West Africa’s new regional peacekeeping force, documented.
The ECOWAS announcement strikes me as an important move given your analysis for TMC on why the ECOWAS responses to recent coups in West Africa raise questions about the credibility of their commitment to constitutional order. But what does your book tell us about how policy decisions like this are actually implemented?
These kinds of decisions are typically made at the Authority of Heads of States level — i.e., the leaders of the 15 ECOWAS member nations. These decisions are flashy, and they get the headlines. But it’s important to know how ECOWAS leaders got to this moment. My book talks about the incremental processes of how practitioners helped formulate and eventually implement these decisions made by the heads of states.
Practitioners are the workers that are close to the ground. They identify and incorporate key stakeholders. But critically, they articulate ECOWAS’s normative standards, and they determine how ECOWAS will respond to issues. And so practitioners can discern the feasibility of these kinds of decisions and how capable ECOWAS is in implementing interventions, and then match the feasibility and capability with the institution’s norms and values.
They are subject matter experts who are part of the civil service, and they come from many different backgrounds. They are not just political appointees from the member countries. ECOWAS has a procurement process through which they hire and staff the headquarters in Abuja and throughout West Africa. Most of the time, staff come from ECOWAS countries, sometimes on loan from national governments. They are former lawyers, former government bureaucrats in ECOWAS members, perhaps former military personnel — and people who have worked for other international organizations like the United Nations, and not just in Africa.
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