Against the background of recent global crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and generally a resurgence of more aggressive global geopolitics, the Junior Research Group investigates the agency of African regional organizations (ROs) in governing the complexity of contemporary globalization processes across a range of policy fields that have been connected to global security. Africa has not only become a space where elements of potential new global orders are being tested, it is also a space of enormous global socio-economic and geopolitical importance. Consequently, African ROs have become important actors and key fora to discuss, negotiate and coordinate regional and global politics, increasing the need for scientific knowledge on African ROs. Therefore, this project investigates and compares six African regional economic communities (RECs) that the African Union formally recognizes as key partners and building blocks in developing and implementing regional/global policies, focusing on the policy fields of climate change, energy, health and migration, to highlight, differentiate and theorize their agency and practices in defining and confronting global challenges.
Studying the six most active RECs, across four key policy fields (i.e., climate change, migration, health, and energy), the project aims to close a large gap in existing research, which still struggles to highlight, differentiate and theorize the agency of African ROs in defining and confronting global challenges. This helps to establish a broad empirical basis for cooperative political action and to advance key theoretical debates in International Relations (IR) scholarship, specifically in the intersecting academic fields of Comparative Regionalism, Inter-Regionalism, Inter-Organizational Relations, and Global Governance. In this way, the project lays important groundwork for achieving more global comparability and generalizability, overcoming Western/Euro-centric perspectives, and thus advances theory-oriented research towards a more global IR.
African regional organizations: COMESA, EAC, ECCAS, ECOWAS, IGAD, SADC, AU …
Policy fields: security, energy, health, migration, climate change …
General topics: African regionalism and global politics, global securitization discourses
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