The AU’s Constitutive Act: Contextual Threats and Its Implementation in Modern-Day Africa

The African Union’s (AU) Constitutive Act of 2000 embodies a vernacularisation of the United Nations Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) concept. It is from this Act (and the 2004 establishment of the Peace and Security Council) that the authority of the continental body stems to protect vulnerable populations by intervening, brokering peace and ending armed conflict. In theory, by having made the AU the first regional organisation to have a clear mandate to intervene in the internal affairs of its member states, the Constitutive Act of 2000 was not only progressive but a bold testament of Africa’s reverence of ideals such as human rights, good governance and democracy. Amidst such hope, however, we have counter-intuitively witnessed an unrestrained proliferation of unconstitutional government changes, terrorist activities/insurgencies, displacements, neglected and protracted crises/humanitarian emergencies. Such occurrences and their growing frequency rationalised an inquiry into the AU’s efficacy in operationalising the RtoP’s edicts. In doing so, this paper confined itself to examining the existential threats and opportunities facing the AU (particularly in the context of realism and today’s multipolar world system), in implementing two components of the RtoP (i) the responsibility to prevent and (ii) the responsibility to react. The realist theory of international relations was used in the study along with secondary data and literature on the AU’s handling of neglected/protracted crises situations on the continent. Selective application of Article 4(h), authoritarian collaborations, and a constricted focus on the symptoms, rather than a systematic prediction of the patterns/root causes of crises were some of the threats to the Constitutive Act, discussed in the chapter.