Challenges to Regional Security in West Africa: Focusing on the ECOWAS Response

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국아프리카학회
· 수록지 정보 : 한국아프리카 학회지 / 54권 / 1호 / 151 ~ 178페이지
· 저자명 : 황규득

초록

Since the end of the Cold War, the ideological confrontation that had shaped the interventions of the great powers in African countries came to an end, paving the way for a transformed milieu of international politics. Within this context, ECOWAS had to take responsibility and deal with conflicts jeopardizing regional security and stability. Driven by the lead state of Nigeria calling for ‘a coalition of willing states, however, ECOWAS rode out the absence of a legal framework for intervention by initially generating ad-hoc mechanisms and, afterwards, more permanent structures through a systemic search for conflict prevention and conflict management tools to deal with the more widened and complicated security paradigms in the region.
Distinguished from the other regional economic communities (RECs), which have developed their security mechanisms within the framework or under the influence of the African Union (AU) peace and security architecture, ECOWAS’s attempts in this field predate AU initiatives. Given that it developed its own conflict prevention and management framework, inspired more than anything by the West African political context in the 1990s, moreover, the performance of ECOWAS is worthy of being attentive to its own security experiences and the particular nature of instability in the region. Against the backdrop of these contextual meanings of ECOWAS as a regional security entity, the paper tries to reflect on the ECOWAS response to the various regional security challenges in West Africa, which followed by discussing some theoretical foundations to be reckoned with.

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