Between Robust Norms and Centrifugal Realities: Gaps and Challenges in the Implementation of Africa’s Regional Law on Unconstitutional Changes of Government
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of Africa’s “post-colonial” history has been characterized by a struggle between democratic and anti-democratic forces. Today the former are now mostly ascendant on the continent, but the tendencies are not uniform. 1 With at least five successful coups in four countries between 2020 and 2023 (Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso x 2, and Niger), the West African region accounted for the vast majority of all the unconstitutional changes of government (UCGs) that occurred on the African continent over the five years between 2020 and 2025. These developments occurred despite a decades-long effort on the continent to elaborate and institute robust regional international law frameworks prohibiting UCGs. They also transpired despite efforts by the relevant continental and sub-regional bodies to sanction actors that offend against the anti-UCG rules enunciated in the relevant regional legal texts. Thus, especially in West Africa, there has been an appreciable degree of dissonance between the robustness of the normative framework that prohibits and seeks to sanction UCGs, and the contrary socio-political realities on the ground. This essay explores the law on UCGs underpinning this dissonance—the most interventionist aspect of Africa’s international law of democracy. It examines the nature, gaps, and challenges of the implementation of Africa’s regional international law on UCGs. The essay begins by briefly mapping the terrain covered by the generally robust regional normative framework for dealing with UCGs on the African continent, locating its sources, discussing its content, and analyzing its significance. It thereafter turns its attention to the gaps and challenges that have afflicted attempts to implement this normative framework—focusing on the problems that have been experienced by the African Union (AU) and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) sanctions regimes that have done the most to faithfully implement the continent’s regional international law on UCGs. The essay ends with brief concluding remarks.
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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 | 0.052 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.089 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| 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".