A Caring Moment: Emotion Norms in European Union-African Union Security Cooperation

The study of postcolonial relationships within Global IR would benefit from further conceptualisation through the study of emotion norms of relationships and the prism of ethics of care. This chapter investigates relations between the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU) at two critical junctures in their history of security cooperation to determine to what extent this relationship can be categorised as one of care. First, we examine the establishment of the African Peace Facility (APF) in 2004, which made the AU a primary stakeholder in planning, authorising and disbursing EU funds for African-led peace and security operations. Next, we study the replacement of the APF with the European Peace Facility (EPF) in 2021, which redefined the terms of the EU–AU relationship by stripping the AU of the equal steering role it shared with the EU under the APF. By employing emotion discourse analysis on the EU and AU documents, we find that with the switch from the APF to EPF, the EU–AU relationship lost its character of being a care relationship. As such, the APF represented a caring moment, before the relationship reverted to terms that privileged the EU.