The Renewed Phenomenon of Military Coups in West Africa: The 26 July 2023 Coup in Niger

Abstract

Military intervention in politics is not new to Africa, but its return since 2020 has concentrated in West Africa and the Sahel, reopening questions about the durability of the continent's democratic transitions. This study examines the coup that removed Niger's elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, on 26 July 2023, asking how far internal and external factors shaped the seizure of power and what it produced. The design is descriptive-analytical, combining David Easton's systems analysis with a single-case study: the coup's causes are treated as inputs, its consequences as outputs, and the evaluation of Niger's transition as feedback. A conceptual framework comes first: the senses of the coup, three schools explaining military intervention — political and social environment, the military institution's nature, and concordance — the indirect pressure-group and direct praetorian patterns, and African coups from their 1960–1990 peak through their 1990–2019 recession to their post-2020 Sahel resurgence. The article then identifies the principal actors — General Abdourahamane Tiani, the deposed president, the army and its National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland, and the M62 civil-society movement — and reconstructs the environment of jihadist violence, regional contagion, failed foreign counterterrorism, anti-French sentiment, Russian ambition and economic fragility in which the coup occurred. Indirect causes, from elite and ethnic rivalry to suspected Russian and regional interests and popular anger, are distinguished from the direct causes the army declared, and consequences traced domestically, regionally and internationally. Niger's transition is found highly precarious, and three scenarios are set out for its future.