ABSTRACT
The West Africa sub-region has faced a lot of security challenges, particularly in the past three decades. The organisation comprised at inception 16 countries, which have now been reduced to 15 since the withdrawal of Mauritania in 2000. The sub-region has a diverse colonial history, with the countries being either former British, French, or Portuguese colonies. As West Africa experiences rapid transformation, democratisation, and population growth, security challenges have continued to threaten its progress. The collapse of the economies of many West African countries in the wake of the introduction of Structural Adjustment Programmes in the 1980s, the end of the Cold War, and negative effects of globalisation, coupled with the nature of authoritarian domestic politics, led to political crises in many West African states, leading to state collapse and civil wars and conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Côte d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso.
