Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The article explores how and why communities of practice (CoPs) of international organizations (IOs) work together effectively despite the rigid formal bureaucratic and institutional borders they inhabit. The manuscript explains how four informal mechanisms combined to enable CoPs embedded in the African Union (AU), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the United Nations (UN) Organization to resolve political crises in Burkina Faso, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, and Togo between 2016 and 2022. The informal mechanisms allowed CoPs to overcome their institutional limitations, cross rigid organizational borders, and work together to resolve different political crises in the six countries. Some of the informal mechanisms were cultivated by CoPs, while others emerged organically from activities and interactions of these like-minded professionals. The informal instruments that were developed and used to resolve the crises provide a telling illustration of how CoPs create global governance norms, practices, processes, rules, and structures from below. The enabling role that informality played in the six conflict theaters suggests that paying close attention to the informal dimensions of CoPs has enormous analytical benefits.

Abstract
The article critically explores the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) from an informality perspective. The informality perspective sees unofficial rules, norms, practices, processes, actors, and decision-making structures as driving forces of the social world. They are ontologically prior to and building blocks of their formal counterparts. From this viewpoint, the failure to design the AfCFTA from the informal economy baseline makes it an unfit trade agreement for the African continent. Those who drafted the agreement, its supplementary protocols and annexes, and the decision-makers who signed as well as ratified them neglected the informal trading actors and unregistered enterprises in Africa. Rather than building the agreement around unregistered small-to-medium-scale enterprises, operated mostly by women and the youth, the AfCFTA and its legal instruments envisioned a utopian African trade market without them. The drafters and decision-makers of the AfCFTA seem to operate on the basic principle of no formalization and no gain from the free trade agreement. The result is a serious mismatch. The formally oriented AfCFTA is supposed to govern the largely informal African trading ecosystems. The failure to mainstream the informal economy in the AfCFTA makes the African free trade agreement look like, to use a house metaphor, a beautifully constructed house located in the wrong neighborhood. The article substantiates this claim and shows its implications for the Pan-African integration project and the study of international relations.

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Introduction: Peacebuilding in contemporary Africa / Kenneth Omeje -- The peacebuilding and development debate : is contemporary peacebuilding development in disguise? / Mala Mustapha & Usman A. Tar -- Peacebuilding in micro-level inter-community conflicts in West Africa : examples from Ghana and Nigeria / Afua Boatemaa Yakohene -- Marginalization and violent conflict in the Karamoja region of Uganda / Tony Karbo -- Peacebuilding in micro-level inter-community conflicts : examples from selected countries in southern Africa / Pamela Machakanja and Chupicai Manuel -- Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone one and half decades after the civil war : at what stage does a country cease to be post-conflict? / Ibrahim Bangura -- The task of rebuilding Liberia / T. Debey Sayndee -- Conflict intervention, insecurity and the challenges of peacebuilding in South Sudan / Nicodemus Minde -- Boko Haram insurgency, terrorism and the challenges of peacebuilding in the Lake Chad basin / Usman A. Tar and Bashir Bala -- Obstacles to peace and security in North Africa / Ibrahim Bangura and Sampson Lau -- Peacebuilding through peace education in the Horn of Africa : a transformative cosmopolitan perspective / Yonas Adaye Adeto -- Transiting from armed conflict to peace in contemporary Africa : changing tides, research findings and future directions / Kenneth Omeje