By Lyes Tagziria and Lucia Bird Ruiz Benitez de Lugo

West Africa is one of the world’s most vibrant and diverse regions; home to over 400 million people, around 1 200 languages and many different religious and ethnic identities. The region’s economic growth since the turn of the century has been impressive, resulting in a significant reduction in absolute levels of poverty. Nevertheless, with rampant insecurity at the hands of violent extremists, armed groups and criminal bandits, political instability, limited economic opportunities for the region’s burgeoning youth population and the worsening impact of climate change, West Africa faces many complex challenges.

With over 20 000 conflict fatalities across the region in 2022 alone, violence in West Africa, especially in the Sahel region, is at unprecedented levels. According to the ACLED Conflict Severity Index, three countries in West Africa – Mali, Burkina Faso and Nigeria – have extreme or high levels of conflict. Illicit economies play an important role in sustaining instability across the region.

The security and well-being of citizens across the ECOWAS region is affected not only by violent conflict, but by myriad, interwoven factors from economic prosperity to political representation, justice and security, social cohesion, freedom and much more. In this context the concept of human security, as opposed to the narrower concept of state security, has increasingly become the focus of policymakers across West Africa.

As set out in the ECOWAS Country Risk and Vulnerability Assessments (CRVAs), ‘the human security framework provides a holistic approach to understanding different threats that affect individuals’ lives, whether this is through conflict, health, food, environment, or other social, political or economic factors’.

A key component of this human-centric approach to security, focused on reducing harm to the people of West Africa, is prevention. This requires comprehensive, accurate and timely data on existing and future threats and is therefore one of the main rationales behind the work of the ECOWAS Commission, through both the Early Warning Directorate and the ENACT Organized Crime Index. While the objectives of the index are manifold, its principal aim is to build an evidence base to underpin responses to organized crime.

The 2021 ENACT Organized Crime Index identified the West Africa region as having the second-highest level of criminality on the African continent, with human trafficking, drugs and the illicit trade in non-renewable resources forming the most prevalent criminal markets. The region placed in second once again in the latest iteration of the index, the 2023 Global Organized Crime Index.

In 2023, West Africa overtook Southern Africa as the region with the highest resilience score on the continent, pointing to comparatively high levels of resilience even in areas affected by significant criminal markets. The index highlighted legislative frameworks, civil society actors and the region’s international collaboration in the fight against organized crime as relative regional strengths. Overall levels of resilience, however, both objectively and within the global context, are weak.

The index’s findings provides a statistical underpinning for the relationship between illicit markets, security and stability, demonstrating a strong negative correlation between criminality and peacefulness. In other words, the less peaceful a country, the more likely it is to be afflicted by high levels of organized crime. In other words, the less peaceful a country, the more likely it is to be afflicted by high levels of organized crime. Responding to illicit economies which pose a threat to these goals must be a central element of programming. In line with this, the Organized Crime Resilience Framework (OCRF) examines the major organized-crime threats facing the West African region, as identified by the index and the CRVAs published by the ECOWAS Early Warning Directorate.

While the index is devoted to organized crime, the CRVAs focus on conflict and human security more broadly. Drawing on both these datasets engenders a conflict-sensitive and human-security-focused assessment of organized crime in West Africa, encompassing threats and vulnerabilities, as well as potential sources of resilience.

Geneva, SWIT: Global Initiative Against International Organized Crime, Ecowas Commission, 2023.

By Mark Shaw

Drug seizures are widely referred to in the media and academic reporting on drug trafficking and organised crime. Everyone knows their limitations. But what if seizures represent the exact opposite of what we generally think them to be? That is, not a reflection of state efficiency, but rather cracks in systems of political protection. If that is the case, they may appear more regularly at some times rather than others. A detailed study of West African cocaine seizures in the context of periods of political instability over a twenty-year period suggest this association is worth exploring.

ENACT (Africa), 2021. 23p.

By Lucia Bird and Lyes Tagziria

As the nature of armed conflict in West Africa is in flux – with the constellation of conflict actors multiplying, the intensity and geographic dispersion of violence growing, civilians increasingly targets of attacks, and conflicts more commonly spreading across borders – now is a key moment to consider the role played by illicit economies in creating the enabling environments for conflicts to develop, and in prolonging them.

Yet the intersection between illicit economies and instability is an often misunderstood and over-simplified subject of research and debate. The inherently clandestine nature of organized crime poses an obstacle to accurately understanding the dynamics of illicit economies and their relationship with conflict and instability. In West Africa, this is compounded by the paucity of comparable data in much of the region.

This report represents a step towards addressing this deficit. It presents the findings of a new initiative that maps the key geographic hubs of illicit economies across West Africa (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo)

Geneva, SWIT: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 2022. 88p.

By Lucia Bird

On 1 February 2022, gunshots at the governmental palace in Bissau signalled the beginning of a reported failed coup attempt in Guinea-Bissau, a country long known for its prominent role in international cocaine trafficking. Had the incident resulted in a military overthrow of power, it would have been the fifth successful coup in Guinea-Bissau’s history, and also the fifth coup in West Africa in the preceding 12 months, hot on the heels of the seizure of power in Burkina Faso in late January.1 Hours after the gunfire had begun, President Umaro Sissoco Embaló addressed the press, condemning the incident and declaring the perpetrators had failed. In press statements, he indicated that those behind the attack were involved in the drugs trade.2 This implication appeared to echo history: a 2012 coup in Guinea-Bissau was so clearly motivated by competition for control over the country’s lucrative cocaine markets that it has been dubbed the ‘cocaine coup’.3 The nature of the February attack, and the identity of the perpetrators, is still unclear – as explored further below. However, arrests announced by the government following the attack include individuals with known links to the cocaine trade – most prominently Admiral Bubo Na Tchuto – underscoring the drug connection implied by the president. Guinea-Bissau is a key entry point for cocaine into West Africa, a region that operates as a transit point on international cocaine trafficking routes between cultivation countries in Latin America and consumer end-markets in Europe. The country has played an important role in international cocaine trafficking dynamics since the late 1990s. The close involvement of Guinea-Bissau’s political-military elite in the cocaine market over the years has been a critical factor in Guinea-Bissau’s repeated cycles of political turmoil. In turn, profits from the cocaine market have bankrolled a remarkably resilient elite protection network composed of elements of the state infrastructure. Guinea-Bissau is at a critical juncture once again. The curious February incident has brought to the fore the country’s cyclical tendency towards political volatility, and the president has deemed the country to be in ‘political crisis’ and dissolved the National Assembly. This report explores the role, past and present, of the cocaine trade both as a driver of political instability in the country and as a source of resilience for elite power-sharing arrangements.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2022. 50p.

By West Africa Commission on Drugs.

After looking at the evidence, consulting experts from the region and around the world, and visiting some of the most affected countries and communities in West Africa, the Commissioners of the West Africa Commission on Drugs detail their conclusions in this report about how the problems of drug trafficking and consumption in the region should be tackled.

Geneva: WACD, 2014. 64p.