Securing lasting peace in West Africa

For over five decades, the quest for democratic governance in the West African sub-region has been punctuated by coup d'etats, the proliferation of illicit small arms and light weapons, ethnic violence and armed conflicts. The intensity of resource conflict, multifaceted political crises, including insurgencies and intra-state wars has notoriously earned it the reputation as a theatre of anarchy or bloody civil wars. The constant threat to human and state security has refocused scholarly attention on the role of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in sustaining stability among its Member States. As such, this chapter surveys the internal complexities of the sub-region and how they influence ECOWAS's (in)actions to political instabilities or transnational crimes. In doing this, the discussion explores contemporary conceptual and normative debates on armed conflicts, their evolution and causes within the sub-region, and ECOWAS's responses to attain stability. A specific area of concern is that while both ECOWAS and the African Union (AU) have a plethora of institutional frameworks for conflict prevention, management and resolution, their Peace Support Operations (PSO's) are often riddled with complex inter-and-intrastate barriers including cultural, linguistic, lack of consensus on doctrine and strategies, limited communications, logistical as well as intelligence capabilities and insufficient funding. The chapter concludes that without a timely and efficient ECOWAS Standby Force, one of these two things or both might occur: ongoing hostilities might exacerbate, or foreign powers, including former colonial powers, might enter the void and impose their Western solutions to an African problem.