The Implementation of Norms in ECOWAS: Contextualising the Normative Environment

This thesis aims to investigate the norm-building process within the West African region. The focus is on variations in the outcome of accepted sovereignty-threatening or limiting norms. Notably, this thesis contextualises the region’s normative environment in accounting for these variations. In 1999, ECOWAS member states adopted a security mechanism which introduced an interventionist norm within the region. Since then, ECOWAS has activated its intervention mechanism in several instances, including the conflicts between 1997 and 2000 in Sierra Leone, the 1989-2003 war in Liberia, the 1998- 2003 conflicts in Guinea-Bissau, and the conflicts in Mali that began in 2012 and 2017 in the Gambia. This region’s security mechanism has been regarded as the first of its kind and was initially also considered as usurping the powers of the United Nations. In contrast, implementing accepted norms of democracy and good governance has not achieved similar levels of integration in the region. Instead, as observed recently in 2023, following numerous challenges to the democratic process across member states, the region suffered multiple coup d’états. The investigation of this thesis revealed that the West African region’s normative environment exhibits concern over the obsolescence of conquest and variations in member states’ sovereignty, which are critical sources of cognitive priors influencing member states’ preferences for normative outcomes. When these influences are further analysed within the case studies, the results reveal contributory causal mechanisms that explain the varying outcomes of regional security norm acceptance and the abandonment of democratic and good governance norms. The thesis findings demonstrate that the causal mechanisms for ECOWAS regional security norm link to outcomes include circumstances of preserving regional stability at all costs, deterring external interference and aggression, and serving as norm substitutes. The variation in outcome observed with a similar sovereignty-threatening norm—democracy and good governance —is caused by member states integrating the norm’s outcomes and engaging in norm revalidation due to the continuous contestation of the norm.