The Role of Ethnicity in African Militaries

• In Event: Understanding State Institutional Variation in Africa

Abstract

Ethnicity has played a core role in the construction of African security institutions. Leaders have often relied on coethnics to control the military while excluding rival ethnic groups from service. Such reliance on ethnicity as a shortcut for loyalty likely has profound consequences for a range of important outcomes, from combat effectiveness to coup propensity to democratization. Our understanding of these effects, however, has been hampered by the lack of systematic cross-sectional, time series data on ethnicity and the military. This paper begins to fill this gap by introducing new data on the ethnic stacking practices of African leaders from 1960-2015. After presenting the coding procedures, temporal and sub-regional trends in ethnic stacking practices are described. The ethnic stacking data is then incorporated into standard structural risk models for coup propensity, demonstrating that accounting for ethnic dynamics improves their predictive power. Ethnic stacking has been a widespread and important practice in African security institutions: this new data should encourage its incorporation into the sophisticated statistical analysis of African militaries and their behavior and capabilities. 

Author

• Kristen A. Harkness, University of St. Andrews