The crises in Africa in the 1980s and the threat of marginalisation in an increasingly global international system motivated the African elites to search for corrective strategies to speed up development and modernisation processes on the continent. Democratisation, conceived as a way of empowering societies and of creating effective government institutions, was considered an element of these strategies. The need to build democratic regimes based on the rule of law was included on the agenda of regional international institutions, including the Organisation of African Unity and its successor, the African Union. And yet promoting democratisation in Africa runs into a range of obstacles having to do with the socio-political conditions in different countries and subregions of the continent.