Concepts of and Issues in Collective Security for West Africa

Abstract

International relations have undergone drastic changes in recent years. The year 1991-92 witnessed dramatic shifts in world politics. The break-up of the erstwhile Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, coupled with the collapse of communism, brought into focus fresh tensions and alignments. These events led to the redefinition of the dynamics of the policies of nations. The present bleak economic situation in the world has adversely affected international relations and international security. The last several years have witnessed a growing number of interventions in internal and regional disputes in Africa. The frequency of this kind of behaviour by both regional and external actors suggests that intervention is a significant issue of African regional security. However, discussion of intervention and regional security will be narrowed down to the West Africa Sub-region, but it made retrospective enquiry into the League of Nations; the United Nations, as well as Africa. Since the establishment of the UN and the signing of its Charter in June 26, 1945, the nature of the international body's activities to implement the Charter has changed considerably. These operations have evolved from the classical peacekeeping operation, to complex multi-dimensional peacekeeping operations, where the military component is but one of the role players. Where the use of force was usually not a consideration for the earlier peacekeeping operations, the mandate to use some form of force has now become the rule rather than the exception. African High Command (AHC) was mooted as a form of collective security in the 1960s. Due to plethora of problems, the AHC did not go beyond the drawing board. The failure of the OAU to midwife a regional collective security under its umbrella, paved the way for Sub-regional arrangement such as ECOWAS/ECOMOG. The coming into existence of an institution like ECOMOG was foreshadowed in the original articles of the ECOWAS treaty. It needed the simmering conflict of the Liberian Civil War to trigger its evolution. It was against the background of gruesome forebodings that the Authority of Heads of State and Government of ECOWAS met in Banjul The Gambia, in 1990. It is unimaginable what the fate of Liberia and its immediate neighbours, Sierra Leone and Guinea, who were swamped and overrun by hordes of Liberian refugees, would have been today had ECOMOG not been established to help bring peace to Liberia. ECOMOG was an insurance of safety, and it provided visible and assured security guarantees. ECOMOG's professionalism, competence and dedication throughout all phases of the peace plan have earned it and ECOWAS high praise from the international community.