Multilateral Machinations: The Strategic Utility of African International Organizations in the Pursuit of National Security Interests in West Africa and the Greater Horn

Abstract

Since the end of decolonization, African states have created a series of dense and overlapping international organizations (IOs) at both the continental (Organization of African Unity/African Union) and sub-regional (regional economic community, REC) levels of analysis, both of which broadly claim to fulfill similar mandates on a range of issues, including the provision of collective security. Given that every African state is embedded within at least two African IOs with similar mandates – which have generally been assumed to be important primarily for the accomplishment of collective goals – how, when, and why do individual African states understand when such IOs might be strategically useful for the pursuit of their individual security and foreign policy aims, especially as relates to national security interests? To answer this question, this dissertation creates a theory of how African states understand the strategic utility of African IOs in relation to the pursuits of their national security interests, which it tests against the historical record of actual state behavior in eight countries in a combination of West Africa and the Greater Horn. Ultimately, it shows that with the knowledge of four variables – a state’s international power projection capability; its location within regional and continental IO polarities; and the nature of the national security interest at hand – one can broadly predict when, why, and in which African IOs states will pursue their individual national security interests.