How can the countries of West Africa improve their security environment? This paper from the International Peace Institute looks at West Africa’s daunting security challenges. It argues that with the region’s weak internal capacities and its peripheral status in the global market, the prognosis appears grim. However, through properly coordinated and calibrated measures aimed at incrementally strengthening democratic institutions, expanding infrastructure and creatively transforming other negative indicators, the security environment could significantly improve in the coming years.
The West Africa region, part of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), covers an area of 4.7 million square kilometres. It is more than twice the size of Western Europe. Its location stretching from Angola to Western Sahara makes it both strategically important and vulnerable. Local, regional and international actors play a complex role in its evolving security architecture.
Its security challenges are a function of the region’s natural resource endowments, the vulnerabilities inherent in its geographical location, and environmental and demographic factors; internal and international governance processes; and regional and external geopolitics exerting distinct pressures on the region’s security architecture. In particular:
- Maritime security in the territorial waters of West Africa is precarious. There is little surveillance, or interception capability, rendering it vulnerable to piracy, poaching and dumping of toxic waste.
- The sea routes provide channels for arms and human trafficking. Drug trafficking constitutes the most serious security threat.
- Erratic climate change has created a heavy toll on human life, food security, and health. Common water sources are becoming an object of conflict across the region.
- The porous nature of West Africa’s northern borders and the proximity of the Sahel-Sahara divide to Algeria and Morocco, and to the Middle East, make the region vulnerable to terrorism, arms and human trafficking, and to refugee flows.
- Governance processes within individual countries are the key drivers of security dynamics. The actions of the regional hegemon and other subregional powers exert an influence on the regional security architecture.
- There is a correlation between bad governance and political instability. Democracy is slow in translating ‘popular’ mandates and economic growth into development dividends. ECOWAS has limited influence over member states.
As frontline implementation agencies, ECOWAS member states bear principal responsibility for peace and security in West Africa. Together with civil society they must ensure the domestication and implementation of regional norms and standards aimed at strengthening collective peace and security. ECOWAS:
- has a responsibility to promulgate regional norms with regard to conflict-inducing issues, including natural resource exploitation and political and security governance;
- should set standards and monitor compliance within member states;
- induce a systematic approach to consolidation by strengthening institutions at regional, national, and local levels, and promoting responsible leadership among political aspirants, the youth, and women;
- must execute a paradigm shift in member states’ security posture, moving from a reactive to a preventive mode;
- should pay greater attention to the ‘soft’ (developmental) aspects of human security; and
- should build capacities to confront the current and emerging threats to regional security – extremism, terrorism, drug trafficking and environmental degradation.
