Forging an African Union Identity: The Power of Experience

Abstract

Pan-Africanism and references to a shared African cultural identity have an important function in the way the African Union (AU) seeks to mobilize a sense of belonging among African citizens. However, we know very little about how African citizens, in turn, relate to and identify with the AU and what shapes their sense of belonging as political subjects of the AU. In addressing this lacuna, this article takes a bottom-up perspective on the formation of an AU identity among African citizens, placing citizens’ own sense-making practices about the relevance and value of the AU in their everyday lives center stage. Drawing on focus group discussions among citizens in Burkina Faso and The Gambia, I show that the way research participants relate to the AU is based on and mediated through experiences. Rather than a vague Pan-African identity, what shapes the way citizens relate to the AU are concrete experiences with the organization’s norms and policies and their tangible effects on everyday life, which are conditioned by people’s (different) exposure to AU policies and their positioning within existing social, political, and economic structures. The importance of experience in forging a sense of belonging among African citizens does not preclude the existence of a shared Pan-African identity, but it offers important cues for both how to study the formation of an AU identity and how it can be shaped in the future.

Le panafricanisme et les références à une identité culturelle africaine commune jouent un rôle important quand l'Union africaine (UA) tente de mobiliser un sentiment d'appartenance chez les citoyens africains. Néanmoins, nous en savons très peu sur la façon dont les citoyens africains, eux, s'identifient à l'UA et sur ce qui façonne leur sentiment d'appartenance en tant que sujets politiques de l'Union africaine. Pour combler cette lacune, cet article adopte une approche ascendante sur la formation d'une identité d'Union africaine chez les citoyens africains, en mettant au premier plan les pratiques de création de sens des citoyens sur la pertinence et la valeur de l'UA dans leur vie quotidienne. En se fondant sur des discussions de groupes types constitués de citoyens ordinaires du Burkina Faso et de la Gambie, l'article montre que l'identification de ces citoyens à l'UA est fonction de leurs expériences. Plutôt qu'une vague identité panafricaine, ce qui façonne le sentiment d'identification des citoyens à l'UA, ce sont des expériences concrètes avec les normes et politiques de l'organisation et leurs effets tangibles sur sa vie quotidienne. Ces effets dépendent de l'exposition personnelle (différente pour chacun) aux politiques de l'UA et du positionnement au sein des structures sociales, politiques et économiques existantes. L'importance de l'expérience dans la constitution du sentiment d'appartenance chez les citoyens africains n'exclut pas l'existence d'une identité panafricaine partagée, mais elle offre des pistes significatives d’étude de la formation d'une identité d'UA et sur la manière de la façonner à l'avenir.

El panafricanismo, así como las referencias a una identidad cultural africana compartida, tienen una función importante con relación a la forma en que la Unión Africana (UA) busca crear un sentido de pertenencia entre los ciudadanos africanos. No obstante, tenemos muy pocos conocimientos acerca de cómo los ciudadanos africanos, a su vez, se relacionan e identifican con la UA y acerca de lo que da forma a su sentido de pertenencia como sujetos políticos de la Unión Africana. Para poder abordar estas deficiencias, este artículo adopta una perspectiva ascendente sobre la formación de una identidad de la Unión Africana entre los ciudadanos africanos, situando en el centro del escenario las prácticas propias de creación de sentido de los ciudadanos en materia de relevancia y del valor de la UA en su vida cotidiana. El artículo parte de discusiones de grupos focales entre ciudadanos medios en Burkina Faso y Gambia con el fin de mostrar que la forma en la que estos ciudadanos se relacionan con la UA se basa y está mediada por experiencias concretas. Lo que da forma a la relación de los ciudadanos con la UA no es tanto una vaga identidad panafricana, sino experiencias concretas con las normas y políticas de la organización y sus efectos tangibles sobre la vida cotidiana, que están condicionados por la exposición (diferente) de las personas a las políticas de la UA y por su posicionamiento dentro de las estructuras sociales, políticas y económicas existentes. La importancia de la experiencia para forjar un sentido de pertenencia entre los ciudadanos africanos no excluye la existencia de una identidad panafricana compartida, pero ofrece pistas importantes sobre cómo se podría estudiar la formación de una identidad de la UA y sobre cómo se podría moldear en el futuro.

Introduction

It is the May 25, 2013 and a festive day in Addis Ababa. At least for some. The African Union (AU) is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which became the AU in 2002. The celebrations take place under the theme “Pan-Africanism and African Renaissance” and are meant to revive Pan-Africanism as an ideological engine for the continental political project (see also the Introduction to this special forum).¹ As stated in a background document, the OAU/AU 50th anniversary is intended to “promote and define Pan Africanism to re-energize current generations and inspire new generations” (AU Commission 2013a, 5). As normal for an intergovernmental organization, the official ceremonial act is made up of high-level reunions among African Ambassadors, Ministers, and Heads of State who exchange speeches about the past and future of the continental organization, praising achievements, and making promises for the future. A few official guests, African intellectuals and international partners, are invited to deliver their messages to the continental organization.

But there is also another festive stage. Several kilometers away from the AU Headquarters, a public event is happening that is supposed to be “memorable (. . .) people-centered and activity based” (AU Commission 2013a, 21). In the past weeks, tickets have been handed out for free to “ordinary” citizens, raffled at radio shows or sold for small money on a quickly emerging shadow market. Apart from speeches by international state officials, the celebration includes several dance and drum shows enacting African cultural heritages. It also gives praise to the “heroes and heroines” in the successful liberation and decolonization of the continent, culminating in Kenneth Kaunda’s appearance on the stage, accompanied by strobe lights and music. By the time the last speeches are delivered, the hall is almost empty. The “people” who were supposed to be at the center of this event have almost entirely left the venue. Contrary to their expectations, the celebration of Pan-Africanism was a party at which one had to pay for one’s own drinks and food. It was a staged memory of a shared past whose script had already been written and which had little connection to the everyday lives of those in the audience. While the drums at first animated at least the youth in the audience to dance, the majority of participants did not experience an “activity-based” event as envisaged by the organizers. To many, the organization they were meant to celebrate on this day remained as unapproachable and alien as it had been before.

The 50th-anniversary celebrations were an attempt by the AU to perform and activate what I will call an AU identity, that is, a sense of belonging and allegiance among the continent’s citizens toward the AU. But as the episode shows, this attempt obviously failed. In contrast to what the celebration’s organizers envisaged, the citizens in the room decided to not relate at all. Exit was their preferred mode of relating (Hirschman 1970).

This scene is in line with the dominant academic descriptions of the relationship between the AU and African citizens. In the literature, this relationship has been described mainly as a great gap and disconnect, which stands in sharp contrast to the AU’s aspirational self-description as “people-centered” and “citizen-driven” (Dingwerth et al. 2019, ch. 4). The gap refers to the limited opportunities for citizens to participate in and shape decision-making processes at the AU and to receive adequate information about continental politics. There is also the widespread assumption that the AU does not have any meaningful impact on the lives of the majority of African citizens (Murithi 2012, 668; Touray 2016, 181; Tieku 2019, 14; Assogbavi 2023).² The AU’s use of Pan-Africanism as a shared political identity has therefore been criticized for being an “elusive concept,” not resting on “any endorsement from African citizens” (Musabende 2020, 347) and for being “experienced as a grandiose gesture of political goodwill with no real or substantive power of execution” (Eze and van der Wal 2020, 200). Despite these diagnoses, however, there is scant systematic empirical analysis as to how African citizens think of and identify with the continental organization, including with its Pan-African representational claim.

In this article, I seek to contribute to filling this lacuna by exploring how African citizens relate to the AU and what shapes their sense of belonging and identification with the continental organization. As I will argue, the above vignette reflects a more general disconnect between the AU's own imagination of African citizens’ way of relating to the continental organization and the way African citizens themselves speak about the AU. In line with the Introduction to this special forum by Abrahamsen, Chimhandamba, and Chipato, I do so by scrutinizing a particular form of Pan-Africanism the continental organization employs to construct an imagined African citizen and their identification with the AU. I then contrast this with African citizens’ narratives about the AU’s relevance to their own lives as expressed in focus group research conducted in Burkina Faso and The Gambia. In so doing, I demonstrate that while the AU seeks to mobilize a pre-given, unspecific, elite-focused, and backward-looking African identity, how citizens relate to the continental organization is heavily shaped by their variegated experiences with and exposures to AU norms and policies as well as their tangible effects on people’s everyday lives. Their way of relating is experiential rather than driven by an imagined cultural identity and grand, Pan-African ideas. This disconnect may ultimately explain why it has been so difficult thus far for the AU to forge an AU identity. The two forms of relating, the cultural and the experiential, are not mutually exclusive, but neglecting the importance of experience in shaping Africans’ multiple relations to the continental political project has crucial implications for both how we understand the role of identity for African integration politics and how it can be shaped in the future.

My analysis is based on a distinction between “African identity” and “AU identity.” While the first is an individual sense of belonging to and sharedness of an imagined collectivity of Africans, the AU identity refers to a sense of belonging to and support for the continental organization. It means understanding oneself as a political subject of the AU. While African identity might be an element of AU identity, it is neither a necessary nor an exhaustive condition; and to confuse the two neglects the possibility that Africans’ feeling of belonging to the AU may draw on other sources than merely a shared “Africanness.” To argue that African citizens relate to the AU through experience is therefore not mutually exclusive with the relevance of an imagined collective identity as Africans. In fact, Africanness is not sufficient to understand just how African citizens relate to the continental organization. This does not amount to making the (different) point that African citizens do not feel African.

Creating a sense of belonging among African citizens and nourishing their identification with the AU is important for the organization, as it is for many other regional organizations across the world. The AU’s stated aim is to become a “people-centered” organization, and to be “driven and managed by its own citizens” (AU Assembly 2013, 1). This requires not only institutions and structures for participation, but also a general sense of belonging to that political project among those addressed by its rules and norms. In their Solemn Declaration adopted at the OAU/AU’s 50th anniversary, AU Heads of State and Government confirmed their “commitment to strengthen AU programmes and Member States institutions aimed at reviving our cultural identity, heritage, history, and Shared Values [and] (. . .) to fly the AU flag and to sing the AU anthem along with our national flags and anthems” (AU Assembly 2013, 2). Among the seven aspirations of the Agenda 2063, the AU’s blueprint development program for the continent is therefore also the entrenchment of Pan-Africanism and a “strong cultural identity” (AU 2015, 7).

This striving for allegiance and a sense of belonging among those subject to rule is not uncommon to political projects. In the modern nation state, nationalism fulfilled this symbolic and ideological function to create an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) among those subjects. However, today, the state is only one among many political orders governing people’s everyday lives. Regional organizations like the AU have developed comprehensive and potentially intrusive mandates to govern various aspects of life, from democratic elections to health and gender equality (Edozie and Gottschalk 2014; Tieku 2016). If those mandates are supposed to be realized, integration is no longer merely a matter of economic exchange and legal harmonization, but becomes a societal, potentially transformative project. Unsurprisingly, then, the question of how to create a sense of belonging and identification with that project among those affected constitutes an important dimension of this endeavor (see Shore 2000; Jones 2004; Santos 2015; Acharya 2017; Börzel and Risse 2020).³

In the study of regionalism and regional integration, however, this question has so far been mainly raised with regard to the European Union (EU), and widely neglected in the study of other regionalization projects (Checkel 2016, 561; but see Neuvonen 2019; Mulugeta 2021).⁴In the field of EU studies, the formation (or not) of a European identity among EU citizens has become a vibrant field of research from various disciplinary angles and even an integral part of early integration theories (for an overview, see Jones 2013; Checkel 2016). Until today, there has been no equivalent to this literature in the study of the AU.

Against this background and with this article, I want to make two contributions. First, conceptually, I explore the question of an AU identity from a bottom-up perspective, placing “ordinary” citizens’ meaning-making practices and their everyday life center stage, thus countering the hitherto elite-centered approaches through which regional identity and the AU’s Pan-African ideals have been studied. This is in line with a more recent interest by International Relations (IR) scholars in the everyday and vernacular theories of international politics (Acuto 2014; Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016), including the observation that there “is a need for further consideration of non-elite constructions, and ostensibly, mundane practices” (Björkdahl et al. 2019, 123). In so doing, I build on anthropological and sociological approaches to “everyday nationalism,” which stress citizens’ own agency in constructing and narrating identities and questions of belonging.

Second, empirically, I seek to make the case for understanding African citizens’ experience-driven way of relating to the AU. As I demonstrate based on focus group research in Burkina Faso and The Gambia, when focus group participants relate themselves to the AU, they do so in experiential terms; that is, their narratives about the AU are mediated by concrete experiences such as participation in capacity-building programs and election observation missions, by regional peacekeeping, economic investments around the organization of an AU summit, or the AU’s presence on the ground through diplomatic missions and conflict resolution. Very rarely did focus group participants set the AU’s Pan-African character in relation to themselves, and nowhere in this research was it specifically raised as a source of identification.

Building on debates in anthropology, I use the term experience to refer to “lived through” events that are imbued with meaning (Turner and Bruner 1986; see also McIntosh and Wright 2019). While “mere experience,” generally speaking, is how the world is received consciously, and hence fundamentally an individual matter, the encounter with the world becomes “an experience” when it is intersubjectively expressed, that is, narrated and articulated, thus made meaningful (Bruner 1986, 6; Turner 1986, 35). Experiences are not merely cognitive, but can be sensory, motoric, affective, bodily, etc. They can be both direct/immediate and mediate (e.g., representational through texts, images, etc.) (Throop,2003a, 369; Throop,2003b).

In stressing the importance of experience for the formation of an AU identity, two clarifications are in order. First, experience as employed here should not be confused with self-interest or personal benefit. Rather, the relevance of experience is not always found in the functional outcome, but in the meaning created through that particular experience. Second, while experience sets the ground for knowing and relating to abstract polities such as the AU, not every experience also helps foster a positive sense of belonging and allegiance. As widely demonstrated in the study of EU identity formation, exposure to EU policies may, in fact, have the reverse effect (Kuhn 2015; Bergbauer 2018). Experiences are meaningful only to the extent that the experiencing subject attaches meaning to them. How people attach meaning to a particular situation of experience is therefore a matter of empirical inquiry and a fundamental aspect for understanding how feelings of belonging are forged.

The relevance of experience in the way citizens describe, speak about, and make sense of the AU has three important consequences: First, it means that identification with the AU is contingent on people’s positionality within already existing social, economic, and political figurations, which shape who is able to experience what (Scott 1991). Second, the importance of experience might temper the expectation that a general and grand emotional attachment is actually necessary to build a societal foundation for the continental political project. Forging and sustaining a sense of belonging through experiences might be more pragmatic than imagined by those in power, but it might also be more sustainable. And third, the power of experience also means that attachment to the AU is more amenable than any allegedly pre-given cultural identity, precisely because it makes the AU more experienceable.

The remainder of this article is structured as follows. In the next section, I will situate this article within existing literature on the role of identity formation for regional integration processes, which has been, at least with regard to the African continent, dominated by top-down, elite-centered approaches; and I will explain the value-added of a bottom-up perspective that places people’s own sense-making practices center stage. The third section discusses the AU’s own imagination of an AU citizen and their way of belonging to the continental project, based on an analysis of the AU’s branding campaign “I am African—I am the African Union.” Followed by a brief methodological discussion, I will then contrast this imaginary with empirical insights from focus group research conducted in Burkina Faso and The Gambia and the way research participants expressed how they relate to the AU. In the last section, I will summarize my argument and conclude why taking the power of experience seriously is relevant both for understanding and shaping how African citizens relate to continental politics.

Studying Regional Identity: Top-Down and Bottom-Up

Identity, as understood here, refers to an individual sense of belonging to a larger community or group, which includes both attachment and the idea of being part of something (Yuval-Davis 2010). Identity thus crucially rests on construction, that is, narrative or visual practices by which a group or community becomes imagined, defined, and related to, be it in cultural, political, or legal terms. Such a processual and constructive understanding of identity also underlies this article, which is interested in exploring what nourishes such a sense of belonging to the AU (i.e., identification with the AU) and how it could be forged, rather than in measuring the “state” of regional identity among African citizens.

In the academic study of regional integration, identity has been explored from two different angles: as a driver and as an outcome of political integration (Checkel 2016).⁵ In both fields, however, as summarized by Jeffrey Checkel (2016, 561), “the bulk of scholarship” has focused on elite actors as the main authors and recipients of regional identity politics and thereby neglected exploring the relevance regional identity politics have for everyday life and “ordinary” citizens, a field widely left to sociologists and anthropologists (see, for instance, Bellier and Wilson 2000; Favell 2010).

Concerning the first angle, scholars have studied the role of shared identities in facilitating and shaping the formation of regional organizations. Identity, which precedes regional integration as a sense of shared belonging, is thus treated as an explanation for regional organizations and the specific character their political projects adopt. In the study of African continental integration politics, this question has been particularly prominent, as reflected in the rich literature on the constitutive role of Pan-Africanism for the establishment of the OAU and later the AU (Amate 1986; Murithi 2020; Mumford 2021; see also the introduction to this special forum). Altogether, this literature is interested in carving out the ideological and identity-related sources and origins of the African continental political project. It is, however, also focused almost exclusively on elite actors such as (former) heads of state, government officials, and intellectuals as carriers of a Pan-African identity and crucial actors driving political integration on the continent.

The second angle turns the relationship between identity and regional integration around and explores how regional organizations themselves, once formed, create, and shape feelings of identity and community. Identity is thus not the explanation, but the outcome of regional integration processes. A shared sense of belonging is not the precondition, but the result of interactions with and within regional institutions. From this perspective, identity is studied less at the level of ideas and discourses and more by analyzing the processes and interactions through which feelings of belonging are formed and sedimented. In this sense, scholars have explored learning and socialization processes among regional elites as well as regional public spheres and their effects on the formation and sedimentation of particular collective identities (Risse 2010; Acharya 2014). Others have focused on the way regional institutions themselves construct and disseminate regional identities through public communication, specific policies, or collective symbolisms such as anthems and flags (Shore 2000, part 1). This perspective has mainly been developed with a focus on the EU and to a much lesser extent explored outside of the EU (see Jones 2004; Acharya 2017). Similar to the first angle, however, this literature, at least in International Relations, has been dominated by a top-down perspective in which regional identities and feelings of belonging are imagined to be either engineered by regional organizations themselves, or diffused from the regional level to national elites and individuals within states (Checkel 2016, 568).

This article is situated in this second angle, interested in understanding the identity-related effects of regional institutions. However, I explore this question from an inductive and bottom-up perspective that focuses on the role of “ordinary” citizens in narrating and imagining questions of belonging. Such a perspective has so far only been developed in the study of European integration politics (see Jones 2013; Checkel 2016, 571). It is true that the EU, as an organization and in terms of its effects on everyday life in Europe, is not comparable to any other regional organization on the globe, including the AU. However, although the observation that since “it has taken 60 + years of institution-building for the EU to have identity-shaping effects of this (limited) magnitude, then they are likely to be much less in the case of weaker and less institutionalized ROs [regional organizations] in Asia, Africa, or South America” (Checkel 2016, 571), might necessitate a more inductive research approach, this is not a convincing argument against studying the conditions for the formation of such an identity. It is also quite a Eurocentric reflex to assume that integration trajectories across the world, including questions of societal embeddedness, will (have to) follow European paths (Fioramonti and Mattheis 2016).

Rather than being excluded from processes of regional identity formation or mere recipients of their outcomes, I argue that “ordinary” citizens are crucial producers and authors of meanings of belonging and attachment. This perspective has developed mainly in anthropological research on what is commonly called “everyday nationalism” (Knott 2015). Approaches to “everyday nationalism” rest on the fundamental observation that nationalism and national identities are constructed both from above and from below, and thus focus on understanding “the ways that people actively reproduce or challenge the nation through ordinary daily practices” (Goode 2020, 974). This perspective particularly recognizes the agency of “ordinary” citizens in constructing, maintaining, or resisting political identities through everyday practices. Through this lens, scholars of “everyday nationalism” have particularly contributed to understanding the varied ways in which feelings of belonging are expressed and practiced in everyday life, which often stand in sharp contrast to the broad and monolithic imaginations of collective identities produced and “engineered” from above. A perspective on the everyday and people’s own practices, including narrative ones, is thus particularly well placed to examine the success or failure of such broad, top-down constructions (Goode 2020, 978; see also Shore 2000; Favell 2010). They have also helped to nuance widespread assumptions about the overall relevance of broad collective identities for everyday life and the emotional load “ordinary” people attach to them (Knott 2015 , 8; Goode 2020, 977). Both aspects are important to the empirical analysis in the two ensuing sections and will be taken up again in the conclusion of this article. I will first explore the way the AU imagines African citizens relating to the AU and then contrast this with the way citizens in Burkina Faso and The Gambia make sense of their relationship and attachment to the AU during focus group discussions.

Speaking to “The People”: The AU’s Imagined Pan-African Identity

One of the clear changes that came with the institutional transformation from the OAU to the AU in 2002 is the growing attention the AU places on communicating and relating to “the people”—a term used to designate the entirety of 1.4 billion Africans currently living in AU member states. Unlike its predecessor, the AU therefore increasingly uses various means of mass communication, such as Twitter, Instagram, and corporate films, in order to reach beyond the state-centric diplomatic public and toward an African societal one (AU DIC 2019). The discourse the AU employs in these communications is complex, of course, and would be worth its own analysis. For the sake of this article, I concentrate on just one crucial aspect: The recurrent use of a particular Pan-African imaginary that the AU employs when addressing African citizens. This imaginary draws on a shared identity as Africans, an “Africanness” that is already there and for which the AU becomes the institutional embodiment (Mulugeta 2021). It was reflected in the way the public event around the OAU/AU’s 50th anniversary was set up, whose main identification offer was an imagined shared past as well as cultural artifacts reflecting this shared “Africanness.” Beyond the anniversary celebrations, this dominant imaginary is also reflected in an AU branding campaign launched in 2012. Both the anniversary and the branding campaign may be only selected instances of the AU’s efforts to reach out to “the people,” but both are significant in the sense that they represent extraordinary rather than mundane efforts to address and relate to African citizens. They can therefore be seen as representative of a strategic effort to communicate the continental organization and to shape identity and allegiance on the part of African citizens.

The 2012 AU branding campaign was a strategic effort to build the aspired “people-centered” Union (AU Commission 2013b, 114). It consists of four images showing four different individuals: two middle-aged, festively dressed, rouged women,⁶ one equally middle-aged man,⁷ and a brightly smiling young boy with a gap in his teeth.⁸ Each image is accompanied by the slogan, “I am African. I am the African Union.” The displayed individuals have bright faces and—with one exception—look directly into the viewer’s eyes, reflecting hope, trust, and dedication. Their different styles of dress speak of the diversity and multiplicity comprised in the continental organization. The text, in contrast, underlines their (assumed) commonality: a shared Africanness and ownership of the AU. Since their launch, the images have been used in the AU’s virtual communication; they also were displayed on billboards erected in several large public squares in Addis Ababa and at the compound of the AU Headquarters (AU Commission 2013b, 121; Edozie and Gottschalk 2014, xxii).

According to the press release for the launch of the branding campaign, the intention was to raise awareness of the “visual identity of the AU” such as the AU flag, the AU colors, and the AU’s overall vision. It also contains other “embedded messages” such as “the African sense of belonging to the AU; the sense of ownership of the AU by African citizens” (AU DIC 2012, 1). According to the masters of this campaign

the slogan [I am African. I am the African Union] strongly expresses the linkages between the African Union and its people, publicizes the existence of the African Union as an independent continental intergovernmental institution with no equal in its stature, and links all that is African with the AU flag. (AU DIC 2012, 2)

In this branding campaign, the AU transports a particular imaginary about both “the people” and itself. On the one hand, it appeals to a sense of belonging on the part of African citizens that draws primarily on their identity as Africans. It is a shared “Africanness” that is already there, that can be appealed to without needing to nourish or build it up through action or conviction. This identity is either timeless (branding campaign) or informed by the past (OAU/AU 50th anniversary) and is shared across all differences (gender, age, region, etc.). On the other hand, the branding campaign contains a crucial representational claim on the part of the AU as being the institutional embodiment of this shared identity: “all that is African” is linked to the AU flag. The equation of being African and being the AU not only presumes a shared African identity, but it also existentially ties Africans to their continental organization and vice versa—they are the AU. So the attachment this imagined identity produces is unconditional and without further need for justification.

The masters of the branding campaign recognized that “only when people know what the AU does will they support it and recognize its crucial role in the integration efforts in the continent” (AU Commission 2013b, 122). However, the campaign speaks a different language, imagining an entirely different relationship between the AU and its “people.” Adopted at the time when the branding campaign was launched, Agenda 2063, the AU’s development blueprint for a period of 50 years, in fact, reinforces this Pan-African imaginary with its focus on community and identity formation as a mainly cultural phenomenon. One of the seven declared aspirations is the creation of a “strong cultural identity” (AU 2015, 7), nourished through the entrenchment of Pan-African ideals in school curricula and the promotion of “Pan-African cultural assets such as heritages, folklore, languages, music, theater, and literature among children in school” (AU 2022, 41). In a similar vein, Agenda 2063 also repeats the backward-looking approach to questions of identity, specifying that the programs and initiatives of Agenda 2063 are key to “promoting our common identity by celebrating our history and our vibrant culture” (AU 2023).

In the remainder of this article, I will contrast the AU’s imagination of and attempt to forge an AU identity with Burkinabe and Gambian citizens’ own narratives about their relationship to the AU, generated through focus group research conducted in Burkina Faso and The Gambia. I will first introduce the methodological approach behind this research before I discuss the empirical observations.

Methodological Approach: Focus Group Research in Burkina Faso and The Gambia

The following section draws on a total of more than twenty focus group discussions that were conducted between 2020 and 2022 by a multinational research team in different parts of both countries.⁹ The focus groups included participants from different social and political backgrounds, such as parliamentarians, civil society leaders, teachers, religious leaders, market women, and inhabitants of marginalized neighborhoods.¹⁰ Focus groups were mixed in terms of age and gender, but otherwise held homogeneous in order to create the necessary confidential atmosphere and to allow typical narratives to be identified (Stanley 2016, 244). Focus group research is a pertinent methodological approach to studying people’s own meaning-making practices, as it allows a great deal of ownership over the content and course of the discussion to be given to the participants themselves (Hennink 2007). Unlike individual interviews, focus groups have the additional advantage of a built-in social audience, as research participants interact, respond to, and challenge each other. This within-group interaction as well as the comparison across different groups facilitates the identification of larger patterns of meaning-making common across research participants, so that individual accounts can be analyzed as reflective of broader types of experiences and meaning-making (Stewart and Shamdasani 2015; Stanley 2016, 242). The aim of focus group research is thus not to measure people’s degree of identification with the AU (as in “how much do you feel part of the AU?”) as survey research would usually do, but to understand how participants themselves bring up and make sense of the AU’s presence and value in their own everyday lives. In that regard, and unlike a “natural experiment” that directly observes identity formation, focus groups create a somewhat artificial setting as they propose a particular topic and encourage discussion around it, even though ownership as to how that topic is discussed and what relevance is attached to it depends on the group itself. In the particular case at hand, the focus groups might thus themselves have created a moment of “lived through” experience and offered an otherwise rather rare opportunity for research participants to express and reflect on their relationship to the AU, as some of the research participants explicitly acknowledged in the subsequent feedback.¹¹

The AU in Burkina Faso and The Gambia

Burkina Faso and The Gambia both joined the continental organization, the AU’s predecessor OAU, shortly after independence in 1963 and 1965, respectively. However, until today, as in most other AU member states, the AU’s presence in the politics and everyday lives of both countries is anchored in exceptional moments, such as summits, as well as particular institutions that represent the AU locally. This does not mean that AU policies do not have an impact on domestic politics, such as, for instance, in the field of human rights. However, it is to underline that, especially in contrast to the sub-regional Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) through its protocols on free movement and economic integration, or elsewhere the EU through its grand symbolic projects such as the common currency, the AU’s presence in everyday life on the continent is much more exceptional and mundane.

A key exceptional moment that both countries experienced was an intervention by the AU together with ECOWAS in response to political crises in both countries. In Burkina Faso, President Blaise Compaoré, who had ruled the country for 37 years, was ousted in October 2014 by a popular movement supported by the army, which had rallied against Compaoré’s plans to extend his time in office. In The Gambia, President Yahya Jammeh, who had ruled the country for more than 20 years, refused to accept his electoral defeat in December 2016 and to hand over power to his electoral opponent Adama Barrow. The AU called both of these situations unconstitutional changes of government, in line with the AU’s anti-coup norm, which prohibits governments coming to power by unconstitutional means (OAU 2000). The anti-coup norm also mandates the continental organization to ensure the re-establishment of constitutional order in the country concerned within the shortest time possible. The AU’s responses to unconstitutional changes of government on the continent are therefore one of the most direct ways in which AU norms and policies have salience in the lives of African citizens (Souaré 2014). The AU allied with ECOWAS to intervene in both situations, by means of mediation and negotiation, the application of targeted sanctions, and in the case of The Gambia, even the threat to use military force, leading to the re-establishment of constitutional order in both cases. While not immediately affecting people’s lives the way free movement policies or agricultural programs do, the AU’s anti-coup policy clearly affects politics and order in the countries concerned by determining how and what kinds of conflicts are resolved in the effort to re-establish constitutional order, and what kind of order is (re-)established (Witt 2020). In this sense, both countries can be seen as particularly exposed to continental politics and thus pertinent examples for a more detailed analysis of what shapes citizens’ different ways of relating to the AU.

Reflecting the exploratory character of this research, the two case studies are not considered representative for the entire continent: Not least, they are both in West Africa, a region with a strong sub-regional organization ECOWAS, where, according to Afrobarometer survey results, public opinion is comparably more favorable of regional integration and supranational decision-making than in the rest of the continent (Olapade et al. 2016, 11). As I will show in the remainder of this article, however, focus group data from both countries underline the specific national circumstances in which individual and collective reflections take place, making an exploratory and inductive research approach all the more necessary.

Narrating Attachment and Belonging from the Bottom-Up

Despite a growing interest among IR scholars in both the everyday and questions of political identity and belonging, there is still scant systematic research about the relationship between the AU and African citizens and how African citizens relate to and identify with the AU. In line with the bottom-up approaches to studying processes of identification discussed at the beginning of this article, in this section, I will present empirical insights from focus group discussions held in Burkina Faso and The Gambia. The empirical insights from these discussions reveal a crucial difference in the way focus group participants speak about and relate to the AU and the way the organization itself imagines and seeks to forge a sense of belonging among African citizens, as discussed in the previous section. Concretely, I will show that (1) the AU’s Pan-African character and a cultural identity as “African” are rarely invoked to express a sense of belonging by African citizens; rather, (2) what people associate with the AU, and (3) how they talk about the AU is experientially based, that is, heavily shaped by people’s mundane and variegated experiences with the continental organization in their everyday lives. While these insights are necessarily exploratory rather than comprehensive, they offer important cues for understanding precisely how the formation of an AU identity could be studied and shaped in the future.

What the AU is. . .

When asked about their first association with the term “African Union,” focus group participants in both countries predominantly described the AU in formal, rather sober terms as “institution,” “structure,” “association,” or “body.”¹² These descriptions resemble the beginning of an encyclopedia entry and rarely relate the AU to the individual responding. As a female civil society leader in Burkina Faso said, “so, for me, ECOWAS and the African Union are sub-regional or regional organizations to which my country belongs and which normally have texts” (FG, March 14, 2020, Ouagadougou), while a student in another focus group explained, “the African Union manages issues on a continental level” (FG, February 13, 2021, Ouagadougou). For a young teacher from the Greater Banjul Area (GBA), the AU is an “organization of African countries coming together for the interest of their members” (FG, March 6, 2022, GBA), while an elderly person in Bwiam, former President Jammeh’s stronghold in the south of the country, explained “it is a body for the entire Africa” (FG, March 10, 2022, Bwiam). Others referred to the AU’s location in Addis Ababa or its evolution from the OAU to describe the continental organization.

Crucial to these formal descriptions is also the fact that most of the participants initially did not see major differences between the AU and ECOWAS—“one is continental, the other is regional” (FG, April 16, 2022, GBA) and “they play the same role” (FG, February 21, 2021, Djikôfê)—even though such differences, particularly in how the participants evaluated both institutions, became apparent in the course of the focus group discussion (Schnabel et al. 2022; Birchinger et al. 2023). Thus, when asked for their first associations, focus group participants predominantly responded with short and formal descriptions of the AU, which concentrated mainly on the AU’s intergovernmental character, the organization’s primary functions, or historical evolution. Strikingly, and in contrast to the organization’s own self-description, the AU’s character as a Pan-African entity was explicitly mentioned by only a few participants, and more in The Gambia than in Burkina Faso. As a male member of Parliament in a focus group in the GBA explained

So, I think AU is here to stand for that or to represent that for Africans to see the commonness they have and realize that it's one fox. It's not something that is defined or divided but yet since Africa is big there is need to have other sub branches that can work in accord in the entire African Union that is the ECOWAS and the likes. So this is my perspective and this is what comes to me when I hear the terms AU and ECOWAS. (FG, November 5, 2021, GBA)

A male inhabitant of Bwiam said

Ah, African Union, when you hear it, it is a body for the entire Africa, how we deal with each other and [that] we should see ourselves as black African like we are from the same mum and dad. (FG, March 10, 2022, Bwiam)

In Burkina Faso, a representative of a social movement in Koudougou, a small city east of Ouagadougou, likewise described the AU in terms of solidarity among African states

It is first of all African institutions, which were set up by Africans to manage African issues. That is to say, if a brother country has problems, the other countries must still support it. (FG, March 10, 2020, Koudougou)

In a similar way, a member of parliament in Ouagadougou referred to the AU’s role as representation of an “African voice”

(…) ideally, I mean according to their founding text, it is to carry the voice of Africa, I mean the African Union and the OAU. (…) And I think they carry the voice of Africa in many areas. When there are international meetings, it is always the African group that has something to say, so it is not just us at the level of crises that the African Union has positions on [referring to the political crisis in Burkina Faso in 2014/15]. In any case, it has positions in several areas. (FG, March 18, 2021, Ouagadougou)

However, this Pan-African character was rarely set in relation to the respondents themselves. Thus, while Pan-African identity was mentioned as important to the AU, it was not so obviously important to the respondents themselves, and not necessarily seen as creating a sense of belonging for African citizens. In fact, only in one focus group, among civil society leaders in the capital region of The Gambia, did participants spontaneously discuss the AU with regard to their personal feeling of belonging

Female leader: when I think of AU, I see not an organization but a platform of different colors of people and talking about having a common interest in terms of trade, in terms of human rights and some other things. But when I look at ECOWAS, I feel more related to ECOWAS than to AU. (…)

[Other participant: Exactly]

Female leader (continued): Because AU, as I said, I see all colors [laughs] and I see AU as up, up, there while I see ECOWAS nearer, nearer to me. I know they all have the same objectives, bringing people together, but I think ECOWAS, the objective of bringing people together … I feel more related to ECOWAS than with AU. (FG, November 1, 2021, GBA)

Similarly, when confronted with the AU’s image campaign, participants treated it as “slogans” and “communication,” as “desired ideal.” In the words of one member of parliament in Ouagadougou: “Well, it's true, that's the ideal we're looking for, eh, the smile and all that, that's the ideal we're looking for, but we're far from that, we're very far from that” (FG, March 18, 2021, Ouagadougou). A representative of a civil society organization in a marginalized area of Ouagadougou noted: “when you look at the face of the man in the photo, you know that this man is not poor. . .” followed by loud laughter in the room. “No, what poverty?” a fellow participant added (FG, February 21, 2021, Djikôfê).

Locating the AU in Multiple Everyday Lives

In contrast to these first, often pragmatic and sober descriptions of the AU, for the most part unrelated to the respondents’ own lives, the question as to whether participants felt they benefitted personally from the AU prompted much more diverse and personalized accounts of the continental organization.¹³ Although some participants felt they do not benefit at all from the AU, the breadth of examples and areas brought into the discussion shows how direct and mediate experiences, that is, lived-through events imbued with meaning, translate the otherwise abstract organization into peoples’ lives and enable African citizens to relate to the continental organization and to identify value in it.

The personal, often also emotional accounts research participants offered referred to concrete experiences with AU norms and policies rather than abstract questions of cultural identity and representation. Some politicians and leaders of civil society organizations, for instance, immediately talked about AU trainings such as on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, the AU’s development program adopted in 2001; other participants mentioned their participation in AU election observation missions, as well as AU scholarships for students they know.

A resident of Kanilai, The Gambia instantly mentioned the United Nations – African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID), the UN–AU peacekeeping mission in Darfur, and explained how it affects an entire community in the south of Gambia: “our own brothers were sent to those peacekeeping areas, they benefited as soldiers and families that brothers were sent to those regions” (FG, March 25, 2022, Kanilai). Similarly, a female politician in the GBA recalled the first regional peacekeepers the country sent to Sierra Leone and Liberia: “(. . .) I could fully remember the participation of the Gambia and in turn how Gambian soldiers or how Gambian men get ready. Who when they came back we saw how it enhanced them or changed economically and then seen that they were able to get something” (FG, November 5, 2021, GBA).

Another participant at a focus group in Kanilai explained how the 2006 AU summit in Banjul directly and indirectly affected the lives of Gambians through job creation and road construction

Today it has increased a lot transformation (…). In previous years those areas were a bare land where nobody will dare go to those areas, but today when you go there: electrification is there, infrastructural development and also some mini roads projects there and some social amenities (…). (FG, March 25, 2022, Kanilai)

Particularly in The Gambia, many participants immediately talked about their experience during the AU and ECOWAS intervention in 2016/17, which forced long-term President Yahya Jammeh to accept his electoral defeat. As a politician in a focus group in Basse, a small town in the very east of The Gambia summarized, “there is no personal benefit, hence I do not know the heights of the integration, whether bilateral or (. . .). We have experienced [it] during the impasses, the political impasses of the Gambia where they have intervened. That is the impact we have from them” (FG, March 12, 2022, Basse). Similarly, a young vendor in the informal sector from the GBA contributed

(…) to my own understanding, [AU and ECOWAS] are very important personally to me, what we see and what these organizations did to Africa, and not only in the Gambia, meaning some countries in Africa benefitted. On my own side these organizations (…) they did so many things here like to intervene, that is one thing (…). When it comes to the AU, they promote peace in the country. Like what happened here in 2016 then, when the former President said he is not going to step down. These are people who come together as one body to talk and negotiate and promote peace within the country and that is a very important thing, you understand? (…) These organizations they helped a lot in the Gambia like what I experience here and when you go to Guinea Bissau and other countries, they also helped there. Like this AU, they came here when Yaya Jammeh said he is not going out, they negotiate and tried to promote peace and bring prosperity in the country. So that is what I have to say. (FG, March 6, 2022, GBA).

But also in Burkina Faso, the 2014/16 AU intervention in response to the ouster of Blaise Compaoré became a recurring reference point for how research participants made sense of the AU in their everyday lives. As in The Gambia, particularly those citizens from marginalized areas of the capitals and rural parts of the country used the AU interventions to stress the AU’s relevance for their own lives in promoting peace and the restoration of “normal life” in an otherwise turbulent political situation (Schnabel et al. 2022, 19–21).

Another field invoked by several participants in both countries was that of human rights and legal empowerment through continental or regional law. In Burkina Faso, several participants cited the 2014 ruling of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the case of Burkinabe investigative journalist Norbert Zongo, who was brutally killed in 1998 by members of the presidential guard (African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights 2014). The Court not only found fundamental rights violations, but also rendered a reparations judgment for the victims, Zongo’s close relatives—the first time in the Court’s history (Windridge 2017). A female civil society representative in Ouagadougou summarized

At the African level, I think that the simple fact that Burkina is among the six countries that ratified the African Charter on the creation of the African Court [of Human and Peoples’ Rights], and having done its… what do you call it? Allowed to handle a case like Norbert Zongo, it's because it's in the African Union, and the African Court was created for African countries. And Burkina Faso not only ratified, but made its declaration [allowing individuals and NGOs to directly access the Court]. That is why the Norbert Zongo case was tried, and I think that 75 percent of the Court ruling is being implemented. We were not able to manage the case at home, but on behalf of the African Union, we were able to manage it elsewhere through the African Court. These are small achievements, but they should not be neglected. Otherwise, in Burkina, we would never have managed the Norbert Zongo case. (FG, March 14, 2020, Ouagadougou)

Many of those citing the Norbert Zongo case are themselves human rights activists and have been involved in one or the other way in making and supporting this legal case. Beyond that, however, the case of Norbert Zongo is also an important collective symbol, representing both the brutality of the ousted regime of Blaise Compaoré as well as the potential of civic resistance—in this case crucially supported by regional law—thus turning the ruling, and the reparations in particular, into a moment of enduring collective significance.

In summary, all these accounts show that apart from extraordinary moments like an intervention, the AU is also present in people’s lives in a much more mundane and small-scale way, through training programs, law, and decisions sometimes taken very far away from the places where their repercussions will be felt. All these little stories refer to quite variegated experiences, lived-through events, and encounters with the AU that are imbued with meaning. In some cases, they are direct and personal, such as participation in capacity-building training or election observation missions. In other cases, experiences are more mediated, such as the repercussions of peacekeeping missions and large economic investments ahead of an AU summit or the collective empowerment resulting from a Court’s ruling that is felt to trump unjust national legal systems. Experiences can be cognitive, such as learning more about the AU through training and missions; they can be physical, such as becoming a peacekeeper; or affective, such as regional norms fostering relief and empowerment. These narrated experiences are not randomly distributed but reflect the individuals’ different and distinct positioning within local social structures: as politicians, as human rights activists, and as residents of a particular area. In that sense, the focus group discussions rendered visible a variety of “peripheral” experiences of the AU that have so far been widely ignored if not denied in the study of the continental organization. They all demonstrate that it is through such experiences that research participants are able to relate the otherwise abstract continental organization to their own lives and identify value in it.

“Seeing” the AU

When relating the AU to their own lives, many focus group participants referred to the AU’s visibility or lack thereof to explain what the AU has done or fails to do, thus also talking about the AU in terms of sensory experiences. One participant from a marginalized area in Ouagadougou explained, “it's true, these are necessary institutions, which are useful, but we need to see them in action” (FG, March 18, 2021, Ouagadougou). A participant in Loumbila, a small town north of Ouagadougou, said, “I don't see anything that these organizations have done” (FG, February 27, 2021, Loumbila), and another participant explained, “it's mainly what the AU has brought to Burkina Faso that is not visible” (FG, February 27, 2021, Loumbila). A representative of a Burkinabe school association observed

I personally do not know the ECOWAS flag or the African Union flag, because these are institutions, when we hear about them we see them on TV, when there is a summit we see them. And then after that, well concretely on the ground, I can't, well, I don't see in any case, what we have benefited from this cooperation, in any case from the membership of Burkina. (FG, February 13, 2021, Ouagadougou)

For others, this (in)visibility has a more material character, reflected in infrastructure projects or buildings as one participant in Bundung, a marginalized part of the GBA explained: “go to the villages you will see EU project and you will never see AU project. In any village you go in Africa you will never see AU” (FG, March 6, 2022, GBA). A member of the National Youth Council of Burkina Faso likewise noted that “(...) what could be palpable is infrastructure, but it is rare that you see the African Union, (. . .) building infrastructure for a country” (FG, February 13, 2021, Ouagadougou). A representative of a Gambian civil society organization likewise compared the AU to ECOWAS, explaining that

So, to me, in terms of peace and security, you see that AU is not doing well compared to what ECOWAS is doing and because Gambians, in our eyes, we see the work of ECOWAS more visible in terms of projects, in terms of programs specifically in peace and security. Like for example UNFPA [UN Population Fund] will say we are having this project or the UN system will say on peace building, ECOWAS could also have that. In AU you will never hear anything like that (…). (FG, November 1, 2021, GBA)

(In)visibility is thus used as code for assumed (in)action. In the eyes of the participants, not “seeing them” makes the AU unreal, almost inexistent. As explained by a woman from Bobo-Dioulasso

Perhaps what I can (..) say (..) is perhaps the visibility of the actions taken by these institutions, that's it. Maybe they do it and we don't really feel it. (…) Except for those who read a lot, who understand what they are doing, what is really going on. Maybe the rest of us don't read too much, and the media also don't talk about it too much. It's possible that they really do good deeds, but it's not, it's not really visible, that's it, maybe that's it, I can add that. (FG, March 31, 2021, Bobo-Dioulasso)

But (in)visibility was also important in another way. When reflecting on how the AU intervention in the aftermath of the respective political crisis has shaped people’s knowledge about the AU, many respondents explained that now they feel more knowledgeable about the continental organization because they have been “here” and were “seen.” As one student from the GBA explained

Me I think my knowledge has changed totally, because like I said initially all we hear (…) is AU intervention or ECOWAS intervention but we have never seen it in practice, we may see it in another country, but those ones are on TVs, but this one was a real time example and was a learning point. So definitely it changed my knowledge. (FG, November 3, 2021, GBA)

Another student agreed, “Like [she] said I only knew about the commonwealth and the AU summit, and I also knew that they do peace and conflict resolution but I never saw it” (FG, November 3, 2021, GBA). In a similar vein, others framed it in terms of co-presence, stressing the fact that these were the first times the AU actually “came” to the two countries. In the words of a youth activist in a marginalized part of Ouagadougou: “It's through the crisis that we see them and we start to know them” (FG, February 21, 2021, Djikôfê). An elderly person in Wassu, a small village in north-eastern Gambia, likewise observed that “we used to hear about them but didn't know; but since they came, then we knew” (FG, March 12, 2022, Wassu). Others again contrasted their immediate experience with an AU intervention with their previously acquired, formal knowledge of the organization, framed as the difference between “hearing” and “seeing” the AU. In the words of a student in Loumbila

I too can say that the crisis was a kind of concretization of what we learned at school about these organizations. We had studied them. But it was really with the crisis that we saw them in action. With the crisis it was more concrete and not just a matter of hearing. (FG, February 27, 2021, Loumbila)

Another young participant from the same focus group added, “Since primary school, we had heard about these organizations, in a theoretical way. What happened in 2014 was the practice of what we had learned for a long time” (FG, February 27, 2021, Loumbila). Thus, being visible in the sense of “projects,” buildings, and infrastructure, or as co-presence through “coming to” and “being in” a particular place are important terms in which focus group participants related to the AU and made sense of the organization’s relevance for their own and their country fellows’ everyday lives. It is important to note that not all these narrations of “seeing” the AU also reflect direct visual encounters between citizens and the AU. In fact, even during the intervention most of the research participants, especially those in marginalized areas of the capitals Banjul and Ouagadougou and in other parts of the two countries, almost certainly never directly interacted with or even saw a single AU official in person. However, precisely because of and not despite this, it is particularly telling that the intervention is so dominantly narrated in terms of sensory experiences.

In sum, the empirical insights from focus group research in Burkina Faso and The Gambia offer a different understanding of how “ordinary” citizens relate to the AU. Unlike the AU’s appeal to a pre-determined, backward-looking, Pan-African cultural identity, people’s own narratives about the AU place experience center stage in describing their way of relating to the AU. What binds these citizens to the continental organization, in their own narratives, is not abstract culture, but direct and mediate experiences with AU norms, policies, and actions and their “visibility” in people’s everyday lives. Such experiences are neither equally nor randomly distributed. Rather, each realm of experience reflects an individual’s specific situatedness in already given social and political structures that shape just how experienceable AU policies are for different individuals and social groups.

Conclusion

The attempt to forge a sense of belonging to the AU’s political integration project is an important aspect of AU politics today. This reflects a more general effort by potentially intrusive and multipurpose governance organizations beyond the state to replicate the state’s search for attachment and allegiance through the creation of a shared identity among those subject to the organization’s rule. However, contrary to the field of EU studies, until today neither the AU’s strategy and practices to forge a sense of belonging nor African citizens’ responses to them have been subjected to systematic empirical analysis. In seeking to contribute to filling this lacuna, I started from the conceptual assumption that belonging and political identities are not only engineered from the top down, but also from the bottom up, thus pointing to the crucial role of “ordinary” people’s own sense-making practices in understanding questions of belonging and identity.

While exploratory in character and not representative for the continent, I demonstrated that there is a sharp mismatch in the way the AU speaks to and constructs African citizens’ attachment to the AU, and the way citizens themselves speak about, relate to, and attribute value to the AU in their everyday lives. As the AU speaks to a given, for-all-equal, and mainly backward-looking Pan-African identity, focus group participants in Burkina Faso and The Gambia relate to the AU in experiential terms, that is, mediated (and narrated through) concrete mediate and immediate experiences. This experience-driven way of relating is not per se in contradiction with the Pan-African identity the AU is seeking to activate. Its importance also does not mean that African citizens do not also have a Pan-African identity. However, this research has shown that an assumed, shared Pan-African identity is not sufficient for understanding just how African citizens relate to the continental organization. The observed power of experience as a condition for relating offers some important cues for both how the formation of an AU identity could be studied and how it can be shaped in the future.

First, the power of experience means that how African citizens relate to the AU is much more expressive of the vast inequalities among African citizens than the Pan-African imaginary suggests. Citizens’ way of relating to the AU is hence much more preconditioned than suggested in the AU’s imaginary. These inequalities result from individuals’ different exposure to AU norms and policies as well as from their different positionalities within local social, economic, and political structures, which, taken together, mean that experiences are neither equally distributed nor equally attributed with meaning (Scott 1991). Both future research into the formation of an AU identity among African citizens, but also political strategies to forge such an identity should therefore be much more concerned with difference than with unity (see also Neuvonen 2019, 251).

Second, citizens’ ways of relating are also more conditional than assumed in the AU’s imaginary, since they express concrete, functional expectations toward the continental organization to be “seen.” In turn, however, this also means that people’s attachment to the AU may be more pragmatic and much less emotionally “loaded” than imagined by the AU. The relevance of experience in driving people’s relating to the AU may thus altogether temper the expectation that top-down “engineers” of regional identities place in symbols such as flags and anthems, and grand narratives about a shared history and heritage. In the focus groups, none of these symbolic devices was brought up by the participants themselves; and yet, their absence in everyday life, I sought to argue in this article, does not mean the absence of a sense of belonging and attachment. After all, focus group participants were indeed able to narrate their relationship to the AU and to place meaning and value in the organization’s presence in their everyday life.

Third, the power of experience also means that allegiance to the continental organization is much more amenable than assumed by the AU: It can be shaped, not merely by making the AU more known, but by making it more experienceable. In this sense, the assumption that “only when people know what the AU does will they support it” (AU Commission 2013b, 122) reflects a crucial misconception. It ignores the difference between getting informed about the experiences of others and experiencing oneself. After all, this is the difference between “hearing” and “seeing” that several research participants employed. Only when continental politics become more experienceable will African citizens have the possibilities to develop a sense of belonging and attachment as political subjects of the AU. However, as the vignette at the beginning of this article reflects, an experience as such is not enough to activate a sense of belonging. Thus, which kinds of experiences shape positive attachments and which ones shape negative attachments need to be subjected to systematic empirical scrutiny reconstructed from citizens’ own accounts. This article has hopefully made the case that such an endeavor in the study of the AU is both worthwhile and overdue.

Acknowledgement

For their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article, the author would like to thank the editors of this special forum, the participants of the workshop “The African Union at 20: Pan-African Pasts and Futures in Global Politics” at the University of Ottawa, April 21–22, 2022, Sophia Birchinger and Simone Schnabel, as well as the two anonymous reviewers.

Funder Information

This research has been funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) under project grant “Local perceptions of regional interventions: AU and ECOWAS in Burkina Faso and The Gambia” (No. 661664). The publication of this article was funded by the Open Access Fund of the Leibniz Association.

Footnotes

1

The following two paragraphs are based on the author’s own observations as an accredited guest at the anniversary celebrations.

2

The gap between the AU and African citizens is also recognized within the AU itself, both in everyday conversations among AU Commission staff and at an official level within the Assembly of Heads of State (Adedeji 2007, 191; Kagame 2017, 4–5).

3

The search for a sense of belonging among those subject to rule is different from the search for legitimacy and legitimation, which is a constitutive aspect of rule (Weber 1921). Legitimacy, contrary to identity, is the acceptance of the rightfulness of a particular form or system of rule. It can draw on a sense of belonging (that is, collective identity), but this can also be just one out of several sources of legitimacy (Tallberg and Zürn 2019; Dellmuth and Schlipphak 2020). Also, while the search for legitimacy is a ubiquitous feature of any governing structure, including international organizations (IOs), the attempt to create a sense of belonging among those subject to rule obviously only matters for those IOs with a broad governance mandate. Task-specific governing organizations like the World Health Organization or the International Atomic Energy Agency seek legitimacy, that is, acceptance of their particular claim to rule, but not a sense of belonging among a wider public.

4

There is, however, a growing body of literature on public opinion and regional organizations, but this literature is mainly concerned with citizens’ trust in and support for regional organizations, thus exploring attributed legitimacy rather than a sense of belonging to these organizations (see, for instance, Schlipphak 2015).

5

There is also a strand of literature interested in the formation of “institutional identity,” but this has often been studied through the active roles of individuals or particular groups within an institution in shaping that institution’s identity (Oelsner 2013).

6

https://www.flickr.com/photos/africanunioncommission/7307819202/ and https://www.flickr.com/photos/africanunioncommission/7307835550/ (last accessed August 25, 2023).

7

https://www.flickr.com/photos/africanunioncommission/7307829964/ (last accessed August 25, 2023).

8

https://www.flickr.com/photos/africanunioncommission/7307825992/ (last accessed August 25, 2023).

9

Focus groups in Burkina Faso were conducted by Adjara Konkobo, Pascaline Kaboré, Amado Kaboré, and Simone Schnabel in February/March 2020 and January until April 2021 in Ouagadougou, Bobo-Dioulasso, Koudougou, Loumbila, and Yako. In The Gambia, focus groups were conducted by Omar M. Bah, Sophia Birchinger, Baboucarr Fatty, Karamba Jallow, and Sait Matty Jaw in October/November 2021 and from February to April 2022 in the Greater Banjul Area, Kanilai, Bwiam, Basse, Wassu, and Fass Njaga Joi.

10

While some focus group participants spoke French/English, others used local languages such as Mooré, Dyula, Wollof, Mandinka, and Fula. Quotes in this text from the focus groups in Burkina Faso are the author’s translations of the French transcripts.

11

I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing me to this reflexion.

12

The concrete wording of the question was: “When you hear ‘African Union’/‘ECOWAS,’ what comes to your mind? What do you think of?” with probing questions to find out how and where research participants associate different things with these two organizations.

13

The concrete wording of the question was: “When you look at your own life, do you think you have benefitted from the African Union?”/“When you look at your country, Burkina Faso/The Gambia, do you think it has benefitted from the African Union?”