The African Peace and Security Architecture: Addressing the Continent’s Peace and Security Challenges

Open lecture with Ulf Engel, Professor of Politics in Africa at the Institute of African Studies at Leipzig University in Germany

The failure of UN peacekeeping missions in Somalia and in Rwanda in the early 1990s, alongside a growing discourse among the continent’s leadership in the later 90s about providing African solutions to African problems, among other things prompted a focus on Africa’s capacity to respond to its own security and peace challenges. In 2004, the African Union’s then Commissioner for Peace and Security, Said Djinnit, argued that ‘No more, never again. Africans cannot watch the tragedies developing in the continent and say that it is the UN’s responsibility or somebody else’s responsibility (Dersso 2012: 21). Similarly, the first chairperson of the Commission of the African Union, Alpha Oumar Konaré (2003-2008) noted that ‘The primary responsibility for ensuring peace in Africa belongs to Africans themselves’ (ibid: 24). It is in this context that the newly-constituted (2002) African Union (preceded by the Organisation of African Unity, OAU) adopted an ambitious policy in the field of peace and security. Against the backdrop of increasing numbers of most often transnational violent conflicts, the present talk will discuss how successful the African Union has been with the implementation of the African Peace and Security Architecture, and how this relates to the complementary African Governance Architecture.

Ulf Engel, who is trained in both political science and history, is Professor of Politics in Africa at the Institute of African Studies at Leipzig University in Germany. He is director of the graduate programme of the DFG Collaborative Research Group 1199, Processes of spatializations under the global condition (2016-2019). He is also a visiting professor at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies at Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia), a professor extraordinary in the Department of Political Science at Stellenbosch University, and a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies (STIAS, South Africa). In addition, since 2006 he has been working as an adviser to the African Union (AU) Peace and Security Department, especially regarding the Continental Early Warning System and the Panel of the Wise.

See the event-page here.