Peace and Security Partnership Between the European Union and the African Union: Progress and Challenges
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Date
2010-05
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The 2007 EU- AU Summit has heralded the inauguration of multiple partnerships between Africa and Europe. Subsequently, issues of peace and security have become among the major dimensions of the Joint Africa-EU Strategy adopted at the end of the summit. A number of goals are declared in this respect and believed to be implemented by means of peace and security partnership with its Action Plan that ran from 2008 to 2010. The plan identifies three priority actions to be executed in three years time. Using a qualitative research methodology, this thesis has evaluated the implementation process of this Action Plan and the progress achieved to date. Moreover, a critical analysis is made on the challenges that the partnership encountered so far. The evaluation has found that the two partners have registered a limited success in realising what they envisaged under their plan. This is particularly true for the goal set to fully operationalise the African Peace and Security Architecture by the year 2010. This has been at the heart of the first Action Plan. The thesis has come up with five major challenges that led to the limited progress. First is the low level of cooperation between the peace and security structures of the African sub-regions and that of the African Union. The AU takes sub-regional bodies as building blocks of its continental peace and security architecture but the level of interaction between the two is not to the desired extent. The second one is the insistence on the myths and rhetoric of African
ownership of the peace and security project in the continent. Africa and its organisations, for different reasons, are not up to the task of assuming the ownership status and the thesis has attempted to show how this ill-timed claim for ownership poses a challenge for the partnership. The third challenge is lack of consistency and coherence between EU’s policies on one hand and its members on the other. There are times when the official European policies come to clash and compete with national interests of individual states. The fourth is over emphasis on the military dimension of the partnership at the expense of other important endeavours notably the structural instability in African states. Here, there is a strong tendency of emphasising on traditional security over the desperately needed human security in Africa. The last challenge is the role that the policies and actions of third parties have on peace and security in Africa. There are major actors whose involvement in Africa has repercussions on the EU-AU relations in general and the peace and security partnership in particular. The challenge posed by two of these actors is discussed and analysed in the thesis.Under these challenges and elsewhere in the thesis, the asymmetrical inter-regionalism that prevails between the two actors and its implication on the effectiveness of the partnership in peace and security has been highlighted and analysed.
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International Relation