Research
Cross Border Crimes in West African Sub-Region: Implications for Nigeriaas National Security and External Relations
Despite the efforts of cross-border security agencies like the Nigeria police, customs service, Immigration services, and Nigerian civil Defense etc, Nigeria borders have been described as porous allowing all sorts of cross border or transborder criminal activities such as human trafficking, smuggling, drug trafficking, arm robbery, money laundry and illicit arms trafficking resulting to proliferation of SALW. Thus, West Africa’s regional superpower, Nigeria, continues to face serious security challenges due to cross border or transborder criminal activities. We argue that; one, the spate of cross border criminal activities in West Africa undermines Nigeria’s national security; and two, frequent trans-border crimes in West African sub-region impede Nigeria’s external relations. The focus of this paper therefore is to examine the implications of cross border crimes in West Africa for Nigeria’s national security and external relations. The study is basically a historical research method relying mainly on secondary sources of data from internet sources, official documents and country websites as the method of data collection. In other words, we made use of qualitative-descriptive analysis as our method of data analysis, that is, documentary studies of official document and other materials in analyzing the secondary data. This paper titled “Cross Border Crimes in West African sub-region: Implications for Nigeria’s National Security and External Relationsâ€. The paper is basically a historical research method relying mainly on secondary sources of data from internet sources, official documents and country websites as the method of data collection. We made use of qualitative-descriptive analysis as our method of data analysis, that is, documentary studies of official document and other materials in analyzing the secondary data. The major purpose of embarking on this research is to examine the implications of cross border crimes in West Africa for Nigeria’s
United Nations-Ecowas Intervention in Mali- Guinea Bissau: Geo-Economic and Strategic Analysis
Intervention in terms of international law, is the term for the use of force by one country or sovereign state in the internal or external affairs of another. In most cases, intervention is considered to be an unlawful. Oppenheim (1992) defines intervention as a forcible or dictorial interference by a State in the affairs of another State calculated to impose certain conduct or consequences on that other State. The military intervention by ECOWAS has not been totally successful in quelling conflicts, crisis of regime change and political succession and military intervention into politics in the West African sub-region and the Africa generally. Intervention can be done by various means, e.g. military, subversive, economic, or diplomatic. The latest of these conflicts in the sub-region which ECOWAS has intervened are Mali and Guinea Bissau in 2012. The objective has been to restore democracy by forcing the military back to the barracks or restricting it to the constitutional role of protecting the territorial integrity from internal insurrection and external aggression. But the root causes of military intervention into politics and crisis of regime change or political succession are yet to be adequately addressed by the ECOWAS, for example, issues of legitimacy crisis, poor governance, bad leadership, political leadership failure, political corruption, electoral crisis and political violence have been largely left unattended or ignored. The political conditions in most of the countries in the sub-region and indeed Africa as a whole are not democracy friendly or unsuitable for democratization and flourishing of democracy or demilitarization (Aning and Bah, 2010; Sperling, 2011). Most scholars like Nowrot and Schabacker (1998) focus on the legality of ECOWAS intervention while the likes of Olonisakan (2010) concentrates on the eff
