| Summary: | The theory of ‘security communities’ is generally understood as ”dependable expectations of peaceful change” between groups and whether or not the African Union can be said to meet that criteria has been contested in the research community. One of the central disagreements lie in the nature of the region’s conflicts, of which a majority are intrastate but with tendencies of transnational involvement. This paper seeks to understand how extensive this involvement is and how it affects the possibility of classifying the African Union as a security community. The findings show that, despite some increased development in terms of cooperation between former adversaries, there is not sufficient support for the African Union to be a security community because of the deeply destabilizing effect some of the conflict involvements have on the perception of security and reciprocal trust in the region.
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