Global Facilitation Network for Security Sector Reform (GFN-SSR)

Understanding Criminality in West African Conflicts

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What are the links between illicit commerce and political relationships in West Africa? How can a contexualised understanding of social relationships improve approaches to post-conflict statebuilding? This article from International Peacekeeping critiques the automatic criminalisation of armed networks, some of which have strong societal roots. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of the connection between illicit economic activities and violent conflict and a more pragmatic approach to post-conflict statebuilding. A strategy that selectively incorporates some networks, and targets the more predatory, is likely to be most effective.

Most standard analyses and policies aimed at peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction in West Africa understand members of armed groups, and especially their leaders who engaged in illicit commerce, as criminals. This analysis and the policies that follow from it miss the extent to which these transactions contribute to the construction of new political relationships and are seen by those who participate in them as one of the few avenues for active participation in the post-war economy and politics. Measures to disrupt these transactions can destabilise politics, and those who participate in illicit markets can often manipulate externally imposed measures to assert their own interests.

In refining the understanding of the connection between these economic activities and violent conflict, this critique rests on four bases. These are:

1. The notion of ‘reconstruction’ presupposes that pre-war states exercised authority through bureaucratic administrations, and that these must be restored as quickly as possible. The reality is that prewar regimes have incorporated significant elements of ‘criminal networks’ into their strategies of rule.
2. Networks that enjoy measures of popular legitimacy may present opportunities for post-conflict statebuilders. Not all of their activities are exploitative.
3. Those that intervening forces deem criminals may use threats of renewed violence, promises of compliance, and subterfuges to extract concessions from external interveners and local reformers. These interests are hard to change.
4. Eradicating what external actors call criminal behaviour is an unrealistic goal. Wholesale reform often finds severe limits when it confronts networks that provide security and income to large numbers of people.

• A ‘counterinsurgency strategy’ – a short-term recognition of contingency in light of the limits on the intervening forces’ power – may be more appropriate for external actors than law enforcement that presupposes sweeping social structural change.
• It is possible to incorporate social networks of trust into the state in ways that contribute to state power, and this is likely to be less costly than a law enforcement approach in terms of finances, political will, and political turmoil.
• Unless there is a fundamental change in political relationships – stretching back decades and not just from the period of conflict – security sector reforms are likely to be quickly undone upon the departure of the interveners.

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