Moses Khisa

Lets Talk

ABSTRACT

The military is a central component of the state and society with implications for statehood and social stability. Since independence, Africa has grappled with contentious and contradictory roles of armed forces whether they be part of or against the state. Much of the early scholarship on the role of the military tended to paint a positive picture, presenting it as a critical pillar and an agent of modernisation for the newly independent states. This was to change drastically in the era of routine and rampant coups d’états and proliferation of organised rebel activities. But the continent has undergone significant changes since the end of the Cold War. This introduction highlights some of the major changes at the centre of transformations in relations between African militaries and civilian authorities and the public. The overall focus of the introduction, and the entire special issue, is to reposition the theoretical and conceptual aperture for analysing civil-military relations in Africa.

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Introduction

This collection of articles surveys some of the significant changes in the politics of Africa’s civil-military relations over the past several decades. For conceptual clarity, here we mean the fundamental relationship between, on the one hand, a given state’s governmental operators, conventionally framed as civilian authority, and, on the other, the armed forces established and maintained through a set of military and security organisations in order to protect both the civilian authority and the civil society more broadly.

The changes this collection analyses reflect new modes of statecraft in Africa, transformations in social structures and shifts in the economic landscape. In some countries, government institutions have become much more effective in providing critical public goods and services than they have in the past. A few democratic political systems have taken root and some governments, both authoritarian and democratic, have found ways to promote rapid economic growth. Africa has also experienced a demographic explosion with tremendous surges in youth populations now greatly influenced by global flows of information, cultures and ideas. As a region, Africa’s share of global conflicts has declined markedly since their peak in the 1990 s (Straus Citation2012, Williams Citation2016). Still, across the Sahel, central Africa, and in the Horn of Africa, armed factions and insurgents compete for power amidst the shrinkage and collapse of state services. All of these internal developments weigh heavily, each in their different ways, in the development of increasingly diverse models of civil-military relations in the continent.

African states and their armed forces also face remarkably changed regional and international geopolitical environments. These include a growing tendency for African armies to intervene in conflicts outside their borders in peacekeeping operations (E.g., in Central African Republic, Somalia and Sudan) as inter-state proxy wars have seen a steep decline (Day and Damman Citation2019). Moreover, there are signs that a fresh round of competition between outside powers is gearing up in Africa, though with different motives and aims than those during the Cold War and the colonial era (Carmody Citation2016, Taylor Citation2014, Citation2012). China, Russia, Persian Gulf states, Turkey and others now manoeuvre for strategic advantage in ways that shape state behaviour and drive diverse models of civil-military relations.

These different changes in Africa have lined up with a marked decrease in coups d’état. For too long, the coup was at the centre of postcolonial African politics, and the state was a machine vulnerable to a small but critical segment of its apparatus – the military – that seized the central levers of power through force (Luttwak Citation1969, p.12). The coup phenomenon became a defining feature of the African political landscape very shortly following independence in late 1950 s and early 1960 s (Young Citation2012, p.140). It also became the central focus of scholarship on civil-military relations in the decades that followed.

Between 1970 and 1989, for example, across the continent there were 99 coup attempts – successful and unsuccessful – and up to 80 successful coups between 1956 and 2001 (Young Citation2012, p.147, Barka and Ncube Citation2012, p.5, McGowan Citation2003, p.346). From 1990 to 2012, the number dropped to 67 attempts, 25 of which were successful (Souaré Citation2014, p.85). While this is still a significant number compared to other regions, the example of a short-lived six-day coup d’état of General Gilbert Diendéré in Burkina Faso in September 2015 highlights an increasingly hostile environment for coup plotters. Popular opposition, regional pressure and rejection among other security forces forced Diendéré from power and, in 2018, he and his co-conspirators were brought before a tribunal. ‘Carrying out this coup was the biggest mistake,’ said the general soon afterwards.Footnote1 Elsewhere, the jarring 2013 victory of the Séléka rebellion over the Bozizé regime in Central African Republic (CAR) went unrecognised by most African states, signalling a normative change in a region heretofore used to accepting most new regimes no matter how they came to power.

While coups d’état still occasionally occur in Africa, the question remains whether or not African armies still play critical roles and shape trends in African politics. The articles in this special issue address this question by moving beyond the coup idiom to offer a more diverse array of context-driven models of understanding civil-military relations. For instance, one perspective examines the ideals held by relatively ‘apolitical’ military professionals who protect a democratic state’s institutions and its citizens (the focus of Asante’s article). A related perspective, touched on by several of the articles, considers the role of African peacekeepers in shaping new civil-military relations as they acquire experiences with international networks of security service providers. Repositioning the analytical lens, Khisa shows how explicit politicisation of the military can fundamentally reorder the role of the armed forces and their relations with both the civilian public and authorities. Other articles by Berg and Day tackle the range of armed state actors who participate in joint ventures of traditional and quasi-security activities.

The overarching message here, and indeed the central rationale for this special edition, is not so much that such models of civil-military relations did not exist in the first decades of African political independence. Rather, it is that few scholarly frameworks for understanding civil-military relations in Africa have strayed beyond the focus on the coup d’état. In this special issue, we set out to re-orient the study of civil-military relations in Africa based on the observation that despite the downward trend in coups d’état on the continent, there remains remarkable variation in the military’s ongoing involvement in politics. We find that the prevailing scholarship on civil-military relations sits awkwardly within the African context, and does not adequately capture the range of outcomes beyond the coup. Therefore, against this brief overview of the rationale for the special issue, we situate transformations in Africa’s civil-military relations within sight of key changes that have unfolded in the continent’s wider domestic, regional and international contexts, a matter to which we now turn.

Changing Domestic Contexts

To date, there has been considerable debate over the causes of coups d’état in Africa. Scholars in the 1970 s and 1980 s pointed to weak state institutions, economic failures, deep social divisions and repressive policies (Decalo Citation1973, Citation1976, Jackman et al. Citation1986). Many coups were also the result of how colonial armies were organised, the legacy of which remained part of the living memory of independent Africa’s first leaders (see Khisa, this issue). Moreover, African nations languished at the bottom of a global hierarchy, part of a ‘Third World’ on the margins of the global economy and often subject to interventions of major powers in the service of Western geopolitical interests, as pervasively happened during the Cold War.

In the post-Cold War era, the domestic political contexts of most African countries have undergone major changes, with important consequences for the place of their armed forces in political processes and societal dynamics. At the turn of the century, the economies of several countries began what have become significant periods of sustained growth, in contrast to previous decades where per capita incomes had steadily contracted. In a comprehensive survey of the continent, van de Walle perceptively identified civilian and military rulers who ‘accommodate themselves well, not only to the vagaries of the business cycle, but even to unmitigated economic disaster’ through a marriage of international assistance and domestic patronage politics (van de Walle Citation2001, p. 44). In this sense, economic decline defined how armed forces engaged in politics, often with the effect of reinforcing this process of decline and in some cases total disintegration of political order. Precipitous decline in state revenues meant that governments lacked the resources to meet basic corporate needs of the military thus driving the armed forces to prey on, rather than protect, civilians (Bates Citation2008).

Looking past the two decades since van de Walle’s survey, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Ghana, to mention but these few, managed growth rates of over six percent by the mid-2010 s, a rate on par with China (World Bank Citation2019a, pp.108–108). Côte d’Ivoire’s economy posted over 7 percent growth rates annually since the end of that country’s second civil war in 2011 (World Bank Citation2019b, p.17). The size of Ethiopia’s economy quadrupled in 20 years as it sustained one of the highest growth rates in the world. Ethiopia’s development strategy explicitly draws lessons from East Asian development models about the centrality of massive infrastructure development and state-directed industrialisation (Dessalegn et al. Citation2014, Lefort Citation2015, Clapham Citation2019, Khisa Citation2019).

As many (but not all) African countries have diverged from the 20th century pattern of economic decline, the conditions that facilitated classic coups d’état have also diminished – but they have not dissipated. To be sure, it is now far more difficult for a small group of conspirators to seize and run relatively large, more complex and technocratic government administrations as happened in the past in what Clapham characterised as ‘letterbox sovereignty’ (Clapham Citation1996, p. 20). What is more, rising middle classes may be more difficult for military rulers to govern, and international condemnation and intervention loom over violent unconstitutional seizures of power. Alternately, military forces in some fast-growing economies (e.g., in Ethiopia and Rwanda) occupy a variety of new roles in supporting economic growth and diversification, building new relationships with foreign investors and participating in the development of new domestic and global networks of professionals. This model of military engagement stands in contrast to the political economy of military rule and economic decline that van de Walle identified at the end of the 20th century. These underlying internal conditions shape new models of civil-military relations. This means that modes civil-military relations have emerged in ways that simply did not exist in Africa until fairly recently.

As with the increasingly diverse economic conditions in African states, armed forces came to play widely varying roles in the continent’s increasingly divergent domestic political systems and regional geopolitical complexes. Victorious guerrilla movements in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Rwanda and Uganda transitioned from rebelling to ruling, drawing on the cohesive organisational structures they developed through administering ‘liberated zones’, which they reorganised as ruling political parties and governing systems after capturing power (Fisher CitationForthcoming, Reno Citation2011). This path to reforming the basic structures of the state had important implications for civil-military relations, as Moses Khisa argues in this issue, given the centrality of armed forces in these governments and the economic development strategies they adopted.

Elsewhere, the complete collapse of central state administrations and their replacement with warring factions became a feature of the post-Cold War era. Elements of the security forces in states in which formal institutions of government were either very weak or collapsed altogether, such as in Central African Republic, DR Congo, Libya, Somalia, South Sudan, resemble militias and armed gangs with which they often share members, presenting significant implications for civil-military relations. In these countries, both the government army and rebel groups played similarly destabilising roles often perpetuating low-intensity conflicts that greatly eroded the territorial reach of the state and caused grave social dislocation.

Under warring conditions in those countries, the organisational make-up and behaviour of militias and rebel groups often mirror the nature of the armed forces and the central state the former sought to challenge (Reno 2011). In her study of the politics of armed violence in Chad, for example, Debos describes porous borders ‘between the status of rebels and soldiers, soldiers and road bandits, civilians and men in arms’ (Debos Citation2016, p.76). Armed men circulate across factions, and between the army and rebel groups. This constitutes a wholly distinct type of civil-military relations specific to this kind of political system that is reflective of how armed men are co-opted into the regional and global patronage networks. Indeed, in such political contexts distinct ‘civil’ and ‘military’ categories are of limited analytical utility when describing relations of armed actors to the rest of society. In this issue, Louis-Alexander Berg draws on post-conflict state reconstruction processes in Liberia and Sierra Leone to argue that foreign security sector assistance and the attendant reconfiguration of civil-military relations depended on the interplay of the post-war environment, informal networks and compromises between contending political coalitions.

Still within the realm of the domestic landscape, it merits noting that very different political trajectories and divergent outcomes have taken shape in Africa, each with implications for civil-military relations. For instance, as the Cold War wound down, Botswana and the Gambia were Africa’s only two ‘free’ countries in Freedom House’s 1989 ranking (Freedom House Citation1990, p.17, Young Citation2012). Thirty years later, at least six states have sustained democratic governance and attained a considerable level of democratic consolidation (Freedom House Citation2019, p.16). This handful of countries, for the most part, have built professional national armies that fit the conventional pattern in institutionalised democratic political systems in which military officers remain apart from the political system and devote their efforts to developing expertise in the profession of arms.Footnote2

Ghana’s political development illustrates this shift: That country experienced four coups d’états from 1966 to 1981 amidst continued economic decline and political instability. Yet as Richard Asante argues in this issue, Ghana in the early 1990 s began a democratic transition that has led to considerably higher levels of political stability and the sustained professionalisation of the Ghana Armed Forces under the control of democratically elected governments (Salihu Citation2019). While the Ghana case reflects what may be characterised as a more ‘proper’ mode of civil-military relations, the rest of the continent has shown alternative patterns and pathways, as described by Day and Khisa (this volume).

Changing Regional and Global Environments

The move by Africa’s regional organisations to condemn and threaten the use of or actually use force to remove rulers who came to power through military force contributed significantly to the shaping of civil-military relations on the continent. In particular, in several instances the African Union (AU) has invoked the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, adopted in 2004Footnote3 to justify regional diplomatic and even military pressure to remove governments in Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Niger that came to power by unconstitutional means (Souaré Citation2014, Bamidele and Ayodele Citation2018). This is a remarkable norm shift from ‘non-intervention to non-indifference’ (Williams Citation2007).

In March 2008 in a particularly instructive case, the AU launched Operation Democracy in Comoros to remove the incumbent administration on the island of Anjouan that had organised an illegal election to cling to power. This move is an example of how the AU has increasingly provided support for diplomatic and military interventions on the continent (Williams Citation2007, Wilén and Williams Citation2018). In the 2015 Burkina Faso coup noted above, the AU and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) moved to levy sanctions on the coup organisers. Both the AU and ECOWAS played important roles in restoring a civilian government and its commitment to hold elections. A year later in The Gambia, incumbent Yahaya Jammeh was forced out of power after refusing to accept election results in which he had lost to his challenger, Adama Barrow. More generally, the AU has fostered norm transformation through a series of protocols and diplomatic moves aimed at deepening democratic governance. While throughout the Cold War era when the coup was the predominant mode of change of top leadership in Africa, there has been remarkable shift in the past two decades (Souaré Citation2014, p.70). Yet this by no means suggests that the military no longer intrudes in politics or that military power is not at the centre of political processes in the continent.

Another key factor in Africa’s civil-military relations has been the broad geo-political shifts that took place after the Cold War, which shaped the external connections of Africa’s armed forces. The collapse of the Soviet Union effectively ended one side of superpower recruitment and material support for armed forces – national armies and rebels alike – as proxies in a bi-polar, global competition. Until this new period, US military assistance had focused mostly on strategic proxies such as Angolan rebels who fought a Marxist government and Zaire (DR Congo) that served as a rear base for these rebels, while Soviet assistance targeted a few key client states and governments like those in Angola and Ethiopia. American assistance after the Cold War shifted to a much broader distribution and wider engagement especially following Al-Qaeda’s bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and in the wake of the 11 September 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington.

A major frontier in the early anti-Al-Qaeda American counterterrorism strategy focused on the Horn of Africa, including Sudan, which for some time was under the sway of Islamist political actors led by Hassan al-Tourabi. The perception, real or imagined, of Al-Qaeda’s connections with Uganda’s Allied Democratic Front (ADF), which had operational bases in eastern Congo and was notorious for attacks in western Uganda and in the capital Kampala, helped reinforce Sudan’s place at the centre of America’s security interests in the region, as Sudan had hosted Osama bin Laden for a time. This made Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni the foremost point-man for the US in the fragile region. It is instructive that the 1998 twin-bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi happened barely two years after Osama bin Laden departed the Sudanese capital Khartoum, where he had been a ‘state guest’ along with another fugitive, the Venezuelan international assassin, Illich Ramirez Sanchez, a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal. Since then, the global war on terror has had a palpable presence in East and the Horn of Africa with substantial implications for external military engagements with the armed forces of key states closely allied to the US and the EU.

Therefore, it came as little surprise, in light of terrorist activities that developed through the 1990 s, that in 2007 the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) became operational, establishing a separate regional command to coordinate a growing US military presence in the continent. Focused on supporting anti-terrorism operations and multi-lateral African military forces in the Sahel, the Horn and the Great Lakes, US military assistance grew from less than 100 USD million annually in the 1990 s to over 1 USD billion by 2013 (Allen Citation2018, p.659). Individual soldier contact with US training operations became extensive: the African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) programme trained more than 350,000 troops from over two dozen countries in the decade since AFRICOM was established (Burchard and Burgess Citation2018, p.341).

Critics point to the tendency of this assistance to enhance the political role of armed forces in recipient countries, where the securitisation of foreign assistance, including development aid, has the potential to undermine reform agendas (Whitaker Citation2010, Fisher and Anderson Citation2015). Other scholars point to the role of security assistance in bolstering unsavoury policy decisions of African governments as part of a broader ‘illiberal state-building project’ (Jones et al. Citation2013). These governments use this foreign assistance, for example, to target domestic political enemies framed in international terms as terrorist threats (Fisher and Anderson Citation2015). In any event, individual soldiers who benefit from foreign training programmes and peacekeeping missions are more likely to think about their places in their societies, and especially their political choices, as they acquire additional skills, resources and professional connections.Footnote4 These considerations will be very different in a collapsed state versus in a democratic political system or in an authoritarian state that involves its armed forces in joint ventures with foreign firms in infrastructure projects.

More recently, the US government has identified ‘the re-emergence of long-term strategic competition’ with China and Russia (Department of Defence Citation2018a, p.2). This shift towards a potential multi-polar global strategic environment has considerable implications for the external relations of Africa and, by extension, the place of the armed forces in shaping internal political processes and dictating foreign policy. Djibouti provides a good example of leveraging the competing strategic interests of multiple providers of military (and other forms of) assistance in ways that underscore Bayart’s idea of extraversion (Bayart Citation2000, Citation2009). Djibouti’s decision to host China’s first African military installation, constructed in 2017, drew US attention and predictable calls for increased US assistance to counter what the Hudson Institute calls China’s ‘Djibouti strategy’ of geo-strategic expansion (Department of Defence Citation2018b, p.4, Hudson Institute Citation2019). Given that Djibouti already hosts US and French bases along with German and Japanese anti-piracy task forces, and negotiated to add a Saudi base, the material benefits of great power competition appear to be well-understood. The key implication of aid from and contact with these diverse foreign armed forces is that they are certain to play a role in shaping civil-military relations in Djibouti and in other countries that have US military bases, such as Niger.

These domestic and international changes directly affect how and for what purposes governments in Africa maintain armed forces in multiple operational stripes and organisational forms. In that regard, new models of civil-military relations that emerge reflect the diverse contexts at play and the functional considerations underpinned by the intersection of external security interests and internal political imperatives. Understanding the emergent models on the civil-military landscape helps provide insights into an important element of statecraft, and indeed state building, in contemporary Africa. It is to these models that we turn next.

New Models of Civil-Military Relations

The above outlined changes call for new ways of capturing the relationships between armed forces and those they were created to protect – with ordinary citizens on one hand, and with the political establishment on the other. These relationships fit to varying degrees into the four models described below and are illuminated by the different articles in this special issue. To complement this analytical endeavour, Khisa and Day provide a more comprehensive conceptual re-evaluation of civil-military relations later in this issue.

The models proposed here are ideal types, or what Max Weber described as ‘not a description of reality but … unambiguous means of expression to such a description’ (Weber Citation1949, p.90). In other words, these models draw attention to key elements of changing and evolving civil-military relations in the African continent, but do not seamlessly correspond to conditions on the ground. Moreover, these models’ focus on capturing the nexus between civilian authority and military organisations conceptually privileges the role of the military and modes of intervention in politics. The country case studies and empirical analyses in the contributions to this issue contain various elements of the ideal-type models laid out in this introduction and those in Khisa and Day’s article. Civil-military relations in a particular country may exhibit elements of several models, while others will correspond fairly well to a single model. In any event, this analytical tool provides a clear framework for interpreting crosscutting changes taken together on a continental level and across recent decades. In other words, these models are simply referential anchors to frame the analytical lens moving forward.

First, the democratic civil-military model is most evident in states such as Ghana and Senegal, which maintain sizeable military forces in the context of sustained democratic governance. Matisek’s recent work describes Senegal’s army of 18,000 troops as a ‘military enclave’ of soldiers whose extensive peacekeeping experience causes them to internalise international standards of military professionalism. Little wonder that in 2016 it was the Senegalese military that arrived at the border with The Gambia under the auspices of ECOWAS to signal to dictator Yahaya Jemmah of an impending military intervention following his refusal to relinquish power. In contrast to other national armies, Senegal’s policy of having a quota system to ensure balanced recruitment and deployment does not favour a particular ethnic or regional group, alongside a reluctance to use the military for domestic tasks which contribute to reinforcing a conventional professional ethos (Matisek Citation2019). Likewise, Richard Asante’s article in this issue credits socialisation through peacekeeping operations and the regular rotation of politicians in office for a progressive and relative de-politicisation of Ghana’s military under the country’s Fourth Republic. This is particularly noteworthy given the country’s long period of perverse and pervasive military intrusiveness in otherwise civilian political controversies and contestations for power.

To be sure, there are clear instances of government officials in Ghana, Senegal and other democratic African states interfering in military affairs to serve personal or factional political interests. Also, military leaders are inevitably drawn into various political battles (this is at a minimum remotely evident in Ghana). Yet military and civilian leaders’ behaviour, taken together, shows a clear preference for what Samuel Huntington termed an ‘objective model’ of civil-military relations. They use domestic resources and foreign assistance to sustain differentiated and professional forces that embody the ‘management of violence’ to provide security for the state while remaining relatively separate from its political system (Huntington Citation1957, p.11, see also Feaver Citation2003).

This proposition in the democratic context is compatible with the orthodox binary conceptualisation of the problem of civil-military relations in Africa as one of ‘coup versus no coup,’ framed in terms of the relation between the military and civilian authorities and the public. Within the Huntingtonian framing, as Khisa and Day point out, the civil-military problem supposedly gets resolved when officer corps demonstrate high-level professionalism, avoid intrusion in politics and ultimately restrain from actions that undermine civilian authority. They do so while maintaining a strict creed and code of conduct that marks a clear demarcation between functions of the military and activities out of bounds of the armed forces.

This conceptualisation of civil-military relations fits well with US and European military assistance programs in Africa that stress civilian control of armed forces, respect for the rule of law, and the advance of military professionalism (McNerney et al. Citation2016). But such conceptualisations and assumptions, abstracted from western liberal institutional and norms, often collide with or are contradicted by the complex realities and the actual socio-political dynamics on the ground in many African countries, an aspect captured in Berg’s article on Liberia and Sierra Leone.

In contrast, the objective displacement model refers to the simultaneous presence of two factors – ‘objective’ military professionalism in terms of internal organisational capacity, and the socialisation of its members’ to an international standard of military professionalism. This process occurs, however, within a wider context where rulers exercise political authority through personal networks, intimidation, and selective exemption from prosecution for corrupt but loyal senior officers (see Bareebe’s article in this issue). In a sense, then, the internal organisational capacity and the international norm internalisation sit in tension with domestic political imperatives that often run counter to the ethos and ethics of military professionalism. This produces progress but also retrogress as Khisa argues in the cases of reformist rebels that capture power like the NRA in Uganda and the RPA in Rwanda.

The December 2014 coup attempt in The Gambia illustrates this tension between military professionalism and the patronage-based logic that underpins the domestic political structure in many African states. The coup leader, Lamin Sanneh, had studied at the US National Defence University, where he wrote his master’s thesis on drug trafficking in West Africa – a pervasive activity in which his President was allegedly involved. Promoted to commander of State Guards upon his return, Sanneh had to confront the contradiction between what he had learnt about professional military standards and the reality of his position back home in the Gambia (Reid Citation2016). ‘We teach them our approach to a “profession of arms” and professional ethics,’ wrote his US instructor, ‘and we teach them our approach to how they can create a successful, secure and prosperous society back home. But what happens when there are profound contradictions between the ideal they are taught in their PME education and the reality they see back home?’ (Meiser 26 January Citation2015)

In another key example, a leading beneficiary of western military aid has been Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, considered a high-performing reformer and state-builder. Senior officers of the Ugandan military, the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF), have attended prestigious war colleges in the United States and Britain. They are highly trained and well-educated both in military matters and societal developments. But as Khisa argues, Uganda’s current civil-military landscape is heavily conditioned by an ideological provenance that dates back to the initial motivation and objective for the founding of the rebel National Resistance Army (NRA), which eventually became the UPDF. The foundation of the UPDF was decidedly political and therefore its professional ethos, notwithstanding external training and norm-infusion, are informed by its history as a former guerrilla army. What is more, although it has emerged as a capable and professional force engaged in regional peacekeeping and stabilisation, it also has remained subservient to a patronage calculus that includes the instrumental use of military corruption as a technology of rule. Gerald Bareebe’s article in this issue takes up this important piece of Uganda’s civil-military dynamic under Museveni’s rule.

Ultimately, both Berg’s and Bareebe’s articles underscore in different ways the reality of a professional military as a component of a broader strategy of extraversion, in which an African government captures rents generated by dependency on and manipulation of the interests of foreign backers (Bayart Citation2000). This can include addressing foreign military assistance providers’ interest in fielding professionally proficient African soldiers in peacekeeping and counter-terrorism operations in return for political and financial support for the provider (Brosig Citation2017). Bareebe’s article illustrates this strategy that creates a need for the government to tolerate selective malfeasance in armed forces, creating an unstable tension that is dependent upon (1) continued income from assistance and peacekeeping, (2) surveillance of soldiers, often in conjunction with foreign assistance programmes, and (3), selective co-optation and intimidation of senior officers through different streams of military corruption. Relatedly, a group of African countries that experienced widespread social unrest and political violence in the 1980 s and 1990 s became actively involved with external security assistance and were beneficiaries of military aid. Berg’s article on Liberia and Sierra Leone highlights the ways in which external security programmes impact civil-military relations in interaction with the nature of the extant political settlement and the post-war environment.

The developmental model civil-military relations centres on the close integration of armed forces in political decision-making and tasks of domestic governance. This integration recalls Huntington’s ‘subjective control’ model in which officers and their soldiers are drawn from the wider society in times of danger, and once danger is past, return to their various tasks, including political ones. Military professionalism is minimal in his model, based as it is on earlier American historical experience of citizen-militias prior to the maintenance of a permanent standing armed force (Huntington Citation1957, p.11).

The reality of ‘subjective control’ in contemporary Africa is not the citizen-militia, however. Rather, it is the institutionalisation of a ‘people’s army’. Rwanda, Ethiopia and Eritrea provide close examples of this model, insofar as current governments imported the idea of the need for a strong state, guided by a party and armed force constructed along democratic-centralist lines. This ideological inheritance was common among armed insurgents up through the 1980 s, and drew from a global armed revolutionary tradition that placed a high value on deploying its armed wing in national development tasks once military victory had been won (Brett Citation1995, Booth and Golooba-Mutebi Citation2012).

Though in reality these governments have built elements of what most observers would recognise as military professionalism, some scholars identify the ethos and culture of military struggle and command in the contemporary politics in Rwanda, for example (Purdekova et al. Citation2018). Some of these states have used this model’s approach to civil-military relations to adapt to changing circumstances in the global economy. The involvement of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in infrastructure development, for example, is a model for Ethiopia military’s role in infrastructure development and joint ventures (Fourie Citation2015). This is part of a wider cluster of illiberal state-builders (Jones et al. Citation2013).

Finally, the breakdown of distinct civil and military categories distinguishes the fragmentation (failed state) model. A US military trainer deployed to Somalia described a situation in which elements of the national army actually operated as clan militias. ‘Conflict between these different military organisations can often be as violent as their clashes with Al Shabab. There are multiple instances of NISA getting into firefights with Danab. While deployed, my team was able to hear gunfire between the two by a checkpoint near Mogadishu’s airport’ (Steigman Citation2018). The situation in Somalia is a more intense version of Decalo’s description of African armies in the 1960 s and 1970 s. For Decalo, the armies of that time bore ‘little resemblance to a modern complex organisation and are instead a coterie of armed camps owing primary clientelistic allegiance to a handful of mutually competitive officers of different ranks seething with a variety of corporate, ethnic and personal grievances’ (Decalo Citation1976, p.14).

More recently, the weakening and collapse of central government authority in South Sudan, Central African Republic and Mali have left Decalo’s patron-client networks without a central coordinator. Civil-military relations in this context reflects the struggles of the heads of elements of a formerly centralised patron-client structure for position and to hedge their bets. State elites also experiment with integrating a range of armed state actors as ‘sister forces’ of national armies, as Christopher Day shows in his comparative study of park rangers in this issue. The Ugandan state is nowhere the situation in Somalia or South Sudan, but as Abongo et al show in their article, the authoritarian trappings of the regime propel security fragmentation and the crowding out of avenues of civic expression, which give rise to unorthodoxy modes of challenging power through naked protests.

In Huntington’s terms, the fragmentation model is an extreme version of ‘subjective control’ – a situation in which clear distinctions between societal actors and military personnel dissolve, and armed groups play a direct, even primary role in politics. With a gripping portrait, Nathaniel Allen’s article on Sudan explains the different political purposes to which ethnic military stacking and fragmentation were deployed in the service of El-Bashir’s regime. Ethnic selection among officers was meant to ensure loyalty and to cultivate ties to specific communities, while in the lower ranks ethnic selection was designed to buffer individual soldiers from concerns about retaliation or other inhibitions about committing human rights violations in particular communities.

In practice, the Bashir strategy was anchored on the realisation that outsiders make better counter-insurgents because they are more willing to abuse civilians with whom they feel no particular bond or towards whom they have no particular social obligation. This reminds one of the colonial military policy of recruiting aliens into the armed forces or relying mostly on recruiting from peripheral communities whose members were strangers with no familial attachments or social ties with the populations they coerced. The primary objective of recruiting aliens or members of peripheral communities into the armed forces was to ease enforcing colonial administrative policies and commands on rebellious subjects who protested through both voice and exit (see Khisa’s article in this issue).

In Lieu of a Conclusion: The Genesis and Basis for the Special Issue

The primary rationale of this special issue is to reassess the empirical terrain and provide new language to interrogate civil-military relations in Africa, which to date remains underdeveloped and considerably wedded to the binary conceptualisation of ‘coup versus no coup.’ As outlined above, the continent has undergone significant changes and there have been important changes in the relations between the military and civilian authorities and the public that require reconceptualisation and new empirical analyses.

This collection of articles caps years of collaborative research and several rounds of fieldwork by the guest editors in more than half a dozen African countries. Initial research was conducted at different times jointly and individually in the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda between 2016 and 2019. The collaboration was expanded to include other specialists working on civil-military relations in Africa and who focussed on specific case-studies that included Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan. The culmination of the expanded collaboration was the convening of a workshop at North Carolina State University’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) in fall 2018, titled ‘Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in Africa: Beyond the Coup?’

Presentations and discussions at the workshop provided the basis for the subsequent preparation of articles that have come together in this special issue of Civil Wars. Out of the more than a dozen scholars and specialists who participated in the workshop, we selected those whose work we believed to be a good fit for this journal, and also dovetailed more appropriately with interrelated questions and themes on rethinking civil-military relations in Africa. The workshop provided an opportunity to critique the draft papers and shape them into a common and converging theme. Each of the articles went through several rounds of revisions and rewriting including a double-blind review process.

To be sure, we acknowledge the diversity of Africa and the limited ability of this project to capture its entire scale and scope. Yet each contribution plays to the respective strengths and expertise of its authors. Generally, the contributions ably speak to the major empirical developments on the continent and the comparative theoretical implications. Taken together, we believe that the articles in this special issue succeed in addressing different empirical sub-themes and diverse case-studies, and all converge on a common conceptual plane: rethinking civil-military relations in Africa beyond the coup idiom.

Acknowledgments

This introduction and most of the articles in this issue were presented at a workshop coordinated and convened by Moses Khisa at North Carolina State University. We are grateful to the School of Public and International Affairs and the department of political science at NC State University. Several colleagues attended the workshop and served as panel chairs and discussants. For their constructive criticisms, suggestions and advice we are grateful to William Boettcher, John Clark, Clifford Griffin, Mark Nance, Nzongola-Ntalaja, Traciel Reid and Michael Struett. We also thank Andrew Mwenda and Simba Kayunga for help in the field in Rwanda and Uganda. In revising this introduction, we benefited from comments by Pierre Englebert, the co-editors and two anonymous reviewers of this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The guest co-editors are grateful for financial support from the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University and the Research Council of Norway under the Peace Research Institute Oslo project SFAssist project number [274645] which partly funded their fieldwork in several African countries.

Notes on contributors

Christopher Day

Christopher Day is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program of African Studies at the College of Charleston. His work focuses on the politics of conflict in Africa and is author of The Fates of African Rebels: Victory, Defeat and the Politics of Civil War (Lynne Reinner).

Moses Khisa

Moses Khisa is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at North Carolina State University and a Research Associate with the Centre for Research in Kampala, Uganda. His work has appeared in Africa Development, Third World Quarterly and Commonwealth and Comparative, among other peer-reviewed journals.

William Reno

William Reno is Professor and Chair of Political Science and former Director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. His most recent book is Warfare in Independent Africa (Cambridge University Press).

Notes

1.. Patrick Fort and Romaric Ollo Hien, ‘Burkina President Resumes Power after Week-long Coup,’ Agence France Press, 23 September 2015, https://news.yahoo.com/burkinas-interim-leader-says-resuming-power-coup-101202420.html.

2.. This model is known as ‘objective control’ in Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).

3.. http://www.achpr.org/files/instruments/charter-democracy/aumincom_instr_charter_democracy_2007_eng.pdf.

4.. Multiple interviews with Rwandan and Ugandan military commanders and government officials, June-July and December 2017, Kigali and Kampala.

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