When is More More? The Effects of Norm Collisions and Institutional Competition on Democracy Protection in Africa

Conventional wisdom has it that less is more. However, in an era of multilevel governance, the opposite might be true: The more actors at different layers of governance are dedicated to the pursuit of collective goods such as democracy and the rule of law, the more effective their concerted efforts might be. Alternatively, however, one might assume that the involvement of different actors with diverging political preferences and ideological baggage might produce norm collisions, institutional rivalries, forum shopping, etc. and thereby ultimately undermine efforts to promote the common good. This answer to this question is obviously an empirical rather than a theoretical one. Since the debate about the effects of multilevel governance and global legal pluralism still lacks a solid empirical foundation, this contribution seeks to add to the systematic study of norm collisions in global governance by adducing empirical evidence from Africa. Here, democracy promotion and protection have become a crowded field, involving actors from the global, regional, sub-regional, and local levels. Naturally, their preferences and normative frameworks do not always converge: In Burundi, for instance, the African Union threatened a military intervention based on Art. 4(h) of its Constitutive Act to enforce constitutional governance, whereas other actors remained hesitant to take a step which would have violated Art. 2(4) of the UN Charter. In The Gambia by contrast, actors from all levels of governance had much less qualms to violate ius cogens and commended ECOWAS, a sub-regional organization, for its illegal threat of military intervention to enforce the results of the 2016 Gambian elections. This contribution seeks to identify the scope conditions under which multilevel approaches to protecting democracy in Africa have the desired effect, and under which they fail, and also discuss the impact of such norm collisions and potentially ensuing institutional competition on the progressive development of international law.