FROM NON-INTERVENTION TONON-INDIFFERENCE: THE ORIGINS ANDDEVELOPMENT OF THE AFRICAN UNION’SSECURITY CULTUREPAUL D. WILLIAMSABSTRACTThis article employs the concepts of security culture and norm localiza-tion to explore some of the cultural dimensions of the African Union’s(AU) security policies. After providing an overview of constructivistaccounts of norm socialization in international relations, I use theseinsights to analyse the origins and development of the AU’s securityculture. The final two sections explore the ongoing process of normlocalization in relation to the two most recent tenets of the AU’s secur-ity culture: intolerance of unconstitutional changes of government andthe responsibility to protect principle. An awareness of the uneven andcontested nature of this process helps account for the fact that althoughthese two transnational norms have been institutionalized in the AUCharter and endorsed by the United Nations, they have been internalizedunevenly by the AU’s member states. External advocates of these twonorms would thus do well to help the continent’s norm entrepreneursbuild congruence between these norms and the AU’s security culture.IntroductionSINCE THE END OF THE COLD WAR, analysts have offered a variety ofperspectives to explain Africa’s security dynamics. Goldgeier and McFaul,for instance, characterized Africa as part of a global periphery whereinsecurity dynamics could be explained in Realist terms as part of aHobbesean struggle for power. Whereas in the global core liberal inter-national politics is the norm, in the periphery ‘predictability based on aset of shared norms does not exist’ and calculations of material interestPaul D. Williams ( [email protected]) is associate professor at the University of Warwick andvisiting associate professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs, George WashingtonUniversity.For their constructive comments on earlier versions of this article thanks go to Ju¨rgenHaacke, Alex Bellamy, Stuart Croft, Julie Gilson, Matt McDonald, Ian Taylor, and theanonymous reviewers and editors of African Affairs. I also acknowledge research supportprovided by the Economic and Social Research Council’s New Security Challengesprogramme (Project Grant RES 223-25-0072).African Affairs, 106/423, 253–279 doi:10.1093/afraf/adm001# The Author [2007]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reservedAdvance Access Publication 12 March 2007253and power-balancing dominate.1Buzan and Wæver offer a more sophisti-cated but similar approach arguing that Africa is caught up in the regionali-zation of international security, wherein patterns of enmity and amity, andrelative material capabilities within particular ‘regional security complexes’are crucial to understanding the continent’s security dynamics. In thisversion, Africa lacks any well-developed security communities, defined assituations where peace has become predictable between and withinmembers and their disputes are resolved without resorting to coercion.Instead, the continent contains (in their terminology) ‘mutually exclusive’regional security complexes (southern and central), proto-complexes (westand Horn), one sub-complex (north) and a range of ‘insulators’ betweenthem.2These complexes are home to many quasi-states that prioritizeregime security rather than liberal international politics or human security.Implicit in these views is the idea that Africans would do well todevelop mature security communities like those found in the Euro-Atlanticregion. Here, states inhabit what Alexander Wendt has called a Kantianculture of anarchy, where governments view each other as friends andwork in unison to tackle common security challenges. Significant parts ofAfrica, on the other hand, conform to Lockean and Hobbesean cultureswhere states view their neighbours as rivals or enemies and commonsecurity policies are a rarity if they emerge at all.3Similar ideas have alsofound their way into western policy-making circles. Arguably, most promi-nent among them is British diplomat Robert Cooper’s view of Africabeing populated largely by pre-modern states where the law of the jungleis to be expected and outsiders must plan their engagements accordingly.4Such Realist-inspired accounts are problematic for both empirical andconceptual reasons. In empirical terms, Realism’s emphasis on states asunitary, rational and pre-eminent actors is often inappropriate for analys-ing Africa’s contemporary security dynamics. First, it can obscure theimportance of non-state actors and the problematic nature of statehoodon a continent where ‘the dividing line between “states” and “non-states”has become so blurred as to be virtually imperceptible.’5Second,1. James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, ‘A tale of two worlds: core and periphery inthe post-Cold War era’, International Organization 46, 2 (1992), pp. 467 –91 (quote fromp. 478).2. Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, Regions and Powers: The structure of international security,(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003).3. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, 1999).4. Cooper was a former foreign policy adviser for UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and iscurrently Director General for Politico-Military Affairs at the EU Council. See his The Breakingof Na tions: Order and chaos in the twenty-first century (Atlantic Books, London, 2003).5. Christopher Clapham, ‘Degrees of statehood’, Review of International Studies, 24,2(1998), p. 153.AFRICAN AFFAIRS254Realist-inspired approaches are poorly equipped to analyse state–societyinteractions of a neo-patrimonial nature and their impact on the develop-ment of ostensibly ‘national’ security policies.6Nor do they reveal muchabout the attempts of ordinary Africans to provide for their own security,if necessary, by bypassing their states and developing alternative politicalcommunities.7Realist-inspired approaches are also deficient inasmuch astheir focus on material considerations neglects the cultural dimensions ofAfrica’s security dynamics. For example, while Buzan and Wæveracknowledge the importance of non-state actors on the continent, theirfocus on power relations and patterns of amity and enmity downplays theimportance of the cultural beliefs shared by all African states regardless oftheir position in the regional distribution of power or their definition