Summary

Interpretations of sovereignty and human rights in Africa have changed several times since the colonial period. Under colonialism, international society allowed the ruling powers to deny sovereignty to African political entities while also violating the African people’s rights with impunity. Since World War II, understandings of sovereignty and rights in Africa have been influenced by at least five sets of agents: the Cold War, the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the African Union (AU), and the African people and their political leaders. As a result, sovereignty and rights have shifted from championing the self-determination of peoples as the route to sovereign statehood, through the celebration of sovereignty and nonintervention in domestic affairs while neglecting human rights protections during the Cold War, to the increasing salience of human rights and democratic renewal in the immediate post–Cold War era. The early post–Cold War period led to the establishment of an extensive human rights infrastructure. A theoretical framework derived from the concept of interpretive communities demonstrates how major wars and other system-wide political, economic, and social shocks have brought about changes in the core values of global governance, which, in turn, have led to these shifts. The concept of interpretive communities helps to reveal the ways in which hegemonic states, scholars, civil society groups, intergovernmental organizations, and other international actors adopt particular understandings of sovereignty and human rights. Africa’s rights instruments have also faced many challenges, including the OAU’s and AU’s tendency to privilege sovereignty over rights, the continued resistance of states to rights machinery, domestic challenges that hinder the realization of rights, and the weakness of enforcement and accountability mechanisms. This lack of robust enforcement mechanisms remains a key element of the relationship between sovereignty and rights.