Post-Conflict Peacebuilding and Regional Organisations: Lessons from Nigeria’s Leadership in Sierra Leone’s Reconstruction

This dissertation provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis of Nigeria's leadership role in the post-conflict peacebuilding process in Sierra Leone following the end of the civil war in 2002, developing an original account of the conditions under which a regional hegemon successfully translates military intervention success into sustained political, institutional, and economic reconstruction. Nigeria's ECOMOG intervention in Sierra Leone is widely considered one of the more successful examples of African-led peace enforcement, yet the peacebuilding phase has received less systematic scholarly attention than the military intervention itself. Drawing on peacebuilding theory, regional hegemony theory, and post-conflict governance frameworks, this study traces Nigeria's diplomatic, financial, and technical contributions to Sierra Leone's reconstruction from 2002 to 2024, examining state-building support, security sector reform assistance, governance promotion, and development financing. Primary data are drawn from archival research in the Sierra Leone National Archives in Freetown, interviews with Sierra Leonean officials and civil society leaders who worked with Nigerian advisors during the reconstruction period, Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs records, and evaluation reports from the UN Peacebuilding Commission. The dissertation's theoretical contribution advances peacebuilding theory by demonstrating that hegemon-led post-conflict reconstruction in Africa succeeds under specific conditions including continuous financial commitment, domestic political legitimacy in the target state, and the absence of competing great power interests, and introduces the concept of tutelary peacebuilding to describe the distinctive pattern of regional hegemon involvement in post-conflict state reconstruction among neighbours. Keywords: peacebuilding, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, regional hegemony, post-conflict reconstruction.