The Peace and Security Council ofth e Africa n Union : evalua tingan em bryonic in te rnationalinstitution*PAUL D. WILLIAMSElliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, 1957E Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20052, USAEmail: [email protected] has the Peace and Security Council (PSC) of the African Union helpedpromote peace, security and stability on the African continent? This articleassesses the PSC’s activities in light of insights generated by the literature oninternational security institutions. After providing an overview of the immediateorigins of the PSC, it discusses five elements of the Council’s institutional design.It then evaluates the PSC’s activities during its first five years (2004–9), byexamining the Council’s political relevance, its efficiency and productivity, andwhether it is the institution best placed to deal with the continent’s securityproblems. It concludes that the PSC’s future will hinge on whether more of theAfrican Union’s members can be persuaded to devote more serious levels ofresources (human and financial) to it.INTRODUCTIONIn May 2004, the African Union (AU) officially launched its new Peaceand Security Council (PSC). At the launch, Africa’s leaders emphasisedthe PSC’s potential significance, claiming that its establishment ‘marks anhistoric watershed in Africa’s progress towards resolving its conflicts andthe building of a durable peace and security order ’ (AU 2004: para.1).Outside Africa, however, the PSC has attracted precious little scholarly* For their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, thanks go to Brook Beshah, BenediktFranke, Carolyn Haggis, Kathryn Sturman, Tom Tieku and the journal’s anonymous referees. I alsoacknowledge research support provided by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), ProjectGrant RES-223-25-0072.J. of Modern African Studies, 47, 4 (2009), pp. 603–626. f Cambridge University Press 2009doi:10.1017/S0022278X09990048 Printed in the United Kingdomattention.1This is in spite of a growing literature exploring regional ar-rangements and their roles in security policies. The PSC therefore remainsan understudied institution in an undervalued part of the world. Thisneglect is unfortunate because the PSC is a relatively new internationalinstitution with a remit dedicated to promoting peace, security and stab-ility on the African continent, which can shed significant light on severalimportant debates, not least the limits of conflict management in con-temporary Africa, the processes of norm diffusion and socialisation withinAfrican international society, and how regional arrangements operate andrelate to the foreign policies of their member states.This article seeks to help fill this gap by addressing some of these im-portant questions. It does so in three main parts. The first section providesan overview of the immediate origins of the PSC. In the second section,I deploy Acharya and Johnston’s (2007) framework to discuss five elementsof the PSC’s institutional design: its membership, scope, formal rules,norms and mandate. The third section evaluates the PSC’s activities untilMarch 2009 in the light of Edward Luck’s (2006) framework for assessingthe UN Security Council. Specifically, it assesses the significance of thePSCs deliberations and official statements; its political relevance; its ef-ficiency and productivity; and the extent to which it should be consideredthe best placed institution to deal with Africa’s security challenges. Theevidence suggests that many AU member states have yet to take the PSCseriously. Consequently, the Council’s future will hinge on whether moreAfrican governments can be persuaded to devote more serious levels ofresources (human and financial) to it. Nevertheless, even in its suboptimalstate, the PSC has had a significant impact on security dynamics withinAfrica. It is therefore important to analyse how and to what extent the AUPSC matters, and for whom.HISTORICAL BACKGROUND2The PSC was not part of the AU Constitutive Act (adopted in Lome´,Togo in July 2001). Rather, it grew out of an ad hoc process to reformthe Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution,which had been adopted by the Organisation of African Unity’s (OAU)Assembly of Heads of State and Government in June 1993. TheMechanism’s primary objective was the anticipation and prevention ofconflicts (see Muyangwa & Vogt 2000). This focus on prevention emergedafter a series of intra-African debates in Kampala (1991), Dakar (1992) andAddis Ababa (early 1993), when OAU members took a conscious decisionnot to involve the organisation in peacekeeping operations. Rather604PAUL D. WILLIAMSoptimistically, they hoped that a focus on preventive diplomacy woulddramatically reduce the need for subsequent peacekeeping on the conti-nent. The consensus proved short-lived, however. The mass killings inBurundi and Rwanda (1993–4) in particular caused the OAU to revisit itsself-imposed ban on peacekeeping. This began with a series of internaldebates organised by the OAU secretariat and the circulation of a back-ground paper summarising the issues. These discussions, in turn, led to theorganisation’s 1995 summit in Addis Ababa endorsing the idea that ‘readycontingents’ should be earmarked within African armies for deploymenton peacekeeping operations. Despite this change in principle, throughoutthe 1990s the OAU continued to define its priority as conflict prevention,arguing that primary responsibility for peacekeeping in Africa lay with theUN.The problem with this position became increasingly evident as the UNproved reluctant to take the lead in resolving African conflicts. In Liberia,Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau, groups of West African states used theEconomic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) as a vehicle torespond to these conflicts. In 1998, factions within the Southern AfricanDevelopment Community (SADC) did the same in relation to the conflictsin Lesotho and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Althoughthey had their supporters, such ad hoc sub-regional initiatives were in-creasingly viewed as problematic by the OAU’s membership, and within afew years two main views had begun to coalesce. The first suggested thatthe OAU was still an important organisation, and called for it to be re-formed by giving it new structures and resources. The second view, how-ever, viewed the OAU as a