Security cooperation in Africa
Subtitle: lessons from ECOMOG
By: Yonny Kulendi
Publisher: Naval Postgraduate School; Available from National Technical Information Service
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Monterey, Calif; Springfield, Va
Language: eng
Number of pages: 107
Description: This thesis argues that when West African states united to form the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), they did so for reasons very different from those that are advanced by most scholars and West African policy makers. The conventional wisdom holds that the ECOMOG intervention in Liberia was motivated by the desire of West African leaders to relieve the humanitarian disaster caused by the Liberian civil war. In contrast, I will argue that humanitarian considerations were far less important to the participating states than their desire to protect the political stability of their own regimes, which they believed would be threatened by a rebel victory over President Samuel Doe's Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL). In particular, they worried that a rebel victory in Liberia would constitute a dangerous precedent for other dissidents within the sub-region. Moreover, they were concerned that a Charles Taylor-controlled Liberia could become a "breeding ground" for similar insurgencies by dissidents fleeing their regimes.
Notes: "December 1997."

Thesis advisor(s): Paul Stockton.

Thesis (M.A. in International Security and Civil-Military Relations)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 1997.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 99-140).

Approved for public release; distribution unlimited.

Also available online.

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

System requirements: Adobe Acrobat reader.