The man who ruled Burkina Faso for 27 years fell from office a few days ago, and the contours of the transition that will follow remain unclear. The Early Warning Project's statistical risk assessments suggest that this tumult has roughly doubled the risk of an onset of state-led mass killing in Burkina Faso for the next year or more, likely pushing it into the top 30 when those estimates are next updated in early 2015. The several area experts we consulted in the past 48 hours, however, all indicated that this worst-case scenario was highly unlikely to happen. Instead, they seemed guardedly optimistic that Burkina Faso would find its way to a competitively elected civilian government without substantial civilian bloodshed before 2016.
Burkina Faso's long-standing authoritarian regime had faced significant popular unrest before, most recently in 2011, but the bout that finally pushed President Blaise Compaoré from office began in earnest last Tuesday. On that day, hundreds of thousands marched in the streets of the capital Ouagadougou to denounce plans to remove term limits so that Compaoré—in office since a 1987 coup—could stand for and almost certainly retain his post for several more years. Demonstrations persisted in spite of intensified efforts to disperse them. On Thursday, crowds stormed the country's parliament building, state television and radio studios, and the homes of high regime officials. The head of the country's military announced the dissolution of government and parliament and the start of a one-year transition period, but Compaoré asserted he would lead that transition. On Friday, demonstrators responded by surging back into the streets to demand that the president go.
Under that unrelenting pressure, Compaoré finally obliged, and military chief of staff Gen. Honoré Traoré announced that he would lead the transition instead. The lieutenant colonel who heads the Presidential Guard soon took to the airwaves to declare himself interim president, however, and on Saturday the country's military leaders publicly endorsed that putsch. A loose coalition of opposition parties and non-governmental organizations has since demanded that civilians be allowed to lead the transition, saying in a public statement that "the success of the uprising—and therefore the leadership of the transition—belongs to the people and should not be confiscated by the army."
It is impossible to foresee with confidence how this situation will evolve from here, but we can explore how this breakdown and its aftermath could affect the risk of mass atrocities in Burkina Faso. Our statistical models give us one way to do that. By manipulating relevant inputs to those models and seeing how the likelihood of an onset of state-led mass killing changes in response, we can try to reduce the blurriness a little bit.
The bottom line from that exercise is that state-led mass killing remains unlikely under all relevant scenarios, but our statistical models do suggest that the risk of lethal atrocities on this scale has roughly doubled, probably pushing Burkina Faso into the top 30 worldwide.
Surprisingly, this result does not depend on whether or not the events of the past few days qualify as a coup attempt, and if so, whether or not that attempt succeeds. Instead, a prompt transition to democracy would have a similar effect on our risk estimate. This result does not imply that a newly elected government would be prone to engage in mass killing, although that possibility can never be ruled out. A more likely pathway runs through the breakdown of that new democracy or onset of violent conflict during or after its establishment. The problem is that political instability often persists once it starts, and the ensuing struggles for power can create motive and opportunity for political violence that appeared unthinkable under previous routines.
That's what the statistical models and the global comparative perspective it reflects tell us, anyway. The handful of area experts I consulted in the past few days were uniformly more optimistic. All of them said that they expected a return to elected civilian rule in Burkina Faso before 2016 (see here for an assenting elaboration on that point), and they all rated mass atrocities as highly unlikely. One noted the country's history of bloodless coups—before Compaoré's 27-year run, Burkina Faso ranked among Africa's most coup-prone countries—and a few pointed to the absence of the kinds of ethnic rivalries that often devolve into large-scale violence when politics turns fluid. The one who quantified his assessment put the risk of mass atrocities in the coming year at just 5 percent.
The uniformity of that guarded optimism is encouraging, and it suggests that our statistical models may be overstating the increase in risk associated with the tilt to instability in this particular case. Nonetheless, the revised forecasts suggests that it would be prudent to keep a closer eye on the risk of mass atrocities in Burkina Faso during and after this transitional period. One way the Early Warning Project can do that is with a question on our expert opinion pool, and we have now opened one accordingly. When the project's public website finally launches later this fall, you will be able to track how our pool of forecasters sees that risk changing (or not) in real time over the coming year.