Cold War Patronage and the Limits of Democratisation: Social Power Equilibria and Regime Change in Sub-Saharan Africa During the 1990s

This paper investigates how Cold War alliances shaped the structural conditions under which authoritarian regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa attempted—and often failed—democratic transitions during the 1990s. Understanding contemporary democratic movements and dynamics of regime change requires, on the one hand, the development of a conceptual framework that integrates procedural, actor-based, and sociological definitional approaches (Cianetti et al., 2025). On the other hand, such frameworks must account for the complex interplay between domestic and international factors in regime dynamics. To address this challenge, the paper develops a theoretical model and illustrates its analytical utility by showing how structures produced through Cold War patronage systemically foreclosed pathways to meaningful democratisation, producing instead regime collapse and violent contestation. The analysis proceeds in two steps. The first part presents a novel theoretical approach to regime durability and change based on Michael Mann’s concept of social power. It discusses the explanatory potential of this framework. Building on Mann’s work, the concept of Social Power Equilibria (SEP) is developed and defined as the necessary concentration and configuration of social power in the hands of a ruling elite vis-à-vis competing socio-spatial networks to reproduce a given regime type. Regime stability, crisis, and change are thus conceptualised as outcomes of the successful or failed reproduction of such equilibria. This approach demonstrates how social power analysis can bridge procedural, actor-based, and sociological regime perspectives while integrating domestic and international power relations within a unified analytical model. The second part applies this framework to a qualitative case study examining the relationship between Zaire and its Western patrons. The case study focuses on the United States as a key patron of the Mobutu regime, while also considering the roles of France and Belgium. The analysis shows that Cold War patronage enabled authoritarian rulers to sustain the required equilibrium. Following the end of the Cold War, the sudden withdrawal of external support left such regimes too weak to maintain control yet too repressive to allow viable opposition to emerge. The resulting political stalemate—marked by incapacitated incumbents and fragmented opposition forces—foreclosed pathways to meaningful democratisation and instead produced regime collapse and violent contestation. The paper’s contribution is threefold. First, it renders Mann’s sociological work accessible for the study of regime durability and change beyond Western contexts. Second, by foregrounding social power dynamics, it offers a theoretically integrative and empirically grounded framework for analysing regime change that captures both domestic and international dimensions without sacrificing analytical depth. Finally, it contributes to a critical re-examination of democratic transitions in the 1990s by foregrounding the responsibility of global powers—most notably the United States—in generating structural conditions that systematically undermined successful democratisation processes. In this sense, the paper advances regime studies by offering a flexible paradigm applicable to comparative and interdisciplinary research beyond the Cold War African context.