But why now? Like families in Anna Karenina, each of these countries is unhappy in its own unique way, but some common trends can be discerned: Mali, Chad and Burkina Faso have all been destabilised by the growing Sahelian security crisis, an unintended consequence of the 2011 Western intervention in Libya. When Malian Tuareg mercenaries in Gadhafi’s employ fled the country following the NATO-backed rebel victory, they brought with them vast quantities of weaponry looted from Libyan arsenals, which they used to take over Mali’s north — prompting a 2012 military coup in the capital Bamako. The Tuareg nationalists were ousted in turn by better-disciplined jihadist forces, whose advance towards Bamako was halted only by a French-led military intervention.

A gruelling decade-long counterinsurgency campaign has dragged in American special forces as well as European allies — including British troops — but has been unable to prevent the conflict spreading not just to Mali’s previously quiet central belt, now the focus of both the jihadist insurgency and a bloody cycle of interethnic violence, but also across the wider Sahel as a whole, dragging in neighbours like Chad and Burkina Faso. The securitisation of the region’s politics may not have ended the violence, but has raised the profile of the military, while feeding a growing sense of dissatisfaction  with the quality of democratic governance among voters in the region’s capitals.

Whatever its attraction in theory, in practice democracy has failed across much of Africa. As the Burkinabe civil society activist Marcel Tankanao told Reuters this week, “Since the 1990s there has been a wave of democracy across West Africa. But that democracy has failed the people…We must be clear, we need a military regime.” As Rwanda’s relatively benign (or at least, competent) dictator Paul Kagame remarks, military coups are simply the “result of a failure in governance,” asserting that “if, under a civilian government, the situation deteriorates and people die, the problems accumulate and the authorities use the military to rig the elections, who is to blame when the army overthrows these governments?”

Of course, dissatisfaction with the democratic system is not unique to Africa. What has changed is the international context: the wave of democracy promotion that followed the Cold War is receding, and more and more countries are either reverting to or experimenting with non-democratic forms of governance. As in the Cold War, when the continent served as a proxy battleground between communism and capitalism, Africa can be seen as a barometer of wider global trends, reflected by the new Malian regime’s insistence that French troops leave, to be replaced by Russian mercenaries: if that’s the case, then the global outlook does not look good for democracy.