Local Perceptions of Regional Interventions: AU and ECOWAS in Burkina Faso and The Gambia

Part of the collaborative research approach is not only to present the project results to an academic audience, but also to feed them into practice and the broader political debate in both countries. The project team has presented and discussed the results to date in various transfer formats in Burkina Faso and The Gambia, for example with participants in the focus groups and civil society actors, parliamentarians and representatives of international organisations and embassies. In June 2024, the project team also discussed the practical lessons of the research for ECOWAS and its future cooperation with citizens of the region in a multi-day delegation trip to the ECOWAS Commission in Abuja, Nigeria.

African regional organizations such as the African Union (AU) or the Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS) are mandated to promote peace and security and to protect demo­cracy and human rights on the African continent. In this context, they intervene more and more frequently in their member states: for example via mediation and negotiation in political crises, after coups or contested elections. This has for instance happened after un­constitutional changes of govern­ment in Madagascar, Niger, Mali, and, more recently, in The Gambia, when long-standing President Yahya Jammeh refused to ack­nowledge opposition leader Adama Barrow’s victory in the 2016 presidential elections.

But what happens during such interventions? During this workshop in January 2017, which was organized by Antonia Witt (PRIF), Augustin Loada (Université de Ouaga 2) and Ulf Engel (University of Leipzig), the participants addressed the following questions: How are abstract goals of restoring “constitutional order” and promoting democracy translated into concrete action? How do African interveners cooperate with respective national and local actors, be they political elites or civil society? How do African societies perceive these regional efforts and how are their results evaluated? What alternative conceptions of peace, democracy and order can be identified beyond the official negotiating tables?

The choice of location is no accident: Burkina Faso also experienced such a regional intervention after the fall of long-time President Blaise Compaoré in October 2014, although it has received mixed reviews in retrospect. In two interactive sessions with representatives of civil society organizations and public intellectuals, the aim was to reflect on the different experiences of this period of regional intervention. The workshop also focused on the role that academics and universities can play as multipliers of ideas, as places where solutions to crises are rethought, and as a source of ideas of order that could possibly represent an alternative to those currently promoting regional interventions.