I have the common disdain for comparative schema and universalizing generalizations shared by many historians. It’s a bit knee-jerk, and of course sooner or later I have to get around to thinking about connections and comparisons between cases.
But I like that work to focus on what is empirically real for the most part. E.g., when events develop in what looks like a similar direction in different places, communities, nation-states, institutions, I look for actual connections—structures that descend from a common ancestral form, existing relations between the cases, individuals, commodities, groups, resources that have been exchanged between the cases, and so on.
It seems to me that a fair amount of social science works in the opposite direction, creating taxonomies and comparative typologies based on visible resemblances and then searching for a single underlying reason for the resemblance that can be generalized to all similar cases.
Coming from where I do, I’m never troubled by the exception that seems to disprove the generalization, because I always am working on a particularist approach to every case. So I never lost sleep over Botswana not fitting a whole bunch of comparativist generalizations favored by Africanist political scientists and economists. Botswana explains Botswana, if you know its history and particular character, end of story.
But the particularist does get troubled in the other direction, which is explaining patterns when patterns seem extremely evident. Sometimes you can wave off claims about patterns the same way you can wave off someone who claims they saw the face of Jesus in their burnt toast this morning. Sometimes you can’t.
There’s a mirror image of this whole metacognitive problem in the history of biology and taxonomy. The historian or cultural anthropologist is often more like someone who privileges genetic information in deciding what the relationships between organisms are, whereas some field and observational specialists see behavioral or physiognomic resemblances between organisms and generalize those resemblances even when there is no developmental or genetic proximity between the organisms.
Which is to say, sometimes human societies are comparable because they’re operating in similar environments, in response to similar stresses or challenges, because they are a ‘type’, and not because of an underlying historical or relational connection.
With news of a coup in the Equatorial African nation of Gabon, long ruled by an authoritarian dynasty (Omar Bongo, followed by his son Ali Bongo), it’s pretty reasonable to ask “why so many coups in sub-Saharan Africa in a relatively short period of time”?
Though the fact that it’s Gabon also immediately knocks down one not-very-helpful generalization I’ve seen floating about, which is that it’s about a “coup belt” in the sahel, the shifting region that marks the boundary between the Sahara Desert and savannah in West and north-Central Africa, as if there’s something about that environment that produces military coups, in a kind of revision of ibn Khaldun’s famous thesis about environmental cycles and political change over time. Gabon’s not in that environment.
At least some of the explanations for this pattern are the kind that historians and anthropologists are comfortable with, meaning, relational. Almost all the coups have involved Francophone countries, and France definitely has pursued a distinctive approach to military intervention in postcolonial Africa, including in its solicitous relationship to military officers (which has included sponsoring their coups from time to time). But then there’s Sudan, which is in the middle of an unresolved civil war between two military factions trying to dominate the state.
There’s the common factor that the coups have mostly taken place in states that have struggled with persistent Islamic insurgencies, many of which were initially armed and financially supported by the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and then cut loose during the tumult of his overthrow. Both French and American assistance offered with those insurgencies hasn’t helped and in the perception of many locals has made things worse, which in turn has fueled the desire of military leaders to grab the wheel, as it were.
Only Gabon doesn’t have any insurgency of that kind. And Nigeria does, handled roughly as badly as in any other case and yet (so far), no coup. (Recent coup, that is.)
Perhaps the issue is with dynastic political power and the frustration it leads to in particular among long-serving military and civil servants—which the military can do something about, even if the civil servants can’t. But that doesn’t really fit Niger or some of the other sahelian countries—Niger’s overthrown president and prime minister were consummate technocrats and electoral politicians.
If we come around to “the commonality between coups is the hapless incompetence of civilian governments and popular resentment thereof”, we’ve first off built a categorical generalization that is useless because it’s so vague, but also is just as full of holes as the others. There are haplessly incompetent governments elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa that don’t appear to be in danger of military overthrow, and it’s a rare coup indeed where the new military rulers improve on the performance of civilians in any respect. (Ghana’s transition from rule by Jerry Rawlings to multiparty democracy might be the notable exception.)
And yet, does it seem like there is a wave of coups right now, it also seems as if sub-Saharan Africa is distinctively prone to military takeovers. That impression is potentially misleading: Africa has 54 countries counting North Africa and Madagascar; the next biggest number of coups on a regional basis is Latin America, which has 17 countries. In per capita terms, I think Latin America may actually be more prone to military take-overs. There’s also a definitional problem here. Zimbabwe is ostensibly under civilian control, with regular elections, but it would be perfectly correct to describe Zimbabwe as being under a kind of undeclared police-military rule.
This begins to open up the question of the frequency of coups a bit more. You might do it by asking a much more open-ended generalizing question and putting aside the attempt to craft a solid comparative schema for the moment. Why don’t militaries always take over power in every nation-state? And don’t they effectively have some forms of autonomous power in virtually every nation, regardless of what gets said about civilian control? Is there any nation-state that has absolutely nothing to fear from its own military?
Last question first. Yes, but the nations that have nothing to fear have no militaries to speak of, mostly because they have no governments to speak of. Haiti doesn’t have to fear its military because it’s under the control of armed criminal groups. There’s a few micro-states where the people with weapons are just a bunch of goofy ceremonial guards for the Pope or the Prince of Monaco who would get stomped in seconds if they tried anything funny by the larger states that surround them. Maybe the only meaningfully stable, substantial nation-state where you could say the problem of coups was fixed by abolishing a military is Costa Rica.
So moving backwards: don’t most militaries have power that civilians effectively don’t trespass on, even if the org charts or laws say otherwise? Yes, at the very least, during actual deployment of military force, and in many matters of self-governance, militaries by their nature tend to have a lot of functional autonomy, and what they do with that often impinges on civilian power. In the case of really large global militaries, that impingement is more likely to be at sites of foreign deployment—the US military is more inclined to ignore community wishes in Okinawa than Alabama, let’s say. But that doesn’t tend to grow into outright defiance or direct seizure of all authority in many states.
So again, why not in many parts of the world, and why so often in Latin America and Africa? I think in the end there are somewhat different explanations for Latin America and Africa (some of which involve the influence of different neighboring hegemons). Fundamentally in a lot of Africa the explanation today is the explanation for all military coups on the continent back to the 1960s: the nation-states built on European colonial administrations were built on a bedrock of violent enforcement of the state’s whims and on “shoestring” administrative power that provisioned almost nothing to the communities it claimed power over. Nothing about that was revised meaningfully in the transition to postcolonial rule. Where constitutions or transitions were written at length, they were performative veneers.
And yet. This is a conventional explanation, and one much favored both by the first generation of African nationalists and by recent advocates of decoloniality. There’s much that’s right about it and yet something missing.
Why, for example, did Lee Kuan Yew’s rule in Singapore not devolve either into corrupt authoritarian squalor nor into military-backed repression full of excess and arbitrary violence? Lee built a huge military during his time in power, after all. I recognize that it’s cliche to turn to Lee as a case that troubles conventionalized calls for liberal democracy—and his time in power has been fitted into many dumb quasi-racialized generalizations about “Asian tigers” when in fact many other nearby states with substantial militaries have had coups or have had capricious military power overriding civilian administrations on a regular basis.
I do think about Lee a fair amount because it seems hard to get away from the thought that he may have seen the building and maintenance of governmental power differently than many other 20th and 21st Century rulers with access to similar authoritarian capacities, including allowing himself to be subjected to some degree of public oversight for his financial dealings after he stepped down as Prime Minister. There’s at least something personal in the mix—and thus something contingent.
Which seems to me in turn where I’d bring particularism roaring back into the discussion of military take-overs in Africa over the last sixty years. Omar and Ali Bongo have been hated by the population of Gabon in a way that’s substantively different than some of the other overthrown rulers because they’ve ruled so poorly for so long with such extraordinary personal selfishness, in a nation that actually has the potential to check wealth inequality due to its oil reserves. While I wouldn’t hold out any hope at all for the soldiers who’ve taken over to do much better, it’s hard not to suppress the thought that the Gabonese people could scarcely do worse. (Though that’s a statement that someone like Jean Bedel Bokassa or Idi Amin would respond, “Hold my beer” if they heard it.)
Maybe it’s important to start with underscoring the agency of the men involved in coups—and of the men who refuse to entertain the thought. Not just as individuals, some of whom may have Lee’s apparent rectitude about power and its abuse, but in terms of the culture that a given military in a given place at a given time may have.
It’s when I think about the culture of military life in a specific place and time that I believe I’m focused on the right thing for understanding the risks of military power in any society. Not physical environment, not GDP, not relative state weakness or strength. It’s culture (or what some folks in other disciplines like to think of as ‘soft power’) that really pushes a coup into being conceivable, and what culture makes in people, in their individual and shared consciousness and affect.
Americans should be ready to understand this point after eight tumultuous years of national and local politics demonstrating that institutions, rules, and procedures have no intrinsic power on their own in the absence of the agentive will of people, groups and political parties to enact those rules and procedures. A point that applies to their own military: a “tradition of civilian control”, however clearly enunciated in the Constitution, could end in a flash if either military leaders or rank-and-file decided that it needed to end. And under some circumstances, it might be that many Americans would accept that as a necessary evil the way that the Gabonese are today declining to “make noise” on behalf of Ali Bongo. Culture is always in motion, and the political morality of people with access to power waxes and wanes in its relative sagacity and restraint even in the best-case scenario.
The problem in some sense for sub-Saharan African states, even where militaries do not threaten to take over, is that with a precious few exceptions, the people in leadership or vying for leadership are persistently the worst their nations have to offer. There are thousands of Zimbabweans—some of them in the ruling party—would have been better fit to rule than Robert Mugabe or Emmerson Mnangagwa. South Africa is bursting at the seams with capable, careful, sagacious men and women who could have led the country somewhere better than Jacob Zuma (and whatever Cyril Ramaphosa’s possibilities, he’s had them taken from him by the mess that Zuma left). Nigeria groans under the weight of its political class’ incompetence and cupidity. I do not think this is a generalized trait, and I don’t even know that it is a structural inevitability. There are a lot of people, a lot of histories, a lot of institutions, that bear some responsibility for the persistence of bad leadership in Africa—both in places where soldiers stay soldiers and in places where soldiers seize power and become the next bad leaders. But maybe we should start sometimes with the character and probity (or lack thereof) of the people who do the coup, and of the people who fail badly enough to invite it. If we avoid that, it’s often because nobody—even the people of coup-plagued nations—knows much of anything about those individuals and their inclinations. So we turn to bigger, lazier, troubled generalizations in order to skirt around what we’d have to know to really zero in on a more sensitive kind of explanation.
Image credit: U.S. Embassy Libreville/ Public Domain, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Bongo_Ondimba
Thank you for this, I was hoping you'd write something about Gabon. The small soundbites on CNN of some guy in fatigues at a microphone (basically every coup) leaves me none the wiser of who/what/why.
General Abacha could have also asked folks to hold his beer if he had not so conveniently died before he had a decade or three under his gun belt. Nigerians still speculate that he had “help” in leaving this world. So maybe the particularity there has something to do with the Nigerian elite’s willingness to eat their own, politically speaking. And other generals made their “transition” to civilian, or quasi-civilian, life before getting themselves elected (or selected, again a Nigerian English pun). So why no coup in Naija since Abacha? Maybe the generals picked up the political elite’s ruthless message: Join us or…well.