Adaptive Continuity Governance: Governing Logic, State Rationality, and Crisis Management Architecture in Cameroon’s Anglophone Conflict (2016-2025)

This paper examines the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon through the lens of governing logic, state rationality, and crisis management architecture. In moving beyond conventional conflict narratives, centered on state versus non-state actors, this study interrogates how the Cameroonian state operationalized authority, legitimacy, securitization, and institutional continuity throughout the management of the Anglophone conflict between 2016 and 2025. In employing a qualitative forensic policy analysis approach, the paper utilizes the Rational Actor Model, New Institutionalism, Conflict Transformation Theory, and Easton’s Systems Theory as interconnected analytical instruments for examining the operational behavior of this post-colonial Cameroonian state under conditions of legitimacy contestation.
This paper argues that Cameroon’s crisis management model evolved predominantly around three interrelated governance logics: securitized stabilization, centralized administrative continuity, and symbolic reform adaptation. While these mechanisms enabled the preservation of formal territorial continuity and institutional command structures, they simultaneously constrained transformative political adaptation and contributed to the cyclical reproduction of instability. The study further contends that the persistence of the crisis reflects broader tensions within post-colonial African governance systems, particularly regarding legitimacy, participation, institutional flexibility, and adaptive statecraft, within increasingly youthful, digitally connected, and politically mobilized societies.
Rather than approaching the Anglophone conflict solely as a humanitarian or separatist crisis, the paper positions it as a revealing site for examining the operational logic of modern African state governance, when under conditions of political stress. This study concludes that contemporary crisis governance within plural political systems increasingly requires adaptive, legitimacy-centered, participatory, and anticipatory governance architectures capable of balancing institutional continuity with negotiated inclusion and governance responsiveness.

Governing Logic; State Rationality; Crisis Management Architecture; Cameroon; Anglophone Crisis; Securitization.

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