West Africa

Because of the diversity of its resources and its geostrategic location, West Africa is at the heart of various tensions and claims, coming from regional powers or from powers which do not belong to the sub-region. Throughout the 1990s’, the sub-region was in the grip of instability which led to an arc of crisis involving by extension a range of countries from Liberia to Sierra Leone, from Guinea to the Ivory Coast, etc. These crises linked with the internal factors specific to these states are also signs of an adjustment from the West-African societies to the challenges of globalisation and to an international evolving context. Even though, under the aegis of the Economic Community of West African States, regional integration is progressing and numerous countries are returning to a relative stability, new threats and forms of conflicts are appearing. Among them are non-State armed groups, new traffics or the lingering proliferation of small arms.

GRIP tackles, through its work on West Africa, these new forms of conflicts linked to governance deficit, resources management and their consequences on human security, the creation of a state governed by the rule of law and the mechanisms of conflict management and prevention.