This chapter describes: the creation of the ICC; its main features (such as its jurisdiction and its rules for selecting cases); opposition and criticisms; and a brief assessment of its work, including its controversial and sometimes disappointing early efforts, and the challenges that the Court confronts. The chapter discusses the Court’s jurisdiction – including personal and territorial jurisdiction, temporal jurisdiction, and subject matter jurisdiction. It discusses the ‘trigger mechanisms’: State Party referrals (including self-referrals), Security Council referrals, and initiation by the Prosecutor. It explains preliminary examination, investigation, and prosecution, as well as the selection criteria of admissibility (complementarity and gravity), and the interests of justice. It discusses opposition to the ICC, including the criticisms from the United States and the African Union, as well as key developments, such as US attacks on the ICC and threats of withdrawal from the African Union. The chapter reviews the Court’s record, including problems of collapsed cases, slow proceedings, the early focus on Africa, and accusations of selectivity and bias, as well as recent indications of progress.

The chapter situates the class of institutions variously referred to as internationalized, hybrid, mixed or special tribunals in the system of international criminal justice and highlights their main rationales and features. It addresses the known strengths and weaknesses of the hybrid institutional model as compared to purely international criminal jurisdictions. Using the classification based on these courts’ legal nature as defined by the primary basis for their establishment and functioning, the chapter surveys the main hybrid courts (including some which are yet to be established), including but not limited to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Special Tribunal for Lebanon, Extraordinary African Chambers, the African Criminal Court, the UNTAET and UNMIK Special Panels (in East Timor and in Kosovo, respectively), the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, and the Special Criminal Court in the Central African Republic. It outlines the factual background to these courts’ emergence and addresses their subject-matter jurisdiction and applicable law, institutional and procedural features, and noteworthy contributions to international criminal jurisprudence. This overview is followed by the discussion of the issues raised by the hybrid courts’ (potential) relationship with the ICC and reflections on their achievements, deficiencies, and (the prospects of) wider impact.

Chapter 4 analyses the history, evolution, internalisation, and legal operationalisation of sustainable development in Africa. The analysis reveals how concepts like sustainable development flow through nations and regions without being influenced by the peoples and politics that matter to that part of the world. It reveals the colonial and postcolonial politics of natural resource access in Africa by mapping the concept’s progress. It discusses the concept and its link to the international law on nature conservation and how that history omitted Africa as a framework for analysing the law and politics of sustainable development. It also explores Africa’s perspectives on international law relative to the Global South’s position on sustainable development within the never-ending Third World international law-making project. It also reveals deficits in the dominant rights-based approach to sustainable development in Africa as uncritically empowering the state over non-state interests as the state has failed to purposefully incorporate customary and indigenous governance into sustainable development. In addressing this question, I examine the promise and failure of the implementation of sustainable development as seen through the work of Africa’s regional adjudicative institutions.

Energy intersects with the environment at every stage of its life cycle. The energy supply chain can have adverse effects on nature and public health, including GHG emissions, air, land and water pollution as well the generation of harmful waste, among others. In order to reduce our dependence on high-carbon energy, more needs to be done to increase renewable energy generation and improve energy efficiency. As energy is involved in trade and investment projects, it is covered by the trade and investment branches of international economic law and regulated in these fields mainly by the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), regional trade agreements (RTAs) and international investment agreements (IIAs). This book aims to contribute to the existing scholarship by providing a comprehensive analysis of the energy–environment nexus under trade law and investment law, showing, where relevant, their similarities, differences or even (potential) conflicts at the energy–environment interface. It examines the legal foundations of the energy–environment nexus and associated issues regarding trade control, subsidies, technical standards, investment protection and technology policies.

This chapter show how throughout millennia, philanthropy has served as a catalyst for change and as a vehicle for community transformation. While COVID-19 has forced philanthropists worldwide to take immediate action and mobilise billions of dollars to save lives, African philanthropy and the culture of ‘giving’ are not new phenomena but are ingrained in the fabric of African societies. Before the arrival of colonialism, aid agencies and development partners, grassroots philanthropists and associations mobilised resources to address development issues. Within this context, the chapter focuses on the role of multi-sector partnerships in Africa and how they arose out of the crisis of the pandemic to drive the efficiency of vital collaborations between the African Union (AU), local governments, and the private sector. It shows how these partnerships helped the continent curb the pandemic and prevented the massive spread of infections. This chapter highlights the uniqueness and significance of these partnerships at the local and continental levels and identifies some of the core values underpinning them. The chapter also explores the importance and the impact of the AU’s strategic leadership and multi-sectoral partnerships in advancing the continent’s health and economic agenda while deconstructing some of the inherent challenges that were faced when trying to scale these alliances in Africa.

This chapter adds a regional perspective to the study of rule in the international system by exploring the region as a site of rule, formalized in the growing authority of regional organizations to define governance principles for their member states. Concretely, the chapter analyzes the connection between international authority and authority in/of states, thus offering a relational reading of authority which focuses on the constitutive connections between different sites of authority. With a case study on the African Union’s (AU) anti-coup policy, the chapter analyzes how the authority to define what counts as legitimate authority in states both reproduces the state as a locus of legitimate authority and denies it that very authority. Unlike most of the existing literature, which studies the authority of international organizations by focusing on the sources of IO authority, the chapter offers a reading of IO authority through the practices of enacting authority and the effects this has in specific locations.

With respect to the protection of civilians, the African Union has largely focused on elaborating guidelines for its own peacekeeping operations. ‘Draft’ Guidelines were concluded in 2010 and published in 2012. Protection is organised into four ‘tiers’: protection through political process; physical protection; rights-based protection; and establishing a secure environment. These ‘tiers’ are broadly similar to the structure of the UN’s Operational Concept of the time. Practice in protecting civilians has been mixed.

This chapter considers the interaction of the Security Council with other international organizations in relation to the use of force and the role that international organizations may play in implementing Council authorizations to use force. This is an area where the Security Council, the international organizations concerned, and member states have shown great flexibility, with the provisions of the UN Charter (both Chapter VII and Chapter VIII) and of the constituent instruments of the regional and other organizations being developed through extensive practice. A difficult question, however, arises where member states grant regional organizations the authority to carry out such interventions without the target state’s consent to the specific action and without Council authorization, in particualr in light of Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the AU. The chapter concludes that it cannot be said that Article 4(h) of the AU Constitutive Act or similar provisions allow for the use of force without Security Council authorization. The Council remains the body vested by member states with the power to authorize ‘enforcement action’.

The bulk of African peacekeeping is funded externally, particularly by Western powers. Indeed, some African peacekeeping missions have been unable to get off the ground – literally – without logistical and other support from beyond the continent. This has led some commentators to argue that African peacekeeping is not, in fact, 'owned' by Africa. This claim is explored and challenged in this chapter. The authors begin by unpacking and historicising the concept of Pan-Africanism, a language often marshalled by African governments to explain and interpret their involvement in peacekeeping but also a discourse which can obscure as much as it reveals. The chapter then looks in greater depth at the funding and governance of African peacekeeping missions, looking in particular at the bureaucratic politics at the heart of the African Union. The chapter concludes by problematising the linking of financial support to lack of ownership in the context of peacekeeping, underscoring the various ways in which African states and governments exercise agency in the peacekeeping sphere despite their dependence upon external funding.

The main aim of this chapter is to give readers an overview of the evolution of African peacekeeping over time, delineating two somewhat distinct histories of the phenomenon. The chapter first examines the orthodox version of the evolution of African peacekeeping. Here, the focus is on the change from the OAU’s principle of non-intervention to the African Union’s notion of non-indifference. The authors trace this normative shift to the period after the Rwandan genocide, and to the broader security concept including the notion of human security. In line with this development, the chapter gives a brief overview of how the African Peace and Security Architecture represent this normative change in its structure and principles. In addition the chapter underlines the longer (pre-)history of African peacekeeping and the links that can be drawn between today’s peacekeeping, the creation of colonial police forces and armies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and European colonial powers’ deployment of African troops for regional 'pacification' military campaigns. The case of Ghana – and the Ghanaian Police Force – is explored as a case study in developing this argument.