Beyond Transitology Reading African Political Transitions through Regime Sequences: The SRHC Model

Classical transitology has significantly advanced the study of regime change, but approaches centered on transitions toward democracy struggle to account for political trajectories marked by reversibility, durable hybridity, recurring ruptures, and institutional continuity across regime change. This article develops and formalizes the SRHC model (Sequence of Historically Colored Regimes), a methodological framework that shifts the unit of observation from the transition as an isolated episode to the broader regime sequence in which it occurs. The model reconstructs political trajectories by identifying Political Transition Events (PTEs), distinguishing entry, internal, and exit PTEs, periodizing successive regime configurations, and representing them through historically substantiated color codes. Applications to Ghana and Burkina Faso illustrate how apparently comparable experiences of political rupture may belong to markedly different historical sequences. Rather than establishing causal relationships between successive events, the SRHC identifies an intermediate analytical level between individual political events and long-term national trajectories. Its contribution is primarily methodological: the model provides a framework for reconstructing, periodizing, visualizing, and comparing political trajectories; identifying continuities, ruptures, and inherited configurations; and generating hypotheses for subsequent historical, qualitative, or quantitative investigation.