This past spring, William Miles and Martha Johnson set out on a collaborative study in West Africa to better understand the role of women in upholding democracy. The trip, sponsored by the College of Social Science and Humanities as part of its initiative to encourage cross-campus research collaboration, focused on Senegal, which is often described as the poster child for democracy in a region otherwise subsumed in violence and upheaval. “Senegal is one of Africa’s success stories,” says Miles, a political science professor at Northeastern.
“It is a positive outlier in the region. It’s been a continuous democracy since its independence in 1960, and it’s located in a region where neighboring countries have undergone military coups within the last several years,” Miles says. “That’s why it’s very important that Senegal retain its trajectory.” The Sahel region, a 3,700-mile area that spans the Atlantic Coast to the Red Sea, has experienced a significant uptick in violence and instability since the collapse of the Libyan state in 2011. Miles says the country has “symbolic importance for those Western nations who feel that democracy is the proper mode of governance in both the developing and developed worlds.”
