Pathways to Abolition: The Colonial Legacy of the Death Penalty in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

The death penalty in sub-Saharan Africa remains a contentious issue: twenty-eight states have abolished the penalty, and twenty-one retain it. This paper situates the use or disuse of capital punishment as a legacy of colonialism. Colonialism created conditions of ethnic fragmentation and economic vulnerability that prevented a meaningful transition to democracy at independence, resulting in weak states that relied on state violence to maintain power. Differing forms of colonial governance impacted the centrality of the death penalty to state power, and this paper addresses the distinction between direct rule and indirect rule in explaining why British Africa tends to retain the death penalty and the rest of Africa has tended to abolish.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Peel, D.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Accepted: 8 June 2026 Published (online): 10 July 2026
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Law (Leeds)
Date Deposited:	11 Aug 2026 15:31
Last Modified:	11 Aug 2026 15:31
Status:	Published online
Publisher:	Springer Nature
Identification Number:	10.1007/s10612-026-09897-w
Sustainable Development Goals:
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:243878

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Pathways to Abolition: The Colonial Legacy of the Death Penalty in sub-Saharan Africa

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