📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
This dissertation provides an original longitudinal theoretical and empirical analysis of Pan-African institutional development from the founding of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 to the African Union in the present, arguing that existing accounts of this institutional trajectory inadequately theorise the mechanisms through which Pan-African ideology, African state interests, and external geopolitical pressures have jointly shaped the design, transformation, and governance capacity of continental institutions. The dissertation challenges both the idealist narrative of progressive Pan-African integration and the pessimist narrative of permanent African institutional dysfunction, proposing instead the African Institutional Incrementalism Theory, which specifies how continental institutions evolve through cycles of normative ambition, resource constraint, and selective institutionalisation. A longitudinal comparative methodology spanning six decades is employed, combining systematic analysis of 350 OAU and AU summit decisions and institutional design documents with elite oral history research involving 70 interviews with former AU commissioners, member state diplomats, and Pan-African scholars, and comparative case analysis of five major AU institutional reforms. Historical institutionalism, process tracing, and discourse analysis provide the analytical architecture. Nigeria's role as a major financier and normative agenda-setter within the AU system across administrations is examined as a recurrent case study. Keywords: Pan-Africanism, African Union, OAU, institutional development, continental integration.
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