Five elections are predicted to come up in West Africa in 2024: In Cape Verde, Ghana, and Senegal people will vote, whereas elections in Mali and Burkina Faso are less securely set. With the exception of Cape Verde, all of those are presidential elections on the national level, in Cape Verde, elections are on the local level. Meanwhile, the region was battered by one coup d‘Etat after another in the past years. Taking into account only the past four years, Niger, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Mali suffered military changes of their political systems. At the same time, looking at the state of their democracy and market economy, some of the region‘s countries are considered to be among the most developed ones on the continent, like Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. With an estimate of 419 Million people in West Africa, a population about the size of the EU will witness great changes in the coming years - on top of the changes already witnessed since 2020, including for example elections in Nigeria in 2023.
In this Special Issue on West Africa, potential research can therefore focus on the state of democracy in one or several of the 16 countries of the region. Also, the dynamics of Coup d‘Etats or other political and economic characteristics of the region could be taken into focus. What is more, we expect the deteriorating security situation to play an important role in the upcoming Issue.
We thus invite statistics-based and policy-centered contributions to the regional field of West Africa (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Maroc, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo). We especially invite submissions on the following areas and topics:
• Regional focus and comparative perspectives of different countries in West Africa
• Cross-country system comparisons (politics and polity)
• Policy evaluation and impact assessment
• Democracy and autocracy
• Comparative aspects of security policy and transition of power
• Economic policy of infrastructure and development
• Economic and political alliance in the region (ECOWAS); West African Monetary Union (WAMU); Union économique et monétaire ouest-africaine (UEMOA)
Manuscripts should be submitted until 30th of June 2024.