By Dr Ebrima Jogomai Ceesay
Since the fall of Yahya Jammeh following the political impasse in 2017, The Gambia has been widely framed as a democratic success story.
The visible markers are real: competitive elections, a more open political space, and a population no longer governed by fear. Under Adama Barrow, The Gambia appears to have stabilised.
Yet this stability is, in important respects, misleading. It rests less on fully consolidated institutions than on a temporary alignment of internal restraint and external guarantees.
The deeper question is not whether democracy has returned, but whether it has been structurally secured.
At the centre of this uncertainty lies the incomplete transformation of the security sector. The Gambia armed forces, intelligence apparatus, and police were not designed as neutral institutions; they were instruments of regime survival.
While the post-2017 period has brought some reform efforts, these have been cautious, uneven, and politically constrained.
As a result, the security sector today remains a hybrid structure, formally under civilian control, but not fully reoriented toward constitutional loyalty.
Networks, career pathways, and internal hierarchies shaped under Jammeh’s rule have not been decisively dismantled. This creates a condition in which allegiance is contingent rather than institutionalised.
The internal composition of the Gambian military reinforces this ambiguity. There is no single, unified posture toward civilian authority.
Instead, the officer corps can be understood as comprising overlapping tendencies: those aligned with gradual reform, those shaped by and potentially nostalgic for the previous order, and a larger group of pragmatists whose primary concern is stability and self-preservation.
In moments of political calm, this balance is sustainable. In moments of crisis, it becomes decisive. Coups are rarely driven by a fully unified military; they succeed when key segments choose not to resist.
In the Gambian context, the uncertainty lies precisely in how this middle ground would behave under stress.
That stress is most likely to emerge from the political arena rather than the barracks. Political competition in The Gambia is becoming more polarised, and at times increasingly zero-sum. Elite fragmentation, shifting alliances, and disputes over the pace and direction of reform all contribute to a more volatile environment.
Elections, in this context, are not routine democratic exercises but critical stress tests of the system’s resilience. A credible and accepted electoral outcome reinforces institutional legitimacy.
A contested result, particularly one accompanied by mass mobilisation, risks producing a legitimacy vacuum. It is in such vacuums that militaries often reposition themselves, not initially as rulers, but as arbiters.
The social dimension in the Gambia amplifies these pressures. The Gambia’s youthful population is politically aware and less constrained by the fear that characterised the previous era.
Many of these young people are also being manipulated by some of the Gambia’s politicians and diaspora activists as a result of which these young people are now taking the peace and stability in the Gambia for granted.
The Gambia’s youthful population is a democratic gain, but it also raises expectations that the state may struggle to meet, particularly in economic terms.
Frustration over unemployment, perceived government corruption and governance can translate into protest, and protest, especially if sustained, tests the capacity of civilian law enforcement.
If policing proves inadequate and the military is deployed domestically, the boundary between security management and political intervention begins to erode.
Historically, this is a critical threshold. Militaries that enter domestic political space, even reluctantly, often acquire both the justification and the opportunity to remain.
These internal vulnerabilities have so far been mitigated by an external stabilising force: the presence of Ecomig forces in The Gambia.
Beyond its operational role, Ecomig has functioned as a structural deterrent. It has constrained the strategic calculations of potential spoilers, reassured political actors, and effectively substituted for incomplete domestic reforms.
The eventual withdrawal of the Ecomig forces from The Gambia will therefore mark a transition point. The issue is not that instability will automatically follow, but that the underlying balance of power will be revealed more starkly.
In the absence of external enforcement, the credibility of civilian authority will depend far more directly on internal institutional strength, particularly within the security sector.
The regional environment further complicates this picture. The recurrence of coups in Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso has reshaped norms around military intervention.
While each case is context-specific, the broader effect has been to lower the perceived costs and increase the perceived feasibility of coups.
Military coup or intervention is no longer an unthinkable rupture; it is a known, if risky, political pathway. In such an environment, the threshold for action is not elimination of risk, but a judgment that conditions are sufficiently permissive.
Within this evolving landscape, Senegal occupies a uniquely influential position. Geography ensures that no major development in The Gambia can be insulated from Senegalese interests.
Dakar possesses both the capability and the incentive to act decisively in the event of instability in the Gambia, as demonstrated in 2017. However, Senegal’s role as a guarantor is not automatic or unconditional.
Senegal’s response will depend on its assessment of legitimacy, regional consensus through Ecowas, and the risks of entanglement. This introduces a critical variable: timing.
In many coup scenarios, the decisive window is measured in hours or days. A rapid and unambiguous signal can deter action; hesitation or ambiguity can create the perception of opportunity. In that narrow interval, outcomes are often determined.
The most plausible risk pathway for The Gambia is therefore not a premeditated seizure of power by a cohesive military bloc, but a contingent sequence of events.
A disputed presidential election or political crisis generates unrest. Civilian institutions struggle to manage escalation. The military is drawn into a domestic role. Internal cohesion is tested, and factions reassess their positions. External signals, particularly from Senegal and Ecowas, are delayed or unclear.
In this environment, a limited military intervention or coup in The Gambia can be framed as a temporary corrective measure: Restoring order, safeguarding the state, or resetting the political process.
This framing is not incidental; it reflects the dominant narrative of contemporary coups in the region.
None of this suggests that a coup in The Gambia is imminent or inevitable. On the contrary, The Gambia retains significant stabilising advantages: a small and relatively cohesive society, the absence of large-scale armed conflict, and a broadly shared preference for political order.
The most likely trajectory in the near term is one of continued, if uneven, democratic practice. However, this should not obscure the underlying reality: stability is currently maintained as much by constraint as by consolidation.
The long-term trajectory will depend on whether The Gambia can complete a set of transitions that remain unfinished. The first is from personal rule to genuinely institutionalised governance, where political authority is derived from and limited by durable rules rather than contingent alignments.
The second is from a politically embedded security sector to a professionalized one, in which loyalty to constitutional order is both expected and enforceable.
The third is from externally supported stability to internally sustained resilience, where the withdrawal of forces like Ecomig does not expose systemic weakness.
The true test of this transformation will not be found in periods of calm, but in moments of contestation. The first highly competitive and genuinely disputed election, let us say, in a post-Ecomig environment whenever that time arrives, will serve as a decisive indicator.
If political actors accept the outcome and the military remains unequivocally subordinate, the foundations of democratic stability will have been significantly strengthened.
If, however, that moment produces fragmentation, intervention, or ambiguity, it will confirm that the transition remains incomplete.
For now, the risk of a coup in The Gambia is best understood as latent rather than acute. It resides not in overt plotting, but in the interaction between unresolved institutional weaknesses, shifting political incentives, and evolving regional norms.
The Gambia’s future will hinge less on avoiding crisis altogether than on whether its institutions, civilian and military alike, are capable of absorbing and resolving crisis without recourse to force.
In many post-authoritarian contexts, including The Gambia, the armed forces are both a legacy institution and a potential veto player. Security sector reform has progressed unevenly, and questions remain about professionalism, cohesion, and long-term loyalty to civilian authority.
The continued presence of Ecomig in The Gambia underscores this reality: it acts not only as a guarantor of presidential security but also as a deterrent against unconstitutional action.
This external buffer has, in effect, reduced the immediate risk of military adventurism. Yet it also highlights a structural vulnerability, namely, that full civilian control over the Gambia Armed Forces has not been conclusively consolidated.
The eventual drawdown or withdrawal of Ecomig therefore represents a critical inflection point. If it occurs alongside incomplete security sector reform and unresolved grievances within the military, it could create uncertainty about the balance of power between civilian authorities and The Gambia armed forces.
Still, such uncertainty alone does not produce coups. For that to happen, military actors must not only possess capacity, but also perceive both an opportunity and a justification, typically framed in terms of restoring order or rescuing the state.
This is where political dynamics become decisive. The concern about increasing polarisation and the politicisation of identity reflects a broader anxiety about the trajectory of post-Jammeh politics.
Yet available evidence suggests that, while political competition in The Gambia has intensified, it has not yet hardened into the kind of deeply entrenched, identity-driven conflict seen in more unstable contexts.
Social cohesion remains relatively resilient, and ethnic or religious divisions have not systematically defined political alignments. This does not mean such divisions could not emerge or be instrumentalised in the future, particularly during contentious elections, but it does suggest that polarisation alone is not currently at a level that would destabilise the system.
Equally important is the role of public unrest. A youthful population, economic pressures, and rising expectations can certainly produce protest movements.
However, mass mobilisation does not automatically translate into coup risk. In fact, in many contemporary African contexts, youth-led movements have been strongly pro-democratic and resistant to military rule.
The key threshold is not protest per se, but whether unrest becomes sustained, unmanageable, and beyond the capacity of civilian law enforcement.
It is only under such conditions, when the state appears unable to maintain order, that the Gambia Armed Forces can plausibly present itself as an alternative authority.
Again, comparative experience across West Africa reinforces this point. In Mali and Burkina Faso, coups were preceded by severe security crises that undermined the credibility of civilian governments.
In Guinea Conakry, the trigger was a constitutional rupture that delegitimized the political order. In Niger, elite and military factionalism played a decisive role.
Across these cases, coups occurred not simply because societies were polarised or leaders were unpopular, but because multiple risk factors converged: legitimacy crises, military grievances, weakened institutions, and diminished external constraints.
By contrast, The Gambia currently lacks several of these critical ingredients. There is no large-scale insurgency, no territorial collapse, and no acute legitimacy crisis comparable to those observed elsewhere.
Moreover, the continued engagement of Ecowas acts as a powerful deterrent. Having already intervened to enforce the 2016 electoral outcome, Ecowas has established a precedent that unconstitutional seizures of power in The Gambia would likely face swift regional response. This significantly raises the cost of any attempted coup.
None of this implies that risk is absent. Rather, it suggests that risk is conditional. A more plausible pathway to instability would involve a sequence of reinforcing events: a contested political transition, escalating protests, a breakdown in civilian policing capacity, and growing frustration within the military, combined with a perception that external actors are either unwilling or unable to intervene.
In such a scenario, The Gambia armed forces might frame intervention as a necessary response to chaos, rather than as an overtly opportunistic power grab.
A post-Ecomig transition could, in this sense, serve as a stress test for Gambian institutions. In a stability pathway, political actors would manage succession through party structures, elections would remain credible, and tensions would be absorbed within institutional channels.
In a crisis pathway, however, leadership vacuums could exacerbate elite fragmentation, intensify competition, and weaken the norms that have so far contained conflict. The decisive factor would not be the absence of a single individual, but the capacity of institutions to regulate competition and maintain legitimacy in his absence.
Ultimately, the most accurate characterisation of The Gambia’s trajectory is neither complacent optimism nor imminent collapse, but fragile stability.
The Gambia is navigating a difficult transition with real vulnerabilities, particularly in the security sector, but also with meaningful safeguards, including regional oversight and a still-functioning political system.
The risk of a coup exists, but it is not structurally embedded in the way it has been in more volatile contexts.
The central lesson, then, is this: coups do not emerge from political change alone, but from the failure to manage it.
The future of The Gambia will depend more on whether the country’s institutions, civilian, military, and regional, are strong enough to navigate the uncertainties that follow.
Ebrima Ceesay is a Gambian-born academic UK who works and lives in the UK. He was a former editor of the Daily Observer newspaper.
