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SUMMARY
ECOMOG, its glaring deficiencies notwithstanding, is an important example of the emerging modes of regionally based peacekeeping. Yet, the ECOMOG operations also demonstrate the difficulties and pitfalls of such regional peacekeeping. In a geopolitically fissured region like West Africa, regionalism proved to be a problematic vehicle for intervention. While regional self-interest forced ECO WAS to stay in the operation, factional frictions within the organization (exploited in turn by the warlords), forced a prolongation of the conflict. On the other hand, many of the challenges faced by ECOWAS/ECOMOG were also inherent in the very nature of post-Cold War conflicts and peacekeeping. The deep-seated causes of these conflicts, and the lack of overwhelming military advantage on the part of governments and intervention forces, make for protracted violence, and call for political commitment as well as open-endedness in the intervention agenda (in the ECOMOG case, the peacekeepers went in expecting the intervention to last between six and twelve months, and ended up with an involvement that lasted eight years).
