Pan-African gender governance: The politics of aspiration at the African Union

Abstract

The African Union (AU) has developed an elaborate gender governance architecture, including gender machineries and women’s desks, policy frameworks, path-breaking women’s rights laws, and ongoing campaigns on women’s rights–related issues. At the same time, the member states’ engagement with this architecture is at best lukewarm, with a lack of domestication, compliance, and accountability. This paradox is addressed in this article by developing the theoretical thinking around aspirational politics (Martha Finnemore and Michelle Jurkovich, ‘The politics of aspiration’, International Studies Quarterly, 64:4 [2020], pp. 759–69) and political brokers (Stacie E. Goddard, ‘Brokering change: Networks and entrepreneurs in international politics’, International Theory, 1:2 [2009], pp. 249–81), showing the social and relational origins of pan-African gender governance. In doing so, the article examines how ‘aspirational politics’ can be operationalized to examine the sociocultural and political production of shared future imaginaries. The paper focuses on AU femocrats as the key actors for AU’s aspirational gender agenda and argues for their importance as political brokers between AU member states, donors, UN agencies, and civil society organisations. By mobilizing actors and facilitating common ground and agreement, their institutionalized broker position allowed for various political entrepreneurs to emerge and thrive. At the same time, their pursuits are met with ‘aspirational fatigue’ or outright contestation by the member states. The case of the AU demonstrates how aspirational politics is not a ‘phase’ leading to norms governance but part and parcel of normative negotiation and engagement.

Video Abstract

Introduction

So many of us believe in the African Union, even though we don’t have [any] reason to do it. It just disappoints us time and time again. But eventually, we are going to have to make the African Union work as a place that sets the standards that we can all uphold. In our own self-interest, really. If we were trying to look for an alternative … where is it?¹

The African Union (AU) has codified its ambitions and aspirations regarding women’s rights and gender equality into an elaborate gender architecture while facing gaps in ratification, compliance, and accountability reporting by its member states.² Due to lack of domestic engagement by member states, the AU is rarely considered a dominant normative actor to advance gender equality on the continent. The fact that member states are disengaged from the gender regime they themselves have signed off on does not mean that it is irrelevant – on the contrary, we should try to understand its reasons and ways of existing. This article explores this tension by developing theoretical thinking around aspirational politics³ and applying it to the case of the AU’s gender architecture. In doing so, the article takes up this emerging IR concept and asks who are the actors in aspirational politics and what do they do. The article identifies the actors that facilitate the AU’s evolving liberal and ambitious gender architecture, regardless of the member states’ disinterest.⁴

The existing literature addresses commitments to a progressive gender agenda through different, and at times intersecting, lenses. The agency of the actors advancing global or international norms on women’s rights is theorized through transnational advocacy networks whereby non-governmental and civil society organizations enter the spaces of international organizations (like the United Nations) and collaborate with like-minded actors to socialize states into normative change.⁵ Similarly, the AU’s adoption of women’s rights legislation has been theorized through regional advocacy networks.⁶ The literature identifies norm entrepreneurs as part of transnational advocacy networks, and as collective or individual actors who strategically work towards normative change.⁷ Conversely, the research investigates why countries commit to human rights treaties and agreements that are likely to limit their powers and institutional freedoms.⁸ The studies show that repressive states may support normative ideas for reasons of self-interest, such as reputation and image management, belonging to the international community, and status-seeking.⁹ This article builds on these insights while pointing to a complex dynamic between pan-African femocrats, state and non-state actors, and United Nations (UN) agencies and development partners.

The question of the AU’s role in advancing human rights on the continent is a complicated one. The AU originates from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which was founded to counter imperialism and neo-colonialism and to support the sovereignty of African states.¹⁰ The AU continues to commit to pan-Africanism and ‘African solutions to African problems’. Yet, with the transformation from the OAU to the AU, the organization adopted liberal good governance norms, centred around human rights, development, and peace and security. The existing literature notes that the AU exercises normative agency¹¹ and informal authority¹² on peace and security issues. According to Viljoen, the implementation of human rights standards in the AU was designed to be weak.¹³ Its premier body, the African Commission for Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), is perpetually underfunded, and the member states fail to report on their commitments. According to a former commissioner, the ACHPR is handicapped by the influence of the member states, and its interventions in human rights violations are regularly ignored.¹⁴ Tieku argues that the member states have not internalized the human rights norms of the AU, which is why these are not ‘integrated into national legislation of member states nor implemented at the level of the state, community and the individual’.¹⁵ Some case studies indicate that member states contest the AU women’s rights more readily and strongly than global frameworks.¹⁶ Not least, the AU is 75 per cent donor-funded, raising questions of ownership and legitimacy. Considering the lack of peer pressure to adhere to the AU’s human rights standards, as well as the material incentives to do so, the IR assumptions about human rights regimes are not explaining the developments inside the AU. In this complex institutional and normative context, what can we learn from analysing the AU’s elaborate, yet somewhat symbolic, gender architecture?

If we consider that the brokers of the gender agenda have successfully set up aspirational goalposts, rather than a norms regime, the paradox of the AU and its gender architecture starts to unravel. Conceptually, ‘aspirations’ allow for imagining radically different, unlikely, futures. A politics of aspiration untangles the intentions behind goal-setting and how the articulation of shared values and identities can eventually lead to social change.¹⁷ Examining the long-winded nature of negotiating meanings in international politics, this article challenges the view that aspirational politics precedes norm-making¹⁸ but sees aspirational political work as part and parcel of normative politics where norms are ‘acknowledged, but not necessarily accepted, understandings of collective ambitions’.¹⁹ Yet for politics of aspiration to have analytical currency, the actors, practices, and spaces which constitute aspirational politics as a dynamic of transnational governance should be identified. This article does so by showing how pan-African femocrats became political brokers of diverse gender equality norms. Femocrats are officials, bureaucrats, and civil servants hired to advance women’s issues internally and externally in an institution. By following their traces of institutionalizing gender equality at the AU, the article examines how they engage in aspirational politics through mobilizing actors and facilitating agreement.²⁰ Seeing their work and achievements as aspirational politics helps to understand the ‘toothlessness’ of the AU gender desks and resistance by its member states. Consequently, the article contributes to constructivist discussions on normative agency in gender politics, theorizing of aspirational politics, and centreing regional governance in IR research.²¹

The article proceeds in five parts and a conclusion. After this introduction, the literature on aspirational politics and political brokerage in international relations is discussed. The third part discusses the methodology of the research, particularly the use of political ethnography. Thereafter, the fourth part explains the AU’s gender architecture. The empirical sections trace the institutionalization of the broker position within the OAU/AU and the translation of cultural and technical knowledge for aspirational policy agreements. The article shows that femocrats mobilize actors and funds but face contestation and ‘aspirational fatigue’ among the member states. The conclusion discusses the article’s contribution to theorizing aspirational politics and its actors.

Theoretical framework

What is the politics of aspiration?

The ‘politics of aspiration’ is theorized by Finnemore and Jurkovich as a novel way to understand the transformative effects of collectively negotiating lofty and difficult-to-reach goals, such as the Paris Agreement or the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and to make sense of their performance gaps.²² Indeed, while political processes are sometimes described as aspirational by diverse scholars,²³ Finnemore and Jurkovich are pioneering in conceptualizing aspiration as part of international politics. In the following sections, I outline Finnemore and Jurkovich’s arguments and relate aspirational politics to the existing literature. I propose that the ‘politics of aspiration’ can be further developed by qualifying the actors involved and examining how shared aspirations are facilitated in practice. Aspirational politics, this article suggests, has the potential to untangle the relational elements of setting international (regional or global) goals.²⁴

Finnemore and Jurkovich’s theoretical project has two explicit objectives: explaining the adoption of lofty and highly ambitious goals by state actors; and making sense of the state actors’ and governance institutions’ failure to achieve such goals beyond IR paradigms of cheap talk, credibility, reputation, points, and norms. Aspirational politics, they argue, can help us in differentiating between implementation gaps and ‘simple incompetence, hypocrisy, and moral failure’.²⁵ They differentiate between norms and aspirations by arguing that, unlike norms, aspirations are not expectations towards specific actors and are vague about who should do what. Furthermore, aspirations are future-oriented and not expected to come into effect today.²⁶ Because aspirations come with different socio-political expectations, the consequence of not performing is nearly non-existent. Violating agreed norms, however, is expected to bear consequences. The authors concede that norms can be aspirational and that aspirations can have normative aims. A major aspect of the politics of aspiration is the element of agreeing on future imaginaries and mobilizing around them. According to Finnemore and Jurkovich, aspirational politics involve the political work of identifying and mobilizing like-minded actors, bringing actors into a dialogue about an issue, and collectively formulating shared goals.

The AU’s gender architecture is therefore an appropriate institutional setting for studying the politics of aspiration. The AU’s authority partly depends on its ability to ‘establish, spread and sustain specific imaginaries of what order should look like’.²⁷ Additionally, aspirational politics relate to the emerging literature of governance by goal-setting, which considers goal-setting to be replacing rules-based governance.²⁸ While highly aspirational, institutionally weak, and difficult to measure, goal-based governance is considered to be less coercive and top-down, and therefore a positive step towards a more dynamic and locally relevant transnational governance.²⁹ Some legal anthropologists suggest that human rights as a whole can be understood as a politics of aspiration. They define politics of aspiration as ‘a form of political action that is grounded in the normative ethics of “yet to come”’.³⁰ Goodale conceptualizes the various political adaptations of human rights principles as moral creativity. Both state and non-state actors adjust the language of rights to match their moral ideologies, integrating human rights into locally relevant political agendas.³¹ Others consider the universality of human rights as inherently unrealistic while acknowledging that to claim they are possible has real-world consequences. The pursuit of universally applicable rights then amounts to ‘transformative utopianism’³² or ‘institutionalized utopianism’.³³ Anthropological discussions on aspiring can help to operationalize ‘politics of aspiration’ and deepen its analytical potential. For instance, Appadurai’s work discusses aspiration as one of the cultural practices which inform a politics of possibility instead of a politics of probability.³⁴ To him, the future is a cultural fact, constructed through imagination, aspiration, and anticipation as collective social practices.³⁵ Goal-setting and aspirational work may thus be transformative even when not achieved or implemented in full or when meanings are reconfigured along the road. Unlike the various norm diffusion theories that focus on the norm life cycle, aspirational politics can provide tools for analysing sustained efforts and the political work of envisioning a better future in a particular field or sector.

Finnemore and Jurkovich highlight that aspirational politics also has considerable shortcomings for social transformation, as the outcomes of this political work are difficult to measure or evaluate. Continuously failing to achieve aspirational goals may lead to aspirational fatigue, whereby actors begin to manipulate the progress made to sustain popular support or reputation rather than regroup and escalate efforts.³⁶ Pointedly, Appadurai links aspiration to the politics of hope, politics of patience, or politics of waiting.³⁷ The politics of hope can stagnate and undermine transformative goals and become a political strategy directed towards those ‘whom the world is unable or unwilling to offer anything else’.³⁸ Regardless, making sense of the intentions and reasons why political actors fall behind and do not prioritize the goals they subscribe to can be complicated. For instance, Htun and Jensenius argue that gender equality legislation is institutionally weak ‘aspirational rights’ because of non-compliance by officials, decision-makers, and wider society.³⁹ As such, the limited progress can be a manifestation of resistance and contestation instead of a lack of capacity or adequate policy.⁴⁰ Not only, as the human rights scholarship notes, because of limited accountability mechanisms, oppressive regimes can performatively indicate shared aspirations without any true intentions for action.⁴¹ Here, however, aspirational fatigue is understood as fading political and normative commitment in the face of competing political priorities and limited or shifting collective buy-in.

Whose aspirations?

So what can aspirational politics help us to understand and analyse? Finnemore and Jurkovich point out that not only does aspirational politics form different and unexplored dynamics of goal-setting, but it is also constituted by particular political work: mobilizing actors and facilitating agreements. Finnemore and Jurkovich propose that aspiration may ‘help political actors broker agreements among diverse or disagreeing parties’,⁴² but they refrain from discussing the political actors further. Building on their argument and considering it through a political anthropology lens, aspirational politics, therefore, carries the potential of exploring (a) who are the actors in aspirational politics; (b) what are their practices; and (c) where do they operate. While the case of the AU offers opportunities for exploring all these directions, the article takes up this line of inquiry by focusing on actors.

Goddard’s notion of political brokers is beyond useful for making sense of high-level and long-standing political processes.⁴³ While human rights norms literature has analysed how normative ideas are translated or vernacularized by intermediaries,⁴⁴ Goddard’s network approach focuses on brokers as strategic actors who occupy structural holes between disconnected political actors. Situated at the intersections of networks, brokers access diverse sets of norms, ideas, symbols, histories, and rhetoric, which they can manipulate for mediation and cultural invention.⁴⁵ Therefore, a broker’s capacity to initiate structural change is not embedded in their individual traits but depends on their position within a network.⁴⁶ They facilitate political entrepreneurship in contexts where ‘norms and rules are disputed, and actors attach different meanings to symbols and events’.⁴⁷ Similarly, for Appadurai, the capacity to aspire is a cultural one and draws from actor’s social resources.⁴⁸

Femocrats, or gender bureaucrats, are uniquely positioned as potential brokers because of their mandate to work on women’s or gender issues in sectoral ministries, councils, commissions, directorates, or other government offices.⁴⁹ According to Tieku, the bureaucrats in AU institutions proactively shape the organizations’ political agenda and institutional practices,⁵⁰ including the low-ranking bureaucratic staff.⁵¹ In the three-dimensional analysis of intergovernmental organizations, bureaucrats are positioned in the supranational layer, connecting and mediating between the intergovernmental and outsider dimensions (see Table 1).⁵²

Table 1. Three dimensions of intergovernmental organizations.

The AU bureaucrats (including femocrats) hold specialized knowledge and rely on formal and informal networks to assert influence within the different organs and institutions.⁵³ Many are educated abroad or in African elite universities and move fluidly between multilateral, donor, government, and non-governmental posts. Consequently, ‘professional feminism’ or ‘gender expertise’ in transnational spaces has become a field of practice, drawing from social movements and state structures.⁵⁴ Femocrats are hired into a ‘challenge position’ within their institution and are expected to deliver institutional transformation in reluctant environments.⁵⁵ While femocrats can broker access and internal insights about advocacy opportunities, gender machineries themselves are usually located at the fringes of the state, underfunded and poorly mandated. Therefore, femocrats benefit from practical and strategic alliances with civil society groups.⁵⁶ Not least, femocrats also function as gatekeepers, and indeed, they are regularly distrusted by the activists in civil society.

Method: Political ethnography

The research methods I used to open up the ‘black box’ of subjectivities, relationships, and situated decision-making in a highly political context are informed by global political ethnography.⁵⁷ Grappling with access, scripted accounts and documents, and ‘scales’ of global governance, political ethnography invites researchers to collect data ‘sporadically’, across sites and by combining methods.⁵⁸ The research was conducted over two-and-a-half years online, in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), and to a limited extent in Pretoria (South Africa). I conducted interpretive document analysis, observations, and semi-structured interviews. The interpretive document analysis⁵⁹ included nine women’s rights–focused frameworks with provisions on gender-based violence (see Table 2). The analysis excluded documents that mentioned women’s (or girls’) rights but had a different focus.

Table 2. A list of documents that frame the AU gender agenda.

I observed and recorded 19 online events between late 2020 and early 2022 organized by the AU and its partners. These observations and ‘lurking’⁶⁰ on Twitter and other social media pages were crucial for identifying pertinent themes, individuals, organizations, and actors. This involved following press releases, Facebook posts, speeches, and statements among other publicly available data. As policy spaces like the AU, the European Union, and even the United Nations are notoriously difficult to obtain formal access to, the online presence proved a useful strategy for immersion. Former OAU/AU femocrat Yetunde Teriba’s autobiography was another excellent resource. The interviewees in Addis Ababa and online included permanent and temporary AU staff, various AU liaison offices, member state representatives, donor and development partners, and staff from various civil society organisations (CSO)s. The analysis focuses on interviews with thirty individuals. The verbatim quotes have been edited for readability and clarity in this article and the interviewees’ institutional affiliations are referenced only when they cannot be traced back to the individual.

The setting: The African Union’s gender governance

The African Union (AU) replaced the OAU (founded in 1963) in 2002 and is an intergovernmental organization currently comprising 55 member states. The AU Commission (AUC) is located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where a majority of member states have official representation. Gender discussions within the AU/OAU go back to the regional conferences between 1977 and 1995, where African common positions for the UN World Conferences on Women were articulated.⁶¹ The OAU’s Women’s Unit was created in 1992 and transformed into the Women, Gender and Development Directorate with the launch of the AU in 2002, when it was also moved to the office of the chairperson.⁶² The majority of AU’s normative frameworks on gender equality were adopted after 2002 (see Table 2 above). Additionally, the new AUC adopted a gender parity principle among the commissioners and deputy-commissioners. The AUC is mandated by the Assembly of Heads of States and the Executive Council, which represents foreign affairs ministries and is responsible for implementing the AU’s policy agenda (see Figure 1). The Women’s Directorate facilitates and coordinates efforts to achieve gender equality as per the policies and decisions adopted by the AU member states.

Source: Author’s own compilation. Note: Specific gender desks are highlighted in grey, their location within the AUC structure is indicated through arrows, and hierarchical positioning based on observations. Further information about the AU structure can be found in the African Union Handbook 2021, available at: {https://au.int/en/handbook}.

Figure 1. Dominant gender equality institutions within the AU gender architecture.

The AU decision-making process is multilevel: a variety of actors may propose agenda items, which must pass the committee of permanent representatives, ambassadors, or alternatively the Specialised Technical Committee (STC). As follows, the proposals are adopted at ministerial meetings before being presented to the heads of state. In STCs, representatives of the relevant sector ministries and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) review proposals and present their country positions.⁶³ Ideally, matters of contestation are ironed out before they reach the ministerial level.⁶⁴ Once approved by the ministers, the final decisions are made by the heads of state. The standard procedure is to seek consensus rather than to vote. As one femocrat revealingly commented: ‘Even if you smuggle something by [past] the ministers, they can still crush it through the heads of states [meeting] once they realise [what you have done].’⁶⁵

The AU gender governance and actors in aspirational politics

Inside actors: Femocrats as agents of change?

The preparatory meetings organized by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the OAU (in 1977, 1970, 1985, 1989, and 1994) ahead of the UN World Conferences on Women generated some early ties between the OAU, UN agencies, and civil organizations. However, in those years of economic crises and postcolonial disappointment, the political elites and activists in Africa held diverse views on the role of culture, the private sphere, and marriage as well as discrimination and violence against women. The networks and coalitions on women’s issues were highly disjointed and the primary space for transnational gender discourse was the UN. The following sections examine how the establishment of the Women’s Unit at the OAU in 1992 initiated a shift, in the sense that the OAU/AU became a space where a pan-African gender agenda could be negotiated. By following the institutionalization of the gender agenda, the sections identify femocrats as the actors who brokered a highly aspirational agenda on women’s rights and facilitated the political entrepreneurship of other actors in the network.

The idea of a Women’s Unit at the OAU was first promoted by the First Ladies of Egypt and Nigeria, Susan Mubarak and Maryam Babangida, with the view of coordinating African countries’ participation at the 4th UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. While the heads of state gave the green light, funding for the unit came from the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). The Women’s Unit was launched in 1992 within the Labour and Social Affairs Division. Creating bureaucracies in political institutions had become a global trend that was articulated by UN resolutions on women’s rights.⁶⁶ African countries oversaw the establishment of 51 gender machineries between 1975 and 1985.⁶⁷ The role of gender bureaucracies was developing policies, strategies, and action plans and creating accountability within institutions, while they remained underfunded, understaffed, and undermandated.⁶⁸ They were:

sometimes set up to fail, especially when mired in an ongoing struggle for minimal authority and budgets, with organisational leaders and donors claiming that influence requires strategic thinking and practice rather than resources.⁶⁹

At the OAU, the Women’s Unit was expected to act as a public relations office, marketing and communicating African participation in Beijing.⁷⁰ Hirut Befekadu, the first director, was transferred from the information and communications division and was assisted by Yetunde Teriba, an experienced administrator with no expertise in women’s rights. The office was supported by UN-funded consultant Ambassador Fama Joka Bangura from Sierra Leone. As such, the first years in the office were about learning the job and proving oneself and the office as a reliable and committed actor, whilst sensitizing the AUC staff and permanent representatives of the member states regarding ‘women’s issues’.⁷¹

From early on, the aspirational gender agenda promoted at the pan-African level was shaped by the networks of actors around the Women’s Unit. The establishment of the African Women’s Committee for Peace and Development (AWCPD) and the drafting of the Protocol to the African Charter on the Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women (the Maputo Protocol) are examples of aspirational politics through which actor constellations can be examined. After the end of the Cold War and in the context of multiple conflicts on the continent, diverse women took up advocating for women’s participation and representation in peace processes.⁷² At a regional level, the Ugandan government, OAU, and UNECA co-hosted a Regional Conference on Women, Peace and Development in 1993. The outcome was a recommendation to establish the AWCPD. Affirmed by the 1994 regional conference in Senegal and the Women Leadership Forum on Peace in Johannesburg in 1996, AWCPD officially launched in 1997. This was the first time women’s organizations had formalized, albeit limited, access to the OAU.⁷³ The AWCPD included six nominated individuals, five country representatives, and five women’s NGO representatives. It was an advisory body working closely with the OAU Women’s Unit. Consequently, it increased the Women’s Unit’s mandate of promoting the inclusion of women in the OAU, in member state policies, and in peace-building initiatives.⁷⁴ The committee involved an OAU focal point from the unit and UN agencies who provided expertise and most of the funding.⁷⁵ The member states did not approve funding for the AWCPD, and its secretariat was located in UNECA rather than at the OAU. Yet its association with the OAU brought the Women’s Unit to the centre of the emerging pan-African policy networks.

The establishment of AWCPD and its connection to the Women’s Unit facilitated the emergence of a new network actor and a normative entrepreneur, the founder of Femmes Africa Solidarité (FAS) Bineta Diop. Alongside the AUC femocrats, Diop facilitated the institutionalization of the OAU/AU gender agenda and brought specific CSOs and donors to the pan-African organization. To an officer at the Women’s Unit, ‘the story of the development of the OAU/AU gender programme can never be told without looking at its relationship with FAS’.⁷⁶ While Diop’s primary focus was always on women in peace processes, and from the late 1990s the women, peace, and security agenda (WPS), she and FAS worked closely with the AWCPD and the Women’s Unit to campaign for the adoption of gender mainstreaming in the new AU Constitutive Act of 2002.⁷⁷ They succeeded in that, and in achieving the adoption of the gender parity principle among the AUC commissioners. What is less well known is that a coalition of the Women’s Unit, FAS, and other allies pushed for the creation of a position of Women’s Commissioner at the reformed AU.⁷⁸ They recruited a champion for the cause, the Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade.⁷⁹ The proposal for a Women’s Affairs Commissioner was supported by South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki but faced strong opposition among the member states and was eventually voted down. Instead, the Women’s Unit attained considerable independence when it became the Women, Gender and Development Directorate at the Office of the Chairperson. Diop provides an example of how the emergence of brokers, like the femocrats at the Women’s Unit, within fragmented and contradictory networks enables the entrepreneurial behaviour of other actors. Not least, in 2014 the AUC Chairperson appointed Diop as the Special Envoy of Women, Peace and Security, making her advocacy part of the AUC institutional structures.

The Maputo Protocol provides another example of how networks form around certain aspirational agendas and are brokered by actors who straddle the institutional context and activist policy agenda.⁸⁰ The interviewees agreed that the purpose of the Protocol was to address the shortcomings of the African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights and to create a legitimate, explicitly African, and contextually appropriate women’s rights framework.⁸¹ The idea gained traction at the 1995 meeting between the ACHPR and NGOs. Subsequently, the ACHPR submitted a draft protocol on women’s rights to the OAU.⁸² In parallel, the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children (henceforth IAC) was working closely with the OAU Women’s Unit on developing a Convention on Harmful Traditional Practices. The OAU Secretariat asked for the documents to be combined.⁸³ Similarly to AWCPD, the IAC benefited from a close relationship with OAU and UNECA and became located in the UNECA compound in Addis Ababa. IAC became an observer at the OAU and built a strong relationship with the Women’s Unit:

And Mrs Teriba was one of the very active person[s], who we were working [with] to bring all of our ideas together: to write, to review, to correct and to submit [them] to the governments, to negotiate everything. But all of this was under the umbrella of this Directorate of the AU.⁸⁴

The Women’s Unit and IAC jointly organized high-level sensitization programmes over the years, addressing female genital mutilation (FGM) and more.⁸⁵ The alliance between IAC and the OAU Women’s Unit combined expertise, transnational ties, locally embedded knowledge, and shared identities around women’s rights. Indeed, they had established shared aspirations to work towards.

The African Women’s Development and Communication Network (known as FEMNET) got involved in the Maputo Protocol drafting in 2000 after UNIFEM (now UN Women) sponsored their presence at an OAU meeting in Addis Ababa. FEMNET ended up sharing the protocol draft with its networks, which demanded a more inclusive process.⁸⁶ When organizations such as FEMNET, Equality Now, and Akina Mama wa Afrika, among others, entered the picture, their demands for a ‘stronger’ document were initially resisted by the initiators, who worried about losing the momentum and the gains made so far. A pioneer feminist communication network in Africa since 1988, FEMNET was up to the task of getting involved:

It seemed like it was not open to women. Basically, anticipation was that the civil society who were part of that process would consult [or] organise consultations with other women outside their respective organisations. And broaden the [discourse], so that women can [provide] input. That was clearly not happening at the time.⁸⁷

The CSOs ended up going above the Women’s Unit to an engaged Algerian diplomat Said Djinnit from AU Political Affairs Division:

We explained to him [that] this is our concern, and that African Union will bring embarrassment to the continent if you pass this [protocol] like this.⁸⁸

The draft was reopened for negotiation in 2003, and women’s organizations mobilized to give comments and propose amendments.⁸⁹ Equality Now and FEMNET convened the permanent representatives to the AU and provided them with leaflets and booklets explaining the choice of wording and how relevant articles appear in global agreements. Here, transnational CSO networks mobilized as ‘knowledge brokers’ for international human rights into pan-African realities.⁹⁰ In 2003, the AU adoption of the Maputo Protocol was a landmark moment for a pan-African approach to women’s rights. This protocol is a legally binding international treaty addressing controversial issues such as FGM, abortion, economic rights, polygamy, and rights in marriage, which are rarely found in other women’s rights treaties. With 30 per cent of the member states adopting the protocol between 2003 and 2005,⁹¹ it is currently ratified by 43 states (78 per cent of the member states).

Now, how do these empirical cases help better understand the actors that drive aspirational politics? It is worthwhile starting with why we should consider the development of the gender agenda within the OAU and AU as aspirational politics. The aspirational nature of the norms on eliminating discrimination and violence against women is embedded in their ‘depiction of a reality with a different set of social norms and practices. Such rights are goal posts, stakes in future developments, and guides to the process of social change.’⁹² The establishment of AWCPD for one was an expression of a shared vision in which women’s participation in peace processes was desirable, but pathways to achieve that were unclear. The AWCPD, as a symbol of this shared future imagination, created opportunities for dialogue, cooperation, and indeed norm entrepreneurship. Yet while the position of the Special Envoy on WPS is now institutionalized, the political work of Diop still very much involves mobilizing actors around the WPS agenda. The Maputo Protocol challenges the argument that aspirational work graduates to more binding norms once institutionalized.⁹³ It is a legally binding normative framework, yet there is no evidence that violating the Maputo Protocol has consequences for AU institutions, CSOs, or the member states. The protocol has attracted more reservations in Africa than the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and it is scarcely used for litigation.⁹⁴ Rather, it symbolizes a moment in which African states signed off on a shared future vision of pursuing gender equality in Africa – something yet to come. The protocol thereby embodies an imagination of African states that can provide adequate healthcare, housing, social protection, and access to justice and transform social norms, which indeed would enable the protection of women. The case of the Maputo Protocol also demonstrates the crossover between political entrepreneurs and brokers and shows how expertise and symbolic resources can form a basis for shared aspirations, which the new network actors could elevate by drawing on international human rights standards and feminist strategies.

Looking at the actors who mobilize for and facilitate agreement around shared aspirations, we can identify a few: there are activists, norms entrepreneurs, donors and funders, reluctant member states, performative champions, and of course the AUC bureaucrats and femocrats. Indeed, the actors of aspirational politics are not radically different from those in transnational advocacy networks who socialize and internalize global norms in national settings.⁹⁵ However, considering aspirational politics as a sustained normative effort and political work centres the ‘middlemen’ of shared future visions. The above examples show that the OAU/AU femocrats became brokers of knowledge, information, institutional access, and symbolic capital.⁹⁶ The formation of the Women’s Unit created a focal point through which activists, norm entrepreneurs, donors, and member state representatives could be connected into a network of stakeholders for the future of women’s rights in Africa. Interestingly, and as the literature affirms, ‘co-operative constellations’⁹⁷ or ‘strategic partnerships’⁹⁸ between femocrats and activist and civil society allies emerged out of need above all.⁹⁹ The femocrats relied on donors and women’s organizations for funding, knowledge, and technical expertise because the member states were reluctant to provide those things. Civil society and UN agencies were interested in advancing women’s rights at a pan-African level and needed access to OAU/AU. The member states, however, were perhaps the most disconnected actors within the network. The role of brokers in aspirational politics is to capitalize on the fragmentation:

in fragmented networks, actors face friction, contradictions between different sets of social relations, institutions, and discursive elements. This friction creates room for strategic action, and even the invention of new ideas.¹⁰⁰

As such, the development of the gender agenda at the OAU/AU has been heavily relational and negotiated through leveraging human relationships, partnerships, and allegiances.

Outside actors: Brokering knowledge, culture and agreements

The brokers are central to aspirational politics because of their ability to mobilize diverse ideas, norms, and sociocultural resources strategically. Their position within a network depends on their ability to galvanize relations with other actors towards a shared purpose. The social embeddedness of this position and reliance on mobilizing rhetoric, histories, and other symbolic resources relate to Appadurai’s anthropological perspective on aspiration as a cultural practice.¹⁰¹ Therefore, the capacity to aspire ‘takes its force within local systems of value, meaning, communication and dissent’, embedded in ‘language, social values, histories and institutional norms’.¹⁰² This aligns with Finnemore and Jurkovich’s argument that the value of aspirational politics is primarily in mobilizing actors and facilitating agreement.¹⁰³ Since the brokers in general, and OAU/AU femocrats in particular, depend on their networks for both their position and their success in facilitating change, their partnerships and alliances are explored further in the sections below.

Returning to one of the network actors from above, it is worth considering how the Maputo Protocol became possible and adopted by the heads of state. The IAC was led by Berhane Ras-Work and Morissanda Kouyate, both trained by the World Health Organization in Geneva to advocate for the elimination of female circumcision/genital mutilation.¹⁰⁴ This objective was central to IAC’s work, later expanding to harmful tradition-based practices:

But what kind of things will attract the community? The most important thing for communities is their health. So we said, okay, now, let’s link health to harmful traditional practices … affecting the health of women and children. So that was very, very, easy to sell to the population, to the leaders.¹⁰⁵

The IAC translated the notion that some sociocultural practices harm the integrity of women into a discourse of health that resonates differently than ‘women’s rights’, ‘gender equality’, or ‘patriarchy’. In the 1990s, the OAU Women’s Unit and IAC collaborated to sensitize and inform the member states regarding the negative effects of FGM. OAU femocrats communicated the eradication of FGM as an OAU policy in presentations, and various high-level events were organized by the Women’s Unit and IAC.¹⁰⁶ This work bore fruit, considering that the first drafts of the Maputo Protocol focused explicitly on harmful traditional practices. ‘Cultural’ brokering was implied among interviewees who participated in the Maputo Protocol negotiations, especially regarding polygamy.¹⁰⁷ Furthermore, the Catholic lobby was strongly advocating against abortion rights, and religious and traditional views were used to debate inheritance rights. That said, ‘harmful traditional practices’ like FGM and child marriage were not vehemently contested:

You couldn’t defend child marriage, although some did. There were ambassadors, in Addis, who themselves had married young children, and they were sitting there talking about this protocol. But they, on the whole, had been neutralised.¹⁰⁸

These normative contestations set the stage for aspirational politics to come. Ending FGM and child marriage, alongside the WPS agenda, have become central goals within a larger aspirational agenda of gender equality towards which the AUC femocrats strategically mobilize actors. Indeed, the fact that African political leaders largely agree on the elimination of FGM, child marriage, and the inclusion of women in peace negotiations means that strategic activities, such as events, conferences, and campaigns, can be used for more general discussions about gender equality.

While organizations like IAC and FAS have been allies of the Women’s Unit from early on, the Maputo Protocol alongside general shifts towards a good governance discourse at the AU signalled a need for integration and inclusion of civil society actors. AUC femocrats, FAS, and the African Center for Democracy and Human Rights combined efforts between 2002 and 2005 to create a civil society platform for gender issues. The outcome was the Gender Is My Agenda Campaign (GIMAC), which today has 55 members. Its offices are located at FAS Secretariat, housed by UNECA.¹⁰⁹ GIMAC holds biannual pre-summit events ahead of the AU Assembly, coordinated with the Women’s Directorate and UN partners. The Women’s Directorate reaches out to GIMAC with policy drafts for CSO consultations and participates in its events. Whether these result in any amendments to the document is unknown among the GIMAC members.¹¹⁰ Smaller organizations also struggle to meet the requirements of GIMAC membership, not to mention observer status at the AU.¹¹¹ Notably, the gender machineries’ and CSO relationships are not always collaborative but are often riddled with tensions over resources and mandates:¹¹²

we were able to access that space [GIMAC] because we were collaborating on a project with Oxfam. And Oxfam has access to that space. When we went there we actually were part of one of the panels at the GIMAC [meeting]. And that’s the only time [we had access].¹¹³

In that sense, political brokers function as gatekeepers, and not everyone can participate in negotiating shared aspirations.¹¹⁴ The OAU/AU femocrats also secured their strategic broker position by facilitating dialogue and agreements. Event observations indicate that the same representatives of international and pan-African organizations are more likely to be given a platform than smaller national organizations. The speakers tend to be chosen based on existing relationships, availability, and good public-speaking skills.¹¹⁵ The femocrats in the AUC, therefore, hold considerable power regarding which ideas will find an audience in the organization:¹¹⁶

I know, to be able to access some of the [formal] meetings, you need to have a rapport with the organiser. So normally, it’s, you know, trying [to] kind of get your foot in that door.¹¹⁷

Events are at the heart of the femocrats’ mobilizing strategy. Issue-focused events are a common way of facilitating agreement within the organization, and identifying common ground through events can provide a low-level aspirational agreement and move the conversation forward.¹¹⁸ Regardless of reinforcing power asymmetries through access and visibility, events can spark new social processes and therefore be generative.¹¹⁹ The role of the brokers in exerting agency over which actors are included and platformed in spaces of normative negotiation and aspirational goal-setting is therefore an important one.

The AU Women’s Directorate also relies on its partnerships with donors and UN agencies. The UN needs the AU to legitimize its presence and work on gender on the continent, and the AU needs funding and technical assistance to function.¹²⁰ The alliance between the AU and the UN agencies was central to the founding of the Women’s Unit in 1992, as the member states expected the budget for the unit’s activities and any additional staff to be funded by the UN agencies.¹²¹ Some institutions, like Bineta Diop’s office on WPS, have been particularly resourceful in collaborating with donors to ensure enough staff at her office.¹²² This has created a dynamic whereby AU femocrats’ and UN agencies’ aspirations around gender equality are more likely to align than those of the Women’s Directorate and the member states. The member states, who refuse to foot the bill for the activities they have approved, cite donor involvement as an imposition and interference with AU policies.¹²³ The AU Gender Policy, adopted in 2009, is a good example. It was initiated concurrently with the Maputo Protocol negotiations in the early 2000s and was met with fierce opposition on the grounds of disrupting the lives of African families.¹²⁴ When finally approved, the Women’s Directorate and UNIFEM were working side by side in developing the policy text:

The director who was at the time leading this had been really engaging. I would say, [she] really relied a lot on UN Women and [UN]ECA. We have that tripartite even to the extent that we are approaching the donors together.¹²⁵

As Döring et al. have pointed out, the UN and the AU are ‘institutions with entangled histories and overlapping groups of actors’, and their institutional practices are as much intertwined as they are comparable.¹²⁶

On the other hand, development partners (both bilateral and multilateral) admit that their access to AU offices is sporadic, and getting meetings can take months.¹²⁷ The liaison officers lamented the lack of access and diverging delivery timelines. One admitted that she was treated with disdain until relationships were formed during common missions abroad. Others suggested that it helps to appoint a member state national, rather than a Westerner, to work with the AU. Limited access is explained differently by actors. While donors and partners see limited access as protectionism and an ownership issue, the CSOs see it more as elitism. The interviews, however, clearly indicated limited human resources and a need to demonstrate loyalty and service to member states through impartiality as primary reasons.

A case in point is the Spotlight Initiative launched by the EU and the UN in 2017 as the largest global effort to eliminate violence against women. After lengthy talks, the AU become a regional partner in 2019. The AU is the regional lead, but the programme is primarily implemented by UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF and UN Women, focusing on child marriage and FGM. Here, the AU’s role is that of an ‘interlocutor’, or a broker, whose buy-in legitimizes the programme in Africa.¹²⁸ Two UN employees working on this initiative have long-term experiences with the AU as seconded staff or heading a liaison office.¹²⁹ With the understaffed AU gender offices, the partners prefer employees who have a robust understanding of the AUC’s internal workings and can mobilize existing networks. ‘At the AU, relationships, the networks you have, play a great role’, one of the initiative staffers said.¹³⁰

The diverse networks centred around the AU femocrats ultimately have produced campaigns on ending child marriage, eliminating FGM, reducing maternal mortality, and recently a campaign to popularize the AU Strategy on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment.¹³¹ The Child Marriage Campaign includes a technical working group comprising UN agencies, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), and relevant AU divisions. Adjacent to the campaign, the Human Rights Centre at the University of Pretoria and the Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child drafted a Joint General Comment on Ending Child Marriage, funded largely by INGO Plan International.¹³² The AU femocrats’ networks generated another political entrepreneur, Dr Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda. A pioneer in the UN and INGO sector and a participant in the Maputo Protocol negotiations, she is the AU’s Goodwill Ambassador on Ending Child Marriage. The networks also recruit ‘continental champions’ from member states, whereby Zambia stands for eliminating child marriage and Burkina Faso for eliminating FGM. By drawing from diverse symbolic resources, the AU femocrats then legitimize the shared aspirations of the AUC and its partners by putting an ‘African stamp’ on the gender agenda through policies, legal frameworks, campaigns, and high-level meetings. Yet the AU member states are possibly the most reluctant participants in the pan-African gender network.

Member states and aspirational fatigue

The AUC is not always considered a ‘representative body’ but more like another actor to negotiate with.¹³³

An AU researcher Tieku too observed that the AUC is sometimes like a ‘tail wagging a dog’.¹³⁴ AUC femocrats bring the member states in for deliberations, advocacy, sensitizing, and capacity-building events, which are largely produced by the actors discussed above. As the ultimate decision-makers and implementers, however, the member states require further attention. The following sections examine the contestations and ‘aspirational fatigue’ towards the pan-African gender agenda promoted by AUC femocrats and their networks and show that there are multiple reasons why facilitating agreement or mobilizing actors are long-winded and taxing processes.

According to Tieku, the AUC bureaucrats are expected to transcend regional rivalries and political rifts, making the Secretariat somewhat independent from the member states.¹³⁵ In parallel, accentuating the member states’ agency might be necessary to legitimize AU policies.¹³⁶ The national experts and ministers meet annually in sectoral Specialised Technical Committees (STCs). First, the national government experts review agenda items and provide feedback. They then brief their ministers, who have the decision-making power at STCs. The heads of state at the General Assembly have the final word on whether the AU adopts proposals under discussion. The STCs are then a formal space for normative contestation. A case to consider is the debate at the 2020 STCs, where several member states disagreed with the language of ‘sexual rights’ in the continental Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Strategy (henceforth the Gender Strategy) and the need for the African convention on violence against women.

The Gender Strategy was a joint programme with Canada, the United States, Australia, and Sweden aimed at replacing the Gender Policy of 2009. The strategy became contested in 2018. In 2020, the member state experts decried the sections on sexual and reproductive rights and disagreed on the French and Arabic translations.¹³⁷ That surprised donors, as the principles in question had already been adopted in previous AU documents. The AU Women’s Directorate reminded the member states exactly of this point, at which point they were accused of pushing their own agenda. Indeed, many country representatives have no expertise in gender and are advisors on a range of issues at their Foreign Affairs Ministries.¹³⁸ One interviewee even suggested that the former director of the Women’s Directorate nearly got fired for tabling a Strategy which the member states perceived to include LGBTQIA+ rights.¹³⁹ While the Gender Strategy was not adopted by the end of 2020, the AUC femocrats confirmed to funders that the Directorate’s work will be guided by it regardless.¹⁴⁰ A UN femocrat commented:

Sometimes I feel like the AU is a reflection of the member states … when we are not addressing issues at the member states level, why would we want them to be addressed [in a] highly political organisation or policy process context?¹⁴¹

As such, the AUC femocrats are like ‘missionaries’ who continue to ‘convert’ their colleagues and the member states regarding the diverse elements of the gender equality agenda.¹⁴² Some member states resent the polarizing discussions created by these progressive ideas.¹⁴³ Indeed, ‘sexual rights’ that could imply the protection of gender nonconforming groups were pointed out as one of the only ‘no go’ issues when working with the AU. The LGBTQIA+ rights have been a cause of contestation between the member states and the ACHPR, leading to the revocation of the Coalition of African Lesbians’ observer status at the latter.¹⁴⁴ This type of conservative ‘backsliding’ is not unique to the AU.¹⁴⁵ Concepts like ‘gender’ or ‘equality’ (as opposed to equity) have been contested at the UN level since the early 1990s.¹⁴⁶ The increasing conservative mobilization has led to five-year reviews of the Beijing Platform of Action (1995), rather than a new policy framework, as feminist actors are afraid to lose the gains made. Abrahamsen proposes that nativist pan-African thought can be vulnerable to conservative neo-traditionalism which rejects cosmopolitan identities.¹⁴⁷ International civil servants and femocrats would fit the brief. Indeed, queer identities are often cited as ‘un-African’ regardless of historical evidence to the contrary.¹⁴⁸ Additionally, African states hold varying positions on the issue and the contestations are not universal.

The issue of the African convention on violence against women is different from that of LGBTQIA+ rights. Member states question the femocrats’ appetite for new initiatives and frameworks. One of the main opponents to the convention was Egypt, whose delegation argued that the focus should be on the implementation of existing frameworks.¹⁴⁹ Notably, Egypt itself is one of the three AU member states that has not signed the Maputo Protocol. Yet the sufficiency of existing frameworks vis-a-vis the lack of implementation was also noted by both UN agencies and CSOs. The development partners know that the aspirations of the AU are at odds with the socio-political realities in the member states.¹⁵⁰ Htun and Jensensius argue that laws are aspirational not because of their lack of implementation, or guidance to do so, but their distance from the sociocultural realities of the target audience.¹⁵¹

Observing the AU public meetings, funding regularly comes up as a source of ‘fatigue’ among actors. For instance, the Office of the Special Envoy on WPS advocacy has led the AU member states to adopt national action plans on women, peace, and security. Yet the Office admits to a huge implementation gap and little influence on transforming the national action plans into action.¹⁵² As Madame Diop pointed out:

The AU is not a financing mechanism, who[ever] tells you that I will fund you is not right. What we do is policy and accountability! That’s what we know!¹⁵³

The donors’ strong rhetorical support for women, peace, and security is not matched with financing either, meaning that funding is the responsibility of state governments.¹⁵⁴ There is a stark difference between access to funding and the expertise the UN agencies can provide and what the member states can expect from the AU. Most African countries have strong UN country programmes on diverse issues, including women’s rights, and access to seconded staff by the UN and donors. The AU cannot offer that, but rather, is on the receiving end itself. This makes the role of the AU’s gender governance largely symbolic.

While STCs, ministerial meetings, and the ACHPR are useful for ‘moving the normative space’ and doing the sociocultural work of engendering shared understandings about gender issues, they lack more tangible results.¹⁵⁵ According to the former junior staff at the AUC, the general public in the member states is largely unaware of the AU’s gender agenda.¹⁵⁶ The activities of the Women’s Directorate are perceived to not entail follow-ups, and their primary role is to facilitate conversations. The networks centred around the AUC gender agenda are producing shadow reports and accountability mechanisms and recently launched the Maputo Protocol Scorecard and Index.¹⁵⁷ Yet the member states regularly ignore their reporting duties. Additionally, research on the UN human rights system has shown that indicators and benchmarking have only marginal effects on closing the ‘compliance gap’.¹⁵⁸ Instead, the states use them for signalling engagement or acknowledging shared aspirations. What is clear is that the political work of constructing shared aspirations is non-linear and involves disagreement, debate, and institutional constraints.

Conclusion

The analysis of the AU gender architecture affirms that regardless of the dysfunctionalities and pathologies that undermine international organizations, they hold power and influence by creating actors and becoming agents in their own right.¹⁵⁹ This article has made two contributions to the theoretical and empirical analysis of transnational governance structures. First, the article applied a recently developed theoretical concept in a particular political context and demonstrated how aspirational politics can be operationalized by studying the mobilization of actors and how agreements on shared aspirations are achieved in governance contexts.¹⁶⁰ Secondly, the article developed conceptual thinking around aspirational politics by focusing on the actors central to facilitating shared aspirations. By focusing on the AU femocrats as ‘brokers’, the article has shown how they connected networks, mobilized actors, and built common ground that led to the establishment of different building blocks of the AU’s gender architecture. In doing so, the article has affirmed the agency of both femocrats and their networks in regional gender governance.

The empirical case presented in this article shows that aspirational politics can offer more analytical insight when understood as part of normative governance, not as an alternative to it. Somewhat diverging from Finnemore and Jurkovich’s original contribution, the article has argued that ‘aspirational politics’ can help us unpack the continuous political work that goes into creating, enabling, and sustaining shared aspirations around a possible and desirable future. This political work can be analysed through the examination of actors, practices, and spaces which facilitate the creation of shared aspirations. When this article focused primarily on actors as they ‘facilitate agreement’ and ‘mobilize actors’, it shows how they engage in concrete practices and the everyday political work of information sharing, capacity building, training, organizing events, putting together campaigns, creating thematic coalitions or networks, and others. As several IR scholars have pointed out, these political practices of future-making require further interrogation and analysis.¹⁶¹ Through this political work, femocrats broker normative ideas, resources, and information for political objectives. The case of the AU shows that while norms on eliminating child marriage or FGM have been crystallized into legal frameworks, the aspirational politics continue through campaigning, events, and producing new policy texts. Additionally, while the AUC is central to agreeing on shared aspirations, much of the political work takes place beyond its walls, particularly in the ACHPR and the UN agencies. A further examination of the institutional spaces where aspirational politics take place will clarify the concepts’ analytical aims.

That said, a focus on brokered networks as the driving force behind aspirational politics allows us to think about transnational governance differently, highlighting the work of ‘secondary characters’ rather than high-level or grassroots heroes and complicating the artificial dichotomy of successes and failures. A relational approach to global and regional governance networks can help to better understand the ‘the social origins of interests and preferences’.¹⁶² The article has demonstrated that the networks among the AU femocrats, their civil society allies, and donors have rallied on numerous occasions to bring the reluctant member states into the fold. The femocrats’ relationship with member states is somewhat characterized by ‘aspirational fatigue’ regarding the continuous expansion of the gender equality agenda. Even governments sympathetic to women’s rights struggle to live up to the expectations of the ambitions put forth by the pan-African gender networks and face contestation at home. Aspirational politics should therefore not be interpreted as a social movement within governance structures; rather, it is a political struggle over the future. As such, the conceptual development of ‘aspirational politics’ holds the potential to examine the sociocultural and political production of the future in transnational governance structures.