The Last Defender of Liberal Democracy? ECOWAS’ Difficult Role as a Democratic Peacebuilder

Democracy has long been regarded as a constitutive part of the broader liberal peace project. Amid broader scepticism about the normative justification and the feasibility of adopting the liberal peace paradigm in the Global South, ECOWAS, with its explicit stance of both defending liberal democracy and linking it to peace, remained a strongly deviant case. Since the 2020s, a series of military coups and open challenges to liberal democracy have hit the organization massively. The paper asks why ECOWAS has failed to mobilize support for the defence of its normative framework, which has arguably, for many years, shaped peace operations and political dynamics in member states. A central component of this framework was to position democracy as a prerequisite for sustainable peace. The ECOWAS response to the Sahelian coups reflects the growing erosion of this underlying rationale in the organization’s normative framework. The analysis shows how changing contextual conditions since the 2010s invalidated the theoretical mechanisms underlying the nexus. Most ECOWAS member states struggled to maintain their democratic regimes, predominant regional conflicts were transnational, and the liberal international order was strongly contested.