West Africa and ECOWAS: Regional Inspiration for the Responsibility to Protect

Dr Jochem Rietveld writes on the West African and wider regional underpinnings of the Responsibility to Protect, drawing on his recently published book, ‘Regional Approaches to the Responsibility to Protect: Lessons from Europe and West Africa’.  

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is still conventionally understood as a global norm, i.e. a norm that emanated from the global level through the United Nations system. While that premise holds to a significant extent, what remains underappreciated are the local roots of the norm.

In my book, ‘Regional Approaches to the Responsibility to Protect. Lessons from Europe and West Africa’, I analyse the regional approaches of the European Union (EU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to the R2P norm. I conclude that the West African contributions to the norm building of R2P have been particularly rich and multiple, even though they remain underappreciated in the current literature. In this literature, the African Union’s Constitutive Act (2002) usually gets a well-deserved mention, but the many principles and practices built in the West African region that co-inspired both the AU Constitutive Act at the regional level and R2P at the global level do not get the level of recognition they deserve.

While many analyses focus on the implementation of R2P in the post-summit Era - and indeed my book too engages with this aspect of R2P through seven case studies - it is equally important to investigate the local priors of the norm. This key notion was recognised by Acharya (2004; 2011; 2013) who questioned the dominance of global norms and transnational actors in the early norms scholarship of the 1990s (i.e. the so called ‘Western bias’) and aimed to give agency to actors from the Global South, through the concepts of norm localisation, subsidiarity, and circulation. My book builds on Acharya’s work and aims to demonstrate the importance of ECOWAS and the West African region at large in laying the fundamental groundwork for what was later to constitute the R2P norm.

Essentially, West African actors built the local building blocks that subsequently fed into the R2P norm through engagement at three different levels: individual norm entrepreneurs, emerging regional practices, and subsequent associated regional institutional innovation. First, it was former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan - a Ghanese national - who acted as a crucial norm entrepreneur of R2P. He famously challenged the international community in his 2000 Millennium Report by asking "if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to gross and systematic violation of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?”

Annan, coming from the West African region, was deeply shaped by the turbulent developments in his home region, where following the end of the Cold War, there was an increase in intrastate conflict that often coincided with the commission of mass atrocity crimes. During research interviews with key officials from the West African region, it was strongly emphasised that Annan could not have engaged in his norm advocacy for the R2P norm at the global level had he not been shaped by these profound events and developments in West Africa. Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo also made a key contribution to R2P through his advocacy for finding a new balance between security, sovereignty, and human rights as early as the early 1990s.

Second, in terms of practice, West African actors such as Nigeria and ECOWAS took the lead in responding to the increasing incidence of intrastate conflict and mass atrocities through the deployment of ECOMOG, the region’s ad-hoc force that was first deployed in the 1990s to quell the violence in Liberia and Sierra Leone. ECOWAS, as a regional organisation, primarily had an economic mandate prior to the late 1980s, except for two regional security protocols, which were largely dormant at the time. The organisation extraordinarily reinvented itself in the 1990s, realising it had to put a lid on the flaring insecurity in the region in order to stay relevant. ECOWAS managed to do this in a resounding way, adopting its 1993 Revised Treaty, the 1999 Mechanism and the 2001 Protocol that institutionalised conflict prevention, protection against mass atrocity crimes, good governance, and democracy in the West African region. ECOWAS thus both implemented and codified mass atrocity protection in the region at a time when the EU, for instance, was largely ineffective in its strategies during the various conflicts in the former Yugoslavia (FRY), and the term R2P itself was not even coined.

While the EU has made important and substantive progress since, ranging from, inter alia, the establishment of an R2P Focal Point in the European External Action Service (2016), to the adoption of a regional Atrocity Prevention Toolkit (2019), as well as its well-recognised longstanding advocacy for the norm internationally, it is equally important to recognise the crucial contribution ECOWAS has made to the norm construction of R2P. It is through the professional and personal advocacy of norm entrepreneurs such as Annan and Obasanjo, and the inspiration that both West African practices and institutional innovation provided to the regional and global level through the key advocacy of the aforementioned norm entrepreneurs, that we can observe and recognise the crucial contributions ECOWAS and the West African region at large have made to the global norm of R2P.

It is this recognition that is not only due in academia, but also in policy practice. For instance, the EU routinely finances and supports regional security projects in West Africa,  which is important in its own right as it contributes to regional security and stability in West Africa. One can, however, wonder sometimes if sufficient learning takes place ‘the other way around’. European policymakers - and Western policymakers more broadly - would be well advised to take note of and learn from the extraordinary progress in protection norms and practices that have been realised in West Africa in the past few decades. These advances in themselves carry the potential for the development and refinement of more effective protection approaches across the world in these turbulent times.

Dr Jochem Rietveld is Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge, UK.

Image credit: https://thecommonwealth.org/news/remembering-kofi-annan

If you are interested in submitting a blog post for the ECR2P’s Fresh Perspectives series, then please contact Dr Richard Illingworth by Email (r.illingworth@leeds.ac.uk) or Twitter (@RJI95).