A tale of regional transformation: From political community to security regions the politics of security and regionalism in West Africa

Abstract

This article draws attention to the intersection between the politics of regionalism and the politics of security by investigating the recent reorganisation of the West African space. It shows how international actors' reinvestment in West Africa is driven by their security priorities, and how these actions, in particular those of the European Union, are deconstructing West Africa into smaller security regions such as the Sahel. This transformation is legitimised through a regional imaginary depicting the Sahel as a fuzzy region constituted by fluctuating boundaries of networks of organised crime and terrorism. This imaginary strongly contrasts with an earlier one that conceived of West Africa as a regional political community. The tensions between these two imaginaries raises important questions about how these perceptions emerged, which agencies and interests have driven them, and what consequences this has for the reallocation of political authority and sovereignty practices in West Africa. Hence, drawing on International Political Sociology, Critical Geopolitics and Political Geography, this article symmetrically engages with the simultaneous processes of spatialisation of security and securitisation of space to understand the production and transformation of security regionalism in West Africa.

How freedom of movement infringes on the right to leave

“…Practices that were trialed since the 1980s led to the observation and problematization of international migration, imagined to be mostly young and black men, as a security issue in the early 2000s (Huysmans, 2006). The result was, as is impressively visible with the ECOWAS Common Approach on Migration, a focus on border management (Frowd, 2014;Lopez-Lucia, 2020;Aniche, 2022;Mouthaan, 2022), with ever more perverse effects evidenced by the many deaths in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas and African deserts (Callamard, 2018;Forensic Architecture ). However, when the number of deaths became even untenable for European countries, the door opened for reigning in security measures to a certain degree and expanding measures of development.…”

An Ocean Free of Nuclear Weapons? Regional Security Governance in the South Atlantic

“…Regional governance is therefore closely related to the dominant perceptions and conceptions of security within the region, from human to regime security, and therefore reflects existing power constellations and ideologies. For all intended purposes, regional governance serves to legitimise specific security practices and delineations (Ciută, 2008;Lopez-Lucia, 2020).…”

Spaces of (in-)security and intervention: spatial competition and the politics of regional organizations in the Sahel

“…Simultaneously, this interpretation of the region implies specific prescriptions for intervention, which should be based on policing and hard-security approaches and practices reiterating a territorializedthat is, state-centredspatial and security imaginary (Baldaro, 2021a). In recent years, various scholars have employed these 'spatial lenses' (Döring & Herpolsheimer, 2021) to explore how competing security and spatial projects are shaping those spaces and the field of security regionalism in the Sahel (Baldaro, 2021a), revealing the transformative effects that the politics of security and regionalism produce on space and the agency of the actors involved (Charbonneau, 2017b;Lopez-Lucia, 2020).…”

“…13 In their eyes, the G5 Sahel was a more easily controllable regional counterpart, thought to reproduce the spatial imaginary of the 2011 'European Strategy for the Sahel' and the French mission Barkhane which, succeeding Serval in 2014, significantly restructured the local French military presence by concentrating its deployment in the territories of the G5 countries (Charbonneau, 2017a). This move by European actors also met an emerging preference for more functional and security-focused regional initiatives, perceived as better fitted for tackling African security challenges (Grebe, 2018;Lopez-Lucia, 2020).…”

“…The G5's spatial imaginary became the unique frame of reference for international interveners' engagement, as illustrated by the launch of international coordination mechanisms such as the Sahel Alliance, the Partnership for Security and Stability (P3S), and the Coalition for the Sahel, created after 2018, following a French and European impulsion, and reproducing this imaginary. However, the success of the G5 Sahel self-legitimation strategy also has its downside: while it has enabled G5 Sahel states to concentrate international financial and political support and disrupt the traditional functioning of the APSA, its political authority and agency over Sahelian security matters remain circumscribed by international priorities (Lopez-Lucia, 2020).…”