Berhale/Johannesburg — "The UN deploys where there is peace to be kept, African-led PSOs deploy where there is no peace at all."
In 2011, Ugandan and Burundian troops of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) fought for control of a shattered Mogadishu in bloody house-to-house combat against determined jihadist militants that lasted for almost a year.
It was grinding urban warfare. In one month alone, more than 50 African Union troops were killed - as were an unknown number of civilians. It wasn't until October 2011 that AMISOM finally overran al-Shabab's last strongholds in the north of the city. (See The New Humanitarian's film Soldiers' Stories, which followed Ugandan troops during the so-called "Battle for Mogadishu".)
This wasn't peacekeeping in the traditional sense, where UN blue helmets oversee an existing peace agreement and use only minimum force. This was heavily militarised expeditionary peace enforcement - part of a trend in which conflicts have become more complex, and peace operations increasingly look like counter-terrorism missions.
AMISOM was sent to Somalia in 2007 to support a weak but internationally backed transitional government against an insurgent movement that had grown out of resistance to a US-backed Ethiopian invasion in December 2006.
At the time, AMISOM was a unique military intervention. Although it deployed under AU command and control, it was dependent on a mix of international partnerships. Six African countries eventually provided the troops and the EU paid their stipends. AMISOM's logistics operation was handled by the UN, the United States and other Western countries provided various training and equipment programmes, with the UN Security Council approving its overall mandate.
Eighteen years on, al-Shabab remains a potent presence in Somalia's south-central countryside. AMISOM found itself hamstrung by inconsistent financing, shortages of equipment, poor coordination, and the complexity of Somalia's domestic politics.
Rather than being on the front foot, it became a garrisoning operation. The Somali armed forces - that were supposed to take over - have remained fragile and externally dependent.
Two years ago, AMISOM was reconfigured as the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia, with an exit date set for the end of 2024. However, with the war stalemated, it is expected to be rehatted in 2025 as the AU Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM).
The clue to its priorities are in the name - "stabilising" the country to provide the federal government the space to expand its legitimacy and challenge al-Shabab's authority. Protection of civilians will also be an explicit function - a step towards addressing AMISOM's worrying rights record, which undermined its support among Somali citizens.
Faster and cheaper
AUSSOM is an African-led peace support operation (PSO) - the latest iteration of a trend in interventions that have become an integral part of the international system's response to security challenges on the continent.
They fill a vacuum created by an ideologically log-jammed and penny-pinching UN Security Council that has fallen out of love with large, multidimensional missions. African governments and regional organisations are not only taking on the responsibilities once assumed by the UN, they are also accepting riskier deployments that the UN's Department of Peace Operations would tend to avoid.
UN missions traditionally deploy with all-party consent, consolidating an existing peace agreement. African PSOs are geared to intervene offensively in ongoing conflicts. These are increasingly more transnational - involving violent extremism and banditry - which can generate monumental levels of violence and humanitarian suffering.
"The UN deploys where there is peace to be kept, African-led PSOs deploy where there is no peace at all," said Andrew Tchie, a senior researcher at NUPI, the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. "[PSOs] demonstrate a more local, context-specific response to insecurity, and the goal of turning to more self-help options."
Yet the shift from UN peace operations towards militarised regional missions and so-called ad hoc coalitions can be worrisome, argues Eugene Chen, a senior fellow with the New York University's Center on International Cooperation.
"In particular, this turn back towards counter-terrorism, peace enforcement, and other types of kinetic operations can actually be counter-productive in resolving conflicts," he told The New Humanitarian. "It can exacerbate grievances and other socio-political and economic risk factors for violence."
There is no one-size-fits-all approach for the form PSOs have taken. They have varied from a few dozen personnel, to the 22,000 troops AMISOM had at its height. Mandates also differ - from hard-edged cross-border counter-insurgency operations, to support for the Ebola health response.
What they do share, however, is a common ability to deploy much faster and more cheaply than UN missions. They also typically work in tandem with the armed forces of the host government.
A patchwork of interventions
African-led PSOs include AU-run missions like AMISOM/AUSSOM. There are also deployments by regional economic communities (RECs), such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) intervention in northern Mozambique in 2021; and ad hoc, task-specific initiatives like the four-country Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) tackling Boko Haram in the Lake Chad region.
These coalition arrangements, in particular, mark a significant shift from institutionalised responses to security challenges - and often come with very little human rights oversight.
Since 2004, the AU has had a framework in place for a continent-wide African Standby Force (ASF). It's designed to be multidisciplinary - combining soldiers, civilians, and police - and coordinated by the five regional economic communities, with each brigade-sized military component capable of rapid deployment.
But it has remained on the shelf and has never actually been used.
Part of the problem is the flawed assumption - made 20 years ago - that underpins it: The AU's Peace and Security Council, the continental organ responsible for the management of conflicts, was expected to initiate deployment of the ASF. But in fact it has been regional organisations that have increasingly asserted their primacy when it comes to security issues.
It was SADC that deployed troops to Mozambique in 2021, and SADC that took over in 2023 from an East African Community force that had struggled to restore stability to the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. AU endorsement of these missions came after the fact.
With each conflict unique, more organic coalitions have increasingly become the norm - tailored to the specific context. Like REC deployments, these are typically short-term missions, aimed at restoring order before handing over to host governments.
"Some fear that ad hoc coalitions are a fragmentation of the international system and contribute to a kind of delegitimisation of the African Union and United Nations," Cedric de Coning, a senior researcher at NUPI, told The New Humanitarian.
"I see ad hocism as the system has become more sophisticated and resilient, able to deal with problems in a greater variety of ways."
Who pays?
Inevitably money is the key issue. The last large AU missions, launched in Mali in 2013 and the Central African Republic in 2014, were quickly passed wholesale to the UN.
The AU's Peace Fund - moribund for years - only recently reached its $400 million target (actually surpassing it by $208 million following a pledge in July by the African Export-Import Bank). But to put that figure in perspective, AMISOM is estimated to have cost $1.2 billion a year.
The funding difficulties the AU has faced have eroded its influence - incentivising the current patchwork of sub-regional operations and coalitions of the willing. They have typically sought external financing to help maintain their troops in the field.
Money tends to go hand in hand with leverage. Rather than an African-owned initiative, the anti-jihadist five nation G5-Sahel force was set up by France and the EU in 2014 as part of the West's broader "war on terror" - and folded nine years later when Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger withdrew in opposition to French policies in the region.
In some cases, the start-up costs for these coalitions are initially borne by the contributing countries - in the MNJTF's case, Nigeria - and international partners are only sought once they have been established, said Tchie.
"Yes, funding is a challenge, but I also see PSOs as an evolution - the result of the inability of the AU to deploy the ASF," he told The New Humanitarian.
A deal is done
For years, the AU has been pushing for a global bargain in which African countries provide the troops, and the UN the money.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres' 2023 policy framework, the New Agenda for Peace, recognised that the UN now plays a supporting rather than a leadership role in peacekeeping. He has long backed the use of assessed contributions - stipends from member states - for AU operations.
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The breakthrough came in December 2023 when the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2719. It caps UN financial contributions at 75% of the annual budget of an AU mission, with the balance raised from other sources.
To qualify for funding, these missions need to comply with UN financial regulations and human rights policies - and be authorised by the Security Council. Only operations led by the AU will be eligible for UN contributions, which excludes RECs and ad hoc coalitions.
But with Donald Trump as the new US president, multilateral arrangements are likely to come under serious scrutiny. "The first Trump administration strongly opposed the use of UN-assessed contributions for African-led PSOs," said Chen. "It's unlikely that they will be supportive of attempts to apply the 2719 framework."
Resolution 2719 is, nevertheless, a recognition of the growing agency of African institutions. But it doesn't give them autonomy over peacekeeping decisions, and it's well short of the "African solutions for African problems" shop-soiled mantra.
"The unintended consequence of 2719 is that we would literally give our agency away to some P3 penholder," noted de Coning. "The AU will have to comply with UN financial regulations, and all those slow and burdensome hurdles that made more nimble PSOs attractive in the first place."
At a more fundamental level, stabilisation missions address the symptoms rather than the causes of insecurity - avoiding exploring the structural issues that can give rise to conflict.
"Militarised efforts in support of a host government against opposition or armed groups can create disincentives for the government to engage in the political dialogue required to resolve the underlying political disagreements," noted Chen.
Somalia offers a lesson. "Focusing on the security sector in Somalia is wrong," said de Coning. "The government and international partners should move to improve governance, improve basic services, improve justice - that's how you defeat al-Shabab, not by military means."
Edited by Andrew Gully.
