ABSTRACT
This chapter explores recent multinational interventions in and around West Africa and the Sahel region. Special consideration deserves to be given to the current change from using established regional organizations to forming ad hoc coalitions of groups of states. While in the past regional organizations have been the primary focus, for example, for deploying peacekeeping missions, we are now more frequently confronted with war-fighting coalitions which are only lightly institutionalized. In Francophone Africa (plus Nigeria) especially, we can see the emergence of institutional innovations: the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) which has been formed by the Lake Chad Basin Conference (LCBC) in order to eliminate Boko Haram and the G5 Sahel (G5S) which is expected to contain Islamist terrorism in the Sahel. This chapter will focus on the MNJTF and G5S, explores their emergence, structure and operation. We will also discuss to what extent these ad hoc coalitions are genuine institutional innovations further enhancing the existing African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) or if they are contributing to an increasingly fragmented institutional landscape and unnecessarily spreading scarce resources.
