AU at the G20: Enhancing African Agency in a Changing World

The blaming of colonialism, neo-colonialism and the multi-national corporations’ sabotage of Africa’s political, social, industrial and economic development must be something of the past in the new millennium. Introspectively, there is absolute need for re-think and re-strategize in terms of approaches, methods and techniques about implementation plans for sustainable and equitable development. In every respect – institutional resources, raw materials, skilled and unskilled labour, material and human resources -Africa has all these potentials to stand on its own feet to initiate its political, social industrial and economic development agenda in the new millennium. Dependency on foreign assistance from the same colonialists and imperialists for Africa’s development should be limited or completely curtailed for obvious reasons. This empirical survey research paper presents recorded and observable evidence enlightened by analytical synthesis of the potential Africa has to trigger its development through its regional blocks. The analysis will be supported by case studies, concrete sources with scholarly argument to make a contribution to the debate towards the industrial and economic development of Africa in the era of the African Renaissance under the auspices of the African Union (AU).

With the Cotonou Agreement due to expire in 2020, formal negotiations towards a new partnership agreement between the EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states began in September 2018. Based on the acceptance of the EU’s negotiating mandate, the new arrangement will be primarily organised via three specific regional protocols with each of the ACP regions. Meanwhile, the Joint Africa-EU Strategy (JAES) launched in 2007, has seen the African Union (AU) gain increased prominence as an institutional partner of the EU. Given its ambitious pan-African agenda, it adopted an alternative ‘African’ vision for future EU-ACP relations, to the mandate agreed by the ACP states and expressed a willingness to become directly involved in the negotiations. This article contributes an important new case-study to the existing literature on ‘African agency’ in international politics by considering the scope for Africa to exert agency within the post-Cotonou negotiations, given the negotiation of a specific regional compact with Africa. It adopts a structurally embedded view of agency, based on Cox’s understanding of historical structures, as a fit between institutions, ideas and material relations. The central argument is that, in comparison to the negotiation of the Cotonou Agreement two decades ago, there is greater scope for African agency. However, both the ideational and material aspects of Africa’s relationship with the EU, condition the limits to how effective such agency might be. Moreover, tensions at the institutional level between the ACP and AU further undermine the potential for effective African agency.

International Relations theory has tended to overlook the role of Africa and Africans in the international system. Traditionally, the discipline’s most influential theorists have focused instead on relationships between and perspectives of “major powers.” A growing body of work, however, has challenged these more limited efforts to conceptualize African agency in international politics. This scholarship has emphasized the significant space available to, and carved-out by, African states in molding the agendas of international institutions, and the role of African governments and advocacy networks in influencing the trajectory of major international debates around issues such as aid, development, trade, climate change, and migration. The study of African agency in international politics continues to wrestle with two key debates: the meanings of “agency” and “African.” Much of the literature focuses primarily on the role and influence of African states rather than that of African citizens and communities. This focus provides, at best, only a partial and qualified view of the ways in which African agency is secured and exercised at the global level, particularly given the significant structural constraints imposed on Africa by global economic and political inequalities. The extent to which contemporary analysis captures the breadth of African engagement with the international system is also compromised by current state-centric approaches. It is thus necessary to examine a range of approaches adopted by scholars to deepen and nuance the study of African agency in international politics, including work on agenda-setting, mesolevel dynamics and microlevel dynamics.

This article joins an emerging body of studies that explore factors and conditions that enable African governments to exercise agency. It does so by showing that formalised African multilateral institutions such as the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the African Union (AU) enabled African governments to exercise agency in the resolution of conflict in Burundi between 1993 and 2009. It argues that the pan-African framework enhanced African agency in multiple ways, including making the African voice louder in a crowded conflict theatre, and turning representatives of the African international organisations into de facto leaders of actors who intervened in the Burundi conflict. The pan-African framework also created the space for African governments to establish an ad hoc regional conflict resolution institution called the Great Lakes Regional Initiative for Peace in Burundi (Great Lakes Initiative) to manage the disparate international players and belligerents in the conflict zone. The exercise of African agency in Burundi was not smooth sailing. Some of the challenges such as regional divisions and interests of powerful member-states that the OAU and the AU encountered in Burundi are classic problems associated with multilateral management of conflicts. These challenges are well documented and will not be the focus of the article. Instead, the article examines problems that emanated from OAU and AU inexperience in exercising agency in a crowded and complex conflict theatre.

The way that the media reports and comments on key events in the fragmented global climate governance landscape is one important route to strengthening public accountability of such governance. Editorials and other opinion pieces provide key contributions to the public sphere, but have been almost entirely neglected in media research on climate change. Another understudied aspect in such research is the reporting on the fragmentation of global climate governance across numerous forums. This article provides an exploratory approach to address these two research gaps. It presents a quantitative analysis of how often leading newspapers in seven countries (Finland, India, Laos, Norway, South Africa, UK and USA) wrote about 18 meetings in six different global climate governance forums between 2004–2009 and whether they provided commentaries about them. The study shows that media coverage (articles and opinion pieces) is limited or absent for many meetings that are not attended by heads of state, are the launch of a new process or do not have the convening power of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The pattern of coverage differs significantly among individual newspapers and there is no clear distinction between developed and developing country newspapers. The article concludes that overall news coverage, and editorial commentary in particular, of global climate meetings in the selected newspapers is too low and too patchy to significantly support domestic publics to hold their own (and indirectly other) governments accountable with regard to fragmented global climate governance.Policy relevanceThis study is instructive for the media and civil society, who should both act as accountholders of governments with regard to how they act in global climate governance and its implementation. Reporting and commentaries need to reflect the overarching process, not only sporadic coverage of high-level meetings, but also critical analysis of what is achieved. They should also take a broader scope in terms of the kinds of meetings and processes in global governance that they cover. Civil society should encourage the media to increase coverage along these lines, e.g. by adequate monitoring of government actions (or lack thereof) and share this with the media.

A Review of the Shortcomings and Consequences of the African Union Peace Ideals: The Interventions in Libya and Cote D’Ivoire

The biggest issues that challenge our global contemporary world are religious and ethnic tensions, the changing nature of global governance, political crises, social injustice, economic inequality, environmental issues, poverty, and hunger, among others. Globalization and global governance are hindered by multiculturalism. For example, the acknowledged failure of multiculturalism to achieve true tolerance and integration has created politicized forms of Islam, which in turn pose an obstacle to global security.

This book examines the complex interrelationships between water availability, governance and violent and non-violent conflicts, drawing on in-depth case studies of Lake Naivasha in Kenya and Lake Wamala in Uganda. When international economic endeavours like flower farming, oil exploration and extensive rice growing are coupled with a government's prioritization of economic development, not only does this lead to the commercialization of water resources but it also creates conflicts between national, regional and local stakeholders. Often overlooked in existing literature, such is the case even in water abundant areas like Lake Naivasha and Lake Wamala. Presenting a comparative study, the book provides a unique perspective on multifunctional water use and illustrates how politically and economically motivated water use increases violent tensions over access to and the use of freshwater resources. The coverage stretches from international and national agencies to NGOs, economic stakeholders and local actors. The book evaluates the resilience and vulnerability of local actors' ability to access water and examines the nexus between the need to access water and the ability to influence access to water, taking into consideration both countries’ economic development agendas. The book concludes by discussing strategies for reducing water-induced conflicts that can be applied to not only these cases but water conflicts across the globe. This book will be of great interest to scholars and professionals of water resource management and governance, African development, conflict resolution and sustainable development.

Making urban excreta and wastewater management contribute to cities' economic development: a paradigm shift

Significance After two years of crackdowns on the sector, this plan promises both consolidation and gradual development, with a particular focus on data and objectives related to the 'common prosperity' economic development agenda. Impacts China will invest heavily in data and computing infrastructure. More regulations on data use will come, as Beijing seeks to combine greater leverage of their economic value with greater security. The intended service improvements will particularly affect access to credit for smaller businesses and traditionally disadvantaged groups.

Both the African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have been global leaders in embracing and operationalizing responsibility to protect (R2P). The adoption of the AU’s Constitutive Act, Article 4 (h) in 2000, has transformed its old-fashioned principle of noninterference to one of nonindifference. This authorizes the AU to intervene in Member States with respect to war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. ECOWAS has through its conflict prevention, management, and resolution protocol and its conflict prevention framework deepened and practicalized the notion of sovereignty as responsibility. These frameworks from both the AU and the ECOWAS have close similarities to the R2P norms. However, although these notions are captured in official documents, their actual operationalization faces challenges relating to sovereignty, limited institutional capacity, a restricted appetite for enforcement action, and a lack of explicit instruments to activate their intervention clauses in R2P-like situations. In spite of these challenges, the article argues that the initiatives of both the AU and the ECOWAS in Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, and Libya demonstrated a positively active African agency in contributing to global peace processes. This article, therefore, assesses the successes and limitations of African regional agency in enforcing R2P-like norms among its member states and its implications for and contributions to global international relations discourses.

Extant literature points at peacekeeping troops, financial support of the African Peace and Security Architecture, and promoting development to be the backbone of China-Africa security engagements. However, despite notable growth in each one of these aspects over the past few years, there are concerns over Chinese ambitions and African agency in conflict resolution and stability maintenance. This article addresses the role that the African Union (AU) can play in enhancing, guiding, and evaluating China-Africa security co-operation. By taking security to encapsulate not only military but economic, human, and environmental dimensions, it becomes more evident that negotiations that are based on project evaluation and follow-up mechanisms lead to a sustainable development-security nexus. However, AU officials have expressed structural challenges within the AU Commission that hinder an efficient participation at China-Africa summits and other multi-lateral platforms. Consensus-building which is vital for a unified agenda as well as lack of means to set up follow-up mechanisms for development projects across over 50 member states are the big roadblocks. In brief, as a way to go around these two challenges, this study identifies the regional economic communities (RECs), Civil Socicety Organisations (CSOs) and think tanks as the key allies of the AU to maximise its potential at the negotiations table.

Neoliberalism has become dominant in many policy fields since the 1980s. However, it has evolved into multifarious and hybrid forms that have generated several variegations. This uneven development has also led to a series of systematic contradictions, which are now considered a distinctive attribute of the actually existing neoliberalism. The so-called contradictory creativity is considered inherent to neoliberal policies, but the mechanism through which it actually develops is not clear yet. According to several scholars, the contradictions are mainly context-induced, because neoliberal policies are often path-dependent on preexisting local practices and institutions and are also often partially transformed and adapted to react to local frictions, emerging conflicts and endogenous crises. This article is aimed at addressing this issue by explaining the features of this contradictory creativity and the mechanism through which it develops. The analysis focuses on the neoliberal economic development agendas that have been promoted and implemented in four entrepreneurial second-tier cities from the 1980s up to the Great Recession of the end of the 2000s. The analysis will argue that the inherent contradictions detected in these neoliberal urban economic agendas were not only context-induced and that a mechanism of neoliberalization of Keynesian-Kaleckian policies took place.

This article examines India's evolving stance on digital sovereignty within the broader context of international public policy and global digital governance. Although much of the current literature has concentrated on the United States, the European Union, and China as leading models, India is progressively establishing itself as an alternative player. The article utilizes a qualitative interpretive policy analysis to evaluate India's domestic initiatives, such as Aadhaar, the Unified Payments Interface, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, while also considering its participation in global forums like the G20, the World Trade Organization, and the United Nations Internet Governance Forum. It posits that India is positioning itself as a norm entrepreneur, promoting a model of digital sovereignty that integrates inclusivity, innovation, and strategic autonomy, which aligns with the developmental goals of the Global South. Concurrently, the article underscores the contradictions that complicate this ambition, including conflicts between democratic principles and surveillance practices, openness and protectionism, as well as dependence on foreign technology. By placing India within these dynamics, the study enriches academic discussions on digital sovereignty by recontextualizing India not merely as a passive recipient of global norms but as a potential architect of a more pluralistic and inclusive digital landscape.

The post-apartheid South African government has placed ICTs at the centre of the national agenda for social and economic development (Mbeki, 1996, 2002b; Presidential National Commission on the Information Society and Development (PNC on ISAD), 2003a). The question of whether the application of technologies to improve information and communication access can increase the capabilities of disadvantaged and poor people is central to whether the new ICTs (particularly the Internet) will support or undermine real development. Technology appears in the South African government’s ICT for development discourse as a politically neutral force with the power to develop, and without which people are classified as information-poor. As Wajcman (2002) cogently argues, “governments everywhere legitimate much of their policy in terms of a technological imperative” (p. 348). One effect of this discourse is to render poor people passive and dependent, as objects to be developed, rather than as active agents of development. Failure to address these assumptions may lead social scientists to become complacent in distracting attention away from the very real global economic, social, and cultural inequalities, to virtual inequalities, which merely hide an unwillingness to address the core failings of the development paradigm. The paper attempts to meet the challenge put forth by Robert Wade (2002): The current campaign to promote the uptake of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in developing countries and to get aid donors to redirect their aid budgets needs devil’s advocates to challenge what John Stuart Mill once called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion.’ (p. 443)