For Peace in Africa, Boost Regional Blocs — Like West Africa's ECOWAS – United States Institute of Peace

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ECOWAS has proven it can solve crises. But like U.N. and other bodies, it needs updating.
Friday, April 19, 2024
/ READ TIME: 8 minutes
By: Joseph Sany, Ph.D.
As the United States and international partners work to stabilize Africa’s Sahel region — and to prevent its warfare, violent extremism and armed coups from metastasizing into Africa’s densely populous and strategic Atlantic coast — the West African multinational bloc, ECOWAS, has proven its value in resolving crises and promoting stability. Yet, as global security threats have evolved, ECOWAS, like other multinational bodies, needs updated capacities to meet new challenges. International democracies’ most effective initiative to support West Africa’s stability would be to partner with West Africans to strengthen their vital regional community. A similar strategy is valid across Africa.
Anyone paying serious attention to U.S. or international security already recognizes the imperative to build effective strategies to stabilize the Sahel and West Africa. The latest Global Terrorism Index redoubles that urgency, finding that the Sahel’s violence wrought fully 47% of all global deaths from terrorism last year. Africans and their partners must prevent the immensely greater African and global crises — human death and displacement, disrupted trade routes, economies and more — from any spread of Sahel-level chaos to the Atlantic coast, a region five times more populous than West Africa’s interior states.
A boost to America’s readiness to help is this: Two U.S. administrations and bipartisan congressional majorities combined in recent years to achieve a 10-year Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability across five coastal West African countries. The U.S. government also has committed to an unprecedented partnership with Africa, recognizing the continent’s rising leadership and influence in shaping the 21st century world.
But a singular partner with, and contributor to, U.S. strategic goals — West Africa’s stability and a broad U.S.-Africa partnership on security, trade, investment and peace — must be the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Any effective U.S. and international response in West Africa must support ECOWAS to revive and strengthen its historically impressive role in building peace and democracy.
While media and policy discussions rightly focus on West Africa’s crises of governance and democracy, including its four states now under military rule, the region also includes a community of democracies — Senegal, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria and Cape Verde — that promote stability and good governance through ECOWAS and its institutions. Recent democratic elections and transfers of power in Liberia, and in Senegal’s resolution of a constitutional crisis, underscore these democracies’ resilience.
Among Africa’s eight regional economic communities, ECOWAS is the most effective in preventing or resolving crises of war and governance. Over years, its members made ECOWAS their forum for setting norms of democracy and good governance, including a 2001 protocol to require fair elections and declare “zero tolerance for power obtained or maintained by unconstitutional means.” Like many multinational bodies, ECOWAS has fallen short in consistently implementing its declared norms. Yet it repeatedly has advanced them; its peacekeeping forces have halted civil warfare, reversed coup attempts or ushered peaceful political transitions in six West African states.
But now ECOWAS must strengthen its capacities to meet the new threats to democracy and peace rising in West Africa, as well as worldwide. These include, terrorism, economic disruptions and impoverishment from COVID, climate shocks and Russia’s war on Ukraine. A decade ago, Sahel nations’ democracy efforts already were weakened by economic impoverishment, especially among communities marginalized from state power; a huge youth population whose needs would have been difficult to meet even by wealthy states; extremist cells linked to al-Qaida or ISIS; an influx of weaponry following Libya’s 2011 collapse; and broad corruption in governance and business. Insurgencies and coups spread across Sahel states, fueled by acute problems:
ECOWAS has at times mis-stepped, as in an ill-coordinated response to last July’s coup in Niger. ECOWAS’ chairman, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, initially threatened military force; the bloc then imposed trade sanctions before lifting them last month to seek dialogue instead on restoring civilian rule. The threat of force heightened a nationalist backlash in Niger and likely encouraged its military rulers to join those of Mali and Burkina Faso in announcing their withdrawal from ECOWAS next year. By contrast, ECOWAS used effective, low-key diplomacy in helping Senegal reverse its ex-president’s unconstitutional effort to prolong his term in office.
To strengthen democracy and stability in West Africa, and contain the Sahel’s chaos, ECOWAS must bolster its capacities — and its connections and legitimacy among the citizenries of its member states. U.S. and other international partners should support. Critical steps include:
Steps such as these will not only strengthen ECOWAS as West Africa’s primary pro-democracy institution, but they will also bolster it as an example to Africa’s other regional economic communities, which are vitally needed in similar roles across the continent.
The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s).
PUBLICATION TYPE: Analysis
Vice President, Africa Center
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