I’ll mind my own business if you mind yours: The OAU and the African Peace

Published in

Dynamiques Internationales, peer reviewed Working Paper #3

Abstract

While Africa after de-colonialization has experienced many internal conflicts, there has been a puzzling lack of interstate wars. Why is this so? Given the historically rootless borders, lack of vital resources like water, and prevalence of dictatorships, one could have predicted that several African interstate wars would have taken place. I argue that national political structures in Africa combined with the existence of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and its principles of non-intervention and national sovereignty contributed to the relative lack of interstate wars from de-colonialization to the end of the Cold War. The explanatory framework is a simple rational choice framework, where national rulers are the central actors. These actors care mainly about their own continuation in office, and take into account how their present actions might affect the future. A modified version of Keohane’s (1984) theory on international regimes is presented formally. The model implies that non-intervention strategies can constitute an equilibrium even if there are short term gains from intervention.1 The logic can be shortly summarized as follows: Political leaders refrain from intervening in another country because they fear this increases the probability of a foreign intervention into their own country later. This equilibrium becomes even more likely under the presence of a regime like the OAU.

By Carl Henrik Knutsen
Published Mar. 23, 2015 11:20 AM - Last modified Oct. 6, 2020 10:33 AM