Why so many coups in Africa? (Le Monde diplomatique

The tally of coups in West Africa currently stands at six, after the recent military takeover in Niger (which was followed by another in Gabon in Central Africa). In this month’s podcast, Anne-Cécile Robert, director of international editions at Le Monde diplomatique, talks about the conditions in which generals step in, offering simple solutions to complex problems.

But, Robert says, it would be wrong to see this as a purely regional phenomenon, an ‘epidemic’ affecting a ‘coup belt’. As she writes in this month’s edition of the paper, ‘Instability in the Sahel looks like an enlarged version of ongoing geopolitical reconfigurations happening worldwide.’