Adoption, adaptation or chance? Inter-organisational diffusion of the protection of civilians norm from the UN to the African Union

Abstract

Norms can be adopted without modifications or adapted to regional contexts for strategic or principled reasons. Norm adoption and adaptation can also happen by chance. When adoption takes place without consideration of the norm's effectiveness or appropriateness, we speak about imitation. When adaptation takes place in such a manner, we lack conceptual tools to analyse it. We propose a novel concept of incidental adaptation -divergence between promoted and adopted norms due to fortuitous events. This completes the typology of scenarios leading to norm adoption and adaptation. We apply the typology to the transmission of the protection of civilians norm in peace operations from the United Nations (UN) to the African Union (AU). The AU adopted the UN's approaches in pursuit of interoperability and resources, and out of recognition of the UN's normative authority. It also happened incidentally when the AU temporarily followed the UN's approaches. The AU engaged in adaptation to reflect the nature of its operations and normative orientations of AU member states. Incidental adaptation accounted for the presence of the rights-based tier in the AU's protection of civilians concept. These findings nuance our understanding of norm diffusion, inter-organisational relations and the role of chance in international affairs.

Shame, Exasperation and Institutional Design: The African Union as an Emotional Security Community

“…It particularly critiques accounts that portray APSA as a product of mimicry, as exemplified by Jetschke's (2017, 181) claim that the PSC is a "virtual copy" of the UNSC. This is made apparent through several examples of innovation on the part of the Architecture's designers, which were motivated by the goal of avoiding, rather than replicating, the mistakes of organisations that some point to as normative inspiration (Oksamytna and Wilén, 2022).…”

“…Unsurprisingly, given the extent to which international relations scholarship has traditionally centred the Western experience, studies on the emergence of the AU provide several illustrative examples that take such a risk. They include research on the adoption of UN peacekeeping practices by the AU (Oksamytna and Wilén, 2022), on the Union's "localization" of the responsibility to protect norm (Dembinski and Schott, 2014), and on the ways in which the AU's complex institutional framework is modelled on the EU (Söderbaum, 2007). A further example that is particularly relevant, given the focus of this article, is provided by Jetschke.…”

“…APSA's establishment marked a fundamental reassessment of the security role the AU would play by comparison to its predecessor the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), sometimes described as a shift from non-interference to non-indifference (Williams, 2007). Significant research has been conducted on the Architecture's emergence, though it often rests on Eurocentric foundations that portray the AU reproducing the norms and institutional designs of the Global North (Söderbaum, 2007, Oksamytna and Wilén, 2022, Jetschke, 2017.…”