Introduction

As already explained in chapter 1, a key objective of the book is to demonstrate the proposition that the African system has manifested its most significant domestic promise when it has been creatively deployed by activist forces in the domestic social struggles that they often wage within certain African states. When the African system is so deployed, it can help shape the self-understandings and conceptions of interest held within key domestic institutions of target states, thereby contributing to the generation of valuable forms of “correspondence” between the goals of the African system (on the one hand) and the behaviour of the relevant domestic institutions (on the other hand). The other key objective of the book is to demonstrate the need for a modest expansion in the range and depth of the conventional optics through which the value/effectiveness of the African system (and similar IHIs) have hitherto been evaluated. There is a need, it will be urged, to reach beyond, without abandoning, the search for state compliance as the measure of the utility of the African system and other such bodies.

However, before the evidence that tends to indicate this touted domestic promise of the African system can be fruitfully discussed, it is necessary to offer a general discussion of the nature and relevance of those conventional conceptions of IHIs that are viewed in this book as more or less limited. This will be the focus of the present chapter (which discusses the conventional conceptions of IHIs more generally).