Project FIS-2 Starting Grant SH2
Title RESWA - Dynamics of Conflict and Instability in the West African Regional Security Complex
CUP C53C25000190001 – Code of the Project FIS-2023-03566
Decreto Direttoriale di ammissione a finanziamento prot. n.3942 del 06-03-2025
Ministerial funding amount: €1,324,466.00
Presentation of the Project
The project RESWA - Dynamics of Conflict and Instability in the West African Regional Security Complex, aims at investigating the main causes and dynamics of insecurity and conflict in West Africa and the Sahel, exploring how international competition, democratic backsliding, and jihadist insurgencies interact and mutually contribute to delineate a system of (in-)security regionalism that is redefining the borders, the functioning, and the patterns of cooperation and conflict in a new geopolitical complex. It does so, focusing the attention on the agency, the strategies, and the schemes of negotiations, competition, and reappropriation deployed by the three main groups of actors who are participating in (re-)structuring the West Africa/Sahel regional complex, namely the international interveners, the local regimes, and the jihadist insurgent groups. Through this analytical approach RESWA is expected to elaborate and offer new insights and contributions at both the academic and policy level, with the aim to extrapolate “lesson-learnt” from the Sahel, and advance recommendation about how to manage the expanding crisis towards West Africa.
Based on this, RESWA is expected to produce impacts at different levels. First of all, the project is expected to produce new knowledge about an area where conducting research is becoming more and more challenging. Knowledge on conflict-affected areas, in fact, is becoming increasingly important for scholarship and policy. Fieldwork helps in avoiding the pitfalls resulting from over-reliance on theory, causal models and assumptions made from afar. This is particularly important in conflict and crisis situations, where meanings are deeply contested. At the same time, knowledge production is undergoing dramatic changes, also because of an ongoing process of securitization of research resulting from institutional and disciplinary practices. While engaged in respecting the most advanced security and ethical protocols defined for this kind of activities, RESWA is designed for addressing these potential limits and barriers, elaborating a research plan based on the fruitful and critical interaction between the research team and local fixers and researchers. In this sense, RESWA aims at offering innovative solutions for elaborating mixed-method methodologies able to support the design of further research projects dedicated to the exploration of conflict-affected areas.
Secondly, RESWA originally intercepts and expands different academic debates which are trying to make sense of some of the most important transformations we are observing in the international security landscape. More specifically, the project investigates in parallel how international geopolitical competition and democratic backsliding in the Global South are affecting forms, norms and practices of international interventions and crisis-management, and how these changes shape the response of transnational armed actors and organizations. By this, RESWA is expected to:
1) Create a renewed dialogue between literatures on – liberal and illiberal – international interventions, current transformations of the African state and political institutions, and violent insurgencies;
2) Open a new venue of research exploring the co-constitutive relationship between regions and security, able to account for the existing connections between an international system in transition and the emergence of new forms of regional security projects and complexes in the Global South;
3) Propose an original analytical scheme for identifying those spillover effects that allow insecurity to “travel”, with the aim of defining potential strategies of conflict-mitigation.
Finally, given the growing centrality of West Africa and the Sahel for European policy-makers and security experts, RESWA intercepts the international policy debate concerning the risk of threat diffusion on the African continent, and aims at advancing recommendation for tackling insecurity and political unrest in West Africa.
