Security cooperation in Africa: lessons from ECOMOG

Abstract

This thesis argues that when West African states united to form the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), they did so for reasons very different from those that are advanced by most scholars and West African policy makers. The conventional wisdom holds that the ECOMOG intervention in Liberia was motivated by the desire of West African leaders to relieve the humanitarian disaster caused by the Liberian civil war. In contrast, I will argue that humanitarian considerations were far less important to the participating states than their desire to protect the political stability of their own regimes, which they believed would be threatened by a rebel victory over President Samuel Doe's Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL). In particular, they worried that a rebel victory in Liberia would constitute a dangerous precedent for other dissidents within the sub-region. Moreover, they were concerned that a Charles Taylor-controlled Liberia could become a "breeding ground" for similar insurgencies by dissidents fleeing their regimes