Coups and Conflict in West Africa, 1955-2004: Part I, Theoretical Perspectives
Abstract
From independence through 2004, the sixteen West African states have experienced forty-four successful military-led coups, forty-three often-bloody failed coups, at least eighty-two coup plots, seven civil wars, and many other forms of political conflict. This two-part article seeks answers to the question, what has gone wrong inWest Africa? Part I uses world-systems and rational-choice analyses to provide theoretical answers involving macro structures and micro leadership behavior. Structural peripherality and poor leadership result in underdevelopment and state weakness, the major structural causes of West African instability. Empirical evidence demonstratesWest Africa's peripheral role in the world-economy, the high risks associated with political leadership in the region, andWest Africa's critical socioeconomic situation. Part II, appearing in the January 2006 issue, will examine new data on coups and conflict inWest Africa and speculate on what can be done to improve the situation.
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References
Robert Guest, “A Survey of Sub-Saharan Africa,” Economist, January 17, 2004, 1-16.
Interestingly, in spite of the continuing prevalence of military incursions intoWest African politics, Armed Forces & Society has not published a comparative study of military coups d’etat anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa since Yekutiel Gershoni, “The Changing Pattern of Military Takeovers in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Armed Forces& Society 23, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 235-248, and nothing onWest Africa since the useful article by Baffour Ageyman-Duah, “Military Coups, Regime Change, and Interstate Conflicts in West Africa,” Armed Forces & Society 16, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 547-70. The most recent relevant article in this journal is Boubacar N’Diaye, “HowNot to Institutionalize Civilian Control: Kenya's Coup Prevention Strategies 1964-1997,” Armed Forces & Society 28, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 619-40.
Patrick J. McGowan, “African Military Coups d’Etat, 1956-2001: Frequency, Trends and Distribution,” Journal of Modern African Studies 41, no. 3 (September 2003): 356-356.
The data comprise event descriptions of every identified coup, failed coup, and coup plot for all independent, majority-ruled sub-Saharan African states. Each event description includes the country, type of event, date, what happened, participants in the event, alleged causes of the event, and sources used. For 1956 to 1984, these data and the data-making procedures used were first reported in Pat McGowan and Thomas H. Johnson, “African Military Coups d’Etat and Underdevelopment: AQuantitative Historical Analysis,” Journal of Modern African Studies 22, no. 4 (December 1984): 633-66. An updated set of data for 1956 to 2001 is reported in McGowan, “African Military Coups.” The year 1955 was added because some sources, such as Tormond K. Lunde, “Modernization and Political Instability: Coups d’Etat in Africa, 1955-85,” Acta Sociologica 34, no. 1 (1991): 13-32, report that there was a military-led coup attempt in Liberia in that year. Our research concluded that therewas no military or security service participation in this event. The participants in the failed attempt to assassinate President Tubman were a former policeman and several opposition civilian politicians. See Patrick J. McGowan, “African Military Intervention Events, January 1, 1955 to December 31, 2004” (Unpublished manuscript Arizona State University, 2005), 214. These event data are available to other researchers; contact the author at [email protected].
These data are fully reported in part II.
The following discuss Cape Verde's political system: Colm Foy, Cape Verde: Politics, Economics and Society(London and NewYork: Pinter Publishers, 1988); and Richard Lobban and Marlene Lopes, Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cape Verde(Metuchen: NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995).
Since many of these conflicts resulted from the region's illogical colonial-era borders, Cape Verde's insular geography has reduced its conflict potential. Onthe conflict potential ofAfrican boundaries, seeRavi L. Kapil, “On the Conflict Potential of Inherited Boundaries in Africa,” World Politics 18, no. 4 (July 1966): 656-673.
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For a general analysis of this problem, see Timothy J. Hilton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Refugees, Asylum Seekers andPolicy in Europe(WorkingPaper Series 10608, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2004).
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This variation in stability and democracy will be examined in part II of this article.
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Thomas R. Shannon, An Introduction to the World-System Perspective, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996); Immanuel M. Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of theWorld Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” Comparative Studies in History and Society 16, no. 4 (September 1974): 387-415; Immanuel M. Wallerstein, The ModernWorld-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the EuropeanWorld-Economy in the Sixteenth Century(NewYork: Academic Press, 1974); Christopher Chase-Dunn, “Interstate System and Capitalist World-Economy: One Logic or Two,” International Studies Quarterly 25, no. 1 (1981): 19-42; Christopher Chase-Dunn, Global Formations: Structures of the World-Economy(Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and Christopher Chase-Dunn and Richard Rubinson, “Toward a Structural Perspective on the World-System,” Politics & Society 7, no. 4 (1977): 453-76.
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Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (September 1993): 567-576; and Goldsmith, “Risk, Rule and Reason.”
Robert Guest, “Africa Earned Its Debt,” The New York Times, October 6, 2004, A31-A31.
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Chase-Dunn and Rubinson, “Structural Perspective”, 456-457.
Aprosperous class of cocoa planters–businessmen did emerge in Côte d’Ivoire and, to a lesser extent, in Ghana during the late colonial era, but their farms were much smaller than the great landed estates of Hispanic and postindependence Latin America as were their business enterprises.
In the early 1960s, GhanawasWest Africa's most prosperous and developed country. Yet its “middle class” of absentee cocoa farmers, liberal professionals, secondary school and university teachers, middle and top grades of the civil service, and business managers numbered “not more than fifteen thousand families... in a population of about seven million.” Robert E. Dowse, “The Military and Political Development,” in Politics and Change in Developing Countries: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Development, ed. Colin Leys (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 233-233.
Shannon, World-System Perspective, 106-106; and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, CapitalistDevelopment and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Immanuel M. Wallerstein, The ModernWorld-System III: The Second Era ofGreat Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840s(New York: Academic Press, 1989), 143-143.
Thomas Packenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1876-1912(London: Phoenix Press, 2001), 175-175 (emphasis added).
Wallerstein, “Africa,” 58-59.
Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914(New York: Vintage, 1989), 34-55.
For a detailed, critical description of this process, see Packenham, Scramble.
Acritical analysis ofWest Africa's colonial political economy is given by Samir Amin, L’Afrique de l’Ouest bloquée, l’économie politique de la colonisation, 1880-1970(Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1971), published in English as Neo-colonialism in West Africa(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973).
Guest, “Africa Earned,” A31.
For structural explanations of domestic political conflict, see J. C. Jenkins and K. Schock, “Global Structure and Political Processes in the Study of Domestic Political Conflict,” Annual Review of Sociology 18 (1992): 161-185.
Goldsmith, “Leadership in Africa,” 77-79; and Robert H. Bates and Anne O. Krueger, eds., Political and Economic Interactions in Economic Policy Reform(Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993).
Goldsmith, “Leadership in Africa,” 77-78.
Ibid., 78.
Olson, “Dictatorship,” 571.
Ibid., 573.
Xavier Renou, “A New French Policy for Africa?” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 20, no. 1 (January 2002): 5-27; and Samuel Decalo, “Coups and Military Regimes 1974-2004: Has Anything Really Changed?” (Paper presented at the U.S. State Department Conference on Military Coups inWest Africa and Regional Instability, Washington, DC, March 5, 2004).
Renou, “New French Policy”; and McGowan, Military Intervention Events, 263-263.
On January 19, 2005, Conté survived an attempted coup when army dissidents tried to assassinate him by firing on his convoy. Saliou Samb, “Guinea President Escapes Assassination Attempt-Govt.,” Washingtonpost.com, January 19, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com (accessed January 19, 2005); and Reuters, “Army Dissidents Suspected of Guinean Leader Attack,” nytimes.com, January 20, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com (accessed January 20, 2005).
Goldsmith, “African Leadership Data”; and World Political Leaders 1945-2005, http://www.terra.es/personal12/monolith/00index.htm (accessed January 24, 2005).
Charles Tilly, “Violence, Terror, and Politics as Usual,” Boston Review 27, no. 3 (Summer 2002), http://www.bostonreview.net/BR27.3/tilly.html (accessed February 17, 2004).
The United Nations Development Programme's first report in 1990 included just thirteenWest Africanstates (Cape Verde, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau were excluded), and they were all in the “low human development” category with Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Mauritania, and Benin being among the ten lowest ranked countries out of 130 that were ranked; United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1990(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 111. While comprehensive data for Liberia are not available, life expectancy at birthwas estimated to be only 41.4 years in 2002, adult literacy was only 56 percent, and 42 percent of the population were believed to be undernourished; United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 2004, 250. After more than two decades of misrule by Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor and two civil wars, Liberia's Human Development Index (HDI) score must be comparable to Niger's and Sierra Leone’s, that is, about theworst in theworld.
Liberia's 3.2 million people were excluded from this calculation because we do not have estimates of their per capita income.
Jackson, “Violent Internal Conflict,” 48.
Africa News on Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, “West Africa's Military and Its Troubles,” Concord Times, October 16, 2003, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe (accessed January 2, 2004).
Reuters, “Attackers Kill Three Soldiers in Southern Senegal,” Washingtonpost.com, January 13, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com (accessed January 27, 2004); and Diadie Ba, “Senegal Signs Peace Deal with Casamance Rebels,” Washingtonpost.com, December 30, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com (accessed December 30, 2004).
In this regard, see Charles I. Jones, Introduction to Economic Growth, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2002).
Jones, Economic Growth, 140; and Janvier D. Nkurunziza and Robert H. Bates, “Political Institutions and Economic Growth in Africa”(Working Paper Series/2003-03, Oxford Centre for the Study of African Economies, 2003).
Put another way, “corruption makes it hard to do business in Africa. Manufacturers need smooth roads, reliable electricity and efficient ports. But too often in Africa, the roads are craterous because someone has looted the maintenance budget, the power fails because the state monopoly utility company is staffed with politicians’ idiot cousins, and the customs officers hang onto your goods for weeks in the hope that you will bribe them to hurry up”; Guest, “Africa Earned,” A31.
Nkurunziza and Bates, “Political Institutions,” 8.
According to Transparency International, Global Corruption Report(Berlin, Germany: Author, 2004), only Bangladesh and Haiti were more corrupt than Nigeria in 2003. See also Dudley Althaus, “Oil Dependence Nurtures Corruption within Nigeria,” Arizona Republic(December 17, 2004), A31.
The Economist’s African editor, Robert Guest, recently provided first-hand witness to these problems: “Nigeria, like much of Africa, ought to be rich but is miserably poor. The main reason is that rather than striving to create an environment in which their people can freely seek prosperity and happiness, most African governments have chosen instead to rob them. This culture of criminality has spread throughout the ruling class, down to the Nigerian border guard who threatened to beat up my driver last month if I didn’t give him a dollar”; Guest, “Africa Earned,” A31.
Tilly, “Violence.”
Jeffrey Herbst, “Economic Incentives, Natural Resources and Conflict in Africa,” Journal of African Economics 9, no. 3 (2000): 286-286.
William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998); and Reno, “Junior Officers’Coups and Civilian Militias” (Paper presented at the U.S. Department of State Conference on Military Coups in West Africa and Regional Instability, Washington, DC, March 5, 2004).
Frederic C. Lane, Profits from Power: Readings in Protection Rent and Violence-Controlling Enterprises(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979).
Peter Fabricius, “Africa Must Bite the Bullets of Sacrifice and Compromise—or Risk Bullets of Chaos, NewColonialism,” Cape Times, February 16, 2004, 9. The question arises, ifWest African states like Liberia are so weak, why then have they survived more than forty years of independence? The answer lies outside the region in the shared norms of behavior promoted by the Organization of African Unity and its successor African Union and the legal framework of the international system and United Nations that ignores empirical conditions and upholds the juridical sovereign statehood of all system members. See Arie E. Kacowicz, “‘Negative’ International Peace and Domestic Conflicts, West Africa, 1957-96,” Journal of Modern African Studies 35, no. 3 (September 1997): 367-385; Robert H. Jackson, “Juridical Statehood in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Journal of International Affairs 46 (Summer 1992): 1-16; and Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, “Why Africa'sWeak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood,” World Politics 35, no. 1 (October 1982): 1-24.
Jackson, “Violent Internal Conflict,” 38-39; and Collier, “Revolutionary Routine,” 82.
Jean-Paul Azam, “The Redistributive State and Conflict in Africa” (Working Paper Series/2003, Oxford Centre for the Study of African Economies, 2001), 7-7; and Aristide Zolberg, “The Structure of Political Conflict in the New States of Tropical Africa,” American Political Science Review 62, no. 1 (March 1968): 70-87.
Azam, “Redistributive State,” 12.
Immanuel M. Wallerstein, The ModernWorld-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the EuropeanWorld-Economy, 1600-1750(New York: Academic Press, 1980), 113-113. Sharing this viewpoint are Lane, Profits from Power, and more recently, Robert H. Bates, Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development(New York: Norton, 2001).
OnAfrican predatory regimes, see the classic article by Richard Sklar, “The Nature of Class Domination in Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 17, no. 4 (December 1979): 531-552; and more recently, Arthur A. Goldsmith, “Predatory Versus Developmental Rule in Africa,” Democratization 11, no. 3 (June 2004): 88-110. In this regard, it is worth remembering that in 1960, Ghana and South Korea had similar per capita incomes, and both were poor and peripheral. Ghana was better endowed with its gold mines and productive cash-crop agriculture, whereasKorea had suffered a devastatingwar that ended only in 1953. Yet, in 2002, Korea's HDI rank was 28th in the world, while Ghana's was only 131st. Korea's Purchasing-Power-Parity per capita income of $16,950was eight times greater than Ghana’s. The key difference between these two countries was the political leadership they experienced after 1960. Culture was not the major cause as Koreawas poor and Confucian for centuries before its rise to core status in the world-system during the second half of the twentieth century. Its leaders were strongly motivated by international security concerns to build a strong and rich state. Beginning with the Nkrumah regime, Ghana has suffered many civilian and military predatory rulers who were motivated to take their “rewards now—and to take as much as possible”; Goldsmith, “Leadership in Africa,” 78-79.
Olson, “Dictatorship”; and Bates, Prosperity and Violence, 101-115.
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