The “African Solutions” Paradox: Assessing the Inertia of the African Standby Force (ASF) in West Africa and the Sahel.

Abstract

African solutions to African problems remain central to Africa’s peace and security agenda, yet the African Standby Force (ASF) has struggled to translate this principle into effective action. Designed to exist under five regional brigades in North, East, West, South and Central Africa, this study makes the ECOWAS Standby Brigade a cases study. Amid escalating terrorism, unconstitutional changes of government, and state fragility, the study examines the ASF’s inertia between 2020 and 2025 to understand the positive transformation the African Union could have achieved in the region. The study examines the nature of governance and insecurity in the Sahel, role of external security arrangements in the region and the challenges of ASF deployment in the operational context between 2020 and 2025. The study made a robust analysis based on the theoretical postulation of regime effectiveness theory and regional security complex theory. Using qualitative content analysis of institutional and media reports, the paper contends that the ASF reveals a capacity-legitimacy mismatch in which the authority of African led security governance has outpaced its practical ability to deliver. The paper concludes that stronger political consensus, reliable financing, improved logistics, and clearer deployment procedures are necessary if African Regional Mechanisms such as the ECOWAS are to make African solutions more than a normative aspiration. Other Regional Economic Communities (REC) in Africa must therefore draw critical lessons from the experience of West Africa and the Sahel to be better prepared for regional security governance in the 21 st Century