In the last year and a half, military takeovers have occurred in Chad, Guinea, Mali, Sudan, and last week, in Burkina Faso. It happens that all of these countries belong to a region below the Sahara known as the Sahel, stretching from Senegal to Sudan, and comprising Mauritania, Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, northern Nigeria, southern Algeria, Eritrea, and northern Ethiopia. The reason for ex-Burkinabé president Roch Kaboré’s overthrow is widely attributed to his inability to manage the destabilizing conflict in the central Sahel that Burkina was dragged into in 2015. For now, the coup has popular support—but where next for the country, and its democracy?

Returning to AIAC Talk is Dr. Lassane Ouedraogo, an analyst of political governance, media, and conflict in Sahelian West Africa, a 2020 AIAC inaugural fellow and an adjunct lecturer at Université Joseph Ki Zerbo in Ouagadougou. Although the coup’s proximate cause is Burkina’s deteriorating security situation, has the country become caught up in a cycle of military insurgency that even revolutionaries, like Thomas Sankara, are partly responsible for? Does this doom liberal democracy in Burkina, or was it ill-suited to begin with?

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