Introduction

The African Union (AU) faces the challenge of crafting regional peace and security institutions that consolidate sub-continental inter-state cooperation and align it to the singular goal of “Rising Africa”, to the desired continental transformation. In 2002, the continental body created the African Standby Force (ASF), a creditable response to the myriad peace and security challenges hitherto facing the continent. The ASF was operationalised via Regional Brigades. Some Brigades are not aligned to pre-existing sub-regional inter-governmental organisations, termed Regional Economic Communities (RECs) in Africa’s political lingo. Conceived to be structural constituents of the AU, RECs already handled peace and security issues within their respective regions by the late 1990s (Touray 2005; Franke 2010). The operational disconnect between the ASF and RECs is puzzling and problematic.

During the 2000s, the realisation that Africa must fend for itself in addressing her peace and security problems resulted from the waning interest of foreign powers to address Africa’s post-Cold War insecurities. There were also misgivings about the motives of western interventions in Africa, especially following the relegation of Somalia after 1991, non-response to a preventable genocide in 1994 Rwanda, and the United Nations (UN)’s slow response to devastating civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone where the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Ceasefire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) struggled for years before the UN surfaced (Boulden 2003; Jaye et al. 2011). The resulting pan-African desire to find “African Solutions to African problems” sowed seeds of “Africa Rising” to the occasion of taking responsibility to handle its conflict and security challenges. This created incentives for pursuing institutional and structural changes in the AU to enable the AU and regional structures to more effectively respond to conflict and security threats (Touray 2005; Sessay et al. 2009). The Constitutive Act of the AU provided for creation of the AU Peace and Security Council (AUPSC). Under the attendant 2002 Protocol, the ASF was created with Regional Brigades to operationalise the Council’s mandate by responding to peace and security threats within regions (AU 2000; AU 2002). Headquartered in Addis Ababa and with a Continental Logistics Base (LOGBASE) in Douala, Cameroon, the ASF’s Regional Brigades, which act as rapid-response units, include: East African Standby Force (EASF); ECOWAS Standby Force (ESF); North African Regional Capability (NARC); SADC Standby Force (SSF); and the Economic Community of Central African States Standby Force or Force Multinationale de l’Afrique Centrale (FOMAC) (AU 2010: 37–52). This mechanism constitutes the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) (Vines 2013; Van Nieuwkerk 2011; Franke 2009).

These structural changes appeared to indicate an Africa Rising and taking control of her security domain (Rwengabo 2013; AU 2004a, b). Sections of “Africa Rising” scholarship underscores this development, precisely continental formations that constitute the APSA, and recognises the demonstrable political will by which the APSA-founding instruments were developed (Touray 2005; Bah 2010; Van Nieuwkerk 2011). Others underscore Africa’s capacity gaps vis-à-vis realisation of these objectives (Kent and Malan 2003; Franke 2009; Vines 2013). Some underscore the limiting influence of state-sovereignty concerns on security cooperation in a continent where states are tenaciously holding onto their highly coveted “meta-political authority” (Rwengabo 2017). Limited effort, however, highlights the challenges this process poses for AU-level assessment of the performance and effectiveness of these Brigades when they have overlapping mandates with RECs’ security structures (Rwengabo 2016b).

In this chapter, I combine a governance analytic lens with Principal–Agent views. I view the crafting of regional inter-governmental organisations like the AU and sub-regional RECs as a governance effort to manage resources, opportunities, technologies, relationships, interests, and fears, within a given geo-social space, for the benefit of peoples inhabiting that space. By logical connotation, the Creators of structures can be regarded as Principals and Created structures as Agents, which ostensibly gives rise to a Principal–Agent relationship between the Creators and the Created. Drawing upon literature on the evolution of regionalism in Africa, I question the establishment of the ASF’s Regional Brigades with limited consideration for the membership, and the peace and security interests of RECs, which antedated these Brigades. I consider AU-level structures and RECs as levels of governance below the UN but above nation-states, yet the AU is a uniquely placed Principal in and of its own right, which delegates security functions to RECs and Regional Brigades. The irony is highlighted accordingly: while many RECs, such as EAC and ECOWAS, already had security-cooperation arrangements that were not unknown to the AU by the time the Protocol Relating to the Establishment of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union was completed in 2002, the negotiators of the Protocol went ahead and created Regional Brigades without aligning them to pre-existing RECs, specifically in Eastern Africa (AU 2002).

Aware that RECs are touted as sub-regional economic-development structures, I maintain that there is a theoretical, empirical, and acknowledged experiential relationship between security and development, which had necessitated the incorporation of security-cooperation measures within RECs (Rwengabo 2017). AU-level decisions regarding regional security measures under the continental body ought to have been constructed in keeping with already-existing RECs. In accordance with this expectation, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) exists between RECs and the AU (AU 2008). While not explaining this disconnect, I show that misalignment between Regional Brigades and RECs results in organisational overlaps and difficulties of assessing performance and responsibility in sub-regional security governance. This overlap is shown in Eastern Africa, where the Regional Brigade, the East African Standby Force (EASF), is not aligned to two RECs that handle peace and security within the region: the East African Community (EAC), and the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD). These RECs have security obligations that overlap and seemingly compete with EASF-related security expectations—possibly explaining why the EASF has been slow to metamorphose and less responsive to the region’s peace and security issues (Rwengabo 2016b).

The first section of this chapter outlines the analytic perspective used to assess the ironical misalignment of Regional Brigades and RECs. The second draws from a governance perspective to show that the AU and RECs below it are levels of governance theoretically best positioned to address problems at their respective levels. The third examines the EASF and shows why it ought to have been aligned to one of or both RECs in Eastern Africa. The fourth and concluding section summarises main arguments and draws implications.

Regionalism as Governance: An Analytic Perspective

Regionalism revolves around the politics of cooperation between states as sovereign political entities within a given geographical region. The politics of regionalism, therefore, is essentially a politics of allocation of political goods, values, and negotiation of interests within a region. Unlike intra-national regionalism, which consists in domestic hierarchy under federalism and/or decentralisation wherein Central/Federal states retain policymaking and allocation powers over strategic issues, inter-State regionalism demands trading off sovereign powers in exchange for collective benefits. This is why sovereignty bargaining is a central process in regionalism (Rwengabo 2017; Litfin 1997). The incentive to act via regional organisations (ROs) (Abbot and Snidal 1998), therefore, influences the willingness and ability of rational political actors, states, to balance their selfish interests with expectations of collective/shared benefits at a point of [at least minimum] interest convergence. The crafting of cooperation rules—regional Treaties, Agreements, Protocols—and structural formations or organisations to implement these commitments usually results from lengthy political bargaining processes. Bargains are the harbinger of international institutions the effectiveness of which is a subject of debate between neorealist and neoliberal theorists (Baldwin 1993; Jervis 1982; Glaser 1994/1995). Beyond this debate, regionalism has become an indispensable aspect of international politics in a post-World War II world (Acharya and Johnson 2007).

Since 1945, the historical trajectory of regionalism changed for three reasons. First, while pre-1945 alliances and other inter-State cooperation forms were mainly concerned with defence-offence imperatives against enemy State(s), mainly in Europe, post-1945 cooperation was globalised. The League of Nations became the UN, arrogated to itself the mandate of global cooperation, and became the embodiment of global governance for the provision of global political goods. The UN’s role evolved beyond security as many agencies handling non-security issues have proliferated. Second, the UN, acknowledging problems which are best addressed at regional than global and national levels, made provisions under Chapter 8 allowing for ROs to emerge in different regions provided they are “consistent with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations” (UN 1945). Finally, other challenges made it imperative for the UN to decentralise: Cold War challenges; proliferation of ROs in different parts of the world, some without referring to the UN; threats of nuclear war; and increasing global interconnections. These challenges triggered a debate on whether the UN would be efficacious as a universal, security-centred, western-dominated entity or if other governance levels were worthwhile. Pro-regionalism intellectuals within and outside the UN saw ROs as “a natural outgrowth of international cooperation and desirable stepping-stones toward world organisation”; as “indispensable elements in [the UN’s] successful growth and functioning” (Wilcox 1965: 789). Opposition from the “universalist” reasoners, who opposed regionalism, was tamed. This gave rise to regionalism as part of international governance in which international organisations are centres of politics and processes of such governance (Karns and Mingst 2009).

The “Governance Perspective”, therefore, need not view the UN as a supra-state entity but as an Agent of states, created and assigned to help realise Principals’/States’ interests. This is why the “Big Five”, who control the UN Security Council, seek to monopolise Veto Power within the otherwise global organisation. From this viewpoint, IOs and ROs are states’ constructions in a post-World War II international system. A scholarly body of knowledge, encapsulated in the Journal International Organization, focuses on organised international cooperation. From this perspective, regionalism is a political process of pursuing states’ collective regional interests through organised cooperation. ROs and sub-regional organisations are regional mechanisms for inter-State cooperation (Young 1999: 50–132). Much of today’s international cooperation takes place below the UN but above the nation-State; in the African context, it occurs below the AU but above the nation-states straddling the African geopolitical landscape. ROs address region-specific problems, which may be difficult or too distanced from all-inclusive IOs like the UN and AU and also beyond states’ capacity to unilaterally address (Claude, Jr. 1964; Gitelson 1973; Rwengabo 2017).

The foregoing viewpoint raises three theoretical and empirical implications. First, if IOs and ROs are formed by states, then they are Agents of states through which states act in pursuit of their interests (Abbot and Snidal 1998). Many students of regionalism take this Principal–Agent relationship as a given, giving it inadequate analytic attention. Second, the Principal–Agent Problem is assumed possibly because this economic theory of agency as applied in Political Science seems obvious. Hence, Solingen’s (1998) analysis of the role of coalition politics in regionalism; Acharya’s (2009) “norm diffusion” thesis; Hemmer and Katzenstein’s (2002) study of differential security regionalisms; Mansfield and Solingen’s synthesis of “regionalism” (2010); as well as Tavares (2008, 2009), Olonisakin (2011), De Waal (2009), and Franke’s (2010) optimism about evolving security cooperation in Africa reflect this link but pay limited analytic attention to the Principal–Agent dynamics of security regionalism.

The challenge of regionalism, from a Principal–Agent perspective, relates to how to create Agent structures that serve Principals’ interests at different levels. Multi-level principalhood and agenthood exist in regionalism, which creates decisional and operational difficulties. First, the UN expects organisations like the EU or AU to act “consistent with its objectives and Principles”, as though they are UN agents, even when some may pursue independent interests. Second, the UN itself, being an Agent, has difficulties coercing IOs/ROs that are themselves equally states’ Agents despite possible unequal positionings of these Agents. Third, a similar problem afflicts security cooperation in Africa: the continental AU with its AUPSC is an Agent for AU member-States at continental level. While mandated by these Principals to operate through sub-regional ROs with wide-ranging mandates, including security, the ROs are also Agents of the same Principals of the AU. The realisation of security objectives expected of the AUPSC requires that delegated responsibilities of the Council are executed by sub-continental Agents, hence creating an Agent acting through other Agents.

Principal–Agent theory assumes a relationship between a Principal and an Agent. In this relationship, the Principal is the actor, the Agent is the means to an end, the channel for action. The Principal acts through the Agent in pursuit of clearly defined interests. Responsibility for outcomes, that is, effectiveness and efficiency, of action lies not with the Agent but the Principal (Ross 1973; Rees 1985). The Principal is expected to provide material, financial, technological and moral-ethical support and mandate to the Agent to act in desired ways. If the Agent be an independent actor, such as a smaller state (proxy) used by a stronger state (the hegemon) to purse regional interests through that proxy, then a reward mechanism is agreed upon through an Agreement (secret or open, depending on the issue) or other forms of promised support or reward in exchange for the Agent’s work.

The Principal may lose control over the process and outcomes of the pursuit when the Agent makes and implements independent decisions. If the Principal has chosen an incentive scheme to maximise expected utility the Agent’s utility may not remain unchanged or stationary. Given these challenges, there may be an optimal way of implementing the Principal’s desired action by the Agent. But when goal conflict arises between Principals and Agents, the later may have more information, access, and space for manoeuvrability within that situation, than their Principals. This may cause information and power asymmetry between them, sacrificing the Principal’s interests at the altar of the Agent’s benefits and benefits (Ross 1973; Rogerson 1985; Watermann and Meier 1998). The Problem may also arise when the Agent desires or chooses to pursue other interests beyond the relationship with the Principal but using Agential advantage.

These viewpoints assume unilinear relationships between Principals and Agents. They may be inadequate to complexities and multi-level existences of Principals and Agents, where Agents at one point are Principals at another level, all subject to Core Principles. They do not address the third and fourth source of the problem and how these sources affect decisional and operational imperatives of Principal–Agent relations in international politics. The third source may be the problem of control over the Agent under two conditions: (i) conditions of failure or difficulty in getting an alternative Agent when the original Agent acts unexpectedly, is seen to be incompetent, becomes too expensive in demands and rewards compared to expeted and/or actual returns on the Principal’s investment, that is, when the relationship degenerates to what may be here called an “Inefficient Principal–Agent Relationship”; and (ii) inability of the Principal to change the course of the pursuit even if at some point it becomes apparent to the Principal that the outcome is likely to be less rewarding and yet the Agent has to be compensated, herein called “Tied-Up Commitments in Principal–Agent relationships” as reflected in difficulties countries face trying to defect from international agreements: Brexit exemplifies the difficulty of leaving the EU. Even when the original decision was Britain’s sovereign decision, the country could not just walk away from the EU. Difficult negotiations have had to follow a referendum in Britain as though the voice of British citizens is inconclusive on Brexit. This Brexit-EU experience raises questions of whether the EU was, in reality, an Agent acting partly on behalf of Britain as one of the Principals, but viewed critically it signals tied-up commitments in principal-agent relationships in which many states find themselves entangled.

The fourth source of the Principal–Agent Problem in regionalism entails multi-level existence of Principals and Agents with competing interests. Typical of international cooperation in Africa, this complexity results from extended chains of delegation, vested and sometimes competing actors’ interests, and challenges of information and incentives distortion that afflict other international organisations (Vaubel 2006). In Africa, there are what one may call “sub-Africas” within Africa, sub-organisations within a continental organisation, and states’ nested belongings in multiple organisations. In these multiple and interlocking spaces, states are positioned in different levels of Principalhood. A state is a Principal at AU level and at sub-regional level where the AU is expected to be acting through the Agent, the RO. Now the Principal, an AU member-State, appears to be at once a Principal and an Agent. We therefore have what are herein called “Core Principles”, then “Mid-Range Principles”, and then Agents. Core Principles are member-States of the AU acting through AU structures to pursue common interests. Here, Core Principals can be assumed to have acquired convergence of interest, a minimum requirement in forming international regimes and institutions (Stein 1993) like the AU. Mid-Range Principles are AU institutions, in this case the AUPSC, which, though Agents of Core Principles, are also Principles in relation to sub-continental Agents at regional level, like the EASF, to which the implementation of the APSA is delegated. The Final Agents and Mid-Range Agents are all at once Agents of the Core Principals, the states. These parallelisms and overlaps are to be seen in the ASF’s regional unit, the EASF.

The EASF: Parallelism and Overlaps with RECs

From a Principal–Agent viewpoint, the AU, though an Agent, has characteristics of a Principal: delegation powers, oversight over regional actors, and mandate to sanction [non]compliance with continental rules. In this relationship, ROs/RECs like IGAD, SADC, ECOWAS, and EAC, perform security roles that are consistent with continental rules. If RECs already have security-cooperation obligations, AU-level security formations that impact upon RECs ought to be tailored to already-existing structures and processes for efficient allocation of time and resources, operational consistency, mutuality of regional courses of action, and harmonisation of interests. This is crucial because AU-level Core Principals are the same Principals at RECs levels. It follows that the EASF, and RECs in Eastern Africa, IGAD and the EAC specifically, are structurally disjointed. They cannot act as Agents of the middle Principal, the AU as well as of core Principals, the states behind both the AU and RECs. This raises important conceptual and empirical concerns on the politics of security regionalism and “Africa Rising”.

In security parlance, the notion of Africa Rising is consistent with the evolution of institutions that address the continent’s peace and security problems (AU 2004a, b). The APSA comprises the institutions charged with the task of providing a peaceful and secure environment for Africa’s transformation. It is rooted in the Constitutive Act of the AU; the Protocol establishing the AUPSC; and the MoU between the AU and RECs on peace and security cooperation. The Constitutive Act reflects states’ consciousness about, and concern with, “the scourge of conflicts in Africa” as a major impediment to the continent’s socio-economic development; the “prevalence of armed conflicts in Africa”; and the human and non-human impact of these crises (AU 2000, Preamble; AU 2004b). Undeniably, states in this Act seek to act through AU institutions like the AUPSC, Panel of the Wise, Continental Early Warning System, Common Defence Policy (Franke 2009), and peace and security department for coordination purposes. The created ASF is an agential structure (AU 2000, Art. 11–13). It echos Nkrumah’s earlier vision of a pan-African common defence policy and structure (Touray 2005). This neither materialised in Nkumah’s Africa which should have been continentally united nor in Nyerere’s Africa where RECs would be functional building blocks for continental unity. The Nkrumah-Nyerere challenge had, by the time the ASF was constituted, become more complicated: the issue is no longer regional versus continental unity, but how to harmonise the interests of 54 “Sovereign” states now straddling Africa’s regionalised geopolitical landscape.

The ASF is regionalised into Regional Brigades as rapid-response units: EASF for Eastern Africa; the ESF for West African states under ECOWAS; the NARC covering the Arab-Maghreb Union; the SSF for Southern Africa; and FOMAC covering Africa’s central region (AU 2010: 37–52). The Brigades are conceived of not as stand-alone structures from the ASF but as its implementation structures. But because they are “Regional” in nature, they are sub-continental, fused with pre-existing, below-OAU/AU structures, the RECs. The AU, then, faces a challenge of coordinating these distinct regional formations under one body. With the exception of the ESF in West Africa, SSF in Southern Africa and FOMAC in Central Africa, the mechanisms for the EASF and the NARC “are not managed by RECs” but are stand-alone structures spanning ROs (AU 2008, Art. 1). These two Regional Brigades raise important questions about pre-ASF regionalism, and whether and why Principal–Agent problems have been overcome. If, as stated in the Constitutive Act (Art. 4)‚ sovereignty, independence, decisional autonomy, sovereign equality, and interdependence must be upheld, then: (i) inter-state relations within the EASF and the NARC ought to be freed from prior commitments under the RECs, or (ii) Brigades and REC sought to be harmonised. This would reduce the Principal–Agent Problem of decisional autonomy, responsibility for [non-]actions and sanctioning mechanisms, but also enable consistency in the regional structuring of the continental ASF.

The EASF consists of Burundi, Comoros, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. These countries straddle RECs like the EAC, ECCAS, IGAD, and SADC, as well as the issue-based International Conference for the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR 2004, 2006). The EASF, an ASF structure, displays parallelism and overlap related to coordination between RECs and Regional Brigades. The first challenge here is this: the AUPSC is hard-pressed to meet the objective of promoting peace and security in Africa, because non-interference in states’ internal affairs (AU 2008, Art. 4) renders the viability of such a pursuit questionable. This is so despite the existence of “Intervention-Threshold Principles” that grant the AUPSC some intervention mandate “under very limited circumstances”, or grave circumstances (Rwengabo 2016b). Were the Council to acquire structures that are autonomous enough to confine states within specified Regional Brigades or security commitments, the Council would be able to attribute failure or success to given Brigades.

The second challenge is the relationship between the EASF and the RECs in Eastern Africa—IGAD, which covers eastern Africa and the Horn, bringing other states in the same regional arrangement with EAC Partner states; and the EAC, which combines IGAD member states (Kenya, South Sudan, Uganda) with SADC founding member, Tanzania. The delinking of the EASF and NARC from RECs may have arisen from the observed challenge of regionalism within Eastern and Northern Africa that antedated the ASF. To this challenge the AU ought to have first paid considerable attention in order to determine whether disconnect between the NARC and EASF from RECs within these respective regions addressed the daunting peace and security question. In Eastern Africa, however, the EASF is independent of IGAD, for it was not fused with pre-existing structures under that REC. It is autonomous from the EAC because it could not be coordinated under the EAC secretariat’s Peace and Security Directorate because other states covered by the EASF are not EAC Partner States. Eventually, the EASF is a trans-regional structure. This cobweb edifice creates Principal–Agent challenges in implementing the MoU between the AU, Regional Brigades, and RECs.

Since the APSA’s implementation mechanism includes continental, regional, and national structures (Panel of the Wise, Continental EWS, ASF, Military Staff Committee, and a Special Fund), the AUPSC is “a standing decision-making organ” with wide-ranging decision-making powers and functions (AU 2002 Art. 2; Constitute Act, Art. 5[2]). It is Africa’s forum for promoting peace, security, stability, conflicts management, and collective crisis response. But the AUPSC implements the AU’s Common African Defence and Security Policy (CADSP). It is accountable to the AU Assembly of Heads of States, especially on interventions in grave circumstances. It monitors the APSA’s implementation while ensuring that external peace and security initiatives take place “within the framework of the Union’s objectives and priorities” (AU 2002, Articles. 3–5). If the AUPSC is a decision-making organ, as the Protocol states, and again a decision-making Agent and implementation mechanism for the CADSP, then its relationship with Regional Brigades is, to a great degree, a Principal–Agent relationship. The question is: to whom does the AUPSC direct its decisional demands—the EASF or RECs?

The third change is that both IGAD and the EAC have security-cooperation arrangements. The role of IGAD in Somalia’s post-1991 peace and security crises makes security cooperation under IGAD imperative (Rwengabo 2016a, 2016b). IGAD’s role in Sudan and South Sudan, specifically in mediating and resolving post-2005 armed conflicts South Sudan, also demonstrates security-cooperation commitment within the REC. In December 2013, IGAD Heads of State and Government flew to Juba to resolve the ongoing conflict in South Sudan. Lacking impartiality, neutrality, and cohesion due to competing interests between the already-deeply involved Uganda and Sudan over the conflict, IGAD’s intervention led to little more than a Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (CoHA) of 9 January 2014 (Rupia 2016: 13). A Troika-imposed agreement followed in 2016, and an IGAD-led Revitalisation Process led to the signing of a peace deal in Khartoum on 12th September 2018. Under the Khartoum deal, Dr. Riek Machar returned to Juba in October 2018 for a peace ceremony that ostensibly marked the end of his armed contestation against President Salva Kiir’s government (Daily Monitor, Wednesday, October 31, 2018; VoA News, Wednesday, October 31 2018). Interventions under the AfSol—a concept that emerged in 2009 within the ambit of the APSA concerned with the “Elimination of Conflicts in Africa and the Promotion of Sustainable Peace” through AU and sub-regional actors like RECs—have had mixed results judging from South Sudan and Lesotho (Rupia 2016). In both Somalia and South Sudan, the EASF was visibly absent. The REC, IGAD, was left to shoulder the burden in which states, specifically Uganda, which would have deployed under the EASF, were too compromised to constitute the ASF’s neutral Regional Brigade. But the demonstrable role of IGAD raises questions on the wisdom behind the provision that the EASF and the NARC “are not managed by RECs” but are stand-alone structures spanning ROs (AU 2008, Art. 1).

Finally, African states have different levels of commitment under different regional structures. Under the EAC, the Treaty and Protocols which are appendages to, and constituent parts of, that Treaty, are binding to Partner States that ratified it almost in equal standing to national constitutions (EAC 1999). New Partner States, such as Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan who are latecomers, joined “as is”. Even if they take part in negotiations of Protocols, they are Treaty-bound. Prior to the APSA, security cooperation in the EAC had evolved. The MoU on cooperation in defence affairs reached in 1998 (EAC 1998), when Treaty negotiations were still ongoing, was adapted to the Treaty in 2001. The 1999 Treaty (amended 2006, 2007—especially Chapter 23) is explicit on security-cooperation commitments. A Protocol on Cooperation in Defence Affairs replaced the MoU in 2012, and a Protocol on Peace and Security Cooperation was reached in 2012 (EAC 2012a, b). Consistent with continental obligations, the Nairobi Protocol for the Prevention, Control and Reduction of Small Arms and Light Weapons in the Great Lakes Region and the Horn of Africa is also acknowledged in the EAC because it falls under the Bamako Declaration (African Common Position) on the Illicit Proliferation, Circulation and Trafficking of small arms and light weapons (SALWs) (RECSA 2000a, 2000b, 2004; AU/Bamako Declaration 2000). Commitments like UN conventions on terrorism, or the “Dar-es-Salaam Declaration” are not as binding to EAC Partner States as is the Treaty or Protocols; they are respected only to the extent of their consistency with the EAC Treaty.

While EASF decisions are made by the AU Assembly of Heads of States and ministerial Council, with advice from Panel of the Wise, EAC decisions are made by the ministerial Council, indicating lower levels of top-level involvement in decisional processes. EASF-related decisions are dependent on state acceptance than EAC decisions, which, once ratified, become part of national law. Under the EASF, states’ willingness, contributions, are more voluntary. There is no institutional pressure to ignite political will. Institutional incoherence under the EASF can be common. The EAC’s legislative organ, the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA), however, can legislate and make regional laws that are then subjected to national processes and result in binding commitments. This implies that there is higher institutional pressure, and organisational frameworks, processes, and opportunities, for forcing state action under the EAC than under the EASF (Rwengabo 2016b). This perhaps explains why the EASF could not be constituted to intervene in Somalia as a Regional Brigade: instead, Kenya intervened unilaterally and Uganda and Burundi joined the AU umbrella before Kenya belatedly joined the AMISOM.

Within the EAC, engagements between Defence Attaches and peace and security experts have been taking place since 2001 (Rwengabo 2017) as though oblivious of the Regional Brigade/EASF. By the time the 2013 and 2016 eruptions in South Sudan took place, the EAC boasted of peace and security and defence protocols, a long history of defence, and peace and security cooperation. These opportunities would have been galvanised to assist the EAC’s troubled new Partner State. By then the EASF had been being constituted for more than a decade (Vines 2013). The EASF, however, but could not rise to the occasion if not for Uganda’s vested interests in the South Sudan conflict then because the Regional Brigade itself has never been fully constituted, tested, and operationalised compared to the periodic military-cooperation activities, such as defence exercises and other confidence-building measures, within the EAC (Rwengabo 2017).

It is difficult to assess the AUPSC’s efficacy in creating organisational processes necessary to regionalise the ASF in eastern Africa. Certainly, the Assembly of Heads of States seems to be complacent in retaining this Principal–Agent Problem afflicting security regionalism under the AU. Keeping the EASF separate from the EAC was a serious oversight because of: (i) prior commitments under the EAC and IGAD; (ii) other overlaps under the ICGLR to which Rwanda-Burundi, Uganda, and Tanzania are party; and (iii) ICGRL links to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), hence to SADC and ECCAS. This created stifling nested structures for regional security measures under RECs and issue-specific ROs. Beyond more binding rules, the EAC has relatively more active institutions and processes than IGAD but cannot coordinate EASF activities. The designers of the Regional Brigade, therefore, possibly had limited intent to avoid organisational overlaps, difficulties of assessing performance and responsibility in East Africa’s sub-regional security governance. Instead, they linked Principals and Agents in ways that disallow for coherent and coordinated relationships by sanctioning the EASF to straddle countries belonging to various RECs—EAC, ECCAS (Burundi and Comoros), IGAD (Djibouti and Ethiopia, but at that time excluding Eritrea), and SADC (cf. SADC 2001, 2003). From a Principal–Agent perspective, even if peripheral relationships with other RECs were held constant, one still finds that the EASF is structurally disjointed from the IGAD and EAC that would be Agents acting on behalf of the Principal, the AU.

Conclusion: Regional Security Policy and Practice Beyond the Principal–Agent Conundrum

The foregoing analysis raises important questions for the “Africa Rising” debate. Specifically, have the structural transformations of the AU, notably the APSA and the ASF’s Regional Brigades, helped the AU to overcome Principal–Agent Problems in security regionalism? The answer requires grasping the imperatives of “Africa Rising”: Africa can only rise by taking cognisance of and overcoming the practical challenges hindering the effectiveness of her regional peace and security institutions—and allowing for operational efficacy in implementing continental rules. The starting point is to garner the requisite political will to support and allow these institutions to function. The next is to further strengthen continental and regional institutions, by clarifying their Principal–Agent mandates and providing necessary resources (human, financial, technical, and equipment) for operational efficacy. Limited institutional and political capacities of regional institutions adversely affect their ability to intervene in instances of organised violence. Worse still, the structuring of these institutions makes it difficult for them to operate without igniting contradictory reactions from the very member states constituting them and parallel institutions astride them. Both capacitation and structuring of regional peace and security institutions are political questions which demand decisional foresight. For instance, the structuring of the ASF’s Regional Brigades, specifically the way in which the EASF is configured, makes it difficult to mobilise forces and resources within East Africa that would be necessary to achieve enduring peace and security necessary for economic growth and development. As a result, development agendas that have periodically been formulated at continental level since the 1980 Lagos Plan of Action (AU 1980) remain on paper, because Principal–Agent Problems in security regionalism led to practical failures to address the agential factors that provoke and/or prolong spiralling armed conflicts and other forms of organised violence.1 What has bedevilled the Horn of Africa, Great Lakes Region/Upper Nile Valley, Sahara-Sahel, and Mano River Union may ruin the “Africa Rising” optimism because efforts to develop the continent depend on sustainable peace and security which remain elusive (Williams 2016).

The failure of AU institutions, and their regional replicas, to effectively respond to security threats in different regions calls for caution about the Africa Rising narrative in theory and practice for two reasons. First, structural weaving of security institutions makes it difficult for the ASF to act as a rapid-response force in regions like Eastern Africa via the EASF. This is shown by the failure to muster regional rapid-response to peace and security woes in Somalia and South Sudan today, as well as in Northern Uganda before 2006. This is partly because the Regional Brigade was not aligned with the EAC’s peace and security roles. The motives behind instruments and practices of peace and security cooperation within the EAC would create incentives for reconstituting the REC’s peace and security infrastructure to operationalise the ASF/EASF (Rwengabo 2017). This paucity of institutional and operational alignment allows opportunistic actors to elude responsibility and hide behind multifarious institutional spaces, hence prolonging conflicts. The conflicting roles of member states in the EAC, EASF, ICGLR, and ECCAS in the conflicts in the DRC is well known. Second, despite the AU’s promising peace and security instruments, peace operations around the continent, and the role of external actors in such war theatres as Somalia, [South] Sudan, and DRC, sustainable peace and security has been rendered impractical because of sovereignty provisions and practical evocations of the same principal in Eastern Africa. The role of RECs in responding to peace and security threats, as demonstrated by ECOWAS during the 1990s and early 2000s, and in Mali and Gambia recently, depended on the extent to which RECs are willing and ready to evade sovereignty concerns to address the practical difficulties of restoring peace and security in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone (Sessay et al. 2009). This is still difficult in East Africa because of limited political goodwill and institutional commitment to disallow sovereignty claims from failing the AU’s peace and security roles (Rwengabo 2017).

Three implications—theoretical, empirical, and practical—arise from this analysis and draw attention to questions of handling multi-level Principal–Agent problems in security regionalism under the AU. The theoretical implication is this: why and when do Principals and Agents disentangle themselves from the Principal-Agent Problem related to autonomy, independence, and accountability in a multi-level Principal–Agent relationship? Addressing this question would enrich our grasp of the political imperatives of “Africa Rising” from a security perspective. In a multi-level international-organisational landscape, where Principals and Agents exist at multiple levels, political commitment‚ necessary for “Africa Rising”‚ may be difficult due to institutional and operational overlaps. Empirically, bargaining strategies and decision-making considerations that informed the ways in which the EASF and NARC were designed need to be exposed. Were there misgivings about misalignment of Regional Brigades with RECs? How did these opinions, if any, underline the ways in which misaligned Brigades would undercut Africa Rising as formulated in the continent’s development agendas between the 1980 Lagos Plan of Action and Agenda 2063 (which includes silencing the gun by 2020) (AU 2014), all of which converge on unity, political and economic self-determination, good governance and freedom, progress and collective prosperity?

Finally, the practical implications of the ASF’s Regional Brigades that are misaligned to RECs need to be considered. The SSF’s intervention in DRC against the M23 and other armed groups partly created cold relations between Tanzania and Rwanda (Rwengabo 2017: 221–224). It may be difficult to make the EAC or EASF deploy in the region when previously afflicted member countries like Uganda failed to allow regional responses to the peace and security problems then afflicting the region. This pessimism is demonstrated by Uganda’s failure to cooperate with the EAC’s Legislative Assembly to find a regional solution to Joseph Kony’s devastating Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebellion in northern Uganda. Kenya’s initial unilateral intervention in Somalia in 2011, four years after the AU-sanctioned AMISOM intervention had taken off, is equally illustrative of states’ hold onto their sovereignty, especially on matters of peace and security (Rwengabo 2017). Given these realities, the Africa Rising narrative needs to take considered cognisance of the failings caused by countries’ unwillingness to fully cooperate to resolve the continent’s peace and security problems. Is it time, yet, for states to swallow the bitter pill of sovereignty—as shown in Kenya’s reference to her right to self-defence as embodied in Article 51 of the UN Charter and sovereignty provisions under AU instruments—to take collective responsibility and overcome practical difficulties of creating functional ASF structures in Eastern Africa? Answering these and similar questions would inform more rigorous assessments of the Principal–Agent travails of “Africa Rising” through AU-level security regionalism. This is crucial in a continent that has witnessed an upward conflict trend since 2010, an increasing role of religious and environmental factors in wide-ranging armed conflicts, increasing occurrences and intensities of popular protests, an “exponential rise” in the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and suicide bombings in terrorism-like attacks, and limited success of militarised responses to these developments (Williams 2017: 33).

Note

  1. 1.

    Some of the factors that led to or prolonged armed conflicts and organized violence in Africa include: ethnicised neopatriamonialism, instrumentalisation of religious extremism, sovereignty concerns, and competition for natural resources, all involving the interplay of local, regional, and foreign interests (Williams 2016).