Agency and Geopolitics of Regional Interventions in African Security: Revisiting ECOWAS’ Response to the Tuareg Insurgency

ECOWAS has sustained its role as a leading agent of peace and security in post-Cold War Africa, with significant experience from diplomatic and military interventions in regional security management. While existing scholarship highlights limited resources as a major challenge undermining ECOWAS' capacity to quell insurgencies, few studies address the question of legal (in)capacity owing to state and nonstate actors (NSAs) preferences. This paper, therefore, aims to analyse ECOWAS' capacity vis-à-vis agency and the geopolitics of regional interventions by asking why its response agenda to the 2012 Tuareg insurgency in Mali was impeded. Drawing insights from the African Security Regime Complex theory, this paper advances three major attributable factors: (i)Mali’s preference for already existing diplomatic arrangements outside the ECOWAS’ response framework; (ii)the weak political authority of the Malian state in the aftermath of the March 22 Coup; (iii)and the UNSC politics owing to Algeria, France, and the US geopolitical interests. This paper also highlights the constraints of the regional power, Nigeria, in circumventing these challenges. The paper relies on extensive qualitative data from elite and expert interviews, ECOWAS treaties and communiqués, and reports analysed using triangulation and process-tracing methods.