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Regional cooperation and integration are increasing globally with regional blocs working towards economic and political stability. In this paper, the nonsituational concept of political commitment and the pathway of normative legitimacy are employed to explore the model for deepening political integration in West Africa. The focus is on identifying key policy areas to enable consistent political commitment and long-term legitimacy in the West African integration. The article addresses this issue by employing a qualitative technique. Results show that ECOWAS policymakers must embrace the awareness that political integration is embedded in the 1993 Revised Treaty; voiding selective implementation of policies is critical for regional development; prioritize harmonization of preferences and compatibility of regional vs national interests; religious intolerance deepens the dilemma concerning religion and politics in West Africa; and an enabling environment for ECOWAS people is needed to make human rights respecting choices against the backdrop of freedom to choose terrorism or kidnapping for ransom as a means of livelihood. The paper shows that ECOWAS cannot be fighting politically and cooperates economically and should work to ensure a robust political union through a consistent political commitment and long-term legitimacy to achieve meaningful economic integration, peace and prosperity and the ECOWAS of peoples. ECOWAS policy makers believe that political integration is a long-term vision because there is no express mention of the concept in the Treaty. This ought to erase the legitimacy of the bloc to intervene in political affairs of member states, such as the Alliance of Sahel States controversy. Selective policy implementation is observed as ECOWAS best practices in regional policy implementation. The leaders urge members to pay their taxes and fees, and to comply with their directives, yet ignore or distort policies that requires respecting the people's rights. Religion and politics are inseparable in West Africa. Efforts targeted at religious tolerance are efforts in the direction to deepen regional political commitment and long-term legitimacy. Freedom of choice to become a bandit or terrorist as means of livelihood is contra social justice. ECOWAS must ensure that the people have the enabling environment to make right choices.

This paper examines how the current format of Regional Economic Commissions (RECs) aids or derails the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). While the AfCFTA conceives RECs as its building blocks, as envisioned in the Abuja Treaty, this paper argues that integrating them would be nearly impractical given their diverse intra-trade arrangements. The paper notes that the Abuja Treaty had not envisaged member states belonging to up to four RECs simultaneously, with different intra-trade arrangements. The paper demonstrates several cases where RECs had to show some level of coordination and struggled to do so. How the AfCFTA envisions this happening at a continental level remains a mystery. Given that the nullification of the RECs’ existing agreement is out of the question, as emphasised in the AfCFTA, much effort is required to facilitate the parallelism and align the RECs and the AfCFTA. The paper adopts the qualitative approach and relies on secondary data collection and document analysis.

The vision of a unified Africa and the abolition of arbitrary borders remain unfinished goals of Pan-Africanism. The faltering nature of many African states, isolationism, exclusionary policies, xenophobic tendencies, terrorism, civil wars, and economic challenges all prompt one to question the raison d’être of Pan-Africanism. Differences in the meaning, interpretation, overall strategy, and the lack of political and economic direction within the movement also create a widening gap in literature and practice. This research explores the prospects and challenges of achieving a borderless Africa, focusing on continental integration’s political, economic, and security dimensions. Using secondary research and content analysis of the identified data, the study synthesises key themes related to Africa’s integration efforts. The findings highlight notable progress, such as the establishment of AfCFTA and various initiatives by the AU and RECs, which have facilitated trade, economic collaboration, and political cooperation across African states. However, significant barriers remain, including political fragmentation, economic disparities, security concerns, and weak institutional capacities. The study also identifies opportunities to accelerate integration, such as leveraging Africa’s youthful population, advancing digital transformation, and enhancing regional infrastructure projects. Recommendations include strengthening political will, addressing economic inequalities, boosting security cooperation, and investing in technology and infrastructure. The research concludes that while a fully integrated, borderless Africa faces considerable challenges, it remains achievable with sustained effort, strategic policies, fresh pro-African ideologies, and collaborations across stakeholders.

Black France, White Europe illuminates the deeply entangled history of European integration and African decolonization. Emily Marker maps the horizons of belonging in postwar France as leaders contemplated the inclusion of France's old African empire in the new Europe-in-the-making. European integration intensified longstanding structural contradictions of French colonial rule in Africa: Would Black Africans and Black African Muslims be French? If so, would they then also be European? What would that mean for republican France and united Europe more broadly? Marker examines these questions through the lens of youth, amid a surprising array of youth and education initiatives to stimulate imperial renewal and European integration from the ground up. She explores how education reforms and programs promoting solidarity between French and African youth collided with transnational efforts to make young people in Western Europe feel more European. She connects a particular postwar vision for European unity-which coded Europe as both white and raceless, Christian and secular-to crucial decisions about what should be taught in African classrooms and how many scholarships to provide young Africans to study and train in France. That vision of Europe also informed French responses to African student activism for racial and religious equality, which ultimately turned many young francophone Africans away from France irrevocably. Black France, White Europe shows that the interconnected history of colonial and European youth initiatives is key to explaining why, despite efforts to strengthen ties with its African colonies in the 1940s and 1950s, France became more European during those years.

African economic integration and peacekeeping constitute respectively the largest institutionalization, and the largest operationalization, of the African Union (AU) and its sub-regional organisations. The number of African soldiers and police in AU and United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations has grown steadily. Sometimes, major strategic decisions have been mistakes which aggravated, or even catalysed conflicts that would not otherwise have occurred. The peacekeeping missions in Nigeria and Somalia are examples of these. Peacekeeping operations are in the larger scheme of things part of the on-going project of African integration. This paper identifies major problems that remain persistent after half a century of protracted Pan-Africanist endeavours at sub-regional and continental integration. One recurrent occurrence is the chasm between aspirational treaties voluntarily signed, and their implementation, taking at best a decade or decades. Often, entities founded on paper remain dormant, until in a subsequent decade another structure is founded to operationalize the function of the previous paper entity, with this process going through several iterations.

The African Financial Architecture holds the potential of enabling the countries of the continent to exercise their right to development. From helping to overcome a history of lop-sided dependence to providing a framework and primary resources for African countries to better master their development priorities, the proposed Architecture could become an important game changer in the African regional integration project, and the continent’s relationship with the international order. However, to fulfil its promise, and especially in order not to simply become a glorified clone of international financial institutions, it is imperative that the politics of a continental rebirth that underpinned the initial framing and adoption of the Architecture is urgently rediscovered and fully embraced. For, in the end, the quest to build an African Financial Architecture is primarily about reshuffling relations of power between Africa and the contemporary global economic order in order to enhance the prospects of continental socio-economic transformation.

Using Diop’s theory of Cultural Identity, this paper discusses the African Union’s (AU) Common Position on Migration and Development and the Protocol to the Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community relating to Free Movement of Persons, Right of Residence and Right of Establishment. The paper argues that, although these policies try to achieve the vision of an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, they ignore fundamental issues such as creating a common African identity and an African consciousness. Unless an African consciousness or an African state of mind is cultivated, these policies are not likely to succeed. The paper proposes that the education systems of African states must consciously inculcate Pan-African values and teach an Afrocentric history in order to create a common African historical consciousness and argues that the AU must use indigenous African languages as official languages in order to show that it is serious about promoting Pan-African values.

Africa’s regional economic communities (RECs) are increasingly active forums for both economic and political issues in the continent. After several political coups in Mali, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) imposed wide-ranging economic and political sanctions on Mali, in the context of ECOWAS’s mandate regarding democracy and good governance. These sanctions were then mirrored by the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). The WAEMU sanctions led Mali to bring a case before the WAEMU Court of Justice, resulting in a rare instance of judicial review, by a regional court, of acts taken by a REC. This article examines the landmark decision rendered by the WAEMU Court of Justice in 2022, in the case Mali v. The Conference of Heads of State and Government of the WAEMU, by which the Court’s President ordered the suspension of the execution of the WAEMU sanctions. We analyse the WAEMU’s constituent instruments, examine the interactions between the overlapping mandates of the WAEMU and ECOWAS, and consider their potential impact on the validity of the sanctioning decision. We argue that the decision taken at the Union’s level is difficult to justify under the applicable international law.

The proposal to build the world's largest hydro-power project on the Congo River is a century old. This article argues that the Grand Inga project could become the political, diplomatic, and economic driver to deepening integration between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other African countries. The Inga delays were not without benefits. Twenty-first century sensibilities ensure revision of the proposed mega-project to minimize both ecological and social harm. While colonial-era projects were configured to maximize benefits to imperialist, settler, and corporate interests, independence and democratization are the prerequisites to facilitate the broadest possible distribution of the benefits of electrification. Since some of the countries involved have hybrid regimes, further democratization, and civil society lobbying, will be necessary to mitigate the downside of its ecological and social impacts.

Since the dawn of democracy, South Africa has grown to be an immigrant attracting nation. Due to the influx of African immigrants in South Africa, the country’s communities have evolved into a heterogeneous society. Hence, some of the prominent existing empirical studies buttress that, the biological and cultural differences between South Africans and African immigrants often trigger xenophobia. As such, xenophobia has a propensity to affect perceptions of African immigrants and South Africans towards social cohesion and African continental integration, amidst the long-term objective of the African Union to establish the United States of Africa. Using qualitative research methods and in-depth interviews as a data collection technique, this paper examines the extent to which cross-border migration influences the social sentiments of South Africans and African immigrants on their idealizations of social cohesion and African continental integration. This paper reveals that, besides the general narrative that positive contact is a determinant of positive relations between diverse groups; positive “client-service provider relations” between South Africans and African immigrants inspires positive idealisations of social cohesion for these two groups. This negates the general narrative that contact between immigrants and host nations is inherently conflict-inducing. In addition, this paper asserts that negative contact between Department of Home Affairs (DHA), South African Police Service (SAPS) as well as Tshwane Metro Police Department (TMPD) officials (who are South Africans) and African immigrants inspire negative idealisations of African continental integration.