The African Union's Africa: New Pan-African Initiatives in Global Governance

by Rita Kiki Edozie, Keith Gottschalk

Overview

The African Union’s Africa: New Pan-African Initiatives in Global Governance examines the initiatives of the Pan-African global governance institution the African Union (AU) as the organization and its precursor commemorate their Jubilee as international actors. Taking a unique approach, the book seeks to explain the AU through a theoretical framework referred to as “the African Union phenomenon,” capturing the international organization’s efforts to transform the national politics of Africa as well as to globalize the practice of African politics. The authors examine Africa’s self-determined international norms and values such as Pan-Africanism, African Solutions to African Problems, Hybrid Democracy, Pax Africana, and the African Economic Community to demonstrate that Africa—the world’s least developed region—is composed of crucial values, institutions, agents, actors, and forces that are, through the AU, contributing to the advancement of contemporary global development. The book reveals how in the areas of cultural identity, democracy, security, and economic development Africans are infusing new politics, economics, and cultures into globalization representing the collective will and imprint of African agency, decisions, ideas, identities, practices, and contexts. Via a Pan-African vision, the AU is having both regional and global impact, generating exciting possibilities and complicated challenges.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611861365
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2014
Series:	Ruth Simms Hamilton African Diaspora
Edition description:	1
Pages:	314
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Rita Kiki Edozie is Professor of International Relations and African Affairs at Michigan State University’s James Madison College and Director of African American and African Studies at MSU. Keith Gottschalk was a Fulbright fellow at Oakland University and is the former head of the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa.

Table of Contents

Foreword Gerald C. Home vii

Preface xi

Abbreviations xvii

Introduction: The African Union as Pan-African Method and as New Study of International Relations xix

Part 1 The African Union in Theories, Methods, and Institutional Design Chapter 1 Africa's African Union: Globalization and Global Governance 3

Chapter 2 The Evolving "African" Suprastate: Histories, Anatomies, and Comparisons 29

Part 2 African Issues and Contexts: Culture, Democracy, Security, and Development

Chapter 3 Pan-Africanist Globalization and Cultural Politics: Promoting the African World View 61

Chapter 4 The African Union Democracy: Navigating Indigenous Rights and Inclusions in Neoliberal Contexts 97

Chapter 5 Pax Africana versus International Security: New Routes to Conflict Resolution 127

Chapter 6 Driving the Pan-African Economic Agenda: Ideology and Institutionalism 153

Part 3 The Prospective and the Prescriptive

Chapter 7 The African Union's Africa: Its Prospects and Its Challenges 183

Conclusion: The (Pan) African Union Phenomenon: Mali as Exemplar 213

Appendix: African Union: Provenance and Derivation of Organs and Institutions in Comparative Context 241

Notes 245

Bibliography 247

Index 261

Editorial Reviews

This is a dream book for the ardent Pan-Africanist who is yearning for a theoretically informed exploration of the African Union and a must-read for scholars and students looking for an interdisciplinary study of the premier and certainly the
most important international organization in Africa in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
—Thomas Kwasi Tieku, Department of Political Science, King’s University College at Western University, Ontario

From the Publisher