This book seeks to explore specific challenges as well as discernible opportunities for parliamentary oversight of the security sector in West Africa. It provides an overview of the performance of selected West African parliaments in the area of security sector oversight, based on a compilation of country studies from Benin, Cape Verde, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone.

Two main criteria informed the selection of countries covered in this volume: the different political contexts in West Africa (fragile, post-conflict and consolidating states) and the diverse colonial influences of Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone countries in the sub-region. The book also takes the sub-regional dimension of the issue into account by analysing the growing role played by the Parliament of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in security sector governance.

While identifying good practices in parliamentary oversight of the security sector, this book provides parliamentarians, policy makers and other practitioners with a number of solutions for improving the quality of parliamentary oversight of the security sector in West Africa. It is also available in French.