Regime Complexity Seen from Below: Reconstructing Media Discourses on AU/ECOWAS Interventions in Burkina Faso and The Gambia

The evolution of an African regional security architecture has become an important subject of academic inquiry. Scholars usually describe this process and its effects with terms such as regime complexity, overlapping spheres of authority and the prominent ‘spaghetti bowl’, stressing the simultaneous and overlapping emergence of different yet similarly mandated regional organizations. But how does this complexity look like from below, ie from the perspectives of societies in which the effects of this complex regional security structure materialize and shape politics and order on a daily basis? Despite African regional organizations’ stated aim to be ‘people-centered’ organizations and to provide security and order based on local ownership and participation, this societal and perceptional dimension of African regional governance has hitherto received scant academic attention. Against this background, this paper reconstructs media discourses on regional interventions in response to political crises in Burkina Faso (2014-2015) and The Gambia (2016-2017) which were led by the African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The two selected interventions were based on the organizations’ normative frameworks against unconstitutional changes of government, which reflects the growing authority of African regional organizations over the internal governance of its member states as well as overlapping and potentially conflicting mandates between them. For each country, we analyzed newspaper articles from three different media outlets and reconstructed how both the concrete intervention as well as the responsible organizations were discussed and evaluated. Contrary to the portrayal in the existing literature, which highlights the ’proximity’ of regional organizations as important characteristic, both cases reveal that regional interventions were nevertheless perceived as a top-down imposition by external actors. Our results thus illustrate the local and societal challenges to regional organizations’ claims to authority as well as the disconnects between regional governance and national and local legitimacies and spheres of authority. Moreover, the paper also shows that both organizations were perceived and evaluated quite differently, despite being guided by the same principles. To the discussion of regime complexity in African security governance this adds hitherto neglected societal perspectives on the practical enactment and perception of complex regional security architectures as seen from below.