West African

13 Pages 3185 Words

sk that conflicts will merge and spread, further exacerbating conditions that make West Africa the most impoverished region in the world.
The Big Picture
In light of this fighting and the gloomy specter of a growing regional war in West Africa, the United States Institute of Peace convened a group of experts on the conflicts in West Africa and formed a working group to bring together individuals from various national and international agencies and organizations to shed light on the nature of the conflicts in West Africa and recommend appropriate American responses. In this way, the group endeavored to inform itself and support the Bush administration's new Africa team that was confronted with complex and difficult policy choices. This effort led to four gatherings of the West Africa Working Group (WAWG) between March and August.
From the outset, the working group adopted a "big picture" analytical focus. That is, the group quickly agreed that the series of conflicts in the MRU stretching over the 1990s and into the 2000s should be looked a...