Quasi-Armies and State-Building in Africa: Towards a Global Understanding of Civil-Military Relations

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Civil-military relations in the Global South are both important and understudied. In practice, this leads to international programmes repeatedly, erroneously assuming that the only way to restore stability, development and peace in post-conflict and post-crisis societies is to focus on state-building. The results in the Global South, and particularly in Africa, have been weak and fragile at best. Here, through rich new case studies of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Cameroon, and Rwanda, Olaf Bachmann takes an important step in de-Westernizing civil-military relations theory. Focussing on one of the key pillars of the statethe armyand starting from the historically established axiom that there cannot be a state without an army and there cannot be an army without a state, Bachmann demonstrates how and why most African militaries never developed into professional armies. Instead, they have generally remained quasi-armies in the context of the quasi-states that established themselves after independence. Analyzing these events in the context of a wide array of Asian and African sources, Bachmann exposes the Anglo-Eurocentrism at the heart of Samuel Huntingtons hugely influential theory of the soldier and the state, and in so doing, he provides a powerful, more globally relevant re-examination of state-formation processes as they relate to the control of violence. Quasi-Armies and State Building in Africa is a must-read for researchers and students of African Studies and International Development interested in civil-military relations, military sociology, and state-building, and it is of keen interest to peace practitioners in post-conflict environments.

Author Bio

Olaf Bachmann is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King's College London, UK. He lived and worked as a practitioner for many years in Central Africa, including in Gabon, Cameroon, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Republic of Congo. His teaching and research focuses on security governance and leadership theory in the developing world.