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32 Armed Forces & Soc'y 5 (2005-2006)

handle is hein.journals/amdfcsad32 and id is 1 raw text is: October 2005 5-23 ©A00mner-Uncersoiety Coups and Conflict in West Africa, 1955-2004 ag hosted at Part I, Theoretical Perspectives bttp:,/online.sagepub.com Patrick J. McGowan Stellenbosch University and Arizona State University From independence through 2004, the sixteen West African states have experienced forty-four successful military-led coups, forty-three often-bloody failed coups, at least eighty-two coup plots, seven civil wars, and many other forms of political conflict. This two-part article seeks answers to the question, what has gone wrong in West Africa? Part I uses world-systems and rational-choice analyses to provide theoretical answers involv- ing macro structures and micro leadership behavior. Structural peripherality and poor leadership result in underdevelopment and state weakness, the major structural causes of West African instability. Empirical evidence demonstrates West Africa's peripheral role in the world-economy, the high risks associated with political leadership in the region, and West Africa's critical socioeconomic situation. Part II, appearing in the January 2006 issue, will examine new data on coups and conflict in West Africa and speculate on what can be done to improve the situation. Keywords: coups; West Africa; world-system; rational choice Because political office is a quick route to wealth in Africa, people fight for it. -Robert Guest1 If we define West Africa as the sixteen member states of the Economic Community of West African States from Mauritania in the west to Niger in the east and all states south of them including offshore Cape Verde, we must then conclude that this region is Africa's zone par excellence of coups and conflict, only perhaps rivaled in conflict, but not in coup activity, by the Great Lakes region in Central and Eastern Africa. A recent study of all failed and successful coup attempts in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) between 1956 and the end of 2001 found that fully 45 percent of all 188 attempts occurred in West Africa, although the states of this regionrepresent only 33 percent of SSA's forty- Author's Note: An early version of this article was presented at a U.S. State Department Conference on Military Coups in West Africa and Regional Instability, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C., March 5, 2004. The author has benefited from comments at this conference and seminars at Stellenbosch University and the University of Cape Town as well as from the comments of three anony- mous referees. 5

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