West African Militaries and Organised Crime

Guinea-Bissau, A tiny state on the West African coast, has helped focus international attention on organised crime in Africa. This state was off the radar of policy makers and criminologists for much of its history. However, since 2009 it has been labelled Africa’s ‘first narco-state’. In that year, the country ’ s president and the head of the armed forces were both assassinated in what appeared to be a turf war over the spoils of the cocaine trade and the higher echelons of the military have been deeply implicated in the cocaine trade ever since (Vernaschi, 2010; Vigh, 2012). In policy circles, Guinea-Bissau is today seen as the most extreme example of the threat West Africa faces from organised crime. Some would even argue that the rest of West Africa is on the verge of a similar criminalisation. This chapter explores links between the state and organised crime in West Africa, challenging some of the dominant narratives about these links. More specifically, the chapter scrutinises the involvement of one of the state’s most important institutions, the military, in drug smuggling, drawing on evidence from Guinea-Bissau and Nigeria. Based on secondary sources and official reports (in the case of Guinea-Bissau) and archival, interview and official data collected in Nigeria during several spells of fieldwork since 2005, the chapter assesses the extent and also the limits of the state-organised crime nexus in the sub-region. The chapter contributes to and challenges existing academic work on the African state and organised crime and it argues that recent claims of military involvement in organised crime in West Africa should be seen not only as a refl ection of states ’actual entanglement with criminal activities, but more importantly as part of public debates about the legitimacy of the state and one of its core institutions.