Abstract
The year 2020 to 2025 witnessed a dramatic and destabilizing resurgence of military coups d’etat throughout West and Central Africa, a region now starkly defined as the “Coup belt.” This wave of interventions, encompassing successful takeovers in Mali (2020, 2021), Burkina Faso (2022), Guinea (2021), Chad (2021), Niger (2023), Gabon (2023), Sudan, Guinea-Bissau, and Benin (2025), signifies a profound crisis of democratic governance and threat to regional stability. This study examines the immediate and root cause behind this phenomenon through a qualitative comparative analysis of ten national cases. Beyond monocausal explanations, the study employs a conjunctural approach, integrating process tracing and Qualitative Comparative analysis (QCA) to explain how deep-seated structural vulnerabilities interact with immediate political shocks to enable military intervention.
From the findings, we established that chronic structural failures create an essential permissive environment for instability. These include widespread systemic corruption and endemic patrimonial governance, which undermine state legitimacy and public trust; economic instability often amplified by a “resource curse” that encourages elite predation; and historical legacy of military rule that normalizes coup-making as political practice. Within this fragile context, acute immediate drivers provide the decisive triggers. The main justification for military takeover of power in the sahelian core was the growing security issue and the government’s inability to contain jihadist insurgencies. In the coastal and central African states, constitutional crises and illicit efforts by incumbents to cling to power were the breaking points.
A critical and defining discovery of this research is the crucial role of post-coup geopolitical realignment in consolidating the new military regimes. These juntas have gained external resilience through the creation of the Alliance of the Sahel States (AES) by Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, as well as their later shift to strategic alliances with none-Western entities like Russia. This shift has effectively institutionalized regional fragmentation, severely undermining the deterrent and normative authority of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and creating an alternative, anti-Western security architecture. The study concludes that the coup wave is a systemic regional crisis rooted in specific combinations of structural and immediate factors, subsequently locked in place by strategic geopolitical choices. Consequently, to achieve sustainable peace and democratic resilience, fundamental reforms that address not just the immediate triggers but the structural issues of corruption, institutional weakness, and inequitable governance that sustain the region's coup cycle must be implemented in addition to addressing immediate triggers.