Back to the Future: Rethinking Alternatives to External Intervention in African Conflicts

Abstract

One of the political cliches in Africa today is “African solutions to African problems”. Both African leaders and development partners to Africa talk about it regularly. Paradoxically, this is the age of foreign solutions to many African problems. The normative framework for this external intervention in African conflicts are the Article 1 of the United Nation’s Charter UN Charter, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, the 2005 “Ezulwini Consensus” of the African Union and the many international protocols and conventions signed by individual African states. All of these authorize the international community to intervene in African conflicts using diplomatic or military strategies. But the implementation of these normative frameworks is problematic to the extent that Africa needs to rethink their utilitarian values. This paper discusses these difficulties, focusing particularly on the questionable NATO intervention in Libya, the debatable role of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in African politics and Nigeria’s invitation of the developed world (and not AU or ECOWAS) to deal with the ongoing Boko Haram crisis. My paper argues that the increasing foreign interventions in contemporary African conflicts are caused by the obvious weakness of the African Union and RECs to prevent and manage these problems. The core lesson of the paper is that a sustainable African continent is one in which African leaders take the front seat in managing their conflict issues, and not the one in which they wait for the intervention of outsiders. This is because external intervention in African conflicts are often organized in a manner that compromises the original intentions of R2P, violates state sovereignty in most cases and securitizes African governments and regional organizations. Correcting this problem would require a retooling of the regional peace and security architecture in Africa by empowering actionable “Panels of the wise” at the levels of AU and RECs and strengthening regional standby armies for Chaps. 6, 7 and 8 peace support operations, in addition to pressing for increased democratization of the international system in a way that leads to sincere practice of R2P.