The African Union Peace and Security mechanism’s crawl from design to reality: Was the Libyan crisis a depiction of severe limitations?

Abstract

The formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) on the 25th of May 1963 gave hope that African countries would unite in eradicating colonialism as well as facilitating economic and social development. Furthermore, the establishment of the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution in 1993 ensured that an institutional structure for the maintenance of peace and security existed on the continent. However, the OAU largely failed to address the challenges that the continent faced and this led to calls for the OAU’s transmutation into the African Union (AU). The establishment of the AU on the 9th of July 2002 was thus greeted with high levels of optimism and euphoria, and the expectation that the continental body would now fully tackle the problems on the continent. An important development was the formation of the Peace and Security Council (PSC) on the 25th of May 2004, as main component of the architecture through which peace and security in Africa were hopefully going to be achieved. This development presented an opportunity for the further institutionalisation of Pan-African ideals, with the hope that Africa would forge even closer unity. However, at present, the AU PSC continues to experience severe challenges, some of them inherent in the organisational structure of the continental body while some are externally induced. Some of these limitations include lack of unity of purpose as well as of political will among member states to deal with the conflicts bedevilling the African continent – as evidenced by developments during the Arab Spring. What transpired in Libya in 2011 was a clear indication of the slow evolution of AU ideals, a situation which was further compounded by the intervention and interference by some members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), under the aegis of the United Nations (UN) and the pretext of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’.

African Journal On Conflict Resolution, 12(2) 2012