Regional Responses to Democratic Backsliding and Military Coups in West Africa.

Abstract

West Africa has become the continent's main site of unconstitutional changes of government, yet regional responses to democratic backsliding and military coups remain uneven and weakly theorized. This study examines how the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), working with the African Union (AU), has responded to democratic backsliding and military coups, how consistent those responses have been, and how far they address both the democratic roots of the crises and their regional security consequences. It uses qualitative documentary analysis of official communiqués, institutional reports, scholarly literature and news analyses covering 2019 to early 2026, comparing Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Niger, with The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Niger's 2010 coup as supplementary contrasts. Democratic Peace Theory and Regional Security Complex Theory are combined in a single framework with explicit indicators. The findings show that ECOWAS is stronger on norms than on consistency. It answers coups with suspension, mediation and sanctions but has said little about gradual constitutional manipulation by civilian incumbents; the severity of its measures varied across cases; no coup in the four core cases was reversed; and the withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in January 2025 exposed the limits of its leverage. The study contributes an operationalized, integrated framework and a comparative account linking domestic democratic erosion to regional security spillover. It identifies early warning, targeted sanctions and even-handed norm enforcement as prioritie