such changes threaten these
ethnically-based military factions, who now face strong incentives to defend
their positions of privilege by deposing the new leaders and restoring their
co-ethnics to power.
Given this level of pervasive insecurity, it is no wonder that many African leaders turned to ethnicity as a solution to their loyalty issues.
African
countries have experienced many violent transitions of power, often at the
hands of either military officers or rebel insurgents. In such circumstances,
we have come to expect further violence. When leadership changes hands
peacefully, however, whether by electoral or other constitutional means, we
have greater hope for future stability. Moreover, countries undergoing such
peaceful change may be democratizing or consolidating their initial steps
toward liberal governance—particularly in Africa where military dictators and
autocrats have long ruled. These, then, are contexts where we least desire, and
indeed may least expect, a violent reaction from the military—for such a
reaction would undermine the positive progress that has been made. After all,
the ability to pass power from one leader to another via established rules,
without violence or a succession crisis, is both a key indicator of democratic
consolidation and one of the great promises of constitutional governance.
Yet, all too frequently, such a
violent reaction from the military is exactly what occurs. Out of a documented
67 constitutional transitions of executive leadership (from decolonization
until
2005), 21 of them
were closely followed by an attempted military coup (within 4 years)—fully 31%.
If we confine the data to electoral transitions only, then the prognosis is
even worse: here 19 of 48 transitions, or approximately 40%, were followed by
coup attempts (see Table 2).[1]
African militaries thus seem to share much responsibility for the fact
that constitutional politics, that democracy and the regular alternation of
executive leadership that it entails, are having a rough time surviving in many
African countries. If we could understand why theses militaries are reacting
violently to changes in the head of state, then we could potentially figure out
how to make democratization more likely to stick.
In this article, I will argue
that ethnic dynamics play a critical role in motivating military officers to
depose elected, or otherwise constitutionally appointed, leaders. In Africa,
where most states are highly diverse and where no single ethnic group
constitutes a majority, the opening of political competition increases the likelihood
that executive power will rotate between individuals of different identities.
In other words, peaceful transitions of power will often entail changes in the
ethnic identity of the governing chief executive. For a diverse society, this
is indeed the normative ideal: ethnic identity should neither privilege nor
preclude an individual from attaining power.
The problem, as far as
civil-military relations are concerned, stems from the historical actions of
past leaders. Faced with uncertainty and insecurity, many post-independence
African leaders chose to ensure military loyalty by recruiting co-ethnics into
their officer corps’. In effect, they created ethnic armies tied through
personal loyalty and identity-based patronage to the leader himself. Thus,
changes in the ethnic identity of the chief-executive, no matter how peacefully
attained, pose a real danger to stability—for such
changes threaten these ethnically-based military factions, who now face strong
incentives to defend their positions of privilege by deposing the new leaders
and restoring their co-ethnics to power.
To evaluate this hypothesis, I
employ a mixed-methods framework incorporating both cross national quantitative
analyses and qualitative country-case studies. Data was collected from a wide
variety of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources on all constitutional
leadership transitions in Africa (from decolonization to the present), the
ethnicity of pre- and post-transition leaders, subsequent coup attempts, and
control variables such as relative wealth and ethnic diversity. Both the entire
set of constitutional transitions and the sub-set of those transitions that
occurred through elections were analyzed. In both cases, where the ethnic
identity of the chief executive changed, the risk of a coup attempt increased
significantly: in all models, the ethnic change variable was positive and
statistically significant. Moreover, the predicted probability of a coup
attempt increased by an average of 47.45 (full data set) and 58.9 (elections only)
percentage points when moving from no ethnic change to ethnic change—from a
coup risk of under 10% to 50-70%. Indeed, in only two instances did a coup
attempt occur after a constitutional transition in leadership without that
transition involving a change in ethnic identity (S˜ao Tom´e and Pr´ıncipe in
1991 and Sudan in 1986).
These broad, cross-national patterns are further supported by
case study evidence. Following Lieberman’s suggestions for model-testing small-N analysis, embedded within a large-N framework, trace the causal mechanisms of the theory through three “on the line”
country-cases: Cameroon and Kenya both experienced a coup attempt after a
constitutional turnover in leadership which involved ethnic change, while
Botswana experienced changes in leadership not followed by coup attempts where
there was also ethnic continuity. In both of the positive cases, we see
evidence of an ethnic patronage system reacting to the threat of change, while
in the negative case no such ethnic patronage system existed nor could one be
threatened by the changes in leadership (due to ethnic continuity).
shield struggling civilian
governments while they restructure their militaries and extricate themselves
from historic systems of ethnic patronage.
2 Literature Review
In writing this article, I have
been driven to understand what I think of as an important empirical
observation—that, in Africa, when power peacefully changes hands between one
head of state and the next, a relatively rare event in and of itself, that
transition is frequently undermined by military interventionism. Why do African
militaries so often react violently to constitutional changes in leadership?
While this question is certainly connected
to two extensive literatures, each of which contain important insights—works
concerned with democratization and democratic consolidation and those that
focus on explaining military coups—it is not directly addressed in either. Two
pieces do come close, however, in that they specificaly address African
military interventionism in the context of democratization: John F. Clark’s
1995 article, “The Decline of the African Military Coup,” and a small section
in Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle’s 1997 book, Democratic Experiments in Africa. Below, I discuss the insights of
each of these literatures in fairly broad strokes while providing a more
detailed look at the work of Clark and Bratton and van de Walle.
Within the literature on
democratization and democratic consolidation, econometric studies generally
agree on a simple and yet frustratingly difficult solution to the problem of
autocratic regression: get rich.
These studies consistently find that
development, and the wealth it generates, are “what makes democracies endure.”The policy prescription stemming from these findings— develop
faster—seems singularly unhelpful, however, for the majority of countries
struggling with democratization today. Consider that in 2008 the average annual
per capita income in sub-Saharan
Africa was $1991 and that 43 countries world-wide are currently classified as low-income economies (with less than $975 annual per capita income). Even with incredibly strong growth rates, it will take decades (if not much longer) for many of these poor countries to reach income levels that are even remotely ‘safe’ for democracy. Are they thus largely doomed to autocracy and failed democratic experiments for the foreseeable future? Perhaps not: some quite poor countries do succeed in establishing and maintaining basic democratic practices—Kenya, Senegal, and Tanzania for example—which suggests that we should dig deeper than development levels; that we should try to understand the mechanisms of democratic breakdown and how even poor countries can avoid them.
The military coup literature is minimally helpful for understanding why militaries might intervene after peaceful transitions of power—mostly because such works are generally insensitive to context and rarely distinguish between interventions against civilian versus military governments or democratic versus autocratic regimes. Nonetheless, medium-N analyses and case studies do provide potentially significant insights relevant to the question at hand, such as the role that ethnic hostilities have played in inciting particular coup attempts. Their findings, however, have yet to be successfully generalized in a methodologically rigorous way. Large-N studies have found no consistent, significant relationship between the measures of ethnic diversity that they include and patterns of coup attempts. Indeed, only two findings seem generally robust across statistical studies: that poor countries are more susceptible to coups and that once a coup has occurred, more are likely in the future. We are thus left with a vague sense that ethnic politics might matter, at least in Africa, and a familiar frustration in the daunting challenge of poverty.
In his 1995 article, Clark seeks
to examine the relationship between political liberalization and the degree of
military interventionism in African domestic politics. He concludes that
liberalization diminishes the overall risk of military intervention due to the
increased legitimacy that democratic regimes possess. As a first attempt to
analyze the behavior of African militaries in the specific context of
democratization, Clark’s article is a significant contribution. Yet, his
methodology— which eschews statistics and fails to compare liberalizing to
non-liberalizing states—does not lend itself well to making broad
generalizations. Moreover, his qualitative case study evidence points to the
fact that many liberalizing African states (9 of 21 by his count) still
struggle deeply with (often repetitive)
coup attempts.
Such cases indicate that more work is needed to theorize and test the
conditions under which militaries do intervene against democratizing states.
Taken together, these various works on military
interventionism compel us to think critically about the role that military
institutions play during processes of democratic transition and consolidation.
They suggest that intra-military dynamics—such as the defense of patronage
networks and the tensions produced by ethnic factionalism—may be critical in
understanding when and why militaries intervene against constitutional
governance. In the remainder of this paper, I will attempt to develop a theory
of why ethnic factions within the military often move against democracy (in
defense of patronage networks) and to test that theory against both
cross-national and case-study evidence. Given the difficulty of measuring
democratic transition and consolidation in their broadest sense, I focus on a
single, yet particularly important, aspect of democracy: legal/constitutional
changes in executive leadership. After all, the epitome of democracy is that
power can, in fact, peacefully change hands via constitutional means.
3 Theory
Why do militaries seize power
after constitutional changes of leadership? The theory presented here is one
grounded in the actions of past leaders and how they structured the military in
the interest of building and stabilizing loyalty. Under certain conditions, it
will be argued, those past actions can severely compromise present and future
civil-military relations, leading to violence by the military when power
changes hands.
The
period of decolonization was a rough time for many African states—in the 1960s,
armed conflicts were waged in Algeria, Burundi, Chad, and the Sudan, among
others; the Congo completely collapsed after a rank-and-file military revolt;
and 34 coups were attempted in 18 different countries.
Given this level of pervasive insecurity, it is no wonder that many
African leaders turned to ethnicity as a solution to their loyalty issues—even
some, like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, who initially decried such practices. Indeed, ethnic military recruiting is a well-documented phenomenon in
Africa. Both Samuel Decalo and Boubacar N’Diaye, in their studies on long standing
civilian regimes, discuss ethnic military recruiting as a successful strategy
for stabilizing civil-military relations. The general idea is that by
“ethnically matching” the military to the civilian regime, a leader can build military loyalty
through both the mechanisms of ethnic identification and patronage, thereby
avoiding military coups and strengthening their hold on power.15
While effective for many years, I
argue that this historic source of stability has become a persistent cause of
instability as long time autocrats finally let go of power (sometimes by dying
in office) and, more generally, as Africa democratizes. The opening of
political systems and the increasing use of democratic means of contestation
have led to more and more peaceful transitions of power—wherein one leader
hands over executive office to another via constitutional means. Given Africa’s
multi-ethnic character, these developments have increased the likelihood that
the ethnic identity of leadership also changes during such transfers of power.
In other words, the odds that the pre- and post- transition leaders share the
same ethnic heritage has diminished.
Both being tactics to restore the
previous status quo. This situation shares many traits with a classic security
dilemma—both civilian and military personnel fear that the other will
eventually move against them, both may then take actions to protect or defend
themselves while they still can, both may view the others’ defensive actions as
aggressive, and, ultimately, conflict may result where no party really desired
it. Whether coup attempts are staged preemptively, or in reaction to real moves
by the new leadership to restructure the military, they at best severely
destabilize civil-military relations. At worst, they may lead to the collapse
of constitutional politics, the ethnic fragmentation of the army, and even the
outbreak of civil war.
In the sections that follow, I
evaluate this theory against historical evidence. First, I use cross national
quantitative data to analyze the effect of ethnicity when leadership changes
hands via constitutional means. The theory predicts that a change in the ethnic
identity of the leader is critically important in provoking military reactivity.
Thus, if there is no significant relationship between a change in the ethnicity
of the leader and subsequent coup attempts, then the theory is invalidated.
While I would ideally also like to include an ethnic stacking variable, and
thereby further submit the theory to cross-national testing, sufficient data is
unfortunately not available.
Second, through comparative case study analysis, I will
evaluate how well actual historical experiences align with the proposed
mechanisms of the theory. Specifically, in the “theory-aligned” positive cases
(Cameroon 1982 and Kenya 1978), where there is both a change in the ethnicity
of the leader and a subsequent coup attempt, we should see that (a) the prior
leader stacked the military with his co-ethnics, (b) action was taken against
them by the new leader, or they feared that such action was imminent, and (c)
the actual coup leaders were co-ethnics of the previous leader (and wished to
re-install him or take power themselves). In “theory-aligned” negative cases
(Botswana), we should find no evidence of ethnic stacking and/or no incentive
for the military to react due to ethnic continuity between leaders. Finally,
where there is a change in the ethnicity of the leader but no coup attempt
(Kenya 2002), we should find that either the military was not stacked under the
previous leader or that an intervening variable, such as a foreign power
actively protecting the government, interfered with the ability of military
officers to react.
Cross-National
Evidence
From 1950 to 2005, there were 67 cases
of power changing hands from one African leader to another by constitutional
means. These cases are drawn from across all of Africa, including North Africa
and the islands surrounding the continent (52 countries in total). At most, a
single country contributed 5 transitions to the data set (Mauritius) with only
a handful of countries represented more than twice (Burundi, Ghana, Liberia,
Madagascar, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania each contributed 3 transitions).17 Table
1 summarizes the reasons for these changes in leadership, broken down by
electoral and non-electoral successions of power:
Table
1: Reasons for Constitutional Changes of Leadership, 1950-2005
|
|
Number
|
|
Elections (n=48)
|
|
Planned Democratization or Regularly
Scheduled
|
35
|
By Transitional Government after Coup
|
7
|
After Retirement,
Resignation, Impeachment, or Death of Leader
|
5
|
By Transitional Government after Peace
Treaty
|
1
|
Non-Electoral Successions
(n=19)
|
|
After Death in Office (natural) of Leader
|
11
|
After Retirement (non-coerced) of Leader
|
4
|
A few preliminary notes on
coding are in order. First, to qualify here as a case, the change in leadership
must occur through competitive, national elections or by constitutional
provisions given the natural death or non-militarily coerced retirement or
resignation of the former leader. Hereditary monarchies, where the monarch
still controls the government and the military, are not included since there is
no possibility of an ethnic change in leadership occurring (examples include
Morocco, Swaziland, and Ethiopia under Haile Selassie). Also not counted are
transitions to
After Resignation (non-militarily coerced)
of Leader
|
3
|
By Terms of Power Sharing Agreement
|
1
|
Total
|
67
|
Many of these power transfers are
followed closely by violent military reactions. The most commonly tracked, and
perhaps the most commonly experienced, of these reactions is the coup
an interim
leader or committee that acts as the head of state during a constitutional
process to appoint, elect, or otherwise determine the new leader. Where such a
new leader does successfully come to power according to those constitutional
means (i.e. the process is not violently interrupted), the case is counted and
for coding purposes the “old leader” is taken to be the one who preceded the
special, transitional arrangements. For example, where the violent deposition
of a leader led directly to a transitional government that then quickly held
elections (within a year or two), the ethnicity of the deposed leader and the
ethnicity of the newly elected leader are used to determine whether a change in
ethnic leadership took place. Finally, more recent transitions (post-2005) are
not included in the data set as sufficient time has not elapsed to ascertain
the military’s reaction. Cases were compiled from a variety of sources, most
importantly the Archigos dataset on global political leaders, BBC Country
Timelines, and Keesings Archives. 17 Many other countries have
never experienced a constitutional change in leadership, including Burkina
Faso, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea,
Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Libya, Togo, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.
attempt. People pay attention when
militaries storm capital cities. Thus, reliable, consistent, and accessible
records exist for this type of event. Such is not the case for other possible
military reactions, such as mutinies and small-scale armed forces infighting.
Therefore, coup attempts are used here, as elsewhere, as the primary outcome
variable of interest.[1]
Note,
however, that other negative, and even equally violent, reactions from the
military do occur and that these types of events may involve the same kinds of
ethnic dynamics theorized here. For example, elections held in the Central
African Republic in 1993 led to the transfer of executive power from Kolingba
(of the southern Yacoma) to Patass´e (of the northern Gbaya). Patass´e rapidly
implemented a general policy of providing patronage positions in his
administration to fellow northerners. The expansion of this policy to the armed
services, involving the blatant replacement of
Coup attempt data was
compiled from the Archigos database on political leaders cross-referenced with
Patrick McGowan’s data set on sub-Saharan African coups and then expanded to
cover the years 1952-1955 (where applicable) and 2002-2009 with supplemental
research conducted primarily via LexusNexus and Keesings Archives. A minimum of
two reports citing evidence of actual military violence, or military occupation
of a government building, or military occupation of a communication or
transportation center, count as a coup attempt. Even in such cases, where there
is strong evidence that there was no plan or ambition to seize national power,
it is not counted as a coup attempt. Following McGowans coding procedures, only
attempts where the military hung onto power for more than one week were
considered successful.
southerners with northerners,
sparked three army mutinies between 1996 and 1997.[1]
Examples such as this suggest that the findings presented here, which are
restricted to coup attempts, may actually understate the connection between
ethnic changes in leadership and military reactivity.
Of the 67 constitutional power transfers, approximately 1/3
are followed by a coup attempt within 4 years (40% for electoral transitions).[2]
For those countries experiencing a coup attempt within 5 years of a
leadership transition, the average length of time between those events was 2.1
years with no coups occurring in the 5th year (see Figure 1 for distribution).
Table 2 periodizes the data by decade, showing the patterns of constitutional
changes of leadership and subsequent military coup attempts over time. From the
table, we can clearly see that this is not just a cold war Figure 1: Time
Elapsed between Power Transfer and Coup Attempt
phenomenon. As the third wave of
democratization swept across Africa in the 1990s, the number of constitutional
leadership transitions skyrocketed. Yet, so too did the number of coup attempts
undermining those transitions. And while the record has improved in the 2000s,
the problem has by no means disappeared.
Table 2.1: Periodization of Constitutional Changes of Leadesrhip
|
||||||||
Decade
|
Number of
|
Number Followed
|
Percentage Followed
|
|||||
Leadership Changes
|
by Coup Attempts
|
by Coup Attempts
|
||||||
1950-59
|
0
|
0
|
-
|
|||||
1960-69
|
5
|
3
|
60%
|
|||||
1970-79
|
7
|
3
|
43%
|
|||||
1980-89
|
8
|
2
|
25%
|
|||||
1990-99
|
25
|
9
|
36%
|
|||||
2000-05
|
22
|
4
|
18%
|
|||||
Total
|
67
|
21
|
31%
|
|||||
Table
2.2: Periodization of Electoral Transitions Only
|
||||||||
Decade
|
Number of
|
Number Followed
|
Percentage Followed
|
|||||
Leadership Changes
|
by Coup Attempts
|
by Coup Attempts
|
||||||
1950-59
|
0
|
0
|
-
|
|||||
1960-69
|
3
|
3
|
100%
|
|||||
1970-79
|
2
|
2
|
100%
|
|||||
1980-89
|
3
|
2
|
67%
|
|||||
1990-99
|
22
|
8
|
36%
|
|||||
2000-05
|
18
|
4
|
22%
|
|||||
Total
|
48
|
19
|
40%
|
|||||
Given these overall trends, I now
seek to evaluate the hypothesis that a change in the ethnic identity of the
leader plays a significant role in provoking military reactivity. Coding ethnic
change was, in practice, not as difficult as theory might suggest. While ethnic
categories are certainly constructed, mutable, and porous at the edges, they
also persist over long periods of time and leaders often readily identify, or
are identified with one (or more) of them. Data was culled from a wide variety
of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources including, but not limited to:
documents from the British National Archives, Library of Congress country
studies, the World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples, Minorites at
Risk qualitative data, BBC articles and country timelines, the Encyclopedia of
20th Century African History, and scholarly articles on African history. The
ethnicity of each leader (before and after the transition) was coded at the
highest level of ethnic aggregation[3]—unless
a compelling reason emerged to consider a sub-group. This was only done for 3
countries: clan was recognized in Somalia, the Ashanti were considered separate
from other Akans in Ghana, and the Djerma were recognized as a politically relevant
subgroup of the Songhai in Niger. Returning these cases back to the highest
level of ethnic aggregation would only alter the final coding in 1 case,
Somalia in 1967. If the ethnic identity of the leader prior to the transition
was different from that of the leader assuming power, the ethnic change
variable was coded as 1 (and 0 otherwise). By this coding method, over one half
of constitutional leadership transitions in Africa, between 1950-2005, involved
a change in the ethnicity of the country’s leader
(35 of 64, with 3 cases
indeterminable).[4]
Table
3: Ethnic Changes in Leadership and Coup Attempts, 1950-2005
|
||
Coup Attempt within 4 years?
|
||
Ethnic Change in
Leadership?
|
Yes
|
No
|
Yes
|
19
|
16
|
No
|
2
|
27
|
Bivariate Logit: Coefficient= 2.775, SE= 0.808, significant
at p ≤ 0.001 level
Predicted Probability of Coup Given Ethnic Change=
0.52
Predicted Probability of Coup Given No Ethnic Change=
0.107
Difference in Predicted Probabilities= 0.415
Missing Observations= 3 (Liberia 1997, Mozambique
2005, and Tanzania 2005; none with coup attempts)
Table 3 depicts the bivariate
relationship between ethnic changes in leadership and coup attempts. The
distribution of cases indicates that an ethnic change in leadership is
practically a necessary condition for a coup attempt to occur after a peaceful,
constitutional change in leadership. Where there is ethnic continuity in
leadership, militaries very rarely attempt to seize power. Moreover, of the two
cases that do defy the general pattern, one may not appropriately belong in
this contextual setting: the Sudan in 1986. Not only was the Sudan once again
embroiled in civil war at this time, but it is also one of the 7 cases in which
elections were held by a transitional government immediately following a
successful military coup. Indeed, of these 7 cases, fully 6 were followed by
additional coup attempts within 4 years. A solid argument can be made that the
1986 Sudanese transition, as well as those like it, are caught up in cycles of
violence with their own dynamics. The statistical models that follow will
include an indicator variable for these cases in order to control for this
possibility—although given that 5 of these 7 cases also involved ethnic changes
in leadership, it is extremely difficult to parse out separate effects.
While the bivariate analysis of
ethnic changes in leadership and coup attempts is informative, there are still
relevant factors to control for and further relationships to explore. Due to
the small size of the data set (64 total observations), I focus on a core of
important variables: most notably, the ethnic change in leadership variable
already discussed. To identify control variables, I return to the existing
cross-national literatures on democratization and military coups. As noted
earlier, these studies consistently find that such events are more likely to
occur in poor countries as well as where there is a recent history of military
intervention. The following logit models thus include a variable for relative
prosperity, log GDPk, which is the
natural log of GDP per capita in the year of the power transfer, as well as a
variable for military intervention, prior.coups,
which is the number of coup attempts in the previous ten years.
It is also reasonable to think
that economic shocks, understood as sharp downturns in a country’s economic
well-being, may also make a coup attempt significantly more likely. I
constructed two indicator variables to capture such shocks. A general economic
shock variable, econ.shock, was coded
1 if in any year during the 4 year period following the leadership transition
the country experienced a negative growth rate of 1.0% or more (and 0
otherwise). A severe economic shock, severe.econ.shock,
was coded 1 if in any year during the 4 year period following the leadership
transition the country experienced a negative growth rate of 3.0% or more (and
0 otherwise).[5]A
measure for general ethnic diversity was also included (1961 ELF scores),[6]
ethnic.diversity, in order to
replicate previous studies which, based on this variable, have dismissed
ethnicity as unimportant in explaining cross-national variation in coups—which
we would expect, given that country-wide indicators of diversity do not
necessarily capture ethnic dynamics within military institutions. Finally, a
version of each model seeks to evaluate whether the results change when an
indicator variable, coup.election, is
included for the 7 cases of violent political transition (coups quickly
followed by elections).
The analysis is run on two slightly different versions of
the data: the first model examines all constitutional changes in leadership
(n=64) while the second model drops the 19 cases of nonelectoral successions of
power (n=48). While certain unpredictable events can cause leadership to change
hands without immediate elections in even the most advanced democracies
(impeachment and the natural death of the president while in office, for
example), I still think it important to analyze electoral successions on their
own terms—especially since some of the non-electoral, yet still constitutional
changes, in power contained in the data here did take place in arguably
autocratic contexts.
Model 1=
all constitutional changes of leadership
Model 2=
electoral changes of leadership only
a:
b: coup.attempti = β0 + β1 ethnic.changei
+ β2 logGDPki + β3 ethnic.diversityi
+ β4 econ.shocki
Table 4: Determinants of Military Coups after
Constitutional Changes in Leadership
Logit, DV= Coup Attempt within 4 Years
Model 1: all data
|
Model 2: elections only
|
|||
n= 64
|
n= 45
|
|||
a
|
b
|
a
|
b
|
|
Variable
|
Coefficient
|
Coefficient
|
Coefficient
|
Coefficient
|
(SE)
|
(SE)
|
(SE)
|
(SE)
|
|
constant
|
0.568
|
0.392
|
-1.220
|
-0.436
|
(4.085)
|
(4.017)
|
(4.825)
|
(4.586)
|
|
ethnic change
|
2.764**
|
3.376**
|
3.796**
|
3.889**
|
(0.923)
|
(1.126)
|
(1.452)
|
(1.452)
|
|
prior coups
|
0.504*
|
0.838*
|
||
(0.239)
|
(0.337)
|
|||
ln GDPk
|
-0.494
|
-0.413
|
-0.192
|
-0.146
|
(0.521)
|
(0.513)
|
(0.618)
|
(0.611)
|
|
ethnic diversity
|
-0.166
|
-1.446
|
-2.177
|
-3.512
|
(1.264)
|
(1.280)
|
(1.884)
|
(2.086)
|
|
economic shock
|
-0.199
|
-0.172
|
-0.003
|
-0.102
|
(0.764)
|
(0.799)
|
(0.887)
|
(0.881)
|
|
coup after
|
3.803*
|
4.176*
|
||
election
|
(1.595)
|
(1.854)
|
||
∗∗∗ = p ≤ 0.001, ∗∗ = p ≤ 0.01,
∗ = p ≤ 0.05
Missing Observations for
all models= 3 (Liberia 1997, Mozambique 2005, and Tanzania 2005; none with
coup attempts)
|
Note: When only severe economic shocks are considered, “prior
coups” increases in significance (**) in model 1.b. No other meaningful
changes occur.
|
The multivariate results confirm
the findings of the bivariate analysis: the ethnic change variable is positive
and statistically significant across all models and their variations. For the
full data set, a movement from 0 to 1 in the coding of the ethnic change
variable increases the predicted probability of a coup from under 10% to
roughly 50%. When only analyzing the subset of electoral successions, the difference
is even more striking: here, a movement from 0 to 1 in the coding of the ethnic
change variable increases the predicted probability of a coup from under 10% to
66-69%. See Table 4 for the full results of the statistical analysis and Figure
2 for the predicted probabilities of all significant variables.
A prior history with coups also
consistently and meaningfully raises the probability of a coup attempt after a
constitutional change in leadership. A country with no past history of military
interventionism has a 17-21% predicted probability of experiencing a coup
attempt after a constitutional transfer of executive power. A country with the
average number of coup attempts in the ten year period preceding the change in
leadership (0.89) has a 23-32% predicted probability of another coup.
Meanwhile, a country with the maximum amount of prior coups (6) has a
remarkable 74-93% predicted probability of a post-transfer coup attempt. In
each of these reported ranges, the first (lower) number was derived from the
models based in the full data-set while the second (higher) number comes from
the elections only data. Constitutional changes in leadership that occur
directly as a result of military interventionism are, not surprisingly, less
likely to stick than change induced by other means. The coup.election variable has a large, positive, and statistically
significant effect on the likelihood of a future coup.
Interestingly, no other variables
attain statistical significance—not even the economic indicators consistently
correlated with coup attempts in other large-N studies. Neither GDP per capita
levels in the year of the power transfer nor economic shocks in the period
following it are statistically significant (although GDP/k is in the predicted
direction). While only the general economic shock variable is reported in Table
4, each of the model variants was run with the severe shock variable in its
place—without any notable change in the results. This seems a hopeful finding:
poor countries are not necessarily more inhibited by their militiaries from
engaging in electoral and other constitutional means of transferring power. Nor
do economic downturns, even acute ones, pose insurmountable challenges to newly
installed constitutional governments. Finally, the society-wide indicator of
ethnic diversity (ELF score) did not predict military reactivity.[7]
Notably, the corFigure 2: Predicted Probabilities of Significant
Variables
relation between
the ethnic change variable and countries’ ELF scores is only 0.17: more diverse
countries do not necessarily have more ethnic changes in leadership than their
less diverse peers.
Some would argue, however, that
while the mere fact of diversity might not matter, ethnic cleavages may still
be driving these results. Where there is a past history of hostility and
violence between ethnic groups, leaders may in fact be forced into building
military loyalty along ethnic lines. Indeed, pre-existing animosities certainly
play an important role in undermining trust between a civilian government of
one identity group and a military dominated by their historical rivals. If a
high correlation existed between the severity of ethnic cleavages in a society
and the use of ethnic recruitment strategies, then the findings here could be
subsumed by this prior variable.
standard
errors for the constant and several other variables became severely inflated
and the model lost explanatory power. I think this resulted from the missing
data within these measures—which non-randomly deleted cases from the data-set
and significantly decreased the sample size. I thus did not attempt to run the
elections-only data, with its already smaller set of cases, with these
diversity measures.
Unfortunately,
good measures of the relative severity of ethnic tensions and cleavages across
societies are hard to come by—and their construction is beyond the scope of
this project. Thus, we cannot directly test this alternative argument in the
large-N framework.
Nevertheless, there are good
reasons to think that conceding causal importance to such preexisting ethnic
hostilities would not erase the independent effect of ethnic stacking given an
ethnic change in leadership. First, even in highly ethnically politicized
contexts leaders have chosen to build military loyalty on the basis of
inclusion—i.e. the one does not automatically ensure the other. For example,
both Nigeria and Ethiopia attempted to build ethnically diverse militaries in
the post-independence period[8]
not only in spite of ethnic and regional tensions but sometimes because
of them.[9]
Also, post-conflict states such as South Africa under Nelson Mandela have
chosen to integrate former combatants from all sides into new, national armies.[10]
Second, in those countries where ethnicity is not already a source of
social conflict, leaders who choose ethnic loyalty as the basis of officer
recruiting may effectively create such conflict. At the very least, governments
that make an individual’s access to an important, prestigious, and materially
rewarding realm of state activity dependent on their ethnic identity, give
people a good reason to organize protest and dissent along ethnic lines. For
these reasons, we should not assume a straightforward relationship between
ethnic cleavages (no matter how severe) and military recruitment strategies.
Observational quantitative data
has its limitations—while revealing important correlations between concepts of
interest, it cannot itself establish causal effect. These results thus only
confirm a suspicion that ethnicity matters to government stability as power
changes hands between leaders. To understand why and how ethnic politics may
drive military reactivity, we must turn to history and the qualitative evidence
it provides.
5 Compartive Historical Evidence
Since the cross-national results satisfactorily
support the ethnic change theory, according to Lieberman’s mixed methods design
we can turn to a model-testing small-N analysis to assess its robustness.[11]
The goal is to use contextual evidence to ascertain whether the theory
works in the manner specified—to trace the intermediate steps of the model and
see whether they reasonably explain the behavior of historical actors.[12]
It thus makes sense to deliberately choose “on the line” cases—cases
that, according to the cross-national evidence, should be explained by the
theory under investigation.31 I thus primarily select country-cases
that either experienced both an ethnic change in leadership and a coup attempt
(the yes-yes box in Table 3) or country-cases that experienced neither (the
no-no box). Table 5 presents the selected cases distributed across the original
bivariate table:
Table 5: Case Study Selection
Coup Attempt within 4
years?
|
||
Ethnic Change in
Leadership?
|
Yes
|
No
|
Cameroon 1982
|
||
Yes
|
Kenya 1978
|
Kenya 2002
|
No
|
Botswana 1980, 1988, (2008)
|
|
The selected cases are purposefully drawn from African
countries broadly considered stable— states without a history of coups or other
forms of severe instability. This distinction serves to clearly separate this
context of peaceful transitions of power from contexts in which other dynamics
of violence may “over-determine” the outcome. Also, for each country included,
I examine every constitutional power transfer, thereby encapsulating the
experience of the country over time. This leads to the inclusion of one “off
the line” case: Kenya, which in 2002 witnessed a peaceful ethnic change in
leadership, via elections, without provoking military reactivity. While
deviating slightly from Lieberman’s suggestions for mixed-methods design, I
think that including this case is useful both as an additional test of the
theory and as a way to develop further explanations for how countries have
avoided military interventionism despite an ethnic change in leadership. If the
model predicts a military reaction, then we should find evidence of some
intervening variable that blocked the likely coup attempt from taking place.
5.1 On
the Line Cases: Ethnic Change, Coup Attempt
If a change in the ethnicity of executive leadership indeed
provokes military reactivity, then what specific processes should we expect to
bear out in the “theory-aligned” positive cases? First, we should find direct
evidence that the pre-change leader indeed stacked the military with his
coethnics, creating an entrenched patronage system that would be endangered by
a change in the ethnic affiliation of the chief executive. Second, we should
see that the new leader either took direct action against this identity-based
military patronage system or that the officer corps feared such action was
imminent. Finally, we should find that the actual coup-leaders were co-ethnics
of the previous leader and that their aim was to restore that leader to power
or seize it for themselves.
5.1.1 Cameroon (1982)
Available evidence suggests that the
1982 transition in Cameroon fits the ethnic stacking theory. The first
President of Cameroon, Ahmadou Ahidjo, a Muslim Peuhl from the North of the
country, did indeed stack the military with his own co-ethnics. After Ahidjo’s
retirement in 1982, the new President, Paul Biya of the southern Bulu people,
began to make restructuring moves against the powerful and privileged
Presidential Guard, comprised of Peuhl and allied northern groups. In reaction,
elements of the Presidential Guard attempted but failed to overthrow the new
government and reinstate Ahidjo. President Biya then moved forward and
succeeded with ethnic stacking policies of his own, which have stabilized
Cameroonian civil-military relations, at least until the next transition.
Ethnic Stacking Under Ahidjo
At the time of decolonization,
there were very few native Cameroonian officers in the colonial military, the
first significant class of which graduated from an officers training school in
Yaound`e that year: 121/175 officers in 1961 were still metropolitan Frenchmen.[13]
Likewise, the Gendarmes, an elite force of rural military policemen
generally considered of a higher calibre than the military itself, were also
still officered by the French (only 39 African officers for a force larger than
the army in 1961).[14]
Thus the first Cameroonian administration had control over the
structuring of the early native officer corps, including recruitment into it.
We also know that the new native officers, and the cohorts
to follow them, were predominantly comprised of northerners, specifically the
allied Fulani and Peuhl groups. A resistance movement against French rule began
in Cameroon around 1955. The armed wing of this movement, the Arm`ee de
Liberation Nationale Kamerun (ALNK), was dominated by members of the southern
Bamil´ek´e and Bassa ethnic groups.[15]
Both the ALNK and its political wing, the UPC, adopted a Marxist ideology
and insurgents received military training and support from various communist
governments, including both China and the USSR. The ALNK/UPC were thus
perceived by both the British and the French as an extreme security threat to
the region and the UPC was banned.[16]
The insurgency movement and its political sympathizers (and southerners
more generally) were then excluded from government, even prior to independence.
Decolonization thus entailed the handing over of power to a northern-dominated
and western-friendly government led by Ahmadou Ahidjo, who continued to fight
against the ALNK with British and French aid until the last of the rebels were
captured in 1970.[17]
This government, from the time it attained significant powers of
self-government in 1958 until Ahidjo retired in 1982, favored the northern
Fulani and Peuhl groups, recruiting them extensively into both the civil
service and the security forces.[18]
After Ahidjo: Biya and the Military
In 1982, Ahidjo retired from office and was succeeded
according to constitutional procedures by Paul Biya, the current Prime Minister
and a christian southerner from the ethnic Bulu group. In January of 1984, Biya
secured his occupancy of the President by winning his first full term in a
general election. Shortly thereafter, Biya began to act against the former
President and to attempt a restructuring of the military in order to diminish
the power of Ahidjo’s followers. In February of that same year, Ahidjo was
convicted and sentenced to death in abstentia by the Yaound`e military court
for subversion and conspiracy to carry out revolution.[19]
Then, on April 5th, President Biya announced his decision to transfer
certain northerners from the elite Republican Guard to other military units.
The Republican Guard was, at the time, a force of 1,000 soldiers outside the
normal military command structure, charged with the protection and security of
the president, and still dominated by northerners.[20]
The very next day (on April 6, 1984), a coup attempt was
mounted against Biya by approximately one half of the Republican Guard. The
rebels took control of the radio station, attacked the presidential palace in
Yaound`e with artillery, seized the airport, and severed communication links
with the outside world. It took nearly four days of intense fighting for loyal
troops to put down the rebellion. It was claimed, at the time, both by the
Minister of State for the Armed Forces, Mr. Tsoungui, and by the Army Chief of
Staff, General Semengue, that all of the rebels were northern muslims.
Subsequently, areas of the north were subjected to a six-month “military
clampdown,” involving roadblocks and security checks. The Republican Guard was
also immediately disbanded, its loyal members being placed under the command of
the Chief of the National Gendarmerie.[21]
Using the failed coup attempt to his advantage, Biya then
moved forward with discriminatory hiring and promotion policies of his own,
both within the civilian government apparatus and in the military. Over the
course of his 25 year reign, southerners have come to dominate both politics
and the military.41 In particular, members of Biya’s own southern
Bulu group, as well as members of the closely related Beti group,
disproportionately hold key positions in the military.[22]
Stability was thus re-achieved through renewed ethnic matching policies.
Biya, however, is not a young man and the near future will bring another change
of leadership in Cameroon. If a northerner returns to power, or perhaps even if
a rival southern group claims the Presidency, then this next transition could
be just as dangerous as the first; bringing with it the potential for
widespread destabilization.
5.1.2 Kenya 1978
The evidence
from Kenya also supports the ethnic stacking theory. Additionally, this case
highlights the potential importance of foreign military power as an intervening
variable. Both Presidents Kenyatta and Moi stacked the militaries with their
co-ethnics. And both Presidents Moi (following Kenyatta) and Kibaki (following
Moi) made moves against their predecessor’s coethnics within the military. Yet,
the officer corps only violently reacted against Moi’s restructuring
efforts—and not against Kibaki’s. The parallels between these two cases of
transition are overwhelming and yet they nonetheless had different outcomes.
One likely explanation points to the role of foreign military powers: there was
a strong relationship between the American and Kenyan militaries at the time of
Kibaki’s assumption of power while Moi was more or less on his own.
Ethnic Stacking Under Kenyatta
Post-independence political power
in Kenya fell into the hands of Jomo Kenyatta (a Kikuyu) and the Kikuyu and Luo
dominated KANU party—who inherited an ethnically fractured society with a
military dominated by politically marginalized ethnic groups, particularly the
Kamba and Kalenjin.[23]
That the military establishment was dominated by a hostile ethnic group[24]
and its allies was, undoubtedly, disturbing to the new government.
Kenyatta thus sought, quite immediately, to alter this situation; a choice that
very well could have been disastrous.
Kenyatta was, however, very clever in his restructuring of
the military and took full advantage of the British protection afforded to him.[25]
First, he refrained from immediately purging other groups from the army.
Instead, he built up the paramilitary General Service Unit, which operated
under the police command structure, as a counterwright to the regular army
while at the same time turning it into an all-Kikuyu force (all non-Kikuyu
officers were effectively purged by 1966).[26]Kenyatta
then stacked the newly established air force with Luo and Kikuyu soldiers and
officers, territorially dispersed the still relatively small army, and made
army rapid deployments dependent on the air force.[27]
Only after these steps had been taken, and beginning in earnest in the
early 1970s, did Kenyatta start stacking the army officer corps with Kikuyus,
making sure co-ethnics were in key command positions.[28]
Thus, by the mid-1970s, Kenyatta had turned the Kenyan military from an
institution with barely any Kikuyu representation to one that was thoroughly
Kikuyu dominated.
After Kenyatta: Moi, the Military, and the Coup
Attempt
In 1978, Kenyatta passed away while
still occupying the presidency. He was replaced according to procedures
outlined in the constitution by his vice-president Daniel arap Moi (a
Kalenjin). Almost immediately, Moi began dislodging Kikuyu officers from both
the police and the military on charges of corruption.[29]
Yet, despite his efforts, Moi’s overall transformation of the military
establishment remained slow and limited and he was unable to sack many of
Kenyatta’s men from top posts.50 Thus, while certainly threatened by
Moi, the Kikuyu officers in the military remained in positions from which they
could orchestrate a response even years after his succession to power.
Four years after Moi took office,
ethnically-based factions in the military finally moved against him. A military
coup attempt was made on August 1, 1982 and was spear-headed by Luo and Kikuyu
junior officers and NCOs of the Air Force and the General Service Unit. The
rebels seized the Nairobi Airport, the Voice of Kenya radio station, the
telecommunications station, and the post-office. Within a matter of hours, they
were put down by loyal sections of the Army and the
General Service Unit. Moi was unharmed in
the attempt.[30]
5.2 On
the Line Cases: No Ethnic Change, No Coup Attempt
What evidence should we see in “on the line” cases that
have neither ethnic changes in leadership nor coup attempts? The first
possibility is that we have continuity—that the previous leader did indeed
stack the military with his own co-ethnics, but that the transition of power
itself was irrelevant—since the new and old leaders were of the same ethnic
group and thus no threat was posed to the existing system of military
patronage. The second possibility is that an ethnic patronage system was never
created within the military. If the military is a diverse organization
insulated from ethnic tampering, with merit-based hiring and promotion
procedures, then the ethnicity of the executive leader (and changes between
leaders) would be irrelevant.
5.2.1 Botswana 1980 and 1988
The case of
Botswana fits both scenarios outlined above. From its inception, the Botswana
Defense Force has been a multi-ethnic, non-discrimminatory institution. Changes
in the ethnicity of the leader thus would not pose an imminent threat to the
officer corps, and should not, all else being equal, provoke a coup attempt.
Second, the Tswana tribes have consistently held executive power in
Botswana—there has been no ethnic change in leadership. Thus we would doubly
predict
stability.
Unlike throughout most of post-colonial Africa, Botswana’s
leaders were not swayed by the nationalistic imperative of having one’s own
military. Instead, they decided to spare themselves the cost of forming an army
and focused their limited budgetary resources on social and economic
development programs.[31]
By the mid-1970s, however, general regional destabilization led to a
reconsideration of this policy. The gravest security threat emanated from Ian
Smith’s apartheid regime in neighboring Northern Rhodesia, and its frequent
violations of Botswana’s borders while in pursuit of Zimbabwean freedom
fighters.[32]
Increasing revenue streams from diamond exports also contributed to this
policy reversal by mitigating financial restraints. Thus, in 1977, the Botswana
Defense Force was formed. It was initially organized as a single battalion and
the majority of its soldiers were drawn from the existing Police Mobile Unit.54
The first class of officers were trained at Sandhurst (in Britain) and
consisted of 17 men.[33]
They graduated in time to fill out the military command structure upon
creation of the army (i.e. no Europeans or other foreigners were seconded to
the officer corps). This first class of officers included the President’s son,
who received the second in command position in the military hierarchy. Aside
from this one possible exception, no other attempts have ever been made in
Botswana to manipulate the army leadership on the basis of kin, tribe,
ethnicity, or any other identity category.[34]
Three Peaceful Transitions: Khama to Masire,
Masire to Mogae, and Mogae to Khama
The Tswana, an ethnic group comprised of eight culturally
similar tribes that speak the same language, likely form a numerical majority
in Botswana. No census with ethnic categories has been conducted since colonial
times, however, so we cannot be sure. Regardless, the Tswana have monopolized
political power for centuries. The British not only ruled indirectly through
the Tswana tribal elite, but treated the Tswana as the only identity group that
existed in the territory: governance was based on the Tswana, who also
dominated the civil service, and other tribal groups were simply assimilated
into this structure.[35]
Seretse Khama, chief of the
largest of the eight Tswana tribes, led the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) to
a landslide victory in the 1965 pre-independence parliamentary elections.
Indeed, the BDP won 28 out of 31 seats, many with overwhelming margins.[36]
Seretse Khama thus became the nation’s first leader: Prime Minister in
the final days of British overlordship and then President upon independence
(the title of the office changed with independence).
Since that first election, the
BDP and the Tswana have continued to dominate electoral politics and have
exclusively held executive power. In 1980, Seretse Khama passed away while
still in office and Quett Masire (a Tswana), the vice-president, was confirmed
as the new president by a vote of the National Assembly. Then, in 1998, Masire
retired and the vice-president, Festus Mogae (also a Tswana), was
promoted—again through constitutional procedures. Finally, and although this
transition is not included in the larger data set because of its recency, in
2008, Mogae retired and Seretse Khama Ian Khama (first son of the former
president, Seretse Khama) assumed the presidency. None of these transitions
elicited any sort of violent reaction from the military. Indeed, Botswana has
never experienced a coup attempt.
Even though the Tswana dominate civilian politics, their
leaders have consistently refrained from politically interfering with military
recruitment and have not intentionally stacked the officer corps with
co-ethnics. This inspires some hope that were someone of a different ethnic
background to rise to presidential power, the military would continue to remain
aloof from politics—for the Tswana in the military would have no reason to fear
the loss of a privileged position they have never held.
5.3 Off
the Line Case: Ethnic Change, No Coup Attempt
In “off the line” negative cases,
where there is a change in the ethnicity of the leader but no coup attempt, we
should find one of two scenarios. The first possibility, as outlined in the
previous section, is that the military is already a diverse organization with
non-ethnically based recruitment and promotion procedures (presumably
merit-based). Here, ethnic changes in leadership do not challenge ethnic
patronage networks because those networks do not, in fact, exist. The second
possibility is that all of the same dynamics exist as in the positive “on the
line” cases (the yes-yes box in Table 3), but that some intervening variable
interrupts the process of staging a coup attempt. The case of Kenya in 2002—as
well as the previously discussed post-independence restructuring of the Kenyan
military under Kenyatta—suggest that the active protection of a foreign
military power can serve such an intervening role by protecting a newly elected
government from military reactivity as it restructures or dismantles military
ethnic patronage networks.
5.3.1 Kenya 2002
After the 1982 coup attempt, and
reasonably worried about military loyalty, Daniel arap Moi decided to continue
and even accelerate his “Kalenjinization” of the armed forces.[37]
The Air Force was immediately disbanded and then re-built from the ground
up under the direction of a loyal army officer.[38]
Moi then gradually reduced Kikuyu dominance of the army officer corps by
replacing those who retired with a Kalenjin officer—or when a qualified
Kalenjin was unavailable with another non-Kikuyu. By the mid 1990s, both the
army and the GSU were once again thoroughly Kalenjin.[39]
After Moi: Kibake and the Military
In 2002, after having been barred from seeking another
term, Moi peacefully stepped down from power and did not contest the elections
of that year. The opposition candidate, Mwai Kibaki (a Kikuyu) won in a
landslide victory. After about a month in office, Kibaki conducted a massive
sweep of the civil service, military, and police—forcibly retiring or replacing
those considered loyal to Moi. These purges included both police chiefs and
members of the military top brass,[40]who
were then replaced with Kikuyu’s.[41]
Much of the middle ranks as well as the rank-and-file, however, escaped
the purges and remained ethnically diverse. The government seemed to fear that
touching the middle ranks and below would cause massive upheaval.[42]
Nonetheless, Moi’s actions against the non-Kikuyu top brass could easily
be seen as threatening by other out-group officers, who remained in place and
potentially capable of staging a coup.
Why No Coup Attempt? The Potentially Stabilizing
Role of British and American Forces
And yet, no coup attempt took place. On the
surface, there is nothing to suggest that this transition should have been any
less destabilizing to civil-military relations than the last. Both power
transfers involved a change in the ethnicity of the leader, across the same
major societal cleavage. Both new leaders also immediately made attempts to
replace military and police officers with co-ethnics. There is even some reason
to think that military intervention would be more likely under the current
regime than under Moi’s: the military has been deployed domestically to curb
major ethnic violence between the Kikuyu and Kalenjin after the disputed 2007
elections.[43]
Yet, the Kikuyu officers attempted to overthrow Moi but the Kalenjin
officers have left Kibaki alone. The question is, why?
One possible explanation is the
return of a strong foreign military presence to Kenya. The British military had
mostly departed, both in terms of stationed home units as well as seconded
officers, by the early 1970s. Indeed, they only maintained a small training
team in Kenya from the mid-1970s on.[44]
During the transition from Kenyatta to Moi, there was thus no outside
military presence to interfere with a coup attempt. In the last 10-15 years,
however, Kenya has once again become a major military partner to a Western
power—this time to the United States. Military cooperation began in earnest in
the 1990s, when Kenya assisted the U.S. with its brief intervention in Somalia.
The relationship deepened after the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing and was then
further cemented after 9/11, when Kenya became a key partner in U.S.
anti-terrorist campaigns. Kenya shares military bases, communications networks,
and intelligence with the U.S. military and is also a major recipient of U.S.
military aid, receiving a total of nearly $80 million from 1998-2004. Moreover,
the U.S. government, including the Joint Chiefs, consider Kenya a ‘critical’
ally—and Washington is deeply concerned by the country’s possible
destabilization as a result of ethnic conflict.[45]
It is conceivable that this relationship between the U.S. and Kenyan
militaries, combined with the aid flows involved, is having a mitigating effect
on the strategic calculations of
Kalenjin
officers, who might otherwise have decided to intervene in the political
sphere.
6 Foreign Military Protection:
Some Evidence
If foreign
military protection does play an important role in preventing military
reactivity, then we should see some evidence of this cross-nationally. While
the extent of missing data prevent a full statistical analysis, we can still
test the hypothesis by critically examining a subset of cases where the data is
relatively complete—where there was an ethnic change in leadership but no coup
attempt (the “yes-no” box in Table 3). Here, we predict that the absence of
military violence should have resulted from either (a) the concurrent absence
of prior ethnic stacking and/or (b) the intervening presence of a foreign
military. Thus, when we place all of the cases with an ethnic change but no
coup attempt into a separate 2x2 table—broken down according to the ethnic
stacking and foreign protection variables—we should find empty the box
corresponding to prior ethnic stacking and no foreign military protection.
For the most part, the data
breaks down in the way the theory predicts (see Table 6). Alas, one country
proves an exception: both of Malawi’s constitutional transfers of power (in
1994 and 2004) show evidence of prior ethnic stacking without any foreign troop
presence. Why then no violent reaction from the military? Does this case
undermine the theory as currently specified or is there an explanation for its
exceptionalism still consistent with the arguments advanced in this article? I
will argue the latter—that in Malawi regional identity (north v. south) has
pre-eminent importance; that military stacking has occurred along regional
rather than merely ethnic lines (southern); and that transfers of power have
not yet crossed boundaries of regional identity (all leaders have come from the
south). Thus, if we were to recode Malawi’s constitutional changes in
leadership according to regional identity, there would be no change in
“ethnicity” and hence no prediction of a coup attempt.
Table 6: Further Analysis of Cases Experiencing an Ethnic Change in
Leadership but No Coup Attempt
Foreign Military
Protection?
|
||
Prior Ethnic Stacking?
|
Yes
|
No
|
Yes
|
Gabon 1967 (FRA)
Kenya 2002 (USA)
|
Malawi 1994, 2004
|
Burundi 2003 (UN)
|
Mauritius 2003, 2005
|
|
No
|
Liberia 2005 (UN)
|
Rwanda 2000*
|
Senegal 2000 (FRA)
|
Tanzania 1985, 1995
|
|
South Africa 1994 (UKG)
|
Zambia 2002
|
|
*The Rwandan military prior
to the 2000 transition was in a sense ethnically stacked. It was dominated,
however, by Tutsis—the co-ethnics of the post- rather than the pre-transition
leader.
Thus the transfer of power
itself creates no incentives for military reactivity.
|
||
Missing Observations= 2
(Ghana 2000 and Nigeria 1998)
|
||
Malawi and Regional Identity
In Malawi, arguably, ethnicity
matters far less than one’s region of origin: economic disparities, government
biases, and voting behavior fall along regional lines while tribal chiefs were
never integral to the colonial state and intermarriage across ethnic lines is
commonplace. Historically, regional differences have played a more prominent and
important role in determining people’s access to goods, services, and
employment opportunities than ethnic differences, especially across the
northsouth divide. The north of the country suffered from poor soil quality and
economic neglect by the colonial state—leading to the mass migration of
northerners to the south.[46]
Additionally, during colonial times and unlike throughout much of Africa,
tribal chiefs had no real standing in the governance of the colony—meaning that
ethnicity did not serve as an intermediary to the state in as sharp of terms as
it did elsewhere.[47]
Post-independence leader Hastings Banda continued to uphold the
importance of regional identity by instituting discriminatory policies against
the north and preferentially allocating development projects to the Central and
Southern Regions.[48]
Voting in the 1994 elections continued to fall along regional lines with
the victorious United Democratic Front drawing its base of support from the
South.[49]
Finally, intermarriage across ethnic lines is so common that chiefly
lineages are scrambled across groups.[50]
These facts suggest that regional identity may be of primary importance
in Malawi—and if so, then this transition should be considered a continuity
rather than a change in “ethnic” leadership.
Moreover, the “ethnic stacking”
that has occurred within Malawi’s military institutions also reflects the
importance of regional identity—recruitment practices have favored southerners,
excluded northerners, and relied on “ethnic neutrals”. After independence, Hastings
Banda selectively recruited southerners into the armed forces, with the Chewa
(his co-ethnics) and Lomwe groups particularly over-represented in both the
police and the army (including the officer corps).[51]
At the same time, Yao and muslim recruits were discouraged but not barred
from service and few northerners were permitted to attain high rank.[52]
Interestingly, Banda placed Lomwe, rather than Chewa, in key senior
positions of the armed forces. He purportedly did this because they were (and
are) perceived as “neutrals” due to their “immigrant status.” The Lomwe began
migrating to Nyasaland during the colonial period, roughly around the turn of
the 20th century, to escape from the brutalities of Portuguese rule in
Mozambique. They were not militant and did not displace existing groups,
remaining largely landless. Instead, the Lomwe settled on European plantation
estates, taking low-wage jobs nobody else wanted, and quickly became the labor
backbone of the plantation sector.[53]
Banda thus created a military stacked with southerners, but with an
officer corps particularly dominated by ethnic “neutrals.”
We would not expect a military so
structured to react violently against a constitutional transition in executive
power unless that change crossed regional boundaries—which it never has. Malawi
has experienced two constitutional transfers of power, both of which involved a
change in the ethnic (but not regional) identity of the leader. In 1993, after
becoming seriously ill, Banda decided to retire from office. Elections were
held in 1994 and Bakili Muluzi (a southerner and muslim Yao) of the United
Democratic Front (UDF) won the presidency. Power thus passed between
southerners, but across ethnic groups. Muluzi continued Banda’s policies of
disproportionately promoting southerners, and of discriminating against
northerners, in officer and command appointments. In 2004, President Muluzi completed his second, and final,
constitutionally permitted term in office. Elections were held and once again
the UDF won, this time bringing Bingu wa Mutharika (a southerner and ethnic
Nyanja) to executive power. Once again, power passed between southerners and
across ethnic groups.
There were no coup attempts nor
any other violent reactions by the military after either of these transitions
in executive leadership. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the prior
stacking according to regional identity and the use of ethnic neutrals in the
officer corps contributed to this non-reactivity. If the politically relevant
groups in the sphere of civil contestation concur on a policy of stacking
ethnic neutrals in the military, then that group has nothing to fear from a
change in leadership. And it appears, at least while southerners govern, that
the privileged Lomwe position in the military hierarchy is secure.
Returning to examination of table 6 and the question of
foreign military protection: if we can legitimately re-classify the Malawi
cases in terms of regional identity—in which case they move out consideration
here as they properly belong in the “no-no box” in Table 3, then the “yes-no”
box here is essentially empty. This evidence supports the theory in general and
also the notion that foreign military protection may be playing an important
role in fostering stability where such stability might otherwise be incredibly
difficult to achieve.
7 Conclusion
The combined
weight of the quantitative and qualitative evidence presented here lends
significant support to the claim that understanding ethnic politics really is
critical to understanding civil-military relations in Africa. Ethnic changes in
leadership, even when they occur by peaceful and constitutional means, often
lead to violent military reactions—which can be directly traced to the policies
of past leaders who have stacked military institutions with their own
co-ethnics in an effort to secure military loyalty. These systems of ethnic
recruiting created vast, identity-based patronage networks within African
military institutions—networks inherently threatened by a change in the ethnic-identity
of the chief executive and willing to act violently in defense of their power
and prestige.
Yet, all is not lost. We can and
should strive toward the normative ideal of constitutional politics where no
single ethnic group dominates the state. While this article underscores the
difficulty and danger involved in restructuring military institutions—in
dismantling ethnic patronage networks and building merit-based recruitment and
promotion systems not tied to a particular leader’s identity—it also suggests a
way that the international community could play a pivotal role in helping
countries make this transition. The experience of Kenya suggests that the
influence of foreign militaries, whether through territorial proximity or aid
flows, may exert a mitigating effect on the strategic calculations of domestic
military actors, giving them a reason to stay out of politics. Foreign troops
can protect and shield struggling democracies while they restructure their
militaries and extricate themselves from inherited systems of military ethnic
patronage.
Appendix: Constitutional Changes in Leadership
Country
|
Year of
|
Reason for
|
Ethnic
|
Coup
|
Leadership
|
Change
|
Change?
|
Attempt
|
|
Change
|
in 4 yrs?
|
|||
Algeria
|
1978
|
Natural Death
|
No
|
No
|
Algeria
|
1999
|
Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Angola
|
1979
|
Natural Death
|
No
|
No
|
Benin
|
1991
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Botswana
|
1980
|
Natural Death
|
No
|
No
|
Botswana
|
1998
|
Retirement
|
No
|
No
|
Burundi
|
1993
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Burundi
|
2003
|
Power Sharing Agreement
|
Yes
|
No
|
Burundi
|
2005
|
Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Cameroon
|
1982
|
Retirement then Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Cape Verde
|
2001
|
Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Central African Republic
|
1993
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Comoros
|
1998
|
Natural Death
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Congo-Brazzaville
|
1992
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
C˜ote d’Ivoire
|
1993
|
Natural Death
|
No
|
No
|
Djibouti
|
1999
|
Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Egypt
|
1970
|
Natural Death
|
No
|
No
|
Gabon
|
1967
|
Natural Death
|
Yes
|
No
|
Ghana
|
1969
|
Resignation then Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Ghana
|
1979
|
Coup then Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Ghana
|
2000
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
No
|
Guinea Bissau
|
2000
|
Coup then Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Guinea Bissau
|
2005
|
Coup then Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Kenya
|
1978
|
Natural Death
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Kenya
|
2002
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
No
|
Lesotho
|
1998
|
Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Liberia
|
1971
|
Natural Death
|
No
|
No
|
Liberia
|
1997
|
Peace Treaty then Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Liberia
|
2005
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
No
|
Madagascar
|
1993
|
Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Madagascar
|
1996
|
Impeachment then Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Madagascar
|
2002
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Malawi
|
1994
|
Retirement then Elections
|
Yes
|
No
|
Malawi
|
2004
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
No
|
Mali
|
1992
|
Coup then Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Country
|
Year of
|
Reason for
|
Ethnic
|
Coup
|
Leadership
|
Change
|
Change?
|
Attempt
|
|
Change
|
in 4 yrs?
|
|||
Mali
|
2002
|
Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Mauritius
|
1982
|
Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Mauritius
|
1995
|
Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Mauritius
|
2000
|
Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Mauritius
|
2003
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
No
|
Mauritius
|
2005
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
No
|
Mozambique
|
1986
|
Natural Death
|
No
|
No
|
Mozambique
|
2005
|
Elections
|
?
|
No
|
Namibia
|
2004
|
Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Niger
|
1993
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Niger
|
1999
|
Coup then Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Nigeria
|
1979
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Nigeria
|
1998
|
Natural Death then
Elections
|
Yes
|
No
|
Rwanda
|
2000
|
Resignation
|
Yes
|
No
|
S˜ao Tom´e and Pr´ıncipe
|
1991
|
Elections
|
No
|
Yes
|
S˜ao Tom´e and Pr´ıncipe
|
2001
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Senegal
|
1981
|
Retirement
|
No
|
No
|
Senegal
|
2000
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
No
|
Seychelles
|
2004
|
Resignation
|
No
|
No
|
Sierra Leone
|
1964
|
Natural Death
|
No
|
No
|
Sierra Leone
|
1967
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Sierra Leone
|
1996
|
Coup then Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Somalia
|
1967
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
South Africa
|
1994
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
No
|
South Africa
|
1999
|
Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Sudan
|
1986
|
Coup then Elections
|
No
|
Yes
|
Tanzania
|
1985
|
Retirement
|
Yes
|
No
|
Tanzania
|
1995
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
No
|
Tanzania
|
2005
|
Elections
|
?
|
No
|
Tunisia
|
1987
|
Retirement
|
No
|
No
|
Zambia
|
1991
|
Elections
|
No
|
No
|
Zambia
|
2002
|
Elections
|
Yes
|
No
|
Primary Sources: Notation
British
National Archives (Kew)
CO=
Colonial Office
WO= War Office
Keesings=
Keesing’s World News Archive
Available:
http://www.keesings.com
Newspapers= full citation
in text
U.S.
National Archives (College Park, MD)
RG= Record Group
[1] World Directory of
Minorities and Indigenous Peoples- Central African Republic: Overview.
[2] Four years is chosen as a
reasonable time frame in which to measure a military reaction for two principle
reasons: first, it takes some time to plan and stage a coup attempt and
strategic actors may indeed wait a while to let the new administration settle
in and see how disagreeable their policies will actually be. Second, expanding
the period of measurement any further would increase the likelihood of
confusing coups conducted for completely independent reasons with the effects
of the leadership transition itself.
[3] In no case was regional
identity used as the basis of coding, even though region plays an important
role in the politics of many African countries. Excluding this identity
category may again lead to an understating of results.
[4]
The ethnic identity for at least one of the two leaders involved in the
transition could not be ascertained for Liberia in 1997, Mozambique in 2005,
and Tanzania in 2005.
[5] If during the 4 year
period of observation there was a coup attempt or another constitutional change
in leadership, the period was truncated so as not to introduce the potential
for reverse causality or other threats to inference. Coup attempts themselves
have been known to have disastrous effects on economic growth, especially when
they descend into more widespread violence, and thus I attempted, wherever
possible, to cease observing growth rates in the year prior to a coup attempt.
[6]
Sao Tome and Principe’s score was estimated from Cape Verde’s score as the 2
island nations were uninhabited prior to Portuguese colonization and had the
same immigration patterns and racial structure imposed on them by the
Portuguese.
[7] When other diversity
indicators were substituted into Model 1.a, in place of the ELF score—such as
Alesina’s or Fearon’s ethnic fractionalization scores or Posner’s politically
relevant ethnic groups score (PREG)—they also failed to attain statistical
significance and did not meaningfully alter the significance or direction of
other variables (there were some fluctuations in magnitude). When these other
diversity indicators were incorporated into Model 1.b, the
[8] Adekson, 1976, p.254;
Keegan, 1983, p.175-180.
[9] Immediately prior to
decolonization, British authorities pushed for the Nigerian military to be
national. They believed that responsibility for defense and for the armed
forces should be exclusively a federal matter as any alternative arrangement
would carry with it the possibility of private armies and civil war. (British
National Archives, CO 968/478, Document 2, p.8-9.)
[10]
See Cawthra, 2003.
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