002 transition from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to the African Union (AU) has been the catalyst for an African road map for Africa's Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). Following decades of feeble attempts, the continent has recently made great strides towards establishing an elaborate security architecture to tackle its complex security needs.
Humanitarianism has emerged in recent years as the driving force behind international efforts towards Africa. This is the central theme running through Crafting an African Security Architecture, which deplores the relative indifference of the international community to massive human rights violations in Africa despite the pledges of powerful nations to defend human rights worldwide, as enshrined in the United Nations' adoption of the landmark Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine in 2006 – a process motivated by the tragic events in Rwanda and on-going atrocities in Darfur. After exploring the root-causes of conflicts on the continent, including the abuse of political and military power as well as struggles over precious natural resources, this book prescribes strong and proactive measures to anticipate conflicts, and postulates that an effective, long-term strategy for deterring and responding to them requires a credible African security architecture (p. xvii).
In his foreword, Lt Gen. The Honorable Roméo Dallaire, an eyewitness to the Rwanda tragedy, sets the tone for the volume by scrutinising the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, and showing how the international community's repeated failures to abide by its rhetorical commitments have forced Africans to take matters into their own hands, even though the APSA has yet to become reality. While there are several advantages to African-led intervention, including proximity, shortened deployment times, local knowledge and enhanced legitimacy, the primary hurdle remains the lack of capacity (pp. xxv–xxvi). In their introductory chapter, Hany Besada, Ariane Goetz and Karolina Werner discuss how new challenges in the realm of peace and security have led to a reconfiguration of existing institutions with the creation of a new security architecture. In their first salvo, they remind the reader that ‘difficult security problems, be they practical or normative in kind, require complex solutions. In order to find widespread approval and improvement of top-down security means, more emphasis should be given to prevention, actual analysis of the roots of conflicts on the ground, as well as the incorporation of systemic causes in the overall assessment and solution-finding process’ (p. 8).
The subsequent chapters contain many highlights. In Chapter 3, Jakkie Cilliers provides an overview of the APSA and points to the decreasing number of wars with the potential of greater prosperity and stability, before outlining the AU's tendency to privilege rhetoric and policy production over action. Ebo and Powell contribute the fourth chapter, which explores Security Sector Reform (SSR) from a human security lens that is cognisant of the various challenges inherent in SSR, and discuss how the strategic partnership between the UN and the AU might help mitigate those challenges. In Chapter 5, Gaenzle and Grimm detail the EU involvement in, and support for, the emerging security architecture in Africa, by exposing the historical and economic ties between Europe and Africa, and by warning against overly westernised models that may not suit Africa's needs. Curtis and Nibigirwe use their chapter to outline the intricacies of a hybrid peacekeeping mission and raise the dilemmas and challenges that such efforts face, drawing on the AU/UN mission in Burundi. Chapter 11 by Franke discusses the challenges inherent in operationalising the African Standby Force, intended to be one of the AU's mechanisms to respond to future conflicts and crisis situations on the continent ‘timely and efficiently’. The final chapter by Michael Hammer closes the loop by identifying the difficulty of establishing public accountability at the global level with regards to R2P, and concludes that ‘currently peace and security governance does not live up to democratic standards due to lack of public accountability’ (p. 215).
Given their extensive personal as well as professional knowledge of both the issues and countries, the academic and practitioner contributors to this volume provide important insights into and critical opinions on both APSA and R2P in a way that agency reports cannot. This collection features pieces by some eminent scholars, and the case studies provide extremely informative and well-detailed accounts of the challenges the AU faces in delivering on its slogan of African solutions to African problems. Several specific obstacles to effective inter-African security cooperation raised by this text will bear on-going scrutiny. Overcoming these challenges remains the key to a successful African security regime and a huge step towards ending the continent's history of competing regionalisms and dependency on outside assistance. Despite some overlapping topics/themes across the chapters, this volume will appeal to social scientists for its analysis and to policy makers for its practical findings.
