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

— —

Olaf Bachmann (King's College London, UK)

Quasi-Armies and State-Building in Africa

Towards a Global Understanding of Civil-Military Relations

Olaf Bachmann (King's College London, UK)

$170

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Zed Books Ltd
19 September 2024

Colonialism & imperialism; Regional government; Theory of warfare & military science

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 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.

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.

By: Olaf Bachmann (King's College London UK)
Imprint: Zed Books Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781350413382
ISBN 10: 1350413380
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 19 September 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

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

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 *