The Gatekeeping Role of Regional Organizations in the Global South

• In Event: International Cooperation and Security

Abstract

In the post-Cold War era, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) at the global and regional levels of governance have taken on wider and deeper security mandates; they increasingly use mediation, ceasefire monitoring, the imposition of sanctions, peacekeeping, and even military intervention to manage episodes of intrastate political violence and other humanitarian crises. As a global body, the United Nations is better financed than its regional counterparts (in the global South) and boasts the legitimacy of universalism. Regional groupings like the African Union are “closer to the action,” and their members arguably hold a greater stake in the outcome of civil conflicts. They also boast a different kind of legitimacy based on shared regional identity (e.g. pan-Africanism). An emerging problem is that there is neither a clear consensus about how labor should be divided among these different levels of security governance nor about which actors should defer to which when goals or strategies diverge. The involvement of extraregional regional IGOs in domestic disputes or disasters (e.g. NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya or the 2008 European Union response to Cyclone Nargis) adds to the potential for inter-IGO conflict. This paper seeks to identify the conditions under which regional IGOs successfully act as *gatekeepers* vis-à-vis extraregional IGOs. It catalogues and compares attempts by the African Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in the 21st century to manage extraregional interference into the domestic affairs of its member states experiencing political, military, or humanitarian crisis. I ultimately argue that crisis type, economic factors, and the international reputation of the gatekeeping regional IGO are the most important variables.

Author

• Brooke N. Coe, Oklahoma State University