AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	25. Regionalisation in Africa: Old Gamble or New Reality?
Paper ID	332
Author(s)	Gibert, Marie V.
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	Regionalisation in Africa is too often considered either under its only intergovernmental aspect, i.e. the emergence of formal groups of neighbouring states, or as a more informal type of exchange, derived from ancient, pre-colonial trade networks that ignored Westphalian state borders. In West Africa, however, where regionalisation is often said to be one of the most developed on the African continent, the phenomenon clearly takes on other forms, at the local and sub-regional levels, born from the initiatives of elected officials or of non-governmental organisations. The first cited form, interstate regionalisation, has been the object of much academic and media attention over the last fifteen years and is sometimes associated with the idea of a global governance based on ‘regional blocks’. Considered from this angle, regionalisation is denounced by some as a foreign import and an African leaders’ political strategy aimed at attracting international funds and support. Others, on the contrary, see in regionalisation something authentically African, illustrated by the pan-African ideal and the traditional porosity of state borders. This paper will show that reality is certainly situated between those two positions and that West African populations, like their leaders, have at times rewritten their modes of regional exchanges according to the pre-established international model and, at other times, have adapted this model to their very own political rules. This paper will attempt to show the wide diversity of regional methods of cooperation in matters of conflict prevention and resolution. Based on fieldwork observations and interviews and on the study of governmental and non-governmental policy documents, this paper will focus on the Western part of West Africa, which some call the Mano River Basin, that comprises Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. The first part of the paper will be devoted to different arguments in favour of regionalisation as an effective means of conflict prevention in Africa, and whether and how these arguments can be applied to West Africa. In the three remaining parts of the paper, specific attention will be given to three different types – depending on actors and/or geographic areas - of regionalisation, i.e. interstate regionalisation, regionalisation in border areas and regional cooperation between civil society organisations. It is hoped that this case-by-case method will help illustrate not only the diversity of West Africa’s regionalisation projects, but also the difficulty of determining what is intrinsically West African – and therefore possibly more ‘locally owned’ – and what is essentially of Western import.

Regionalisation as a Conflict Prevention Tool: Western Import or West African Reality?