I have accumulated many debts in the process of writing this book, which would not have seen the light of day without the encouragement and support of mentors, colleagues, students, research assistants, friends, and the good people at Rowman & Littlefield as well as family members.

AAEA African Association of Electoral Authorities

I

The chapter contributes to both political science scholarship and African studies in at least two major ways. First, it introduces the idea of three-dimensional international organizations (3DIOs) as a conceptual framework for studying the nature of international organizations. The concept of 3DIOs...

Following the 3-D analytical framework, this chapter argues that contrary to popular belief and conventional academic narratives, the AU is not a single organization but rather three international bodies merged into one. It has intergovernmental, supranational, and transnational organizational features. The most important...

This chapter places the AU within the broader history of international cooperation in Africa, with a view to providing a comprehensive historical context for the overall analysis. It examines the intellectual discourses engaged in, as well as the institutions that were created, in each period. The argument of the chapter is that the best way to understand the AU is to see it as part of a search...

The previous chapter showed that competition between those African national governments that preferred to reform the OAU and those that wanted to replace the OAU with a continental federal union led to the declaration to establish the African Union (AU) at the Sirte Extraordinary Summit. The Sirte Declaration was only a statement of intent, inasmuch as it did not define the nature, powers,...

II

This chapter turns attention to the AU’s attempts to promote and defend good political governance across the African continent. These efforts, intensified in the last ten years, have led to the AU creating and adopting innovative and homegrown democracy promotion and defence norms, benchmarks, and institutional structures that focus on African governance challenges. These measures were...

This chapter explores the AU’s work in promoting peace and security on the African continent. It contends that the AU’s peace and security ideas and institutions are among the most ambitious and novel continent-wide security governance mechanisms developed in the last two decades. They are grounded in a collectivist security system, the R2P framework, human security ideas, and lessons...

This chapter examines the performance of the AU in the area of human rights promotion and defence. It contends that the AU has developed path-breaking human rights rules, instruments, and institutional mechanisms, but priority stakeholders have not internalized the rules, and the AU human rights bodies are not working effectively and efficiently. A majority of the rules have neither been...

This book sought to conceptualize the nature of International Organizations (IOs) and to provide the framework for assessing the performance of IOs. It used the AU as empirical turf to illustrate these two primary ideas. The book showed that IOs such as the African Union (AU) are three-dimensional organizations composed of intergovernmental bodies, supranational agencies, and transnational...

Addo, Prosper. “Transnational Threats to Peace in Africa,” Social Science Research Council Forum: Kujenga-Amani (2013). http://forums.ssrc.org/kujenga-amani/2013/09/26/transnational-threats-to-peace-in-africa/.