ECOWAS: State of emergency declared across West Africa - SABC News
Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) declared a state of emergency across West Africa following a series of recent coups and failed military mutinies across the region. The announcement was made by ECOWAS Commission President Omar Touray during ECOWAS’ 55th session of the Mediation and Security Council held in Abuja on December 9, 2025. On December 8, Nigerian fighter jets and ground troops moved to help restore order after a foiled coup attempt in Benin. Nigerian President Bola Tinubu sent fighter jets to assert control over Benin's airspace on Sunday as his close ally, Benin President Patrice Talon, tried to put down the coup attempt.
ECOWAS is a regional group of 12 West African nations currently, including Benin, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo, focused on economic integration, free trade, and promoting peace. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger were all recent member states but announced their withdrawal in early 2024.
ISSE Comment: The ECOWAS community-wide “state of emergency” is best understood not as a single legal act, but as a regional alignment of exceptional security postures coordinated by ECOWAS. ECOWAS itself has no authority to declare an emergency within a member state or suspend constitutional rights. Instead, the formulation signals that multiple governments are simultaneously treating security threats, such as extremist violence, cross-border insurgency, and unconstitutional changes of government, as a shared regional emergency. In practical terms, this creates political and legal space for member states to invoke or maintain domestic states of emergency, especially in border regions, while presenting those measures as part of a collective response rather than unilateral action.
On the ground, this joint posture enables a range of exceptional practices that would otherwise be more difficult to justify. These include expanded cross-border military cooperation, coordinated patrols, and, in some cases, de facto hot-pursuit arrangements. Internally, governments often use the regional emergency framing to legitimize curfews, checkpoints, expanded military roles in policing, restrictions on movement, and delays in electoral or constitutional timelines. While these measures are enacted under national law, the ECOWAS framing may provide regional political cover, reducing diplomatic costs and muting external criticism by situating extraordinary powers within a collective security narrative.
From a state of exception perspective, this matters because the emergency becomes diffuse and durable. Responsibility is blurred: national authorities point to regional necessity, while ECOWAS defers to state sovereignty. This diffusion may weakens accountability and make it harder to identify clear endpoints to exceptional rule. In the Sahel context, particularly in cases such as Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, who are no longer part of ECOWAS, the regional emergency logic has coincided with prolonged military governance and suspended constitutional orders. Rather than a temporary response to crisis, this “joint state of emergency” thus risks becoming a structural condition, normalizing exceptional governance across borders and embedding emergency rule into the architecture of regional security itself.
Photo by Yanick Folly on Unsplash.
