ABSTRACT
The Economic Community of West African States has made significant progress in the areas of conflict prevention, management, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peace enforcement in West Africa. The most famous example is the “restoration of the state,” and in particular the restoration of relative peace and stability in Liberia and Sierra Leone after more than a decade of violent conflict, banditry, and “uncivil wars,” which culminated in the deaths of thousands of innocent citizens and massive internal displacements of people and refugees. ECOWAS’s venture into the realm of peacemaking and peace support operations is in many ways fortuitous, having been conceived in the classical functionalist mould: to promote economic cooperation and create prosperity among member states, through the progressive removal of artificial and non-artificial barriers to trade leading to the eventual establishment of a common market. ECOWAS can rightly be described as a relatively successful security community with a large measure of justification, but it has failed to promote economic development in its member states. This failure has grave implications for its ability to broker peace and enhance the stability of the region. The chapter traces the genesis of this discrepancy and its effects on ECOWAS’s capacity to undertake “lethal” peace support operations in the region, the threats and challenges to peace, and its continuing relevance, and proffers new policy and institutional directions that could enhance its peacemaking roles in the region.
