How African Regional Interventions are Perceived on the Ground: Contestation and Multiplexity

Abstract

Although African regional interventions have tangible effects on politics and order in African states, we know little about how people living in the countries concerned experience and evaluate these interventions. The assumption in the literature is that African interventions are generally perceived as legitimate due to the interveners’ cultural proximity to the contexts of intervention. Based on interview and focus group research, we present firsthand and systematically generated empirical data on local perceptions of AU and ECOWAS interventions in two African states: Burkina Faso (2014/15) and The Gambia (2016/17). Contrary to the assumption in the literature, we demonstrate that (1) AU and ECOWAS interventions are locally more contested than often assumed, but that (2) local perceptions are at the same time multiplex. In both countries, we find (3) a marked difference between elite perceptions on the one hand and those of ‘everyday citizens’ on the other, which reflects variegated experiences with and exposures to the regional interventions resulting from different social, political, and spatial positionalities. These findings extend existing research on local perceptions of interventions by a perspective on non-Western interveners; and they have important implications for understanding both the legitimacy and effectiveness of African regional interventions.