UNAMID and the Legitimation of Global-Regional Peacekeeping Cooperation: Partnership and Friction in UN-AU Relations

Abstract

The 'hybrid' United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) was initially hailed as a model for peacekeeping cooperation between the UN and African regional organizations. However, UNAMID soon faced contestation from different stakeholders, and the UN and the AU have now essentially abandoned the hybrid approach. The article reconstructs how the mission's deteriorating legitimacy relates to changing selflegitimation strategies by the two organizations. The UN and the AU pursued mutual legitimation when establishing UNAMID, but later mobilized historical narratives and diverging normative standards to promote competing authority claims. The article thus advances an understanding of inter-organizational relations as inherently political.

Saving people or saving face? Four narratives of regional humanitarian order in Southeast Asia

“…For example, in African peace and security governance, efforts to establish a system of subsidiarity between global, regional and sub-regional organizations have been of limited success. Instead, the UN and its African partner organizations promote a flexible approach that relies on the ad hoc crafting of roles in multi-actor operations (Spandler, 2020). IR researchers interested in the liberal order and its alternatives can learn a lot from paying close attention to these processes.…”

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

“…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).…”

“…(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).…”

“…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).…”

“…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.…”