The European Peace Facility in action: rethinking EU-Africa partnership on peace and security?

Abstract

The European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU) have had and continue to maintain a long-standing partnership on peace and security, which dates back to the establishment of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) at the beginning of the 2000s. However, in 2021, the EU embarked on a different pathway of financing its activities in the field of peace and security by establishing the European Peace Facility (EPF). This new financial instrument allows the EU to directly finance (bypassing the AU) national and sub-regional military initiatives on the African continent, to finance lethal equipment for African armies and expand its scope globally. While the vast majority of current debates and research focus solely on the „train and equip“ provision of the EPF and its implications in the Ukrainian war, the EU engagement in Africa through the instrument mentioned above is scarcely assessed. Therefore, drawing on the theory of interregional security cooperation, this paper considers how establishing the EPF impacts the EU‘s engagement on the African continent in the security field. Empirically assessing the instances in which the EPF has been implemented on the African continent, this paper aims to answer the research question: how does the establishment and implementation of the EPF impact the EU-AU partnership on peace and security? This paper employs a qualitative research design, namely a case study approach of inquiry and process tracing methods. The results of this approach show two distinct tendencies. First, while implementing the EPF in Africa can solve certain operational and technical aspects of the EU engagement on the continent, the EU-AU partnership must be reinforced on the political and strategic levels. Moreover, considering the plethora of international and regional actors involved in managing the security dynamics on the African continent, it is essential to prioritise the political dimension of the EU-AU partnership.