ABSTRACT
West Africa suffered from some of the world’s most vicious and protracted conflicts in the 1990s, as civil violence in Liberia spawned conflict in Sierra Leone, actors based in Sierra Leone engaged in warfare within Liberia, and violence spread across borders into Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire. A regional peacekeeping operation known as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) and dominated by Nigeria intervened in both Liberia and Sierra Leone with little success for many years. In fact some argued that ECOMOG’s intervention prolonged the conflict and drew in other neighboring states into the cluster of interlinked conflicts. While conflict in West Africa clearly had regional dynamics and sources, efforts to rebuild regional stability focused on the state and reconstruction of postconflict governments through elections. If conflict analysis suggests that some conflicts are regionalized, does that imply that conflict resolution must be regionally focused or does reconstructing a collapsed region begin with the state? This question will be examined here with reference to West Africa but has relevance for regionalized conflicts in the Horn of Africa, Great Lakes region, Balkans, Caucuses, and Central Asia.
