Regional organizations and democratic conditionality: Family resemblances and shaming

Abstract

The six major regional organizations (ROs) covered in this special issue all originated prior to the rise of liberal internationalism, and were repurposed by it. After 1989 they converged towards a common discourse on democratic conditionality, and developed a capacity to discipline and sanction non-compliance, preferring persuasion and appeals to regional norms rather than coercion. This concluding overview highlights the relevance of such metaphors as ecosystem, family resemblance, and peer review; and directs attention to the temporal and spatial scope conditions of the cases considered; and to the bargaining involved. As the ecosystem of liberal internationalism and regional democratic solidarity has faded, ‘pushbacks’ have appeared from regimes ‘targeted’ for sanctions and/or ‘shaming.’ Since states must coexist in permanent interaction with their neighbors, and because the democratic ‘like-mindedness’ of regions fluctuates, such RO stigmatization cannot be a one-shot game. Rather, it will be interactive, and contextually negotiated over time.

Global Governance From Below: Regional Sanctions as Drivers of UN Sanctions

“…While we do not contest the validity of drivers identified in extant literature (conflict lethality and P5 interests), we demonstrate the importance of pre-existing regional sanctions for UNSC sanctions target selection. Our findings also advance burgeoning work on regional sanctions (Whitehead 2021) by showing that the legitimacy bonus of peer sanctions (Hellquist and Palestini 2021) can have a powerful influence on global action.…”

Regional sanctions and the struggle for democracy: Introduction to the special issue

“…Six articles focus on specific ROs: ROs in the Americas (Palestini, 2020), the AU (Hellquist, 2020), the European Union (EU) (Closa, 2020), the CoE (Soyaltin-Colella, 2020), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (Schembera, 2020), and LAS (Debre, 2020). A seventh contribution (Whitehead, 2020) has a comparative and cross-regional perspective. The contributions have been selected to include regions that are democracy-dense (Europe and the Americas), as well as regions that are autocracy-dense (Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East).…”

“…The contributions to the special issue display how the formal and informal standards of democracy protection co-exist in ways that are intimately linked with region-specific trajectories and norms. As discussed by Whitehead (2020) in the concluding article to the collection, regional approaches to sanctions have a ‘family resemblance’, which accommodates considerable within-family variation. Moreover, the enforcement of regional sanctions remains an eminently political process, in which regional courts and tribunals do not play a significant role.…”

“…The relationship of membership has a couple of especially noteworthy implications for sanctions. First, as noted by Whitehead (2020), members of ROs are ‘fated by geography to continue operating alongside each other’. Ceteris paribus , from this basic fact we can expect that ROs will be resolution-oriented and that protracted sanctions episodes will be avoided (see Hellquist, 2020).…”

Regional sanctions as peer review: The African Union against Egypt (2013) and Sudan (2019)

“…A clear notion of who belongs in the region facilitates constructive criticism. Countries within a neatly defined in-group have to find ways to live with each other, despite differences (see Whitehead, 2020). When South Africa became a member of the OAU after the fall of apartheid, or when Morocco rejoined the AU in 2017, these steps were presented as repairing what had been broken and reuniting the region.…”