Public Roundtable: Assessing Constitutional Resilience in Ghana: Institutions, Militarization and Regional Instability

Military involvement in politics, whether direct or indirect, remains one of the greatest challenges to constitutional democracy in Africa. Across the continent, historical patterns of using the military for internal security have laid the groundwork for post-colonial military interventions and fuelled both traditional coups and subtler forms of democratic backsliding. These include “soft coups,” the transformation of coup leaders into elected presidents, and the growing involvement of security forces in everyday governance. Recent events in the Sahel and coastal West Africa also show that democracy is threatened most when state institutions lose public trust and disillusioned citizens stop believing in constitutional processes. Weak civil societies struggling to challenge military actions contribute to this.

Against this backdrop of regional instability, Ghana offers a complex case study. Over more than three decades under its 1992 Constitution, Ghana has avoided overt coups and maintained regular, peaceful transfers of power. At the same time, Ghana is not immune to the wider pressures facing African democracies, nor to the spillover effects of insecurity along its northern borders. On the one hand, there are the enduring legacies of the pacted transition from military to civilian rule, extensive executive powers, fierce partisan polarization, and contentious judicial controversies. On the other hand, the country faces intermittent economic instability, widespread strike actions, growing border insecurity, and the routine deployment of the military in elections and internal policing, such as anti-illegal mining operations. Together, these factors have sparked debates about how resilient Ghana’s constitutional order really is.

Bringing together four Ghanaian voices from electoral administration, constitutional law, the armed forces, and counter-extremism/civil society, this roundtable examines what has kept Ghana’s constitutional order intact so far, where subtler forms of institutional and economic strain, community vulnerability and militarization, especially vis-a-vis regional instability, are emerging, and what lessons can be learned from Ghana’s experience.

Chair: Dr. Afua Boatemaa Yakohene (LECIAD, University of Ghana)

Speakers:

Professor Bossman Eric Asare (Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Ghana; Former Deputy Chairperson, Electoral Commission of Ghana)

Professor Maame A.S. Mensa-Bonsu (Associate Professor of Law & Head of Department of Law and Public Policy, Ashesi University)

Colonel Fiifi Deegbe (Director of Research and Development, Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College, Teshie, Accra)

Dr. Sadiq Adu-Twum (West Africa Centre for Counter-Extremism, WACCE, Ghana)

This roundtable is organized within the framework of the Conference on “Militarisation, Coups and the Crisis of Constitutionalism in Africa Democratic Regression and Constitutional Resilience”, jointly organized by MIASA, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Abidjan, the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa (ICLA), University of Pretoria, South Africa, and the RefLex Centre for Advanced Studies, Faculty of Law, Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany, from 18-20 November 2026 at the University of Ghana.

The roundtable is open to the public.

For virtual participation via Zoom, please use the following link:

https://uni-freiburg.zoom-x.de/j/68628733069?pwd=blfy4BuFVbojTPCWslOaxr7mWoP1nj.1

Meeting-ID: 686 2873 3069
Code: M5mzTjZuK