Abstract
Peacemaking interventions do not only intend to facilitate desirable order in crisis contexts but, thereby, the participating interveners also struggle to attach meaning to their own position in the world. The African interveners, loosely organized around the ‘Regional Peace Initiative on Burundi’, engender an image of the self that affects the possibilities for political cooperation on the regional scale. Based on a discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of diverse voices from East and South Africa, it is shown that intervention politics increased regional awareness—but not in a linear manner. The idea of a progressive and autonomous East Africa was strongest in the first years of regional facilitation between 1996 and 1999, when the revival of the East African Community (EAC) was also simultaneously being negotiated. This regional impetus decreased with South Africa's more active participation in the intervention, which envisioned increasing its own country profile instead.
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