Accountability without transformation: ruling-family prosecutions in post-authoritarian African transitions

Ruling families occupy central positions within authoritarian regimes, yet their treatment after leadership transitions reveals deeper tensions about the purpose of accountability. Why does punitive accountability against ruling families take different institutional forms across post-authoritarian transitions? This article examines six African cases – Angola, Gabon, Senegal, Egypt, Tunisia, and The Gambia – through structured, focused comparison and within-case analysis. Punitive accountability emerges when leadership rupture dissolves protection networks and successor elites perceive legal action as politically advantageous. Three pathways emerge – custodial, criminal in absentia, and financial/administrative – sorted principally by jurisdictional reach, with elite fragmentation and international leverage operating as interacting constraints. Across these cases, accountability is politically initiated but institutionally variable, with its consequences ranging in degree between elite reconfiguration and broader institutional transformation, although the balance falls toward the former. Legal action against ruling families can therefore accompany both democratic consolidation and authoritarian renewal, with its institutional effects shaped by legal opportunity, elite politics, and international constraints.