How Ghana escaped the coup trap

Lessons in political development

I: It is possible to escape coup traps

The recent spate of coups in the Sahel are a reminder that coups beget coups. All else equal, a history of coup incidents is often the best predictor of any given country’s latent coup risk. This truism explains “coup traps”, whereby successful coups are followed by persistent politicization of (interventionist) militaries and generalized political decay. Importantly, not all countries that experience coups get stuck in coup traps. Those that do typically have larger structural problems.

Coup traps were a major part of West Africa’s political history for much of the period between 1960-2000 — and continue to hang like a cloud over their processes of political development. It is striking that among the West African countries with histories of coups, Ghana is the only one that appears to have definitively escaped the coup trap and fully civilianized it’s politics.

Despite its idiosyncrasies, Ghana’s experience offers important lessons on how to escap…