20–23 Jun 2023
Europe/London timezone

Managing Crises Multilaterally: a critical examination of multilateral approaches to crisis management in the Sahel and beyond.

21 Jun 2023, 16:45

Description

Crises grow increasingly more complex in an interconnected world and are interacting in novel and mutually exacerbating forms. The proliferation of complex, transboundary crises necessitate equally novel responses and the deployment of significant resources, numbers of actors and degrees of cooperation. Multilateralism has often been championed as a method of addressing such threats, particularly in Africa’s Sahel region which has emerged as a nexus for converging crises and international action. This research examines the prevailing approaches to multilateralism and crisis management in the Sahel region asking several key questions. Firstly, what are the prevailing approaches to multilateralism that can be identified in Sahelian Crisis management. Secondly, despite significant effort, expense and time have these approaches failed to reverse a deteriorating situation. Finally, as a ‘laboratory of experimentation’ for various forms of international cooperation what lessons can multilateral crisis management efforts in the Sahel provide academic and policy discourse beyond the region and in an era of increasingly complex crises. Through an analysis of state and international/regional organisation strategies for the Sahel complemented with interviews conducted with staff in relevant institutions active in the region, I argue that multilateral efforts have largely been ineffective in contributing to managing such crises because they have fallen into a prevailing approach characterised by overly state-centric, thematically truncated and quasi-cohesive strategies that have undermined efforts to reverse current trends. Addressing the challenges multilateral groupings have faced in the Sahel offers opportunities for critical reflection of crisis management in numerous contexts and settings.

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