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Protests in Burkina Faso, Ivory-Coast, Senegal, Mauretania, Guinea Bissau and Guinea Conakry (2011-2014): A Comparative Analysis of Mobilization, Grievances and Opportunities

Popular protests have toppled regimes in Burkina-Faso and Ivory Coast and exerted pressure on regimes in Senegal, Mauretania, Guinea Bissau and Guinea Conakry to embark on political and economic reforms. The paper seeks to find answers to why protests erupted in these countries and why some of the protests where nonviolent and others violent. The central theme of the paper is to identify theoretical and practical inferences, while using a comparative framework. The paper supports the grievance, political opportunities and resource mobilization arguments to explain why citizens protested in all these countries. Economic grievances in all the cases are rooted in corruption, income inequality, unemployment and the lack of opportunities. Political grievances connect people to exclusion from political power and a desire for democracy. To explain protests in the four cases, the dissertation draws on the literature of mobilization, repertoires of contention, social media, youth bulge, unemployment and regime type to test two grievance based hypothesis and one violence based hypothesis. The paper concludes with evidence that protests in all the cases are associated with socioeconomic and socio political grievances. There is also evidence that the nature of violence is largely caused by the function of regime and security force type.