Gender and Transitional Justice in West Africa: The Cases of Ghana and Sierra Leone

Africa in the post-Cold War period has featured predominantly in the peace and security discourse due to the many conflicts that plagued the continent, but West Africa has been particularly popular for its profound history of political instability. Notably, the post-independence history of Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Benin, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso is replete with multifarious coups and resultant authoritarian systems. This, coupled with the spate of conflicts that engulfed Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau at the beginning of the 1990’s, saw West Africa emerge from being an erstwhile stable sub-region, to become the most politically unstable and insecure sub-region in the 1990’s.