Quasi-Armies and State-Building in Africa

<b>Civil-military relations in the Global South are both important and understudied.</b>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.<br/><i><br/></i>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 state-the army-and 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 Huntington's 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.<br/><i><br/></i><i>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.</i>