Democracy's Discontent and the Resurgence of Coups in West Africa: Implications for Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The resurgence of military coups in African politics poses a challenge for democracy and it highlights the fragility of democratization in Africa. Going by the recent coup waves, democracy appears to be in a very fragile state in Africa. Africa for a very long time has enjoyed relative stability in its democratization process. However, this long period of stability is being challenged again as there have already been five successful overthrows of democratically elected governments in Chad, Mali, Guinea, Sudan, Burkina Faso, and Niger between 2021 and 2023 in addition to the unsuccessful attacks. It is equally worth noting that the recent coup waves in Africa have been dominated by West African states: Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Guinea. Unlike in the past when citizens greeted attacks on democratically elected governments with discontent and disapproval, the recent coups have for so many reasons been met with support and acceptance by citizens through celebrations on the streets and supportive messages on social media. This paper therefore seeks to examine democracy’s discontent and the resurgence of coups in West Africa to identify its implications for Africa. The study relied essentially on qualitative data predicated on secondary data. The paper adopted populism as its framework of analysis. The paper revealed that the popular support for the recent coup waves stems from citizens' dissatisfaction with the performance of democracy and democratic leadership. The study recommended, amongst other things, that democratic institutions should be reformed and strengthened, good governance should be promoted by African leaders, and maximum attention should be paid to the welfare and concerns of the military to strengthen professionalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".