Civil Society – State Relations during the current Burkina Military Transition: Is the Transition Government Throwing the Baby with the Bathwater?
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2022 may go down in Burkina Faso political history as the year of the two coups d’Etat. In effect, in January 2022 a group of young military officers toppled the democratically elected president Roch Marc Christian Kabore. Eight months later, another coup d’Etat occurred, propelling a young captain, Captain Ibrahim Traoré as the president of the country. All along the way, in addition to the crucial issue of the fight against terrorism the current military transition has to face the issues of governance wherein civil society organizations have always played a key role, most of time by checking on the rulers. So, my research question stands out as such: What would be the attitude of the current military transition towards the “contentious” civil society organizations? Cooptation or rejection? Using elite-interviewing techniques coupled with readings of the local press and personal observation, while being focused on the validity of the whole process of my research, I uncovered that the following findings. From the literature review and the numerous elite interviews carried out, it goes without saying that the attitude of the current military transition towards the civil society organizations is ambivalent, that is to say that it has mixed cooptation and rejection in its choosing the civil society associations it wants to cooperate with. In fact, while coopting some associations it has set up or organized new ones. And at the same time, others are simply ostracized because they are considered as politicized. This attitude has no doubt strong implications in terms of governance. In fact, in this situation it is very hard to qualify the military transition governance as inclusive. This lack of inclusion may simply imply that the current military transition is throwing the baby with the bath water. Further research is therefore needed to verify this point.