Autocracy, migration, and The Gambia's 'unprecedented' 2016 election

On 1 December 2016, Adama Barrow representing 'Coalition 2016' triumphed in The Gambian presidential election, defeating incumbent Yahya Jammeh of the Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC) in a three-way race with Mamma Kandeh of The Gambia Democratic Congress. Initial estimates released by Alieu Momar Njie, chief of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), suggested that Barrow won by a significant margin of 50,000 votes out of 551,583 cast. The astonishing news spread like wildfire, including among participants at the 59th annual meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA) of the USA, in Washington, DC, where panels and roundtables were interrupted with ad hoc announcements and impassioned impromptu speeches by scholars and political exiles. And the ASA executive hastily improvised a public forum to discuss the significance of the remarkable...