Interpreting sanctions in Africa and Southeast Asia

Abstract

The Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) were both born to stabilise vulnerable state borders by practising non-interference in domestic affairs. Today, the OAU's successor, the African Union (AU), uses sanctions against unconstitutional changes of government, while ASEAN continues to rule out any collective punitive action against members. To explain these divergent trajectories, this article first shows how different traditions produced different ways of engaging with sanctions in the early formative cases of South Africa and Vietnam. Thereafter, it examines how these traditions were selectively re-thought when confronted with the dilemmas of international sanctions against Libya and Myanmar. The interpretive approach enables a nuanced account of continuity and change in beliefs about sanctions. The AU's sanctions doctrine has updated rather than broken with a traditional interpretation of non-interference. For ASEAN, the longstanding tradition of informality -and not strict adherence to non-interference -has continued to rule out regional sanctions.

Legitimation, regime survival, and shifting alliances in the Arab League: Explaining sanction politics during the Arab Spring

“…While regional institution-building in Europe was mostly pursued as a post-World War II project to curb nationalism and stimulate trade by transferring authority to supranational bodies, ROs in the Global South were rather built as weak intergovernmental institutions without the authority to interfere in domestic affairs (Acharya, 2016). While norms related to sovereignty and non-interference have taken various trajectories across the Global South (Coe, 2015; Hellquist, 2015), they still carry much weight in the Arab League (Barnett and Solingen, 2007). As Barnett and Solingen conclude: the League’s design is ‘the result of the clear imperative of regime survival that led Arab leaders to prefer weak regional institutions [that are] specifically designed to fail’ (2007: 181).…”

“…The League does not have a formal democracy clause that allows for the suspension of member states in order to protect democratic governance and human rights in comparison to other Regional Organizations (ROs) discussed in this special issue (see Palestini and Hellquist, this issue; Whitehead, this issue and also Duxbury, 2011; Hellquist, 2015). Nevertheless, at the time, these decisions seemed to suggest the potential for the LAS to finally embrace norms of democracy and human rights protection.…”

Regional sanctions as peer review: The African Union against Egypt (2013) and Sudan (2019)

“…Any RO is a collection of states, but not all amount to normative communities, and not all normative communities choose to become active senders of sanctions. As I have argued elsewhere (Hellquist 2014(Hellquist , 2015, different historically derived notions of regional identity cater to different approaches to sanctions. Arab nationalism has, for instance, shaped the exceptional and highly politicised approach to sanctions of the League of Arab States.…”

Clubs of autocrats: Regional organizations and authoritarian survival

“…Additionally, ROs often represent ideational communities with common value systems such as Eurasianism in the post-Soviet space (Laruelle, 2008), the "ASEAN Way" in Southeast Asia (Acharya, 2003), pan-Arabism in the Middle East (Korany, 1986), or the Shanghai Spirit in Central Asia (Ambrosio, 2008). By drawing on those regional values and identities, autocratic incumbents strengthen alternative domestic legitimation narratives while critical actors are cast as part of an illegitimate out-group (Hellquist, 2015, Debre, 2020.…”