Local perceptions of regional interventions: AU and ECOWAS in Burkina Faso and The Gambia

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African regional organizations such as the African Union (AU) or the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) increasingly intervene within member states in order to resolve conflicts and enforce regional political norms. In this way, they decisively shape the political order in African states and thus the conditions under which many Africans live today. With the so-called ‘local turn’, peacebuilding and intervention research has emphasized the relevance of understanding local perceptions of international interventions. Yet so far this literature has largely ignored those interventions conducted by African regional organizations.The proposed research project aims at establishing a new analytical perspective for studying African regional interventions by scrutinizing their local perceptions. Drawing on two case studies, the project analyses how people living in societies affected by African regional interventions understand, interpret, and evaluate the general aims, concrete implementation and outcomes of these interventions, as well as what kind of general knowledge and expectations people have about the organization(s) responsible. Answers to these questions will generate new knowledge on the effectiveness and legitimacy of African regional interventions where they are supposed to matter, which is of relevance both academically as well as for practitioners. The project extends the current state of the art in three respects. Conceptually, it breaks with the hitherto dominant top-down perspective on African regional organizations and their intervention policies by investigating their local, societal perceptions and experiences. Empirically, the project focuses on African interveners and thus extends the existing literature on local perceptions of interventions by adding a perspective on non-Western, regional interveners. Methodologically, the project links a political science research question with ethnographically inspired multi-sited fieldwork. In this regard, especially the planned cooperative field research as well as the joint publication of research outputs with junior Burkinabe/Gambian academics is innovative.