Hybridity and Friction in Organizational Politics: New Perspectives on the African Security Regime Complex

ABSTRACT

Security governance in Africa constitutes a web of interactions between national, regional, and international organizations. This emerging ‘African security regime complex' receives growing attention in International Relations debates on international organizations (IOs). Most analysis, however, follows institutionalist and problem-solving approaches, centred on regulatory concerns. We offer a different perspective. Moving beyond dominant perspectives on organizations as either pre-given institutional ‘wholes' or rationalized ‘tools' of states, we instead unpack the ‘politics of organizations’, understood as the multiple processes and forms of agency through which organizations emerge, diversify and transform. In doing so, we bring IO analysis into conversation with debates on hybridity, friction and translocality.

KEYWORDS:

• Organizations
• hybridization
• friction
• security governance
• Africa

Introduction

Contemporary security governance in Africa constitutes a dense web of interactions between national, (sub-)regional and international actors as well as organizations. Institutional density has increased in particular with the rise of new forms of regionalism and associated organizations offering fora for collective forms of agency that have become key in shaping and producing security governance in the interfaces between ‘international’ and ‘African’ affairs. The creation of the African Union (AU) in 2000–01, and what has become known as the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), has in this regard been deemed the ‘most important development in the security field’ during the 2000s (Engel and Porto 2009, 7). Meanwhile, the deployment of international peacekeepers to conflict and post-conflict settings has reached a new historical peak (Brosig 2015, 3), with just over 100,000 personnel of the United Nations (UN) serving in 14 UN peacekeeping operations – out of which six are on the African continent (Western Sahara, Central African Republic, Mali, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Darfur, South Sudan) – at the time of writing.

Against this backdrop, the number of actors, frameworks, doctrines, as well as partnerships and coordination mechanisms, have multiplied in the field of security governance in Africa. In this regard, the field offers a paradigmatic illustration of a wider, global, trend of organizational proliferation whereby over the past two decades, the number of international and regional organizations (ROs) and the amount of international authorities, as well as related agreements and treaties, ‘have reached all-time highs’ (Kreuder-Sonnen and Zürn forthcoming).

In the wider International Relations (IR) literature on international organizations (IOs) much work has gone into analysing the consequences of increasing institutional density across numerous policy fields of global governance. One branch of scholarship has focused on fragmenting effects that challenge the certainty of the international legal order. Others have discussed these developments through the lens of regime complexity, thereby moving beyond the analysis of single organizations towards studying interactions and overlapping regulatory mechanisms (Faude and Gehring 2017). Within this literature, security governance, and in particular, peace operations, have received increasing attention as exemplary policy fields for studying organizational proliferation, as well as the ensuing challenges regarding ‘organizational cohesion, coordination, agency, and reform’ (Junk 2012, 247). In turn, the IO-debate has also increasingly engaged with, and acknowledged the significance of, Africa, in regard to rising regional agency and RO-IO collaboration on matters of peace and security (Brosig 2013). Substantial attention has been directed, for example, towards identifying comparative advantages as well as mapping variances and complementarities between regional and international organizational norms, doctrines, and frameworks in security governance in Africa (de Coning 2017).

However, despite this widening focus of the debate, the bulk of the literature specialized on IOs mainly grapples with regulatory concerns and takes a problem-solving and institutionalist approach to discussing them. In turn, realist approaches, critiquing the dominant liberal institutionalist outlook, tend to apply a strictly state-centric outlook, focusing on how powerful Western states use IOs as ‘tools’ for reaching geo-strategic goals (Abbott and Snidal 1998; Hawkins et al. 2006, 3; Shapiro 2017). While such analyses present important insights into some aspects of IO activities, they tend to leave out the ‘messiness’, contestations and multiple frictional relationships that shape organizational politics. Such messiness is closely related to another aspect which is largely unaccounted for in established IOs debates; namely, the multiple forms of agency – from international to regional, national and local actors – who act within and through organizations and as such are key in negotiating the boundaries, directions and outcomes of organizations’ practices.

Against this backdrop, and focusing on changing intervention practices in Africa, this special issue seeks to expand the perspective on the study of organizations: We propose to study them not only as institutional ‘wholes’ (Brosig 2020), with each their ensemble of stable norms and frameworks, nor merely as rationalized ‘tools’ of the most powerful states in the international system. Rather, we seek to study them as key sites within which a multitude of actors struggle over legitimacy, recognition, power and order-making. Taken together, the collection thereby responds to recent calls for ‘decentring’ the study of interventions (Schröder 2018), by offering new insights into the empirical practices, interrelations and forms of agency that are part of producing and diversifying organizational intervention politics in the rapidly changing field of security governance in Africa.

Furthermore, in this introductory article, we take hints, conceptual and empirical ones, from the contributions within this special issue, toward laying out a conceptual groundwork for advancing a research agenda of studying IOs as key sites of contestation over intervention politics. In doing so we argue for bringing so far mostly unrelated scholarly debates into conversation, namely, on the one hand, the study of IOs, and, on the other, critical peace- and intervention studies (see also Witt 2018). Specifically, we argue, the latter’s introduction of concepts of hybridity and friction can usefully be applied to the study of organizations, allowing for unpacking their diversification and contested micro-foundations. In a nutshell, combining the analysis of IOs with critical peace- and intervention studies can advance both sets of literatures. First, this perspective renders the ‘politics’ aspect more visibly in the study of IOs. Second, it opens new avenues of exploration for critical peace- and intervention studies, which have so far paid surprisingly little explicit attention to IOs.

We elaborate these ideas into two central contributions to the literatures on IOs and critical peace and intervention studies. First, we make a conceptual contribution by proposing that organizations can productively be analysed as sites of translocal politics, hybridization and friction. In fact, we argue, a focus on organizations offers a particularly instructive lens for studying processes and outcomes of intervention politics that are often simultaneously local, national, (sub-)regional and international. Our outlook, thereby, moves beyond more static depictions of ‘local’, ‘national’, ‘(sub-)regional’ and ‘international’ ‘levels’ of agency, and instead suggests a focus on how co-constitutive relational dynamics across these scales play out within the ambit of organizational security politics.

Second, we make an empirical contribution by indicating how such a focus on the micro-foundations of organizations allows for unpacking the ways in which wider changes in intervention politics are negotiated and ‘acted upon’. Specifically, the collection explores how a shift towards more robust and militarized stabilization interventions on the African continent is appropriated and contested among the various forms of agency that ‘enact’ the practices of organizations, while also leading to new forms of organizational division of work. Thereby we uncover new sites of militarized forms of hybridity, so far understudied in the hybridity and friction debates (Moe 2016; see also Gelot 2020). Moreover, we offer a different – interactional and process-oriented – outlook on change than prevailing IR accounts that take the understanding of IOs as rational goal-oriented or culture-driven coherent agents as their point of departure for assessing institutional change and adaptive capacity.

We proceed as follows: In the first section, we elaborate the argument that notwithstanding the advances made in the literature on IOs and security governance in Africa, there is a need for studies that move beyond narrowly institutionalist perspective on the role and practices of organizations. The second and third sections, in turn, propose a possible way forward in pursuing such an analysis, by elaborating the added value of introducing the conceptual outlook of hybridity and friction to the discussion of IOs. Finally, the last section rounds off by opening the floor for the contributions to the collection.

Beyond formalist perspectives: assessing the debate on international and regional organizations

The concept of ‘security governance’ indicates the high differentiation in the field of international security. Nation-state actors, regional security organizations, other international institutions with a more inclusive agenda, informal governance ‘clubs’, and non-state actors, such as non-governmental organizations, private security companies along with localized forms of authority, all contribute to the contemporary security governance (see Daase and Friesendorf 2010; Schröder 2011).

The bulk of IR security studies, however, has focused on ‘Western’ states and organizations that have dominated security and military intervention-related norm developments and practices. Institutional overlaps, competitions and relations between regional security organizations in the trans-Atlantic community have been dealt with to some extent (Hofmann 2011). In turn, the wider proliferation of IOs following the end of the cold war is reflected in an impressive production of academic analyses, special issues and weighty handbooks (e.g. Biermann and Koops 2017; Cogan, Hurd, and Johnstone 2016; Reinalda 2013). This literature delivers detailed knowledge about the creation and proliferation, the effectiveness and adaptability, the institutional design, activities, and governance function of international organizations and engages with normative criteria for assessing their set-up and performance such as legitimacy, participation, accountability, transparency (Cogan, Hurd, and Johnstone 2016).

Within this wider branch of scholarship, the study of inter-organizational relations has been on the rise (Biermann and Koops 2017), and in this regard, relations between IOs and ROs, also beyond the ‘Western’ sphere, have received increasing attention (Brosig 2020; Dembinski, Krempel, and Schott 2012). This focus has been stimulated by subtle shifts of ‘Western’ powers, moving from world ordering practices, seeking to spread one’s own notions of security, democracy and political order (Geis, Brock, and Müller 2006) to practices of enabling organizations and elites outside the ‘Western’ sphere to themselves undertake (in particular risky) interventions. In this regard, also the UN, in recognition of its limited capacities and in referring to the spirit of Chapter VIII of the UN Charter, has been increasingly promoting a ‘Regional-Global-Security-Partnership’ (Gelot 2012; Hentz, Söderbaum, and Tavares 2009, 209; see also Nel 2020).

Furthermore, research on a ‘new regionalism’ has strongly highlighted the growing importance of non-‘Western’ regional (security) actors in international politics (see, Acharya 2018; Börzel and Risse 2016; Jetschke and Lenz 2013; Wallensteen and Bjurner 2015). As Söderbaum and Tavares (2009, 5) note

with the rise of so-called “new regionalism” in recent decades, regional organizations have become actors in their own right. A number of them (…) have acquired some kind of institutionalized mechanism for conflict management and regional peacekeeping. Regions, through their regional agencies, have transformed from objects into subjects.

Africa is the continent with the highest number of ROs (20) (Jetschke and Lenz 2013, 632–633) and is as such particularly illustrative of the growing significance of regional agency (Tieku 2013; Aning and Edu-Afful 2016; Acharya 2018). By now there exists a considerable body of literature on the AU, its institutional framework, and operational activities (Wondemagegnehu and Kebede 2017), as well as analyses specifically focusing on the APSA and its wide set of institutional mechanisms (Derrso 2012; Murithi 2008; Williams 2014). In addition, the literature addresses the interaction between the AU, international and (sub)regional organizations in military missions. The increasingly security-related activities of the African Regional Economic Communities (RECs), such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), and Southern African Development Community (SADC), have also been studied in some detail (Aning and Edu-Afful 2016; Healy 2013).

Yet, while the existing literature presents much in-depth knowledge and advances, the majority of analyses of organizations and their interventions tends to focus rather narrowly on official norms, institutions, and frameworks, when explaining the actions, interactions, and shortcomings of organizations. As such, an institutionalist and rationalist bias appears to have been ‘carried over’ from ‘Western’-focused IO scholarship to the bourgeoning research on African IOs. As Witt notes, the ‘politics’ and ‘messiness’ of APSA is largely absent from pertinent studies, perhaps also due to a lack of access to the relevant data and sites of participant observation (Witt 2018, 4–5; Witt and Khadiagala 2018, 136). Similarly, scholars who have linked the analysis of the regional African organizations to the wider IR debate on regime complexity and institutional overlap (Brosig 2011, 2013; Williams 2013) have recently noted that the ‘realities’, practices and processes of organizational interaction and security governance are much more multi-faceted than a focus on formal frameworks reveals.

For example, according to Brosig (2013, 173), the interplay of various actors, including the UN as well as ‘Western’ and African collective and individual actors, can be considered an emerging ‘African security regime complex’, characterized as

decentered, with multiple overlap in membership and policy, raising concerns over operative and normative interaction between elemental actors. Although a number of joint declarations, memoranda of understanding, or partnerships exist, these interinstitutional links are usually only weakly institutionalized and do not proscribe hierarchical relations.

Along similar lines, Williams (2013, 1) argues that the interactions, overlaps and ‘legitimation relationships between the UN Security Council and regional organizations are more complex than the clear normative and institutional hierarchy outlined in the UN Charter’ (see also Gelot 2012; Söderbaum and Tavares 2009, 73).

The mismatch between a formalist approach and the ‘messy’ ‘on the ground’ realities of IOs might be particularly apparent for empirically oriented researchers studying the ‘crowded field’ of African security governance. Yet, some branches of recent wider IR scholarship, in fact, echo the call for placing more emphasis on the actual politics, interactions, practices as well as perceptions related to the actions and interventions of IOs. Kreuder-Sonnen and Zürn (forthcoming), for example, note that while the acknowledgement of the high complexity, and the accounts of both cooperative as well as conflictive dynamics of inter-organizational relations, mark a progress in the long-standing debate on IOs, the perspective taken in most of these studies on regime complexity and institutional overlap tends to remain ‘externalist’:

In legal but also political science scholarship, there is a preponderance of the externalist approach by which the relationship of norms and rules is determined from the outside, i.e. based on the researcher’s analysis of the compatibility of the norms and rules in question. (Kreuder-Sonnen and Zürn forthcoming)

Instead, the reconstruction of an ‘internalist perspective’ of the political actors and their actual practices, relationships and perceptions (Gholiagha, Holzscheiter, and Liese forthcoming) would allow for a better understanding of the ‘politics’ within and between IOs and their struggles for legitimacy and power. This Special Issue seeks to contribute to this perspective, taking security governance in Africa as our focus. Accordingly, our key aim is to take a step further from the general recognition that interventions are political and contested, towards analysing what such ‘politics’ and contestation entail for how we can understand organizations’ practices (see also Witt 2018a).

The following sections outline and discuss ideas for a conceptual groundwork enabling such analysis. In doing so, we partly draw on findings and conceptual framings discussed in the individual contributions to the Special Issue, while we do not aim to set out a fixed framework for structuring the collection. Rather, our aim is to point to possible avenues and ‘next steps’ for further research in the field.

I. Revisiting contestation, hybridity and friction: uncharted waters in the IO debate

From the late 2000s onwards, the intervention and peacebuilding fields witnessed a growing interest in the concept and practice of hybridity (Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012; Boege et al. 2009). Such interest produced a new research agenda placing politics as well as contestations over recognition and legitimacy, at the centre of the analysis of international interventions. This outlook (see among others Lemay-Hébert and Kühn 2015; Richmond 2009; Roberts 2008), offers a starting-point for addressing some of the so far under-researched aspects of the roles, interactions as well as effects of organizations in security governance in Africa.

The study of hybridity gained traction as part of a growing scholarly critique of prevailing international intervention practices and, specifically, the so-called Liberal Peace agenda. Since the end of the 2000s the latter came under increasing critique for being imposing, Western-centric, depoliticizing and blind to contextual practices, needs and agency. As a ‘corrector’ to such top-down bias, the concept of hybridity, and related debates on ‘the everyday’ and ‘friction’, have been advanced as lenses for studying a wider set of interactions and actors, including non-elites, as well as everyday practices and agency at play in interventions processes. This also aided analysis of the often unexpected outcomes of interventions (Björkdahl and Höglund 2013), produced by the interaction and blending of different groups, practices, agendas and worldviews (Boege et al. 2009; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013).

Conceptually, these recent discussions of ‘hybridity’ and ‘friction’, build on earlier cultural, post-colonial and socio-legal research that has uncovered the mutual reshaping and co-constitution resulting from interactions between different cultures, legal orders or forms of authority (see for example Bhabha 1994; Merry 1998; Tsing 2005; Santos 2006).

Thereby, the notion of a ‘contact zone’ within which different forms of agency negotiate, contest, resist and mutually re-shape each other, and thereby produce ‘new forms’ is central to the conceptual discussions of hybridity and friction (Peterson 2012, 11; see also Pratt 1991).

Along these lines, the hybridity concept has been applied in critical peace- and intervention studies as a lens which allows moving beyond neat institutionalist or universalizing accounts of intervention as well as transcending the related juxtapositions of ‘state’ vs. ‘non-state’, ‘local’ vs. ‘international’, ‘formal’ vs. ‘informal’, ‘external’ vs. ‘internal’ etc. Instead, the outlook of hybridity ‘make(s) the blending of these spheres the explicit focus’ of analysis (Moe 2011, 149; see also Albrecht and Moe 2015). It thereby also brings into view the productive powers of contextual practices and interactions, as well as the ‘hybrid forms of (…) politics’ (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013, 778) which tend to result from such interactions. The related focus on friction, in turn, emphasizes the ‘negotiated’ and often deeply conflictive nature of these processes and outcomes (Tsing 2005; Björkdahl and Höglund 2013).

While much work has gone into analysing various forms of interventions from large scale peacebuilding missions to smaller International Non-Governmental Organisations’ programmes, the scholarship on hybridity has paid little explicit attention to IOs, and in fact explicitly aims to ‘look beyond (…) institution centric analysis’ (Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012, 4). The prevailing IO literature, conversely, has remained ‘institution centric’, focusing on formal guiding norms, rules, frameworks and regulatory functions. This may, on the one hand, seem commonsensical given that IOs, after all, are institutions. Yet, on the other hand, it arguably also indicates a paradigmatic narrowness whereby the IO literature perpetually reproduces a fixed set of theories and concepts that predefine how it is possible and rational to go about analyses of organizations; such narrowness is reflected in a somewhat self-referential logic that presupposes institutions as already ‘given’ phenomena – or entities – which accordingly privileges institutionalist analysis as the most fitting lens. These paradigm biases in the IO literature combined with the ‘anti-institutionalist’ stance of the critical peace- and intervention studies, have left certain research gaps in the study of IOs. In particular, analyses of the processes through which social and political context, agency and relationships (also beyond elites and states) shape the reproduction, actions and forms of IOs remain scarce. Other, related, fields of study, in turn, indicate the productive potential of opening up the analysis of institutions for the ‘messiness’ of politics, contestation and relationalism. In particular, scholarship on the state/statehood, as well as ‘state failure’, has over the years produced insightful accounts – some drawing on the concept of hybridity (e.g. Boege et al. 2009) – on the interdependencies between institutional behaviour/performance and dynamics of context-specific socio-political struggles (e.g. Bayart 1993). Analyses along these lines have, as most recently summed up by Jessop (2018; see also Go and Lawson 2017), uncovered the state as a condensation of social relations.

In elaborating on these themes, we suggest, that with its interactional outlook and emphasis placed on multi-sited contestation and ‘politics’, the research agenda on hybridity and friction can productively contribute to the analysis of IOs.

First, it offers a process perspective on organizations, which helps unpacking how organizational intervention politics unfold in practice. It does so by opening up for assessing not only the formal structures, functions, agreements and overlaps of IOs and ROs, but also the ‘everyday’ activities, relationships, contestations as well as politics that are part of constituting, re-producing but also changing organizations.

This advances an understanding of the latter as not merely given institutional ‘wholes’, underpinned by a set of fixed rules, norms and functions (that can compete or coordinate), and also not reducible to rationalized ‘tools’ of the powerful states within the international system (however warranted this outlook often is). The perspective of hybridity, instead, allows for uncovering how these rules, norms and elite strategies become renegotiated, subverted or appropriated through agency, processes and interrelations that mostly do not follow clearly hierarchized transmission chains.

The contributions to this Special Issue uncover, from different angles, such negotiation processes. They reveal how IOs and ROs come to serve as key vehicles for various political projects pursued by multifarious local, national, regional as well as international actors engaging with and within them. These include ‘projects’ of international actors seeking to re-legitimize external interventions through strategically ‘hybridizing’ IO activities with RO activities (Spandler 2020; Nel 2020); ‘projects’ of local public figures and elites seeking to justify or, conversely, contest, context-specific political agendas by making use of regional organizational norms and policies (Witt and Schnabel 2020); projects of traditional authorities seeking to buttress their power by linking up with international resources and legitimacy (Gelot 2020) and; competing ‘territorial projects’ pursued both by ROs through forging ‘networked forms of regionalism’ as well as by a diverse range of AU and ECOWAS member-states seeking to use IO-RO peace operations as vehicles for protecting their respective national interests and territories (Albrecht and Cold-Ravnkilde 2020).

Secondly, such a process perspective, which unpacks organizations as sites of contestations, hybridizations and frictions helps to explain the outcomes of IO interventions in more detail. Such outcomes often differ from what one would expect if studying only official norms, agreements and policy discourses of organizations (the ‘externalist perspective’). In this regard, a central discussion in the hybridity literature’s engagement with the nature of ‘the state’, showing that the latter, in many settings, is shaped by a myriad of ‘informal indigenous societal institutions that follow their own logic and rules within the (incomplete) state structures’ and consequently produce empirical ‘states’ that deviate ‘from the ideal type of “proper” state institutions’ (Boege et al. 2009, 603), can usefully be ‘translated’ and applied to the analysis of organizations.

The research centred on IOs has, to be sure, advanced in regard to mapping various results of IO interaction, along the lines of successful alignment with, or conversely, deviations from formal goals and expectations. Yet, a more fine-grained analysis of the processes behind different outcomes remains limited (Brosig 2020). Paying more attention to the negotiations, contestations and related, sometimes covert, ‘projects’, pursued within and through organizations, we argue, would allow for starting to address this gap, by paving the way for more nuanced understandings of the differing outcomes of IO engagements. This would move analysis beyond merely registering ‘compliance’ or ‘deviation’ according to a yardstick of ‘formal standards’. Such reassessment could, in turn, perhaps inspire a rethinking of certain organizational engagements and policies.

Taken as a collection, the contributions to this Special Issue indicate these potentials for combing existing research on organizations and regime complexity with analyses that, from various perspectives, zoom in on contestations, frictions, and concrete – often violent – interactions playing out ‘from below’, within and between organizations in security governance in Africa. In the following, we further elaborate such a potential by outlining two central contributions toward taking both the debate on IOs in security governance and the literature on critical peace and intervention studies a step further.

II. Extending the research agenda: multi-scalar organizational politics in a changing intervention landscape

The first contribution we see emerging from the collection of articles is the demonstration of the productive potential of a multi-scalar conceptual outlook on organizations and their role in security governance. This aids the analysis of the fluidity and interactions between – as well as sometimes the ‘simultaneity’ (Albrecht and Moe 2015) of – actors and agencies across the local, national, regional, international which produce and transform organizational politics.

The second contribution relates to the empirical observation that intervention politics is changing, in ways that, we argue, significantly impact on the processes through which these multi-scalar interactions are playing out on the ground. Specifically, an emerging reframing of intervention as ‘stabilization’¹ (Soares de Oliveira and Verhoeven 2018, 16; see also Karlsrud 2019, 10–11) has produced so far underexplored forms of militarized friction and hybridization, but also challenges, on certain aspects, old hierarchies and produces new forms of organizational collaboration.

This section starts by elaborating the conceptual outlook of organizations as sites of translocal politics, and then moves on to discuss how such politics shapes and is shaped by current changes toward more ‘robust’ interventions in Africa.

The ‘national’, the ‘local’ and beyond: organizations as sites of translocal politics, hybridization and friction

While IO research, as discussed above, is biased toward institutional and elite-level analysis, scholarship on hybridity and friction, in turn, has been accused of inadvertently essentializing ‘the local’ and reproducing the very binary of ‘local’ vs. ‘international’ that the concept critiques (see for example Bargués-Pedreny and Mathieu 2018). As such, analyses of ‘hybridity’ and ‘friction’ in interventions tend to remain focused on ‘global-local encounters’ (Björkdahl and Höglund 2013, 289) or the ability of ‘local actors’ to ‘resist, negotiate, subvert and modify international peace support’ or ‘Western liberal’ norms (Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012, 5, 6). Thereby, the key analytical figure of ‘the local’ negotiating with ‘the West’, ‘the international’ or ‘the global’ remains central to the debate. This risks casting forms of agency, cultures and practices that are not ‘Western’ or ‘international’ as necessarily ‘local’. In addition, it tends to overemphasize the coherence of ‘the local’ and ‘the international’ as distinct units of analysis (much like IO scholarship tends to overemphasize the internal coherence of IOs). Proponents of the lens of hybridity have put substantial work into addressing this critique, acknowledging the risk of romanization of ‘the local’ and emphasizing that hybridity cannot be reduced to the ‘grafting together of two separate entities (local-international)’ (Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012, 3; see also MacGinty 2011). Rather, as leading voices in the hybridity debate argue, hybridity is best understood as ‘the coming together of dynamics that stretch from international elites to national elites, and to local communities and individuals’ (Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012, 4). This perspective speaks strongly to the (so far untapped) productive potentials of applying the hybridity lens to the study of IOs. In fact, we argue, IOs and ROs, are key arenas for such ‘coming together’ and thereby offer a privileged vantagepoint for studying hybridity and friction in new ways. This may allow for transcending both the ‘local’ bias, and binaries, that the hybridity debate struggles with, and the narrowly institutionalist focus on ‘whole organizations in a particular policy field’ (Brosig 2020, 180) which prevails in IO debates.

In pointing to such potential for productive dialogue between IO analyses and critical peace- and intervention studies, this special issue aims to contribute to contemporary scholarship accounting for multi-order governance (Flockhart 2016), connections between global and local politics (Moe and Geis forthcoming) as well as new expressions of regional forms of agency in international politics (Acharya 2018); all of which are emerging as key aspects of the wider transformations of the world order.

Specifically, we propose that organizations can productively be analyzed as exemplary sites of translocal politics, hybridization and friction, playing out beyond the territorial fixed ‘space-as-container’ outlook (Brenner 1999, 45; quoted in Engel 2020) that is still dominant in political science. As Mandaville (1999, 653) notes, the outlook of ‘translocality’ moves beyond the notion of political identity and agency as determined by ‘the locatedness of people in territory’. Instead, as also partly addressed within the scholarship on hybridity, it draws attention to how a variety of actors, across local, national, regional, and international scales, ‘translocate their own positionalities’ (Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012, 3) and agendas to the different sites of international politics. Hence, this outlook helps to convey ‘forces operating both within and across territorially-bounded apparatuses of governance’ thereby ‘disrupting (…) delinations of “inside/outside”’ and enacting new ‘political forms’ (Mandaville 1999, 653).

Such perspective, we argue, captures important aspects of IO politics; given that such politics of, within and between organizations are, indeed, often simultaneously local, national, regional, international and even global. Similarly, organizations can serve as a medium through which ‘international’ practice is constituted inside the national or the local, or vice versa. Consider, for example, contemporary military missions in Africa, such as the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) or the ‘United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali’ (MINUSMA). These missions are internationally funded and mandated, while implemented by national troops from neighbouring states – most often with vested national interests at stake – recruited through the AU or ECOWAS (Albrecht and Cold-Ravnkilde 2020). Or consider new scenarios in which UN de-radicalization programmes engage directly with local traditional authorities and their security practices, which, in turn, both become redefined within the ambit of UN organizational interests, while also critically shaping and readapting what the organizations’ ‘de-radicalization’ concept comes to mean in practice in local settings (Gelot 2020). As such, organizations come to form conglomerations of practices, norms and forms of agency that can ‘at one and the same time mark new territories, spaces and boundaries (of, for example, security governance) and deterritorialize or rescale by eroding or destabilizing existing spaces or spheres of authority’ (Abrahamsen and Williams 2017, 17; for the spatial perspective applied to the role of organizations in African security governance, see Engel 2020). This outlook shifts focus from ‘units’ (be it ‘the local’ vs. ‘the international’ or organizations as coherent ‘wholes’) to scales and ‘relational bundles’ (Go and Lawson 2017, 28).

It remains important, of course, to not leave power inequalities and hierarchies out of the equation. For example, the causal linkage from local action/actors to the behaviour of an IO or RO can be very long and porous. Thereby, certainly not every local action has an impact in this regard. Similarly, at the wider scales of global north and global south agency, hierarchies and inequalities remain very real in many aspects of international politics. However, the recognition of power inequalities should not foreclose analyses that take actors and forms of agency outside the purview of elite politics serious. The impact of the latter might not always be obvious or decisive in a straightforwardly ‘causal’ manner, and may take the form of unexpected ‘blowback’ or ‘mimicry’ (Johnson 2002; Bhabha 1984; also cited in Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012). Uncovering such different locations/scales, expressions and impacts of agency, as well as its limits, consequently remain a task of specific analytical endeavours.

Furthermore, recent years’ transformations of global power constellations, with a partial retreat of established ‘liberal powers’, the rise of resilience discourse, and the growing importance of global south regional agency (Acharya 2018), lends further credence to the outlook on IOs and ROs as sites of multifaceted translocal politics and hybridization.

African organizations and their growing roles in security governance are particularly interesting in this regard. They simultaneously pursue profoundly localized intervention practices, which produce new ‘socio-spatial orders’ (Engel 2020) with very real effects on local populations (Witt and Schnabel 2020), while they are also emerging as key strategic partners for international organizations, in particular, the UN and the European Union (EU) (Nel 2020; Spandler 2020). These strategic partnerships are, on the one hand, profoundly shaped by resource dependency of the AU on the UN and the EU (Ani 2019, 143; Lotze 2013, 123–124). Yet, on the other hand, the international partners have, in turn, become increasingly dependent on the willingness of the former to mobilize troops and accept casualties (see for example Albrecht and Cold-Ravnkilde 2020). Both the UN and ‘Western’ intervention actors (from the US to the EU) have increasingly sought to delegate risky – or otherwise unpopular – mission tasks to African actors. This has met harsh critique within post-colonial scholarship, arguing that:

The battle cry of “African solutions to African problems,” coined during the Cold War to rid the continent of foreign meddlers, has cynically been appropriated in the current era. It has been hijacked to promote an apartheid system of peacekeeping in which Africans are expected to spill most of the blood, while the West pays some of the bills. (cited in Franke and Gänzle 2012, 96–97)

It is, however, not only the matter of risk aversion, but also the issue of contested legitimacy of external intervention, in particular military intervention, which impact on IO-RO partnerships. As such, the significance ascribed to legitimation, provides the AU and the RECs with substantial leverage, since IOs’ partnerships with ROs have come to be seen as an important remedy to the longstanding critique of ‘top-down’ external intervention (Spandler 2020).

Against this wider backdrop of an increasing emphasis on African ownership, strategic partnerships, and fast developing African regionalism, research on ‘international authorities’ in the global order in fact increasingly considers the AU – together with the UN Security Council – as belonging to the most ‘authoritative’ IOs in the global governance system today (Zürn 2018, 108–110). In this regard, African organizations in security governance clearly constitute sites of increasingly assertive global south agency² playing out well beyond the ‘hidden corners’ of ‘the local’ (i.e. the key focus of the hybridity debate, see Richmond 2009, 338).

The picture that emerges from this Special Issue’s contributions is one of intense negotiations over and re-configurations of scale and hierarchies, unfolding from below, within and between organizations engaged in the rapidly changing field of security governance in Africa. These complexities and their implications can hardly be grasped within a conventional methodology focusing on ‘levels’ or ‘units’ of analysis (and typically privileging ‘the state’ as the primary unit of analysis), nor within an outlook of the ‘local’ contesting with the ‘Western/international’.

In this regard, our proposal that IOs can be studied as exemplary sites of translocal politics, hybridization and friction offers a possible alternative to the ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew 1994) which continues to shape social and political analysis (see Engel 2020). We do not claim to fully realize such a potential with this collection, but more modestly aim to highlight the productive prospects of this outlook as opening avenues for further research.

After the ‘liberal peace’: militarization of interventions and the effects on organizational politics

As discussed above, the scholarship on hybridity – and the related critiques of international interventions – has so far centred on the ‘liberal peace’ framework as it emerged in the post-cold war era (Chandler 2017). Accordingly, studies of hybridity have mainly focused on the contestation of ‘liberal’ transformative and good governance agendas – from security sector reforms and rule of law programmes, to democracy promotion, and liberal state-building.

However, as several contributions to this Special Issue reflect, recent years have seen changes in the politics and practices of interventions, against the wider backdrop of a transformation – and possible decline – of the liberal world order. In particular, we observe a shift from liberal reform agendas towards a more pragmatic focus on security and stabilization (Moe and Stepputat 2018) – a so-called ‘robust turn’ in intervention politics (Hunt 2017). This development is particularly evident in growing militarizing tendencies in interventions in Africa (Gelot and Sandor 2019; Moe and Geis forthcoming), which has however largely been absent from analyses of the APSA (Vlavonou 2019).

As we explore from different angles in this Special Issue, these securitizing trends in intervention politics have profound impacts on IOs and ROs – as well as on the outcomes of their activities –, as power relations, agencies, practices and interactions are changing and being mediated in new ways.

Recent years’ ‘robust’ interventions in Africa have maintained goals which were central to the ‘liberal peace’ agenda, such as good governance and a focus on protecting civilians, but strategies focused on support to governments and their forces to stabilize and protect territory against non-state contenders have increasingly taken centre-stage (Moe and Geis forthcoming; Hunt 2017). As such, peacekeeping, stabilization and ‘counterterrorism’ practices are overlapping in new ways. Indeed, the understanding and pursuit of ‘peace’ through what is designated as ‘peace operations’ in contemporary Africa in fact often involves practices of ‘war fighting’ (Darkwa 2016), as evidenced by recent interventions in contexts from Somalia to Mali, Congo and Central African Republic.

In assessing the impact of these changes, a first observation emerging from this Special Issue is that collaboration between IOs and African organizations (AU and the RECs) has intensified in the context of the ‘robust turn’ (Albrecht and Cold-Ravnkilde 2020; Nel 2020; Engel 2020; Moe and Geis forthcoming). This is partly due to the fact that the legal frameworks and capacities of the UN are not suited for enforcement or ‘counterterrorism’. In a context where the UN struggles to delimit and adapt its role to increasing global demands for responding to armed non-state actors and ‘terrorism’, the mobilization of African regional actors through strategic partnerships offers, in part, a ‘solution’. As De Waal (2015, 189) puts it, the UN

has a set of principles that determine peacekeeping operations that can only be worked around with difficulties, including reluctance to deploy troops from one country in a neighbouring country, restrictions on rules of engagements, and onerous political and human rights reporting requirements. These constraints became a problem as the US sought to merge peacekeeping and counterterrorism, notably in Mali and Somalia. By comparison, African countries contributing troops through the AU, ECOWAS and Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) are more flexible on the political purpose and mandate (… and) more ready to take casualties.

Against this backdrop patterns of a ‘symbiotic division of work’ (de Coning 2017, 154; see also Charbonneau 2017) have emerged. Such division of work is structured by a logic whereby regional African partners and organizations take on ‘first responder’ enforcement activities, whereas the UN (ideally) takes over when there is a peace to keep and/or engage in parallel stabilization tasks. This can be understood as what Pratt (2018) terms deference, whereby one IO selectively confers authority to another IO or actor, so as to mitigate a rule conflict or normative tensions. In peace operations, deference of ‘robust’ tasks to ROs helps the UN to mitigate tensions occurring within its own organizational structure (being a peacekeeping organization faced with new demands for robust action), and allows for transferring risks to African actors (Moe and Geis forthcoming).

In turn, such deference offers regional actors increasingly prominent roles and increased leverage as ‘strategic partners’ as well as the resources and training that come with this. Moreover, stabilization interventions offer opportunities for ROs – as well as African national actors acting through ROs (Albrecht and Cold-Ravnkilde 2020) – pursuing agendas of regaining territory from insurgents and thereby re-asserting or remaking sovereignty and borders (Engel 2018; Moe 2017; Soares de Oliveira and Verhoeven 2018). In this regard, the reconceptualization of intervention as stabilization have inverted the relationship between intervention and sovereignty, since the latter is increasingly pursued and ‘produced through the presence of, rather than the barring of, external interveners’ (Moe 2017, 122, our emphasis), as evidenced by contemporary International-AU-RECs interactions (Engel 2020).

In this regard, the turn to stabilization accommodates certain interests of both regional and international organizations (as well as regional and international intervention actors more broadly). Aligning with such interests, policy analyses have stressed the ‘comparative advantages’ of ROs, IOs and national security actors, and encouraged international approaches to build on such advantages, in addressing new ‘threat scenarios’ (UN 2015; the UN Action for Peace initiative, A4P).

However, notwithstanding a growing consensus on ‘intervention as stabilization’, and the emphasis on comparative advantages of pooling regional and international organizational capacities, a second observation is that the related intensification of organizational security collaboration produces a number of new frictions.

One realm where the ‘robust turn’ in interventions has produced frictions and even outright contradictions, is the realm of law. Specifically, as Nel (2020) observes, these intervention trends have been accompanied by ‘a ‘fragmentation’ of the international legal frameworks, reducing the clarity of the legal obligations’ in military interventions. Along similar lines, IOs’ attempts to legitimize their interventions through ‘partnership missions’ with ROs, have introduced new ‘legitimation audiences and agents’ (Spandler 2020). Such processes of pluralization, which increase institutional density and trigger a related proliferation of doctrines, legal frameworks, priorities and stakeholders, substantially add to frictions as well as competing claims to authority (Williams 2013; Spandler 2020). In turn, such contestations and frictions do not only occur in the interface between IOs and ROs but run further down to the site of national politics playing out within organizations. This is the case, for example, when AU and UN-led missions rely on national troops to execute their mandates. The UN has previously been reluctant to allow troop contributions from countries neighbouring the ‘intervention setting’ as this has been seen to compromise impartiality. However, given the trend toward enforcement-orientated peace operations, the UN has become increasingly dependent on ‘African boots’, as non-African contributors do not have the same willingness to undertake enforcement and accept the related death tolls. Those most willing to bear the brunt of ‘robust’ interventions, are, in essence, commonly those countries affected by, and with a direct vested interest in, the given conflict. The result is that missions’ military components increasingly consist of contributions from states that as neighbours are historically and politically ‘entangled’ with the conflict dynamics in the mission host country. Thus, they tend to regularly pursue (often conflicting) interests and engage in practices that do not align with the formal mission goals and mandates, and thereby commonly produce outcomes that differ substantially from such mandates and organizational frameworks (Albrecht and Cold-Ravnkilde 2020).

The increase in enforcement and military responses to conflicts is particularly visible in regard to contemporary peace operations. Yet, ‘robust’ and securitized approaches have also proliferated into related policy domains of both IOs and ROs. For example, recent regional interventions in The Gambia showcase how the use of military force has been added to the existing repertoire of African ROs’ means of diplomacy and intervention – which have expanded from mediation, negotiation and legal arbitration to now also include military enforcement – against attempts of unconstitutional change of government (Witt and Schnabel 2020). Post-electoral crisis, as in the case of The Gambia, foregrounds the tension between ‘soft’ approaches of mediation and legal process, on the one hand, and ‘hard’ approaches based on military intervention, on the other; especially given the grounding of this type of crisis not only in sovereignty issues but also in questions of democratization and constitutional rule.

In regard to IO policies, such ambiguity between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ security approaches is particularly evident in newly emerging programmes, aiming to add social and ‘population-centric’ intervention tools to wider ‘counterterrorism’ ‘enemy centric’ efforts. These programmes are often launched to compliment peace operations and implicitly draw on counterinsurgency doctrine’s rationale of combining community outreach and development support with strategies of defeating ‘insurgents’ (Moe and Müller 2017). Somalia is, in this regard, one of the contexts that has emerged as a ‘laboratory’ for triangulating ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ security approaches (Moe 2016, 2018), within new ‘de-radicalization’ or ‘countering violent extremism’ programmes. As Gelot shows, through the example of the UN mobilizing Somali traditional authorities to take part in de-radicalization programmes, these approaches might on the one hand carve out a space for softer and more preventative tools in line with the UN’s normative organizational identity, within the wider (long) war against ‘terrorism’. On the other hand, however, they contribute to a securitization of the ‘local’, effectively converting traditional authorities into hybrid ‘civil counterinsurgents’ (Gelot 2020).

Taken together, the cases and the empirical materials presented in this collection illustrate from different angles how new security concerns – especially related to ‘terrorism’ and violent extremism – have produced new patterns of interactions between IOs and ROs as well as new internal politics of organizations. To some extent, the relative securitization of interventions has opened avenues of increased influence for African actors – from ROs to member states acting within these organizations and even localized security actors being directly enlisted into international organizational strategies. This re-prioritization from ‘Western’-led missions to the apparent empowerment of ROs, member states and local actors, appears to be a key characteristic of the wider turn towards ‘stabilization’. In this regard, we see a certain lessening of normative impositions of ‘liberal blueprints’ and increasing ‘Western’ vested interests in mobilizing ‘African solutions to African problems’ through IO-RO division of labour. Yet, it is also clear that this expanded scope of involvement of African actors does not straightforwardly translate into more emancipatory forms of ordering and security. Whereas critical peace and intervention studies have emphasised the promise of ‘hybrid’ forms of interventions, as they ‘appear to offer an alternative, more contextually based and thus more sustainable approach to peace’ (Peterson 2012, 10), our findings are more ambigious. We observe multi-faceted dynamics involving both new sites of African agency but also new patterns of inequality configured around unequally distributed risks as well as new elite-based local-global alliances – with organizations serving as key sites both for contesting and consolidating such alliances – centred on securing ‘order’ and defeating subversion, more than on actually creating locally emancipatory and inclusive forms of peace (see also Vlavonou 2019).

Studying the micro-foundations and apparent ‘dysfunctions’ of organizational intervention politics: closing remarks

The above discussed suggestions and proposed contributions toward setting out a conceptual groundwork for advancing the debate on the politics of organizational security governance in Africa (and possibly beyond) connect with recent ‘openings’ in the more established IOs literature. First, we go some way in responding to the recent call for ‘internalist’ perspectives on IOs and regime complexes (Kreuder-Sonnen and Zürn forthcoming) by shifting focus from an ‘external’ assessment of the compatibility/incompatibility of formal norms, legal frameworks and doctrines, to a focus on the actual behaviour, relationships and perceptions of the multiple actors involved in IO politics. Accordingly, the majority of contributions in this special issue draws on their own empirical observations, interviews and in-depth area-study expertise.

Second, such ‘internalist’ and interactional outlook allows for a productive deconstruction of organizations as larger coherent units, or as merely rationalized instruments of strong states, and instead unpacks the myriad of actors that act and interact inside and across organizations and thus profoundly shape their actual practices and re-negotiate the ‘boundaries’ (local, national, regional, international) of their politics and interventions. This aligns with, and elaborates on, recent accounts drawing attention to how the smaller scale bureaucracies, administrative units as well as relationships among individual actors (re)produce and transform the micro-foundations for organizational actions and interactions (Biermann 2017; see also Brosig 2020).

Third, and finally, our alignment with arguments in the recent literature critiquing liberal interventionism, and highlighting that ‘it is necessary to start focusing on what is there rather than clinging to the notion of what ought to be there’ (Moe 2010, 19) from an ‘externalist’ perspective, strongly resonates with the reassessments of, apparent ‘dysfunctions’ of IOs offered by sociological institutionalism perspectives. As Barnett and Finnemore (2004, 35–36) note,

(m)ost IOs have multiple audiences, multiple principals, and multiple missions. Consequently, it is difficult to analytically label a behavior as “bad” or even “undesirable” since most behavior serves someone’s interest. (…) Behavior is dysfunctional only for something or someone. (also quoted in Biermann 2017, 255)

Assessing outcomes based on such internalist perspective substantially expands insights into reasons and processes behind ‘diverging outcomes’ and may thereby even serve as a basis for advancing more informed policies.

III. Opening the floor: introduction of contributions

After this opening contribution, Malte Brosig provides a state-of-the-art perspective on the wider debate of inter-organizational relations, with a focus on how Africa’s multiple experiences in the area of security governance hold the potential of contributing towards taking this debate forward. According to Brosig, a key challenge, but also a productive possibility, lies in the need for advancing more consistent theory building on IOs and their interactions, while taking due account of the multifarious empirical developments and actors that shape IOs and their practices. Thereby, Brosig’s contribution points to a key strength of the collection, in highlighting the need for area studies playing a greater role in informing and adding empirical ‘corrective’ insights to the established theoretical IO debate. In this regard, he notes, the ‘the ambit of relevant actors might be larger than currently explored, encompassing a space filled with actors operating a various levels again adding more complexity to the analysis’ (Brosig 2020, 182). Meanwhile, Brosig also highlights a remaining challenge, which this Special Issue admittedly reflects as well, namely the need to more extensively feed these empirical advances into existing theoretical developments, so as to realize the potential of area studies to make a meaningful contribution to theory formation in IO and global governance scholarship.

Kilian Spandler uses the focus on legitimacy as an instructive lens for analysing friction in the interface of IOs and ROs. Focusing on the case of the ‘hybrid’ UN-AU mission in Darfur (UNAMID), Spandler conveys how empirical processes of (de-)legitimation, far from merely concerning formal authorization, are deeply political, involving security actors strategically choosing among a range of organizational legitimacy claims and strategies to address different ‘audiences’. At the centre of the analysis is the paradox of ‘hybrid peacekeeping’ which is, on the one hand, understood to facilitate mutual legitimation between international and regional organizations. On the other hand, however, the joint missions in practice trigger a ‘pluralization of legitimation agents and audiences’ and thereby increase frictions. According to Spandler (2020, 153), the largely disappointing experience with UNAMID should serve as a ‘corrector’ to a general overemphasis on IO-RO collaboration as a desirable end in and of itself.

Peter Albrecht’s and Signe Cold-Ravnkilde’s contribution, in turn, shows how in contemporary missions in Somalia (AMISOM) and Mali (MINUSMA) friction plays out not just between organizations but is also a key feature of processes within organizations. This is mainly due to the increasing emphasis on robust stabilization missions and the related growing dependency of AU and UN on troop contributions from countries neighbouring the intervention settings. AMISOM and MINUSMA illustrate the effects of these trends, as the bulk of the troops deployed through the UN and the AU in these missions are ‘neighbours’ who, in various ways, are deeply enmeshed in the conflict dynamics that they are there to address. Such national ‘vested interests’, Albrecht and Cold-Ravnkilde show, profoundly impact on the operational effectiveness and strategic coherence of peace operations. The analysis reveals the paradox of ‘national interests’ (often multi-layered and competing) serving as an arguably increasingly necessary basis for mobilizing troops for ‘robust’ missions, while they at the same tend to redefine and sometimes undermine key organizational goals and norms.

Ulf Engel’s analysis keeps with the theme of ‘robust’ interventions and unpacks the order-making and ‘spatializing effects’ of especially the AU’s engagement in them. Specifically, the analysis conveys how the security projects through which the AU seeks to address ‘terrorism and violent extremism’ are directed towards ‘(re-)establish(ing) sovereignty of member states and build resilient regions’ (Engel 2020, 231). Engel elaborates his perspective of the AU as a ‘spatial entrepreneur’ in regard to both its internal politics, and in terms of its international partnerships. His findings clearly demonstrate the (re)turn to sovereigntist agendas and a focus on (political) ‘order’ in organizational approaches to security governance in Africa, while also conveying how the actual outcomes of regionally-networked governance remain far from ‘orderly’ but are rather marked by profound contestation, competition and asynchronicity.

In her contribution, Michelle Nel discusses how the ‘robust turn’ in security governance in Africa has put legal organizational frameworks for interventions under pressure. In particular, she identifies a gap between, on the one hand, the UN’s intervention framework grounded in a peacekeeping paradigm of non-use of force, and, on the other, the reality of interventions in practice moving to enforcement and stabilization. Despite such growing incongruence, Nel (2020, 241) argues, the organizational responses have tended toward strategies of avoidance and policies of deliberate ambiguity, rather than reform. As such, maintaining the vagueness of intervention concepts such as ‘stabilization’ appears to permit ‘flexible’ international-regional-national collaboration, while largely allowing organizations as well as nation states to escape scrutiny of how their practices push, if not cross, the boundaries of international law.

Linnéa Gelot’s contribution shifts focus to how organizational intervention politics is both affecting, and affected by, localized actors within intervention contexts. Drawing on interviews from recent fieldwork in Somalia, Gelot explores how new security interventions centred on de-radicalization, e.g. promoted by the UN, seek to extend the outreach to local communities by incorporating traditional authorities into their programmes. The ensuing effects, Gelot shows, involve mutual hybridization between ‘traditional’ authorities and ‘international’ organizational frameworks. While the latter become redefined, and in some cases subverted, in the encounter with the agendas and agencies of ‘traditional’ authorities, these authorities themselves are faced with new challenges of balancing upward and downward legitimacy and interests, as they assume the roles of de-radicalization intermediaries. Thereby, the contribution conveys how new organizational priorities of de-radicalization are productive of newly emerging and so far under-explored sites of hybridization.

Antonia Witt’s and Simone Schnabel’s contribution, which rounds off the Special Issue, elaborates on the ‘view from below’ by directing focus towards the questions of how interventions into political election crises are perceived, dealt with and contested by those living in the contexts intervened into. Witt and Schnabel focus on regional interventions in the case of The Gambia as well as in the 2014–15 regional interventions into Burkina Faso. Both cases display the full range of sanctions of African ROs against unconstitutional changes of government. By analysing domestic media debates, Witt and Schnabel uncover how, once enacted, the organizational norms and frameworks both become subject to intense public critique and produce new sites of local elite politics gravitating around competing interpretations of the practical meaning of these frameworks. The analysis highlights the ‘local’ imprints and relevance of regional organizational norms, while it profoundly challenges prevailing formalistic readings of such norms.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Antonia Witt, Malte Brosig and Markus-Michael Müller for insightful comments and feedback that helped to improve this introduction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Dr Louise Wiuff Moe is an associated researcher at the Helmut Schmidt University. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of Queensland. Her research combines theoretical and empirical perspectives on peace, conflict and security dynamics, with a regional focus on Africa. Her recent works explores inter-organizational interactions in peace and security governance, changing norms and practices of liberal interventionism, and spatializing effects of interventions in the Somali context.

Dr Anna Geis is Professor of International Security and Conflict Studies at Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg (Germany) since April 2016. From 2012 to 2016 she was Professor of International Relations at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. She obtained her ‘habilitation’ (2012) at the Goethe University Frankfurt with a study on legitimacy problems of democratic security politics and her PhD (2002) with a dissertation on the Frankfurt airport mediation as an ambivalent governance instrument. Her research areas include the legitimation of military interventions, theories of peace and war, German foreign and security policy, liberal world order, security governance, the (non-)recognition of armed non-state actors in violent conflicts.

ORCID

Anna Geis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7593-2625

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the funding made available by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for this research (within the research group ‘Overlapping Spheres of Authority and Interface Conflicts in the Global Order’, DFG No. 277531170).

Notes

1 Stabilization is not a new intervention doctrine. However, the approach has been undergoing certain changes, whereby in particular the U.S. has adjusted its stabilization efforts from the ‘overreach’ approach in Iraq, seeking to do coercive liberal peace- and order-making, to much more pragmatic stabilization efforts through enabling ‘local’ and regional allies, as now evidenced in for example the Sahel. Moreover, the stabilization approach has gained new and wider traction, and has increasingly appeared also in UN mandates from the first UN stabilization mission in Haiti 2004; the mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the missions in Mali (2013) and the Central African Republic (2014) (see Karlsrud 2019).

2 Under the sweeping label of ‘African agency’, a growing body of IR scholarship has been investigating the role of nation states and ROs in shaping regional and international politics and policies. An engagement with the important concept of ‘agency’ is beyond the scope of this introduction but see, e.g. Achieng (2014), Ani (2019), Aning and Edu-Afful (2016), Beswick and Hammerstad (2013); Brown and Harman (2013), and Tieku (2013).