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 without taking into account the respective political culture in place. The results in the Global South, and particularly in Africa, have been weak and fragile at best.

In this open access book, 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.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Reviews

Bachmann's book provides a critical and insightful take on the extent to which the military has been, and can be, instrumental to the process of state building and state formation in Central Africa. His work comes highly recommended and is a must read for students, academics and practitioners interested in civil-military relations more broadly, and specifically those studying the interplay between the state, armed forces, and civil society in Central Africa. * Prof Evert Kleynhans, Stellenbosch University *
In this outstandingly researched volume, Bachmann advances a global theory of state-building that engages with the specific cultural, political and military trajectories of three Central African countries. Focusing his analysis on the relationship between the Army and the State, Bachmann shows that models of Civil-Military Relations cannot be limited to investigating the importance of war in state formation but must also account for patronage and political sociology. This helps us to properly locate the place and role of the armed forces in Central African Society. In this highly recommended book, Bachmann demonstrates the limitations with existing Western models of civil-military relations. * Matthew Ford, Swedish Defence University, Sweden *
Olaf Bachmann writes, The contemporary democratic state centres on the well-being of the citizens and, in more recent understandings, their human security. This is symbolic of an insightful study of civil-military relations in the African diaspora. Nation-building and militarism was once Hans Delbrcks forte. The achievement of this book is to explain the symbiosis of statecraft and military institutions, without being couched in European bureaucratisation, because Bachmann has intimate knowledge of the countries. A remarkable book and highly recommended. * Philip W. Blood, author of Birds of Prey (2021) *

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.