Why Africa’s Coups Keep Coming
The failed coup in Benin on 7 December 2025 serves as a stark reminder of the persistent fragility within the region, since the August 2020 Mali putsch.
The surge in military takeovers across the African continent over the past half-decade represents a fundamental rupture in regional governance, evolving from a series of domestic crises into a documented ‘coup contagion’. The Mali coup acted as a regional icebreaker, shattering a decade-long period of relative democratic stability and emboldening junior officers across the Sahel and beyond. The continent has since witnessed a significant reversal of democratic trends, creating a ‘Coup Belt’ that stretches from the Atlantic coast of Guinea through to the Red Sea in Sudan coinciding with a geopolitical shift marked by the decline of the international rules-based order and the weakening of external deterrence against unconstitutional seizures of power. This timeline is critical because it highlights a shift in military psychology; once the "zero-tolerance” policy of regional blocs like ECOWAS was shown to be ineffective against the Malian junta, it drastically lowered the perceived cost for officers in neighbouring states to follow suit. Indeed, the international response to many recent coups has been historically lacking in resolve, marked by delayed reactions, token condemnations, and inconsistent enforcement of sanctions - increasing the odds of a successful putsch and thus emboldening other potential putschists to pull the trigger on their own gambits for power, confident that regional and global backlash will be limited, short-lived, or entirely performative.
Why now?
The triggers fuelling this specific 2020–2025 surge are deeply systemic and interconnected. In the Sahelian states of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, the primary catalyst was a ‘security-legitimacy gap’, where civilian governments were viewed as incapable of protecting their citizens or soldiers from the relentless expansion of Islamist insurgencies. In these contexts, the military framed their intervention not as a political choice, but as a survival necessity. However, as the contagion spread the triggers shifted toward more opportunist takeovers. In countries like Guinea and Gabon, the military took advantage of public fury over third-termism and fraudulent elections. By 2025, economic despair, manifested through hyper-inflation and infrastructure collapse, became the dominant spark. As seen recently in Madagascar, military units seized power only after civilian protests reached an uncontrollable mass, allowing the army to frame themselves as the moral protectors of the people rather than power-grabbing putschists.
Each successful coup further proves the long-term viability of the military model. We are no longer seeing temporary military caretaker governments; instead, we are witnessing the institutionalisation of the junta. Leaders in Chad and Gabon have successfully ‘civilianised’ their rule through managed elections, providing a roadmap for other military commanders to transition from rebels to presidents. This normalisation is underpinned by a significant geopolitical realignment, specifically the withdrawal of Africa’s Western security partners in favour of transactional relationships with the Russian Africa Corps (we discuss the implications of this in our ‘Hard Power on the Rise’ insight). This regime ‘survival package’ provides juntas with immediate security and propaganda support without the requirements for human rights or democratic milestones that Western aid typically demands.
Outlook
Looking towards 2026, the risk remains acute in countries where the pressure cooker of youthful demographics, economic stagnation, and institutional decay is at its highest. Benin is currently considered a critical red zone following a foiled attempt in late 2025; the underlying grievances of the military regarding northern security remain unaddressed as the nation heads toward a 2026 election flashpoint. In countries where the ‘security-legitimacy gap’ is less salient, such as Togo, Sierra Leone, and many others where political or socio-economic grievances have been steadily worsening, anti-government protests are inevitably going to manifest, as will the predictably heavy-handed attempts to repress them. As seen not only in Madagascar this year, but also Egypt in 2013, and Sudan and Algeria in 2019, militaries have proven to be patient opportunists, relying on the ‘right’ moment during instances of mass unrest to intervene as popular liberators - disobeying crackdown orders, publicly siding with protesters, and seizing the levers of power indefinitely.
