Building Regional Communities: The Role of Regional Organizations in Africa

Abstract

Theories of comparative regionalism are Eurocentric and do not meaningfully explain the fundamental dynamics of diverse regional organisations in world politics. In particular, only rare attempts have been made to theorise regionalism from the perspective of African peoples, which has led to the loss of important insights for the field. Drawing on African conceptions of the international, I argue that African regional organisations are best understood as instruments used by states to build regional communities that will empower them vis-à-vis the European Other. The concept of ‘regional communities’ developed in this chapter is useful for wider scholarship in the field because it reveals the systematic vertical relationship between the region and the formal regional organisation, and it also allows for systematic horizontal comparison of diverse regional arrangements while incorporating region-specific self-understandings. This argument is illustrated with a discourse analysis of the speeches of African leaders at the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU).