ECAS 2013

A new wave of thinking is evolving in diplomacy: that of deploying military resources for peace instead of war. This new method which gained currency immediately after the World War II and has come to shape international relations in the beginning of the 21st century is constantly bedeviled by far reaching socio-economic implications due to the often haphazard and disarticulated approach of such engagements. Although Nigeria stands tall as a vanguard of peacekeeping around the world, the collateral impacts of these overtures on her domestic affairs has been daunting. From 1960 when she first sent her troops to quell the crisis in the Congo, the country has participated in more than 30 peace missions around the globe, some of which she actually initiated. Nigeria`s experiences in spearheading the ECOMOG missions in Liberia and Sierra Leone came with not only tales of war but other extra-military impacts suffered by the country during and after those operations. This paper attempts to interrogate such domestic fall-outs and argues for a sufficient articulation of such exercises to mitigate long-term impacts.

Though in the grip of violent conflicts, West Africa has developed an advanced regional security mechanism. Since the 1970s, the Economic Community Of West African States -ECOWAS-, within the framework of regional security mechanisms, has designed and set up several protocols and agreements in order to stabilize the region. ECOWAS' early warning system collects and analyses data for conflict prevention. With four "bureau zone", the system has to provide real time reports and analyses allowing to intervene quickly and efficiently in response to the deterioration of a security situation anywhere in the region.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the structure and the composition of the Early Warning System of ECOWAS as well as its methods for data collection and analysis. The efficiency of its emergency procedures will also be reviewed.

The analysis draws on fieldwork and interviews (from October to November 2012) with different "bureaux zones" staff, local organizations, think thanks and private analysts.

Preliminary results show that the ECOWAS Early Warning System is an important and necessary mechanism for the stability of the region. However, its functioning is impaired by problems such as a shortage of staff, inadequate information collection methods, a strong bureaucratic system and the reluctance of organisation members to implement recommendations.

In summary, the ECOWAS Early Warning System could be a major mechanism to prevent and reduce conflict in West Africa. To be efficient, the mechanism needs means and hires the necessary staff, improve its structure and resolve functioning problems.

After a civil conflict, when a peace agreement is signed between the government and the rebels, peace is highly fragile. Military spending is a key issue often used as a guarantee of stability.

The aim of this paper is to show that when a country emerges from civil conflict, military resources are an important factor leading to conflict relapse. Military spending may be viewed as an indicator of government military strength. Thus after the conflict, if the government increases the level of military resource, it may be interpreted as a revealing signal of the government's ability to credibly commit to a peace deal during the post-conflict period, and then conflict may recur. The larger the post-conflict government's army, the more costly renewed rebellion is likely to be and the lower the aspiring rebels' estimate of the probability of victory.

Our study uses data on a sample of 80 developing countries estimating survival models over the period 1960-2010. We examine both the case of democratic governments and of autocratic governments. The paper suggests that military spending is particularly associated with an increasing risk of renewed conflict. We demonstrate the adverse consequences of the use of military spending to sustain peace, particularly on case of civil conflict. We also show that the risk of renewed conflict in highly democratic governments drops rapidly after the conflict has ended; rather than in starkly autocratic regimes, where the process is much longer.

The military power may be one critical instrument that provides the sword for policy-makers and the military itself may be an instrument of conflict resolution and foreign policy of nations, but in domestic conflicts other than full scale wars, circumspection should be the rule of the game in the deployment of soldiers. The continuous deployment of troops to the streets and choke-points in Nigeria responds to the madman theory. The policy of applying maximum force to levels that have previously been regarded as disproportionate to the conflict and to the objectives of the parties is called the madman theory. The Nigerian history is replete with the use of maximum force to attempt to resolve conflicts yet at the end of the day force never had the slightest capacity to terminate such conflicts. The use of soldiers in the Tiv crisis in the First Republic, the military intervention in politics in Nigeria, the deployment of Joint Task Forces (JTFs) to the Niger Delta region, Plateau state, South East zone, Northern Nigeria and road blocks across Nigeria are instances of the madman theory. The central argument in the essay is that in spite of their technical sophistication, the military resources are exceedingly crude in relation to many socio-political objections. Therefore, a big question marks hangs on the use of military resources that are only suitable to sweeping tasks like destruction, conquest and or control people to wage peace in Nigeria, especially under democracy.

The Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) pioneered post-Cold War era regional peacekeeping with the deployment of troops to the first Liberian civil war 1989-1996. Other subsequent regional peacekeeping efforts have been deployed to resolve Sierra Leonean, Ivorian and other conflicts in West Africa region. However, while the use of military resources in addressing civil conflicts have been positively appraised; sufficient attention has not been paid to negative externalities and contradictions which such military operations have created. This paper used the conceptual approach to peacekeeping as enunciated in United Nations' Agenda for Peace, with a view to juxtaposing how ECOMOG's peacekeeping operations have aligned or deviated from the principles of peacekeeping as contained in the Agenda for Peace. The paper argues that externalities, contradictions and deviation from the principles of peacekeeping are plausible reasons why ECOMOG operations had failed to resolve regional conflict on permanent basis. This is evidenced in the two cycles of Liberian civil wars 1989-1996 and 1999- 2003; two cycles of Ivorian civil wars 2002-2004 and March -April 2011 as well as prolonged peacekeeping operation in Sierra Leone. The study submits that deployment of military resources must be combined with other non-military approaches that address fundamental causal factors of conflict in order to attain sustainable peace.