West Africa's Security Challenges: Building Peace in a Troubled Region

West Africa's Security Challenges: Building Peace in a Troubled Region: Edited by Adekeye Adebajo and Ismail Rashld. Boulder CoIo.: Lynne Rienner, 2004. Pp. xviii, 448; bibliography, index, map. $59.95 cloth, $22.00 paper. The word "security" has lately achieved a degree of pervasiveness that can undoubtedly be traced to the 9/11 attacks, but it now pops up (at least in the West, and particularly in the United States) in connection with almost any of the recurrent forms of hardship or calamity that people worldwide have had to face (and sought to avoid) throughout the course of human history. West Africa's security "challenges" (another buzzword) are, for the most part, of this ancient sort, and not different from those faced by other regions of the world where the four riders of the Apocalypse continue to gallop, but one of the effects of globalization is that their "security" dimensions may be read quite differently by local or outside actors. This excellent and informative collection of essays deals primarily with war and (as its title suggests) with peace efforts in the region. None of the essays is exclusively devoted to a particular "case study," if only because earlier publications by Adebajo and others have already addressed the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone.1 Chapters in this volume, which grew out of a seminar jointly convened by the New York-based International Peace Academy (IPA)2 and ECOWAS in Abuja in September 2001, analyze the root causes of conflict, as well as the peacemaking efforts and mediating roles of ECOWAS, the United Nations, France, Britain, and the United States, but the sequels of war and its human toll are not really addressed, except when they pertain to the logistics of the conflict itself (as in the case of child soldiers, covered by 'Funmi Olonisakin). The problems of refugees and displaced persons are barely mentioned, and while several essays naturally include extensive references to specific conflicts (Liberia and Sierra Leone, of course, but also Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Cote d'Ivoire, or Nigeria), the 18 contributors deal for the most part, with broad-gauged issues, such as regionalization or integration, governance and democratization, civilmilitary relations, African unity, civil society, or regional security mechanisms. These chapters refrain, happily, from heavy handed theorizing, but review (and occasionally critique) the many pseudo- or instant theories and/or explanatory schemes that have mushroomed around such confrontations-whether in West Africa or in other parts of the "developing world. …