Of Norms and Ambiguity: The Contested Authority of UN Security Council and African Union in the Use of Force in Africa

Abstract

There has been a renewed interest in the debates on the use of force. This resurgence in academic and policy circles can be attributed to the new wave of military interventions after the initial hiatus of the Global War on Terror period. The recent cases of the use of force are once again raising pertinent legal questions regarding the responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security which is vested in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) by the United Nations (UN) Charter. This authority, exemplified by the UNSC control of the use of force has been challenged by unilateral recourse to force by States, coalitions of States and regional organisations. The African Union (AU) has developed regional legal frameworks which may contest some established legal norms on the use of force, including the primary responsibility of the UNSC to authorise the use of force for the maintenance of international peace and security. In this article, I delineate these norm contestations and identify specific modes of such contestations in UNSC-AU relationship within the frameworks of their respective constitutive treaties. I draw on the idea of norm localisation and subsidiarity to understand the African Union’s approach to its relationship with the UNSC, the ways in which these norm contestations impact that relationship and how the contestations affect the norm on the use of force.