African Exceptionalism? Reconsidering the use of sanctions in Africa and their effect on coups and other unconstitutional changes of government

Regarding sanctions, Africa is an exceptional case not only for being the biggest recipient of these measures but also for being a primary sender of them. Since the early 2000s African regional organizations have become particularly active on this front, adopting an ever growing number of sanctions against regimes born out of unconstitutional changes of government (UCG), predominantly in the form of coups d’état, yet almost overlooking other political issues. Although some works in the literature on sanctions have shed light on this African dynamics of sanctions, no systematic analysis has so far assessed if and how these sanctions eventually influence social and political outcomes in the region. The decline of the resort to coups in Africa since the 1990s suggested a positive influence. Yet, the early 2020s have seen a return to this practice, urging a rethink of the role of regional as well as extra-regional sanctions in Africa. The paper therefore aims to systematically test how the sanctioning behaviour from African regional organizations and other extra-regional actors in Africa has influenced the socio-political performance and duration of the sanctioned regimes since the 1990s. The first section of the paper sets the context of the use of sanctions in Africa, clarifying which are the issues that generally drive the imposition of sanctions from African regional organisations and how they differ from those which are imposed on African countries by extra-regional organizations or states. A comparison of such different practices aims to expose the African distinctiveness in the use, objectives, and tools behind regional sanctions. The final part consists of a quantitative analysis of various hypotheses related to the factors that facilitate the imposition of sanctions in Africa and the effects which their imposition generates in terms of regimes’ duration and performance, using newly coded information on sanctions in Africa collected in the Africa Sanctions Dataset.