Sanctions, Security, and Sovereignty: Recentring ECOWAS as a Regional Sanctions Actor

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is considered an anomaly in the world of international sanctions. Criticised for its resolute use of comprehensive and targeted sanctions that can have substantive humanitarian and security consequences, ECOWAS is a hitherto less contested main guarantor of regional stability, playing a key role in shaping the UN Security Council’s agenda on West African conflict resolution, but increasingly faces a backsliding quality of governance. The literature tends to marginalize African regional organisations without unpacking the repertoires of crisis governance and their outcomes. To recentre the case of ECOWAS in the broader sanctions and IR literature, this paper asks: What explains ECOWAS sanctions practices amidst the broader repertoire of crisis intervention tools? By developing a causal mechanism explaining ECOWAS’s use of crisis intervention repertoires and applying it via process tracing to three cases, this article analyses the design and practice of ECOWAS sanctions as well as incentives and retaliation from target states. We theorise ECOWAS sanctions as just one policy instrument alongside a broader repertoire of crisis diplomacy and military force. The use of sanctions against its ECOWAS members in consecutive coup d’états of 2021-2024 represents an interesting case study to unpack ECOWAS autonomous sanctions episodes, which ultimately concluded with Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso exiting the organisation. The paper not only elucidates what type of sanctions sender ECOWAS is, but it also situates ECOWAS as an actor with contested intentionality in its own right, whose controversial decisions help explain West African contemporary global politics. The discussion contributes to the literature on sanctions and African security governance alike.