Crisis of authority and the cybernetic politics of African international organizations: The ECOWAS and Its Institutional Circuits of Heterarchical Entanglement

This chapter examines how African inter-state relations are shaped by the crisis management initiatives of African International Organizations using the case of the Economic Community of West African States. It leverages the insights of cybernetic politics and heterarchy to decentre the dominant heuristic of hierarchy in the framing of intra-African international politics given that it hardly accommodates transactions beyond a one-dimensional understanding of power by. The chapter demonstrates how ECOWAS member states use the logic of cybernetic politics and heterachy to acquire flexibility and speed to pragmatically manage multiple episodes of authority crisis in West Africa.