Stumbling upon Thorvaldur Gylfason’s Democracy in Africa at VoxEU, I found the two following graphs interesting…
First, the impact of the end of the Cold War on governance worldwide:
Global trends in governance, 1800-2012. Source: Polity IV Project.
Then the same, but for Africa only and focused on the 1960-2012 span:
African Trends in Governance, 1960-2012. Source: Polity IV Project.
No longer propped up by the major powers, autocracies everywhere have fallen with the end of the Cold War. But whereas they have globally mostly given way to democracies, in Africa they have not : anocracy is the dominant form.
So that is the word of the day for me: anocracy – it feels good to have a word to label the sort of mafia cartels that seem to rule most of Africa.