Insecurity and Regional Actors’ Role in Securing Africa: An Analysis of the Role of ECOWAS, SADC, and IGAD in Countering Terrorism

Abstract

Africa’s vulnerability to new security threats from terrorism, illicit trafficking, and organized crime calls into question the effectiveness of its regional security policies and cooperation. Regional cooperation has been identified in the extant literature as being essential to ensuring the collective security of states. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), and Southern African Development Community (SADC) are primarily and explicitly important security organizations, despite their general-purpose mandates. But how they cooperate to confront security threats, the respective roles they play in the implementation of security policies, and the challenges they face are important factors in explaining Africa’s vulnerability to insecurity and how the continent is confronting emerging security challenges. Despite the increasing importance of the role of regional security actors, there has been surprisingly little theoretical and empirical comparative analysis of the role of regional security actors and their cooperative efforts in confronting insecurity in the region. This chapter addresses the gap in the literature by providing a theoretical and empirical understanding of the role, cooperation, and challenges of ECOWAS, IGAD, and SADC in countering terrorism in Africa within the context of the Anthropocene. The chapter observes that aside from the push and pull drivers that negatively affect counterterrorism in the region, the low level of inter-subregional security cooperation worsens the region’s inability to contain the spillover of terrorists.