The African Standby Force: An Element of Prospective Multilevel Security Governance

This article examines the African Standby Force (ASF), an African-led mechanism for crisis management and peace consolidation in Africa, and its potential contribution to multilayered security governance. It analyses the ASF project, which has gone through many phases of redefinition since it was conceived in the late 1990s and elaborates on the inability of African stakeholders to settle on a clear concept, setting themselves ever more ambitious goals. International partners simultaneously suffer from, and contribute to, this state of affairs as their support too often responds to national or institutional interests. The ASF is also burdened by the lack of ownership by African countries and institutions. Only if AU member states make a conscious effort to increase their political, conceptual and especially, financial, stake in the ASF will they be able to credibly demonstrate that it is not an entirely foreign-mastered project, but a real ‘African solution to African problems’. IDS Bulletin Volume 43 Number 4 July 2012 © 2012 The Author. IDS Bulletin © 2012 Institute of Development Studies Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA respond swiftly to a crisis unhampered by the heavy political and institutional burdens typical of the UN (the UN would, however, take over after an agreed period, and assume the tasks of stabilisation and peace consolidation). The concept was later refined and broken down into six scenarios: (1) observation and monitoring missions; (2) preventive deployments in the case of rising political tensions; (3) humanitarian assistance missions; (4) traditional peacekeeping operations; (5) peace support in a non-permissive environment; and (6) forceful intervention in a member state in grave circumstances. While it constitutes a far-reaching achievement on paper, inconsistent interpretations of what the ASF should be has made its implementation difficult. 3 The ASF: a moving target Early on, it was proposed that ASF brigades would be multidimensional, and would include military, police and civilian components. In practice, however, the first ASF Implementation Roadmap, which spelled out the ASF’s stages of development up to 2010, reflected a strong military slant (African Union 2005). This is unsurprising given that it was worked out mainly by the military establishments of the member states and supported mainly by international partners’ military establishments. The civilian component of the ASF suffers from the resulting lack of attention, particularly with regard to training. This may be because the civilian component, with its security sector reform (SSR) experts, election support, administrative training, justice sector reform, support for parliamentary work, and so on, has the potential to play a political role and ultimately might challenge African leaders’ foundations of power (i.e. challenge the status quo). While the AU has gained field experience in the field of peacekeeping (such as the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS), its first field mission), the ASF has yet to be fully operationalised. With ever-more diversified partners gaining interest, and as recent UN experiences (such as with the UN Mission in the DRC (MONUC) or now the UN Stabilisation Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO)) demonstrate the increasing relevance of multidimensional operations, the need to rebalance the original concept has become increasingly obvious. To this end, a second Roadmap, adopted in July 2008, mandated accelerated work on the civilian and police dimensions of the ASF (it was already clear by then that the full operationalisation of the ASF by 2010, as foreseen in Roadmap I, could not be achieved). Roadmap II (African Union 2008) further identified considerable tasks to be accomplished over the next two years, including work on headquarter capacity both within the AU and in the regions; decision-making and mandate issues; logistics depots; strategic lift; the rapid deployment capacity (RDC); and a variety of specific but nonetheless important domains such as medical and legal issues (African Union 2008). In October 2010 a major mapping exercise, Amani Africa, was undertaken. Originally planned to be the final certifying procedure of the ASF and financed by European and Canadian partners, the exercise concluded that AU field operations such as AMIS and the African Union Mission in Burundi (AMIB) had demonstrated that African missions remain heavily dependent on external support for the entire range of their logistical needs, from strategic deployment to field logistics, as well as for their communications and information systems needs. Further, a situation of quasi-total financial dependence on external donors also characterises African capacity-building efforts (African Union 2010). A new plan, Roadmap III – which, to some extent, encompasses the lessons learned from Amani Africa – was endorsed by the African Chiefs of Defence Staff in late October 2011 (African Union 2011). It recognises the lack of institutional capacity and effective coordination between the AU and RECs/RMs as one of the main blockages to standardised planning and management procedures for future ASF missions. This Roadmap includes ambitious additional targets, such as achieving two independent, multidimensional RDC units of 2,500 men/women each on readiness at any given time by 2012, and full operationality of the entire ASF by 2015 (African Union 2010). The RDC, which now tops the list of priorities, combines quick reaction and multidimensionality, blurring the picture further and setting the target even higher. IDS Bulletin Volume 43 Number 4 July 2012 15 Currently, there is no mention of what will follow such AU RDC units, which would only be equipped for 30 days in the field. Clearly AU’s hope is that once a quick response has been launched, the UN can be politically bribed into agreeing to send in UN forces with UN funding. This may work with hybrid AU-UN operations, which are difficult enough to establish. The case of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), however, is a good example that this calculation is flawed (Le Gouriellec 2012). Adding to the level of complexity, other new tasks have appeared on the list of possible ASF commitments in addition to the RDC, including disaster relief and naval operations. It is clear from recent conceptual work and ongoing operations that the AU’s and RECs’ aims are now pitched at the upper end of the scale of scenarios developed in the original Roadmap. An escalating trend is visible in three directions: from a ‘fire brigade’ type of operation, carried out by an agile, relatively unsophisticated ASF (who subsequently hand over operations to the UN), to a scenario where Africans themselves assume peace consolidation tasks in the long run; from mainly military-focused missions, to multidimensional operations, additionally endowed with the whole range of civilian and police components; and from low-risk deployments in relatively peaceful contexts, to operations in environments with a high level of ‘spoilers’. No open debate has been carried out on those evolving assumptions, their political underpinnings or feasibility requirements. Built on unaddressed issues and high expectations, the ASF is therefore a moving target, due to the inability of African stakeholders to settle on a clear concept, setting themselves ever more ambitious goals at every stage. 3.1 Shared responsibility and regional ownership of