APCJ_1528_Win2010_00i_122_4 12/30/10 3:22 PM Page 117 BOOKSHELF Africa’s New Peace and Security Architecture: Promoting Norms, Institutionalizing Solutions, edited by Ulf Engel and João Gomes Porto Farnham, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Co., 2010. Global Security in a Changing World. xix ⫹ 159 p. Bibliography to p. 171. Index to p. 179. ISBN 9780754676058 (hbk). Reviewed by Golda Keng Africa’s New Peace and Security Architecture: Promoting Norms, Institutionalizing Solutions features contributions from academics, development cooperation specialists, and African Union (AU) staff. It serves as an illustrative analysis of the AU’s new African peace and security architecture (APSA) and is aimed at students, academics, and practitioners seeking to understand the objectives, mandate, and potential contributions of this new framework. Central to its message is the forceful, yet critical argument that although facing tremendous challenges, African states were doing more than ‘conveniently changing the name of their continental organization’ from the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to the African Union when they adopted the Constitutive Act, and with it, a new security vision for the continent (p. 2). The editors, Ulf Engel and João Gomes Porto, professors of African politics and peace studies, first introduce the OAU, which prior to the 1990s faced criticisms of ‘indifference, of bureaucratic paralysis and of being an elite club of dictators far removed from the realities of daily life of the common African’ (p. 1). They then proceed to examine the vision, mission, and fundamental objectives of the radically new AU, formed after member states endorsed updated norms, rules, and institutions to enforce and govern their interactions on matters of peace, security, and development. In chapter two, Fredrik Söderbaum and Björn Hettne examine the theory and practice of regionalism, conceptualizing and distinguishing its various dimensions and providing tools for critical review to situate Africa’s security regionalism within a global context. Klass van Walraven provides the historical context necessary to gauge the AU as a whole and the APSA in particular. His chapter illustrates how the accumulated experiences and political record of the OAU—the rationale for it and the complex internal Golda Keng is programme officer for the Great Lakes Programme, a project of the University for Peace (UPEACE) Africa Programme, Addis Ababa. She holds a master of arts degree in peace education from UPEACE, Costa Rica. Africa Peace and Conflict Journal, 3:2 (2010), 117–19. © 2010 University for Peace Africa Programme. All rights reserved. ISSN 1659–3944.