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In the early hours of 23 January 2022, shots rang out in military barracks across Burkina Faso's capital, Ouagadougou, and in two other cities, signaling a coup attempt. Over the course of the day, young protesters fed up with the government's failure to stop jihadist attacks in the country poured into the streets and clashed with security forces as the gunfire drew ever closer to the home of President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, who had been reelected to a second term in 2020. The next day, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba announced that the military was deposing Kaboré and taking over. The French-trained Damiba had served in an elite guard under autocrat Blaise Compaoré, Burkina Faso's longtime leader who had himself come to power via coup in 1987 and lost power via coup in 2014.
This was just one of five successful military coups d'état in Africa between February 2021 and February 2022—in Chad, Mali, Guinea, Sudan, and Burkina Faso—plus one in Burma. During the same period, there were also failed putsches in Niger, Sudan, and Guinea-Bissau. These six successful coups marked a sizeable jump in military interventions over the average of two successful coups a year between 2015 and 2020.1 Here, I define a coup attempt as an explicit action involving some portion of the state military, police, or security forces that is undertaken with the intent to overthrow the government. This encompasses not only the obvious coup attempts but also situations where there were mass protests against the incumbent, as long as the state-security apparatus was part of the removal of the government—for example, by threatening to remove the president if he does not agree to step down. The revolutions in Egypt (2011) and Sudan (2019) are therefore classified both as coups and as popular revolutions.
In a September 2021 address to the UN General Assembly, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated that "military coups are back." A month later, just after the October 25 coup in Sudan, he warned of an "epidemic of coups d'état." And at a summit of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) days after the January coup in Burkina Faso, Ghanaian president and ECOWAS chair Nana Akufo-Addo lamented that a "contagion" of coups could potentially "devastate" the region....