EU-Africa Relations and the Organisational Politics of Populism and the Far-Right

The recent rise of the far-right and populist movements has put pressure not only on international organisations, but also on inter-organisational arrangements. Existing scholarship shows that far-right actors reject, criticise, or repurpose international organisations. Yet less is known about their implications for inter-organisational frameworks of cooperation. While we should expect that far-right governments pursue less rather than more multilateral cooperation in pursuit of national interests and sovereignty, inter-organisational cooperation might enable them to promote policies without disclosing their nationalist agendas in regions with postcolonial ties. This paper identifies a more complex organisational politics, in which the path dependence of organisational norms and routines clashes with the agentic and selective approach of far-right and populist movements. This paper explores these questions by analysing shifts in EU-Africa cooperation prompted by far-right governments in EU and AU member states, while fully incorporating the agency of African actors. The study contributes to debates on the multilateral dimensions of the far right by highlighting shifts in inter-organisational mechanisms as the far right renegotiates cooperation to suit its purposes, and to the study of how domestic politics and inter-organisational relations interact. Finally, it advances the comparative study of African and European populisms and far-right movements.