Behind The Lines with Arthur Snell

On the 30th August a military coup took place in Gabon in West Africa, dislodging the president Ali Bongo, whose family has controlled the country for nearly 60 years. That military takeover in Gabon followed swiftly on the heels of a coup in Niger, one month earlier. There seems to have been a spate of these in the Sahel region of Africa. Indeed, within a period of just over two years, every country in a 5000km line from Conakry on Africa’s West Coast to Port Sudan on the East, has experienced a military coup.

And there’s a bigger picture here: democracy around the world isn’t doing very well. In the United States, Donald Trump’s chaotic rule ended in rejected election results and a violent insurrection. In Britain, we have had multiple prime ministers without a general election. Across Europe authoritarian populists contest - and sometimes win - elections. In Hungary, Poland, Israel and turkey, we see independent institutions under threat and in some cases entirely circumscribed.  And of course in Ukraine, democracy is fighting for its life against a militarised fascist regime.

So this week I wanted to get the big picture, to understand what is the health of global democracy and what are its prospects. And who better to talk to about this than Brian Klaas, who is an expert on African coups, a politics professor at UCL, and author of the brilliant book Corruptible, who gets power and how it changes us. I hope you’ll find our conversation interesting - it was, and this surprised me - a lot more encouraging than I’d expected.

You can find Brian’s book here: https://brianpklaas.com/corruptible He is on Twitter @brianklaas and his Substack https://www.forkingpaths.co/ is also worth a read.

Thanks again for listening to this podcast. Please subscribe and spread the word. You can leave comments and thoughts on my Substack here https://arthursnell.substack.com/ I’m also on Twitter @snellarthur and now on Bluesky @snellarthur.bsky.social

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