Whose Money Funds African Peace Operations? Negotiating Influence and Autonomy with External Partners

International audienceThis chapter addresses the financial dimension of African peace operations. Its objective is to identify the different forms of financial arrangements that make African peace operations possible, and to raise some of the main political issues associated with each of them. Four types of such arrangements will be discussed: (1) when African states deploy military missions with their own financial resources; (2) when financial support is offered on a voluntary and ad hoc basis by non-African partners, not only through bilateral channels, but also through multilateral mechanisms set by regional organizations such as the EU; (3) when African-led operations are funded by the assessed contributions to the UN peacekeeping budget; and (4) when African troop-contributing countries (TCCs) are given the institutional and financial cover of a formal UN-commanded peace operation. This taxonomy is the result of an inductive method, founded on an exploratory, inevitably selective, investigation among case studies – some very recent, others less so – on which the authors have worked. While it does not pretend to cover all the imaginable options, this taxonomy does allow us to address the most lively debates in relation to the funding of peace operations. The question of African ownership is one of the controversies which are of concern to both practitioners and academics. Indeed, one cannot miss the situation of dependency that characterizes the African peace and security architecture, as well as the consequences of this situation for the limited freedom of action African states and organizations have in their endeavor