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

1144501963
Quasi-Armies and State-Building in Africa: Towards a Global Understanding of Civil-Military Relations
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.

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

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

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

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

by Olaf Bachmann

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Overview

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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781350413429
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 03/19/2026
Pages: 240
Product dimensions: 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Olaf Bachmann is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King's College London, UK. He is co-founder of a consultancy in the fields of security governance and institution building, and relevant publishing.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Benchmarking the State and the Military: Historical and Cultural Determinants

Chapter 3: The Congo: The Army that Never Was

Chapter 4: Cameroon: A Two Speed Army

Chapter 5: Rwanda: Three Republics, Two Militaries, One Army

Chapter 6: Quasi- and Other Armies

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