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Over the last couple of years, "African Ownership" has become a buzzword in many fields. Economic development initiatives like the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) are based on it, partnership agreements like the Joint AU-EU Africa Strategy are built around it and its central concept of Africanisation guides virtually all external relations of the continent. African leaders (rightly) insist on it, international organisations (rightly) preach it and many non-African actors are (unsurprisingly) hiding behind it. The concept of African Ownership is so omnipresent today that it is more than surprising that the simple question of who actually owns it has not yet been asked. It is the declared purpose of this paper to disentangle rhetoric from reality and identify the owner as well as the limits of African ownership in the sphere of peace and security.

Following decades of feeble attempts, Africa's states have recently made great strides in establishing an elaborate security architecture to tackle the continent's many perils. I argue that the emergence and particular structure of this architecture and its institutional layers are best described by the constructivist concept of multilayered security communities. While this concept is based on the original idea of security communities by Karl Deutsch and its later adaptation by Emmanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, it recognizes the increasing prominence of elaborate multi-level security cooperation in the developing world and the difficulties of the original theoretical framework to account therefor. Consequently, it combines security community terminology with notions such as organized complementarity and multi-level governance to do conceptual justice to systems like Africa's decentralized collective security arrangement.

The idea of establishing a permanent Pan-African army has for long caught the imagination of Africans as a potential solution to many of their continent's manifold security problems. This feature tracks the quest for a Pan-African military force through the past fi ve decades covering the feeble attempts of Africa's freedom fi ghters to join forces, the repeated failure to establish an African High Command (AHC) in the early years of decolonisation, the subsequent inability of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Defence Commission to agree on a common defence structure, and the various fruitless initiatives of the international community to set up a Pan-African peacekeeping force in the 1990s. On the basis of this retrospective journey, the article argues that the African Union's current initiative to establish an African Standby Force (ASF) based on fi ve regionally administered standby brigades should be seen in the tradition of this long quest and not as a groundbreaking new conceptual development, as argued by some. It further contends that even though the ASF is conceptually closer to the Standby Arrangement of the United Nations (UNSAS) than to a PanAfrican army as envisioned by leading Pan-Africanists such as Kwame Nkrumah, it nonetheless marks a substantial development in Africa's continental self-emancipation which should be greeted and supported by Africans and the international community alike. Downloaded by [Laurentian University] at 05

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