Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in Africa: Beyond the Coup d'Etat 9781955055468

Table of contents :
Contents
Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
1 Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in Africa
2 Political Legitimacy and Military Interventions
3 The African Union and the “Good Coup”
4 The “Coup Taboo” and Authoritarian Politics
5 African Militaries and Contemporary Warfare
6 Military Effectiveness: The African Alternative
7 Security Sector Reform and Civil-Military Relations
8 Beyond the Coup d’État?
Acronyms
Bibliography
The Contributors
Index
About the Book

Citation preview

Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in Africa

Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in

Africa

Beyond the Coup d’État edited by

Moses Khisa and Christopher Day

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2022 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Suite 314, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com

and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB www.eurospanbookstore.com/rienner

© 2022 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Khisa, Moses, editor. | Day, Christopher, 1973– editor. Title: Rethinking civil-military relations in Africa : beyond the coup d’état / edited by Moses Khisa and Christopher Day. Description: Boulder, Colorado : Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Explores the nature and significance of recent changes in civil-military relations across Africa”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021055265 (print) | LCCN 2021055266 (ebook) | ISBN 9781955055406 (hardback) | ISBN 9781955055468 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Civil-military relations—Africa. Classification: LCC JQ1873.5.C58 R48 2022 (print) | LCC JQ1873.5.C58 (ebook) | DDC 322.5096—dc23/eng/20211109 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055265 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055266 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

To our sons

Contents

List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

ix xi

Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in Africa Christopher Day and Moses Khisa

1

Political Legitimacy and Military Interventions Michael Ohene Aboagye and John F. Clark

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The “Coup Taboo” and Authoritarian Politics Moses Khisa

91

The African Union and the “Good Coup” Erin Damman and Christopher Day

African Militaries and Contemporary Warfare Jahara Matisek and William Reno

Military Effectiveness: The African Alternative Jahara Matisek

Security Sector Reform and Civil-Military Relations Louis-Alexandre Berg

vii

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115 139 161

viii 8

Contents

Beyond the Coup d’État? Erin Damman, Christopher Day, and Moses Khisa

List of Acronyms Bibliography The Contributors Index About the Book

185 207 211 237 239 249

Tables and Figures

Tables 2.1 Coups or Attempted Coups in Africa, by Freedom House Ranking, 2008–2018 3.1 AU Actions Against Unconstitutional Changes in Government 3.2 Effect of Coups on Democratic Standing 5.1 Large-Scale Wars Between African States, 1946–2020 Figures 1.1 Coups in Africa over Time 1.2 Configurations of Regime Proximity and Social Embeddedness 6.1 Vertical and Horizontal Aspects of Military Effectiveness in Africa 7.1 Trends in Civil-Military Relations in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1990–2019 7.2 Mean Proportion of African Countries per Year That Shifted Toward Civilian Control, by Country Context, 1990–2018 7.3 Number of EU CSDP Missions, by Country Context, 1990–2008 7.4 US Security Aid to Africa Disaggregated by Country Context

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74 79 134 6

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145 175 176 179 181

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK IS A PRODUCT OF MANY ENCOUNTERS. FIVE YEARS ago, the two of us, along with our mutual adviser, William Reno, set out to investigate how participation in foreign peacekeeping missions and regional security activities impact the organization and behavior of African military personnel and institutions. After research trips to Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda, among other countries, we were compelled to rethink how we perceived the civil-military terrain in Africa more generally. What became the central focus of this book was born in the field. We are therefore grateful to a range of interlocutors and long-standing colleagues who influenced our thinking and shaped our understanding of the role of the military in African politics. Over the years, we have benefited from the kind and generous support of many individuals in various African countries where we have conducted fieldwork. Given the sensitivity of the subject and the actual political situations in certain countries, we maintain anonymity for some of the people who have invaluably aided our work. Informal and off-record discussions with a variety of actors, including senior military and intelligence officers, have helped us better understand the intricacies at the intersection of state politics and military power in Africa. We owe an intellectual debt we can never pay, but we would like all who assisted us and those from whom we learned a great deal to know that we are deeply grateful. Special thanks go to Andrew Mwenda, who helped us navigate military and security institutions in Rwanda and Uganda. We immensely benefited from interview meetings with the top leadership of the military and security establishments in both countries, including a four-hour interview

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with President Paul Kagame. We are grateful to Uganda People’s Defence Force brigadiers Dick Olum and Richard Karemire for pointing us in many right directions. In Rwanda and Uganda we also benefited from the perceptive advice and criticism of Salie Simba Kayunga and Stephen Hippo Twebaze. In Ethiopia, our colleague Abdeta Dbrissa has been a handy contact and a source of invaluable advice over the years, and so has Richard Asante in Ghana. We received funding from the College of Charleston’s Center for Public Choice and Market Process, Northwestern University’s Buffett Institute, the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) at North Carolina State University, and institutional support from the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala, the Forum for Social Studies in Addis Ababa, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa, where Moses Khisa is a visiting fellow. We are deeply grateful to these institutions. In the Fall of 2018, we convened a workshop at North Carolina State University, which laid out the parameters of this book. The workshop received generous support from SPIA’s then–acting director Traciel Reid and faculty members Bill Boettcher, Clifford Griffin, Mark Nance, Michael Struett, and Jim Zink. We presented drafts of the early chapters at three successive meetings of the annual African Studies Association’s conference, from which we gained useful feedback. We are grateful to audiences at these meetings. Three excellent anonymous reviewers for Lynne Rienner Publishers offered trenchant and highly constructive criticisms on the manuscript, from which we enormously benefited. We are also grateful to Lynne Rienner for supporting this project and to Allie Schellong for excellent editorial assistance. We dedicate this book to our respective sons, Samuel Day, Marcus Mulungi, Matthew Mukosya, and Maxwell Mungati, who in their own inimitable ways have challenged us to think about the world and our scholarship in a manner that perhaps we would not have done without them.

1 Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in Africa Christopher Day and Moses Khisa

It is always dangerous for soldiers, sailors, or airmen to play at politics. They enter a sphere in which the values are quite different from those to which they have hitherto been accustomed.

—Winston Churchill

On August 18, 2020, Mali’s president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta was forced to resign only two years into a second term. He had been arrested by members of the Malian armed forces in a coup d’état, the country’s fourth since independence. While Keïta had often relied on security forces to shore up his rickety hold on authority (Human Rights Watch 2020), upheaval in the northern part of the country, popular protests in the capital, and a history of corruption and electoral malfeasance finally drove disgruntled soldiers to take matters into their own hands. The foreigntrained leaders of the mutiny quickly formed the National Committee for the Salvation of the People, promising elections and political stability against the backdrop of regional and international condemnation for an unconstitutional seizure of power. A little more than a year earlier on April 11, 2019, after weeks of popular protests, the Sudanese armed forces bloodlessly relieved Omar alBashir of his three-decade stretch as Sudan’s president. What soon followed was a carousel of interim leaders, an unanticipated disruption to Sudan’s already fragile political order. A military council struggled to renovate regime politics in the face of intraelite wrangling, an attempted countercoup, and persistent civilian opposition (de Waal 2019; Mampilly 2019).

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Seventeen months earlier, Zimbabwe experienced a similar yet more ambiguous fate, as the army’s Operation Restore Legacy put an end to Robert Mugabe’s thirty-seven years of rule, described as “the politest coup in history,” and masquerading as a purge of “criminals” (Cheeseman 2017). This military intervention into Zimbabwe’s politics was more a reshuffle of elites than a full-blown coup, doing its best to appear to act within the country’s constitutional order rather than replace it entirely (Beardsworth, Cheeseman, and Tinhu 2019; Tendi 2020). These episodes all came in the wake of Egypt’s experience in 2013, when after ousting Hosni Mubarak in the face of a relentless street uprising in 2011, the Egyptian military reclaimed power after a short stint under the Islamist leader Muhammad Morsi, a move that prompted the African Union (AU) to suspend Egypt’s membership in the continental body (Tansey 2017: 145). What do these snapshots tell us about the nature of contemporary Africa’s civil-military relations? At first glance, they seem to coincide with a common view of Africa as a continent of coups and military regimes. Yet, a closer look shows that the patterns of behavior exhibited by today’s political and military actors across Africa have changed in ways that fundamentally depart from those of the preceding decades. In the same spirit, societal attitudes toward the role of the military have also changed, moving away from what was largely a negative perception at the height of pervasive military regimes and military-instigated disorder in countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Uganda, to mention but a few. Moving forward, a proper understanding of civil military relations requires situating the military within a set of political and sociocultural changes present in different African states and societies (Ratuva, Compel, and Aguilar 2019: 5). As a coercive institution, the military is an integral part of the modern state, invested with a high concentration of power. Indeed, the Weberian ideal of centralizing and monopolizing the means of violence remains a cardinal yardstick for measuring state strength, effective control, and the range of organizational capabilities that states depend on to manage basic public affairs and that constitute the state’s raison d’être. This is especially relevant in an era when states worldwide face growing and diverse challenges both internally and externally. Yet, if the successful monopoly of violence is a defining feature of the state, it is seldom perfect or complete. This is an acute problem for many African states, where effective state control has historically been beyond the reach of many regimes. The kaleidoscope of coups and countercoups of the 1960s and 1970s overturned regimes in a majority of newly independent states (Young 2012; Meredith 2014). Successive waves of military interventions into politics became heavily implicated in Africa’s state and societal crises of the 1980s and 1990s. And although the nature and extent of political instability changed significantly in the post–Cold War era, Africa still faces changing forms of state fragility,

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shifting threats to regime security, and ongoing political challenges from state armed forces as well as armed nonstate actors. As governments inevitably invest in building coercive institutions, for internal security and external defense, the conventional wisdom points to the looming danger of military intrusion into the political realm if the military is not sufficiently subordinated to civilian authority and subject to public accountability. Indeed, since independence, the common issue facing African states has been the dual problem of (1) failing to exert effective state control and to broadcast power; and (2) building militaries that are loyal to and serve the state rather than the narrow interests of regimes, politicians, or soldiers. This is the true crux of the civil-military conundrum in Africa: the dilemma of protection by the military and protection from the military by building efficient military institutions that guard civilians but are, at the same time, accountable to civilian authorities and the wider public (Feaver 1996, 2003). For a long time, the dominant paradigm of understanding civil-military relations in Africa was anchored in viewing the coup d’état as the primary mechanism for military interference in otherwise civilian politics. This is unsurprising since, as a region, Africa has been historically rife with coups, a phenomenon central to Africa’s civil-military conundrum (Decalo 1998a; McGowan 2003; Souaré 2014). In much of the scholarship on Africa’s civil-military dilemma, the common theoretical entry point has been Samuel Huntington’s The Soldier and the State, the classic study that pivots on the concept of “objective civilian control.” In this “proper” mode of civil-military relations, a professionalized officer corps is subordinate to civilian control and the civil-military conundrum is solved when professional soldiers stick to soldiering and remain neutral agents of, rather than participants in, politics, let alone become masterminds and instigators of coups d’état (Huntington 1957; Feaver 1996, 2003). This means that the military adheres to a strict creed and code of conduct that marks a clear demarcation between functions of the military and activities that are out of bounds (Khisa and Day 2020). This conventional approach to understanding civil-military relations fits awkwardly in the African context and requires some fundamental rethinking for several reasons. Empirically, coups d’état have steadily declined for the past two decades, a trend that poses the question of whether fewer coups signal the absence of military involvement in regime politics. In addition, there is remarkable variation across cases with a set of outcomes in civil-military relations not adequately captured by the existing literature. What is more, the marked decline of coups has happened simultaneously with other key transformations that have reshaped the permissive and constraining conditions of Africa’s civil-military relations. For example, changes in the nature of conflict on the continent have

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prompted corresponding changes in how states respond through a continental regional peace and security architecture (Straus 2012; Williams 2016; Brubacher, Damman, and Day 2017; Whitaker and Clark 2019). There have also been notable shifts in the domestic political dynamics of many African states, where the institutionalization of authority has taken both democratic and authoritarian paths (Riedl 2014; Cheeseman and Fisher 2019). Furthermore, changes in international and regional norms have meant that, increasingly, intrusive military activities in civilian politics are met with swift condemnation and disapproval, a major departure from the Cold War era politics (Souaré 2014; Williams 2006). In our assessment, the conceptual and theoretical language to assess civil-military relations in Africa remains underdeveloped.1 In the broader study of African politics, scholars have considered the coup d’état to be the primary outcome of interest to civil-military relations. This narrow focus has obscured more than it has illuminated the complexities of civil-military relations on the continent. Real political transformations in Africa have outpaced conventional explanations of civil-military relations, and they do not speak to some of the peculiarities of African political systems. In this book, we seek to reorient the study of civil-military relations in Africa by casting a wider net on the empirical terrain to capture a broader range of phenomena beyond the coup. We also reframe the theoretical discussion around not the coup d’état per se, but the broader spectrum of civilmilitary relations as the primary outcome of interest, which recognizes theoretical levers that are more complex than the conventional scholarship has portrayed. As such, we seek to push the field to examine how civil-military relations play out not just in conventional democracies, but in authoritarian regimes as well (Svolik 2012), and how they factor in multidimensional trade-offs between governance, coup-proofing, and military effectiveness that include a variety of armed state and nonstate actors, particularly in times of war (Brooks 2019). This requires us to normalize the military’s role in politics despite normative and analytical tendencies to institutionally disaggregate military and civilian authority. Five Empirical Puzzles This book begins with the premise that Africa’s militaries play key roles in political and societal processes that do not necessarily involve the signature move of the coup d’état previously associated with military intrusions and activities. While coups still occur, and are an important phenomenon, the effort to rethink civil-military relations requires examining patterns of military institutions and actors that stray beyond or engage differently in matters of national security or even domestic law and order, all of which have implications for political processes and societal relations. For instance,

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in South Sudan and Uganda, army officers occupy seats in the national legislature and hold cabinet or other civilian positions (Khisa and Day 2020). In Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda, prominent members of the military and military-owned companies participate directly in state-owned construction and manufacturing sectors of the economy (Booth and Golooba-Mutebi 2012; Gebregziabher 2019). Such actions, among others, enable armies to be involved in political and economic processes in quite unorthodox ways, which makes direct military interventions unnecessary yet allows militaries to function as fulcrums of socioeconomic and political processes. To get at trends such as these, we identify five major empirical puzzles that require fresh thinking and a reorientation of civil-military relations on the continent: the decline of coups, outliers and the “coup but not a coup,” patterns of state violence, regional security and defense operations, and foreign military training. One of the most dramatic changes on the African political landscape in the past two decades has been the precipitous decline in overt military takeovers, a major departure from “coup-routines” of the 1970s and 1980s. The severity of the coup phenomenon in the decades following Africa’s independence was such that military takeovers were a guaranteed annual occurrence, with the exception of a handful of those in the “stable minority” (Decalo 1998b: 10). Sudan’s coup in 1958 marked the first military takeover in independent Africa. However, it is the 1963 coup d’état in Togo that is considered the conventional bookend to a wave of coups that included nine concentrated in just a few months between 1965 and 1966 (Wells 1974; Young 2012). From the mid-1960s through the mid-1990s, Africa was a continent of coups. The question became not why military coups happen, but why they do not (Clark 2007: 142). In his study, Patrick J. McGowan (2003) observed that from 1956 to 2001, there were 188 attempted military coups, 43 percent of which succeeded. This means that during the first three decades of independent Africa, the continent averaged more than twenty successful coups per decade (Khisa and Day 2020). Other passes through the data confirm this pattern, where during the first two decades of independence alone, the continent experienced some forty successful coups (Meredith 2014: 608). Yet another look shows that from 1960 to 1990, there were at least twenty-two successful coups per decade, and more than seventy in total from 1956 to 1990. During this period, at least one-third of African states were under one form of military rule or the other and, by 2012, the continent had experienced eighty-eight successful coups in thirty-three countries (Souaré 2014: 75; Young 2012: 145). In one instructive case, Benin had five successful coups during the first ten years of independence in circumstances where “soldiers were overthrown The Decline of Coups

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by other soldiers with almost revolving-door regularity” (Reid 2012: 154). By the 1980s, most African states had experienced at least one successful coup, with several repeat offenders, notably Benin, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria, tied at six apiece. After overthrowing civilian leaders, uniformed men turned to overthrowing one other in countercoups, palace coups, and “coups of descending order” by junior officers, as happened in Burkina Faso and Ghana, where senior officers who overthrew incumbents were replaced by disgruntled junior officers, who themselves gave in to the ostentatious excesses of authority and were replaced in turn (Schraeder 2003: 204). Only a few countries, including Botswana, Cape Verde, Eritrea, Mauritius, Namibia, and South Africa, emerged from this period unscathed. With the wave of democratization making landfall on the continent in late 1980s, the military seemed to “return” to the barracks. Yet, this trend also corresponded with an increase in armed conflict in Africa, and the coup phenomenon once again accelerated in the 1990s along with rebellion and regional crossborder proxy wars (Tamm 2016; Day 2015). The sheer prevalence of military intrusions meant that coups d’état dominated much of popular representations and scholarly analyses of African politics. The coup also became the primary lens for conceptualizing civil-military relations, associated with the officer corps’ lack of professionalism and the failure to internalize norms of modern military conduct, human rights, and fidelity to civilian authority. By the 2000s, however, the frequency and duration of coups declined markedly, as shown in Figure 1.1. On its own, this phenomenon presents a compelling puzzle—what once was

Figure 1.1 Coups in Africa over Time

Source: Authors’ own.

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a dominant feature of the African political landscape has dramatically faded from view, though it has not entirely disappeared. The decline of the coup d’état raises important questions not just about how to develop a general explanation for this dramatic change, but also how to consider the attendant implications of this decline for broader civil-military relations. On the one hand, this trend suggests at least from the conventional view that civil-military relations in Africa are more institutionalized, and that militaries are more professionalized. The range of possible factors behind these changes include economic development, democratic reforms (see Aboagye and Clark this volume), regional normative changes that condemn unconstitutional means of taking power (see Damman and Day this volume), and foreign training of African armies (see Matisek and Reno this volume; Berg this volume). On the other hand, while there has been a decline of successful coups, a close look reveals that coup behavior—that is, attempted and thwarted coups—has remained relatively present (McGowan 2005, 2006; Khisa this volume). There have been structural changes in Africa’s civil-military relations as regimes have figured out better coupproofing and coup-disguising strategies independent of larger trends. The decline in the prevalence of coups has not meant their total eradication. The odd coup still occurs in Africa, as does the more ambiguous coup but not a coup, and even the “good coup” (see Damman and Day this volume). In the past decade, both overt and disguised coups d’état took place in Niger in 2010, Guinea Bissau and Mali in 2012, Egypt in 2013, Zimbabwe in 2017, Sudan in 2019, Mali in 2020 and 2021, and most recently in Guinea Conakry in September 2021. A related phenomenon is the “constitutional coup,” where incumbents change laws to extend their rule once term limits expire. These have met with much shoulder shrugging from the AU and an international community equally reluctant to pointedly call them “coups” (see Khisa this volume). Either way, where coups were once a dominant and routine occurrence, these cases now represent curious outliers. Put another way, if the decline of the coup d’état in Africa presents an important puzzle, the obverse of this phenomenon is also one that requires interrogating: What explains these outliers and alternative forms of the traditional coup? From a comparative perspective, why do they occur in some countries, but not in others? Among the recent outliers is Sudan’s coup of 2019. While it resembled a straight-up deposition of the incumbent Omar al-Bashir, it was embedded within a set of broad-based popular protests. The Zimbabwe case of 2017 was more representative of the coup but not a coup. While the army chief of staff, Major General Sibusiso Moyo, adamantly declared “this is not a military takeover,” it nevertheless bore the hallmarks of the military seizing Outliers and the “Coup but Not a Coup”

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of power. The 2012, 2020, and 2021 coups in Mali were gripping reminders that it is too early to speak of a postcoup Africa, even as the country had lasted two decades as a stable and functional democracy. Similarly, the events in Egypt in 2013 represented a puzzling anticlimax in the highly anticipated democratic revolution following the historic ousting of longsurviving autocrat, Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian coup—and others such as Mauritania in 2005, Mali in 2020, and Guinea Conakry in 2021—raised the old question of whether it is not morally justified for the military to topple a democratically elected regime that has turned authoritarian; thus, the notion of a good coup, which gets a lukewarm reception from the AU and a pass for the likelihood of democratic transition. What should we make of these episodes? On the one hand, the increasing rarity of the traditional coup d’état in the past decade, compared to previous decades, is a clear positive trend. But the ongoing occurrence of occasional coups indicates continuity in residual patterns of previous civilmilitary relations. This answer appears to lie, at least partially, in the cumulative and path-dependent dynamic that conditions countries that have a prominent historical role of the military to remain trapped in a cycle of military intrusions of one form or another—a kind of “military malware.” On the other hand, as they have faced a broadening range of obstacles to direct intervention, African armies are correspondingly finding alternative ways to remain mired in or to freshly enter politics beyond the coup. Aside from the outliers, the camouflaged coups and the constitutional sleights of hand seem to confirm Samuel Edward Finer’s observation that “the absence of coups does not mean the absence of military influence in civilian regimes” (Finer 1962: 77). The cases briefly discussed here, among others, underline two key points about military interventions in contemporary African politics. First, regardless of regime type, elite factional struggles and institutional fragmentation supply the easy justification for military intervention ostensibly to restore political order. This is of course hardly new, but it has recently been reproduced in quite instructive ways in, for example, Sudan in 2019 and Mali in 2020. That there remain grounds for coups speaks to considerable continuity in the role of the military in African politics. Second, the underdeveloped nature of African democratic institutions means military intervention of one form or the other tends to trump other methods of resolving political disputes when they arise. Another empirical observation (and puzzle) in Africa’s civil-military relations is the changing nature of violence against civilians by state security forces. Historically, African militaries developed an appalling reputation for being unprofessional, undisciplined, and predatory. At best, this involved Patterns of State Violence

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individual, poorly paid soldiers shaking ordinary people down at checkpoints. At worst, it meant strategic violence targeted at a particular group in the service of control, or even worse, elimination. Yet, a quick and cursory look at data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) shows a downward trend of state violence, which tracks closely with violence carried out by state-sponsored militias.2 Assuming the downward trajectory holds, at least at the surface level, it illuminates the changing relationship between state security forces and civilians in which state violence is not an effective or desirable means of control. By extension, if violence is on the decline, what then explains its continuity in some cases, and what factors drive ongoing violence in the cases that seem to disproportionately contribute to the overall tally? And what are the implications for civil-military relations? It is not difficult to conjure up an image of the predatory soldier in Africa. Look no further than Fela Kuti’s 1976 song “Zombie,” a harsh portrayal of the Nigerian army that saw in response his compound overrun by 1,000 soldiers, which also resulted in his mother’s death. Skip ahead two decades to Sierra Leone’s Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) junta, which came to power in a coup in May 1997. Stopped by random soldiers and told to “give me your boots, we soldiers are guiding you!” many ordinary people in Freetown consider this period the worst in the country’s civil war. To be sure, some of these snapshots are caricatures, but despite the contemporary decline in such behavior, similar patterns nevertheless persist. Why do these changing patterns matter for civil-military relations? In analyzing the data, one caveat is certainly in order. Because these are conflict datasets, they do not necessarily capture state violence that happens in “ordinary” times, during popular protests, or in elections. The data are also hard to collect and verify. Again, however, decreasing violence may very well be a sign that the military in Africa is professionalizing, taming its excesses, and evolving from the days of being an “albatross” around the neck of state politics (Kieh and Agbese 2004). This trend may be a function of training and cultivation of professional norms and ethos, or it could be the result of institutional change and democratic transition. Alternatively, it may be that the costs associated with using violence against civilians have climbed beyond what regimes are willing to pay. Either way, whether state violence was by accident or by design, the space where this particular mode of coercion was commonplace has steadily constricted over time. This, of course, is not to say that state violence is a thing of the past. Still another key puzzle is Africa’s steady march toward a common defense framework, which represents key institutional changes over time that also defy expectations of states traditionally protective of their sovereignty. Regional Security and Defense Operations

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What once was a patchy arrangement, based on ad hoc measures and hamstrung by the principles of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), has since developed into the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) of the contemporary African Union. Since the AU took root in 2002, there has been a widening array of regional peace and security operations throughout the continent, undergirded by the development of a robust institutional and normative framework for deciding when and where such operations are necessary. This poses a compelling puzzle for civil-military relations, as there is an increased role for African militaries in regional relations, but normative changes have required a decreased role for these militaries within the political context of their own states. Moreover, it remains an open question as to whether the experiences of African armies that participate in regional operations matter to how they view their role in domestic politics, a role that is either circumscribed or accelerated by other factors depending on the state. These changes are striking. During the days of the OAU, the regional body made several stillborn attempts to cobble together military operations such as one in Chad during the early 1980s (Amoo and Zartman 1992). By 1993, the so-called Kampala Document was a novel attempt at addressing conflicts. But the OAU still could not reconcile its need to collectively tackle regional instability with its overriding principle of noninterference, which prevented the intervention in the internal affairs of member states. In contrast, today’s AU has a much more interventionist stance, undergirded by the Constitutive Act and the Peace and Security Council. For instance, the AU has invoked the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, adopted in 2004, to denounce governments in Burkina Faso, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Niger that seized power by unconstitutional means (Souaré 2014; Day, Khisa, and Reno 2020). In March 2008, the AU launched Operation Democracy in Comoros to remove the incumbent administration on the island of Anjouan. And in 2017, it denounced Yahaya Jammeh in the Gambia, forcing him out of power with an Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS) intervention force under Senegal that was mobilized to intervene if Jammeh did not relinquish power. More recently, the creation of the African Union Task Forces extends the remit of intervention even further. The Regional Task Force (RTF) and the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) were established not as peace operations per se, but to provide a military solution to the transnational threats of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and Boko Haram, respectively (Brubacher, Damman, and Day 2017). What do these developments tell us about civil-military relations in Africa? On one hand, the decline in coups d’état has unfolded in tandem with major changes in regional norms that proscribe military interference in domestic politics. Whereas the OAU’s principle of noninterference created

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permissive conditions for military interference in politics, the AU’s shift to nonindifference has placed constraints on the political roles of Africa’s armies (see Damman and Day this volume). Yet, on the other hand, rather than usher in the demilitarization of African states, these changes have instead elevated the role of African armies, but in a regional context and with an outward orientation. The key puzzle that these competing notions reflect rests on the assumption that African armies are working out their domestic civil-military relations in ways that (1) render them sufficiently professional as to keep their distance from their own political systems; and (2) allow them to be folded into the command structures of AU operations that, by necessity, interfere in domestic political systems of other African states. Solving this puzzle will certainly become more salient as the AU continues its move toward the creation of the African Standby Force (ASF). A final puzzle considers the complex relationships between African militaries and foreign training programs, often bundled into the language of security sector reform (SSR) and tied to a range of evolving global security partnerships. Since the early 2000s, there have been more than forty SSR programs across the continent, funded largely by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union (Bendix and Stanley 2008a, 2008b; Hendricks and Musavengana 2010; Jackson and Albrecht 2010; Kohl 2014). Why does foreign military training signify a puzzle? To be clear, this is not about evaluating the impact of foreign military training on civil-military relations per se, as this would translate into an upside-down research question that “leads with a cause” (Day and Koivu 2019: 2). Rather, it is to ascertain the range of outcomes associated with the foreign military training of African armies, and to hypothesize what antecedent conditions or intervening factors rooted in a specific state’s civil-military relations bend the foreign training in one direction or another. SSR programs are an influential part of the broader framework of foreign aid directed at state building, which includes foreign training of military and police personnel, institutional reforms and restructuring, support for peacekeeping missions, and counterinsurgency operations (Jackson 2018; Reno 2018; Berg 2020). These programs have entailed the supply of external financial and manpower resources toward state building ostensibly to ameliorate the problem of ungoverned spaces that incubate terrorism and to prevent coups from destabilizing African states, which can lead to mass displacements that contribute to migration flows into Europe. All of this matters for Africa’s civil-military relations in several ways. From the perspective of foreign trainers, the core assumption is that developing partnerships with African states helps shape their civil-military relations into the Huntingtonian ideal of “objective civilian control” through Foreign Military Training

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the transmission of norms and values, and by developing military competences. Countries like the United States and France seek reliable partners for larger security operations, with the added benefit of creating professionalism in the military, reducing the likelihood of the military meddling in politics, and thus resulting in more stability and better security. On the other hand, SSR does not always successfully split the military off from politics and, quite to the contrary, may well accelerate or consolidate whatever mode of civil-military relations is rooted in prevailing networks of authority and informal channels—democratic or authoritarian, political or commercial, stable or unstable. Moreover, injecting African militaries with any array of material or ideational resources may confer on key actors the material and ideational wherewithal to ultimately intervene in politics after all, and the development of human capital can make trained soldiers suited for tasks that fall outside traditional military activities. A key insight from recent research, then, is that domestic power distribution and political settlements shape SSR outcomes, sometimes contrary to Western expectations and assumptions (Onoma 2014; Berg 2020, this volume). Rather than shoring up political stability, SSR programs in countries such as Somalia and South Sudan fuel intraelite conflict, increase profiteering, and help incumbents repress their opponents (de Waal 2015; Reno 2018). In a sense, then, SSR suffers from the same perverse incentives that attend foreign aid generally, in part because the approach emphasizes technical fixes and tends to ignore political repercussions (Jackson 2018: 4). Again, the key perspective here is to frame the puzzle of foreign training not as an explanatory factor on its own, but as to how contrasting modes of civil-military relations in different states instrumentalize attendant resources of foreign training to produce certain outcomes, and why these occur in some cases and not others. What We Think We Know To be sure, not all roads lead to the coup d’état as the defining feature of civil military relations. Recently, Risa Brooks (2019) helpfully identified a range of extant phenomena undergoing comparative study, which includes coups but also military defections, civilian control of the military, and societal-military (dis)integration. This book represents an explicit attempt to build on these efforts and move beyond approaches to civil-military relations that focus on the coup d’état. The goal is to help reorient the subfield toward a broader range of relationships at different levels of analysis—not just dynamics between political and military elites or civilian institutions and armies, but also relations between militaries and wider society. This approach requires additional efforts to rethink the coup idiom, which still dominates work on civil-military relations in Africa.

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This begins by casting a wide net around the prevailing scholarship to highlight the factors associated with the military’s role in politics more generally, and also in the distinct African context. By situating this work into four categories at international, macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis, we hope to provide a scaffolding and a serviceable road map to an analytical reorientation that recognizes the ambiguous boundaries between coups and other modes of political transformation, which sit along a spectrum of political authority and military force (Luckham 1994; Hutchful and Bathily 1998). Our first level of factors considers how civil-military relations in Africa are subject to historical and more recent systemic changes in international politics (Clapham 1996). For instance, in her study of army mutinies in Africa, Maggie Dwyer (2017) identifies global economic trends of the 1980s that provided permissive conditions and public discourse not just for popular protest, but for discontent among junior officers in Africa’s armed forces. A major contribution here is the distinction between coups and mutinies. Where coups are concerned with regime change, mutinies seek to change the military hierarchy and have no explicit political motives (Hathaway 2001; Dwyer 2017: 7). That said, both coups and mutinies are significant to civil-military relations, as the linkages between shrinking national budgets and increased military spending historically have become tangled up in externally oriented economics, debt, and structural adjustment (Bienen and Gersovitz 1985; Jenkins and Kposowa 1990; O’Kane 1983; Ihonvbere 1991; van de Walle 2001). The comparative literature confirms the observation that external economic shocks can be reliable predictors of coups (Kim 2016). The obverse can also be true, where foreign aid in postconflict countries nourishes regimes with resources to aid in coup-proofing (Girod 2015). Other comparative work shows how the international security environment shapes civil-military relations (Desch 1999). In particular, the existence of external threats can reduce the risks of coups by cutting off avenues for military involvement in politics, as they are otherwise occupied with interstate conflict (Piplani and Talmadge 2016). Similarly, interstate conflict can create opportunities for deterring internal challenges through coup-proofing (Arbatli and Arbatli 2016). In some cases, regimes navigate the “guardianship dilemma” by calculating that the loyalty of the military will depend on its evaluation of external threats—the more severe the threat, the less likely a military will be willing to take on the dual challenges of overthrowing a regime and facing an international crisis (McMahon and Slantchev 2015). For those states that have suffered from international crises and chronic external threats, coups have become even less International Factors

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likely as armies have sought to professionalize and retreat from politics entirely (White 2017). In the African context, the impacts of international factors on civilmilitary relations have historical foundations. At independence, Africa’s new national armies were essentially poorly institutionalized hand-medowns from the colonial state’s coercive apparatus, which uneven processes of decolonization and authority transfer did little to correct (Crocker 1974; Omara-Otunnu 1987; Parsons 2004). Colonially created distortions in recruitment and leadership hierarchies, and the lack of an overarching ideological commitment to a unified nationalist cause, shaped the praetorian proclivities of African militaries and set them up for the crises that followed independence. In some cases, particularly in francophone Africa, former metropoles continued providing coup-proofing guarantees to new regimes (Goldsworthy 1981; Luckham 1980). African armies were also drawn into regional geopolitical and superpower proxy wars, which invariably shaped civil-military relations by flooding the continent with arms and creating fresh challenges for regime security (Gleijeses 2002; Laidi 1990). More recently, an important development at the international level of analysis has been the changing nature of foreign assistance to African security forces, both material and ideational. Material engagement includes direct training or arms transfers. While the effects of foreign assistance on coup probability are mixed (Wolpin 1972; Rowe 1974; Muller and Zimmerman 1987; Maniruzzaman 1987), there is evidence that the fungibility of foreign aid can actually bolster autocrats and undermine broader institutional development (Remmer 2004; Wright 2008; Licht 2010; Feyzioglu, Swaroop, and Zhu 1998). Ideationally, foreign assistance initiates a transfer of professional norms and national security doctrines while also providing professional reference groups (Price 1971; Janowitz 1977; Marenin 1982), which puts downward pressure on the risk of coups (Ruby and Gibler 2010; Atkinson 2006). An alternative view of foreign training is not so sanguine. Jesse Dillon Savage and Jonathan D. Caverley (2017) have shown that military training increases the military’s balance of power relative to incumbent regimes, increasing the likelihood of coups. Another perspective is found in the more critical scholarship on militarism, or the “preparation for war, its normalization and legitimation” (Stravrianakis and Stern 2018; 4). Here, African militaries are situated within the global “security-development nexus” (Gelot and Sandor 2019: 521) as conduits for great-power interests, particularly their international counterterrorism and peace operations (Abrahamsen 2018, 2019). This approach dovetails with recent work on security sector reform, which is designed to strengthen the coercive capacities of African security institutions, for better or worse (Jackson 2011, 2018; Reno 2018; Berg 2020), a topic that Louis-Alexandre Berg explicitly addresses in this book.

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The macro level captures the structural features of Africa’s institutional milieu and the nature of state-society relations, which ostensibly pull military actors into political roles. Echoing Samuel Huntington (1968: 194), Naunihal Singh (2014: 18–19) observed that macro-level factors reflect the “demand side” of the civil-military equation, where armies enter politics in response to any range of structural factors embedded within politics and society more broadly. Correspondingly, a series of cross-national studies have sought to conceptualize, count, and code the sheer number of coups in Africa (Jackman 1978; T Johnson, Slater, and McGowan 1983; Lunde 1991; McGowan 2003) and capture their macro-level correlates more generally (Powell and Thyne 2011). One salient macro-level factor is ethnicity. While some view ethnic identity in armies as distinct from ethnic competition in state politics (Johnson and Thurber 2020), in the African context there is evidence that ethnicity, enmeshed with political institutions, is a key structural factor underpinning coups on the continent (Jackman 1978; Jenkins and Kposowa 1992; Houle and Bodea 2017). Indeed, with an already poor historical fit between state and civil society in Africa, active mobilization of ethnic (or even regional and religious) identities has hardened into sectarian markers that have situated different groups within political institutions (Luckham 1980; Young 2012). As state actors have sought to demobilize these institutions and their actors through ethnic exclusion, particularly via the mechanism of patronage, this has “activated” ethnic identities in many cases (Harkness 2018). And because Africa’s armies often have high levels of ethnic skewness, they may also possess organizational endowments that can be marshaled toward violence should they face a reversal of political fortune, which works similarly to armed groups that consist of former elites (Day 2019). These insights underline Africa’s historical pattern of weak political institutions, among them the small and rickety armies hastily transferred from the colonial state at independence (Crocker 1974; Welch 1978; Meredith 2014). This inheritance was the foundation for a fragile power equation that created the permissive conditions for uneven civil-military relations, especially given the slow pace of institutionalization against accelerating social mobilization (Huntington 1968). Indeed, as Aristide R. Zolberg (1968) observed early on, the coup itself became an institutionalized pattern of how Africa’s macrostructures operated. Moreover, there are even more moving parts to Africa’s state-society relations and the fragile civil institutions that manage sectarian and class divides (Finer 1962). Beyond ethnicity, rivalries between the petty bourgeoisie and ruling classes can contribute to unstable civil-military relations (Hutchful 1979b; Othman 1984). And elites versus masses cleavages can emerge as urban lumpens Macro-Level Factors

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and rural peasants make class-based claims against the state, which can often blur with ethnic identity and result in “class wolves under tribal sheepskins” (Sklar 1967: 6; Abdullah 1998). Another macro-level factor is regime type. A key insight from recent scholarship has been that democratic transitions risk dismantling the status quo of military institutions (Harkness 2018). Indeed, Eboe Hutchful’s (1997) analysis of Ghana’s failed democratic transition in 1979–1981 was that a “coup from below” resulted from an institutional breakdown between civilian and military elites vying for control over the reorganization of Ghana’s armed forces. And while coups can sometimes be catalysts for democratization, they can also serve to entrench preexisting authoritarian trajectories (Powell, Chacha, and Smith 2019), or simply allow dictators to be replaced by other dictators (Derpanopoulos, Frantz, Geddes, and Wright 2016). In fact, some illiberal regimes in Africa are able to instrumentalize the “securitization agenda” that foreign donors front-end as a condition for development assistance, where aid helps further entrench, extend, and maintain authoritarian control over state militaries (Fisher and Anderson 2015: 131). Indeed, such perspectives point to the military’s role in stabilizing Africa’s politics rather than upending it (Ojo 2009; Ehwarieme 2011; Bah 2015). The broader comparative literature holds conflicting views. While there is evidence that coups in donor-dependent states often give way to competitive elections (Marinov and Goemans 2013), politicized militaries can pose obstacles to democratization (Tusalem 2014). Some argue that democracies are particularly vulnerable to coups (Bell 2016), while others claim that in authoritarian systems, coups are more likely to occur when small ruling coalitions proactively coup-proof through purges of troublesome elites (Marcum and Brown 2016; Sudduth 2017). Alternatively, sometimes autocrats hold elections to gauge political opposition and “allow” coups to occur as a pretext to either accommodate or eliminate rivals (Wig and Rød 2016). And among the strongest predictors of coups is a state’s history of political violence, which causes uncertainty among military elites (Bell and Sudduth 2017). The meso level considers the organizational and behavioral characteristics of African armies that push them into taking on political roles, often through coups. This is “supply side” of the civil-military equation where conflict within the armed forces can also shape civil-military relations and dynamics, and when militaries engage in conflicts with incumbents to protect their identity and interests (Singh 2014; Lammers 1969). Indeed, the classic literature on civil-military relations considers corporate grievances harbored by militaries, which can manifest in various and shifting Meso-Level Factors

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combinations, as major wellsprings of coups (Nordlinger 1977; Thompson 1980). Meso-level factors are embedded in the weak organizational structures underpinning Africa’s civil-military relations (Lofchie 1972; Adekson 1981; Jenkins and Kposowa 1992). While postcolonial armies remained dependent on former metropoles, their command structures were upended by rapid promotions, inflated ranks, and limited actual experience (Coleman and Brice 1962; Luckham 1971; Hutchful 1979a; Baynham 1988). Armies in new states were expected to be technocratic and modernizing agents whose devotion to a “national ideal” could overcome political fragmentation (Janowitz 1964; Hopkins 1966). Yet, more often than not, African armies became organizational “mesocosms” of national-level sectarian imbalances (Mazrui 1975; Adekson 1979; Cox 1976; Enloe 1980; Omara-Otunnu 1987), where the military emerged as a nouvelle bourgeoisie in competition with ruling classes (Meillassoux 1970; First 1970; Wolpin 1980). Idi Amin’s 1971 coup can be understood as an extension of class-based antagonisms of the Ugandan army, which constituted a distinct social class of its own (Lofchie 1972). Similarly, Jimmy Kandeh (2004: 1) refers to a “militariat” whose “coups from below” represent subaltern class grievances and quasi-criminal enterprises more than traditional military intrusions into politics. In the long run, Africa’s armed forces have, on balance, fallen short of being vanguards of modern organization and meeting the expectations to behave professionally—incapable at best, predatory at worst (Howe 2001). Most were historically rife with rivalries along multiple vectors—between senior and junior officers, often leading to “coups of descending order” (Schraeder 2003; Ihonvbere 1991), and between officers and soldiers as well as among different armed services such as paramilitaries or police— which all contributed to exacerbating generalized indiscipline (Lofchie 1972; Baynham 1988; First 1970; Pateman 1992). In countries such as Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Sierra Leone, junior officers responded to dysfunctional politics and the destabilizing role of the military by overthrowing not just civilian governments, but military hierarchies as well. At another level, the army performed the role as a “traditionalizer” of formal institutions and a node of informal networks (Owusu 1986, 1989; Chabal and Daloz 1999). At the meso-level, the coup d’état became an organizational and behavioral mechanism for the patronage-based recycling of elites when political accommodation failed. Meso-level factors also capture why coups fail. In some cases, a “stable minority” of civilian regimes asserted control of state armies (Decalo 1989a, 1998b). David Goldsworthy (1981: 66) credited successful civilian control to the “dominating presence” and personal authority of individual incumbents, and the role of foreign armies as external guarantors of stability.

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Indeed, Boubacar N’Diaye (2001) attributed Côte d’Ivoire’s long-term civilian oversight of its military to ongoing reliance on the French military, a strategy that ultimately backfired as it eroded the legitimacy of the country’s civil-military relations over time. But more often, failed coups result from incumbents’ use of coupproofing strategies to manage risk and intraorganizational conflict with state militaries (Belkin and Schofer 2003). Erica De Bruin (2020), for instance, explained how incumbents “counterbalance” by raising the costs of coups through the mechanisms of coordination and resistance which, respectively, hinder recruitment before coups start and disrupt communication while they occur. Coup-proofing in Africa often pivots on the ethnic composition of political and military institutions. Philip Roessler (2016) showed how regimes must balance ethnic inclusion within state militaries with the risk of certain groups developing an institutionalized power base from which to launch a coup. Yet, on the other hand, regimes must also factor in the risks of ethnic exclusion, which can lead to armed rebellion. In a similar vein, Kristen Harkness (2018) has observed that Africa’s ethnically privileged armed forces, built during decolonization and under threat by democratization, can lead to reactionary coups as the status quo is dismantled and the military’s place in political society becomes uncertain. Alternatively, regimes can stave off coup attempts by dividing armed forces into rival sectarian subgroups (Nassif 2015), often maintaining a loyal parallel force to check the regular army (Böhmelt and Pilster 2015; Quinlivan 1999). Lavishing armed forces with resources may also keep them in check, but it risks bolstering their ability to launch successful coups (Albrecht and Eibl 2018; Powell 2012). Finally, at the micro level sit studies that focus on the psychological traits of individual coup makers and military rulers themselves. By extension, this analytical level includes a focus on how political and military actors behave as rational actors that square off in coordination games. According to Singh (2014), the success or failure of coups in Ghana depended largely on the dynamics of collective action as they unfolded; namely, the behavior of fence-sitters within the armed forces, who backed coup makers only after it was “made a fact” or became common knowledge. This means that once a coup has been widely communicated as a success, often via state-run media broadcasts (see Bleck and Michelitch 2017), it is more likely that the rank and file will fall in line as each individual expects others to follow suit in a broader coordination game, depending on the status of those making it a fact. Indeed, broader comparative work supports the view of coups—and mutinies (Hamby 2002)—as coordination games. Confirming Singh’s (2014) intuition that soldiers will back who they see as the winning horse, Micro-Level Factors

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learning also can factor into how actors coordinate in coup attempts. If regimes have survived previous coups, then support from junior officers and the rank and file is less likely (Little 2017). Another factor influencing the behavior of elites is popular protest, which reflects regime illegitimacy and provides coordination-facilitating signals to coup makers (Casper and Tyson 2014). De Bruin (2018, 2020) applies the coordination game approach to explaining levels of violence during coups, which vary according to which regime type is the target. Because military regimes have a better sense than civilian regimes of the likelihood of a coup’s success, they will take measures to reduce the costs of being ousted while also positioning themselves for survival in a new political establishment. An alternative approach traditionally focused on the African context has been associated with Samuel Decalo (1973, 1976: 3, 1989b) who argued that instead of broad systematic features of African states or even military organizations, coups are the direct result of personal idiosyncrasies, or the “officer cliques, corporate and personal ambitions” of careeroriented military officers. While this perspective helps explain modal patterns of “radical military rule,” “personal dictatorships,” and “military managerialism” in the wake of coups, it also conjures up the worst caricatures of Africa’s military dictators such as Idi Amin, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, and Francisco Macias Nguema. Here, civil-military relations simply become a question of Africa’s persistent patterns of neopatrimonialism, where the right to rule is given to a person rather than an office (Chabal and Daloz 1999; Bratton and van de Walle 1994). This occurs when rule is maintained not just through patronage, but also through the violence afforded by personal control of the state’s coercive apparatus. Here is where vivid images of Samuel Edward Finer’s (1962) The Man on Horseback loom large. The so-called leaders in khaki swoop into power as either temporary political caretakers, earnest reformers out to correct off-course regimes, transformational Marxist radicals, or straight-up usurpers seeking to promote themselves (Nugent 2004; Decalo 1989b). While thinkers such as Karl Marx (1978) and Antonio Gramsci (1971) narrowly touched on these categories with notions of “Bonapartism” or “Caesarism,” respectively, framing military rule in such personal terms was still an institutional conceptualization more akin to praetorianism. A more accurate micro-level, actor-centered framing comes from Juan L. Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996), whose concept of “Sultanism” describes a personal, almost arbitrary form of leadership that is unrestrained by legal-rational institutions, which dovetails with Decalo’s (1989b) work on the “authoritarian syndrome” characteristic of the Amins, Bokassas, and Nguemas. These prevailing strands of inquiry that researchers have installed into international, macro-, meso-, and microanalytical categories have made valuable contributions to the study of civil-military relations in Africa.

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Some scholars have also taken steps to dislodge African political phenomena from conventional Western paradigms (Williams 1998). Yet, together, they still reflect the coup studies approach, which has obscured efforts to explore broader theoretical implications of the military’s role in African politics. In what follows, we take up Robin Luckham’s call to move “beyond the problematique of the coup” by viewing “African states and social formations in their historical totality rather than singling out the coup as a distinct dependent variable” (1994: 32). As such, we develop an analytical framework anchored in our understanding of how African armies are embedded in political and social networks, and how civil-military transformations are situated in the broader shifts in African political development. Civil-Military Relations in Africa: An Analytical Framework At the heart of the civil-military problematique is the dual role the military plays in any society, as protector of the population and as guardian of the government. As a critical pillar of the state, the military is invested with enormous coercive power, which can be deployed for protection or predation. African militaries have had some untidy histories of preying on ordinary citizens with impunity, and of overthrowing instead of defending governments. It is therefore unsurprising that the coup d’état became emblematic of the central paradox associated with how state elites create institutions of violence for their protection, but then come to fear those very institutions. To date, efforts to untangle this paradox have analytically worked backward from theoretical and even normative assumptions about what constitutes the “proper” form of civil-military relations. Departing from this approach, here we develop an analytical framework based on regime proximity and social embeddedness that reengages what we consider to be the two pillars of classic civil-military relations theorizing: the liberal (institutional) perspective of Samuel Huntington and the civic-republican (sociological) perspective of Morris Janowitz (see Feaver 1996). We base our analytical framework on the military’s dual role of defending the state and protecting the civilian public. The gold standard of solving the civil-military paradox has long been Huntington’s The Soldier and the State. Here, ideal civil-military relations require a bargain between political actors and the armed forces to remain institutionally insulated from one another, and where militaries are subordinate to “objective civilian control” (Huntington 1957: 189–192; Feaver 2003; Owens 2011; Barany 2012). What makes this bargain attainable and sustainable is a high level of military professionalism, and a strict creed and code of conduct that guarantee political neutrality; that is, respect for clear boundaries between the civilian affairs of the state and the role of the armed forces. Professional officers therefore remain within

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a “pure military space” where they pursue and perfect the “science of war” (Vajpeyi and Segell 2014: 6). Armies are at once insulated from politics, but beholden to political elites that determine the lawful deployment of violence on the state’s behalf. An alternative perspective within the conventional canon is Janowitz’s (1960) The Professional Soldier, whose notion of “subjective civilian control” considers civil-military relations as a broader set of connections between the military and various elements of society that surround it. Rather than remaining insulated, armed forces are embedded within political and social institutions. In addition to fighting wars, professional armed forces are also socialized into taking on a range of tasks, among the most important is reflecting and upholding liberal-democratic norms. In other words, armed forces do not just protect democratic ideals; they proactively promote them. Such an arrangement is possible only through the establishment of a professionalized officer class that is attuned to changes in domestic and global environments, and that can adapt accordingly. Moreover, the armed forces gain legitimacy when they reflect progressive values, and when they are subordinate to subjective civilian control. It is not our purpose here to rehash Huntington versus Janowitz or revisit the important critiques this debate spawned, as this has been sufficiently addressed elsewhere (Khisa and Day 2020; Feaver 1996, 1999, 2003; Bruneau 2018). It is important, however, to underline the central problem with these approaches vis-à-vis the African experience, which is how they have reinforced two dominant binaries in the literature. The first assumes that the prevalence of coups signals a low level of professionalism in armies, while the absence of coups presumes a high level of professionalism. The second binary associates coups and military rule with political instability and places a handful of states that avoid coups in the “stable minority” of civilian governments (Decalo 1989a, 1998b). In our view, these approaches seek to answer the wrong question, which is most often posed as “How do civilian leaders of governments control military actors?” Neither is the fundamental question here “What causes coups?” Rather, the key paradox that still holds is, as Peter D. Feaver (1996: 150) succinctly put it: “Because we fear others, we create an institution of violence to protect us, but then we fear the very institution we created for protection.” The key theoretical issue, however, is identifying the “others” and the “we” in this equation and considering how this plays out in the African context. In rethinking civil-military relations in Africa, the dominant approaches of objective and subjective civilian control tend to abstract from Western democracies with little regard to the nuances in Africa’s political systems, which have followed alternative and divergent paths of political development (Williams 1998; Young 2012). A go-to observation is that most state institutions in Africa are uninsulated from politics and society, where the

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informalization of politics regulates the distribution of resources down vertical networks in exchange for personalized political support (Chabal and Daloz 1999; Bratton and van de Walle 1994). With regard to civil-military relations, this reading of African politics renders Huntington’s (1957) “objective civilian control” of little utility in a political environment where the exercise of political authority is much more informal and fluid. By extension, the professional boundaries between Africa’s military organizations and wider society are fluid and permeable (Verweijen 2015; Valenzuela 1985). While this dovetails with Janowitz’s (1960) view of the military’s embeddedness in politics and society, the notion of “subjective civilian control” too assumes well-developed formal institutions that connect political elites and social actors. Indeed, in many African states, the fundamental task of institutional development and exacting effective state penetration has been a challenge far more daunting than addressing the paradox of subordinating the military to civilian authority. Yet, while nuance is important, it is also a mistake to essentialize comparative cases, as there are substantial variations. A more recent scholarly turn suggests that “disorder” is not necessarily instrumental for the maintenance of elite authority networks, but can be counterproductive, particularly in violent political environments (de Vries and Mehler 2019). In many cases, the notion of “institutionlessness” is becoming more a scholarly cliché in the face of evidence suggesting that political institutions are becoming increasingly robust (Cheeseman 2018; Opalo 2019). On their own, the classic arguments on civil-military relations are limited but, taken together, they provide useful insights. Alex de Waal (2014) offered a helpful way to square the circle, viewing African political processes as playing out in a “marketplace” where bargaining with, co-optation of, and elimination of rival power bases take place. They occur in the context of the nature of authority (institutional vs. patronage-based), the availability and sources of rents (external vs. domestic), the ways armed state actors deploy violence (centralized vs. decentralized/fragmented), and the level of social integration that exists in networks beyond the state. Such empirical observations (and their theoretical implications) most certainly apply to civil-military relations, where the reality on the ground shows substantial variation across cases and defies the standard assumptions transposed from Western institutions and political processes. To get at these observations, two factors are critical, to which we now turn. Our basis for rethinking civil-military relations in Africa is the complex set of joint interactions that play out between a range of actors, which can be mutually beneficial or exploitative, parasitic or mutually destructive, Regime Proximity and Social Embeddedness

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depending on the power asymmetries associated with the prevailing political order (Day 2018). Here, we disaggregate these joint interactions into two constituent dimensions: the military’s proximity to regime authority, and its level of embeddedness within societal networks and processes. This approach is anchored in a theoretical intuition about the internal drivers of African political processes and outcomes, standing in contrast to the prevailing approaches and allowing for cross-case and within-case comparisons. Regime proximity describes the relationship between political authority and military power, the interface between civilian holders of power and the armed forces. Here, civil military relations are not about subordinating military power to objective civilian control per se. Instead, relations depend on the extent to which regimes of varying stripes manage potential rival sources of power and authority that may operate through military corridors. The driving idea here is that in maintaining hegemony—and political order—regimes deploy remunerative, normative, and sometimes coercive resources in relation to other actors as a set of joint interactions (Korpi 1985). These power resources can be derived from patronage networks, legal-bureaucratic institutions, or both, and are invested into state military organizations in an effort to either mobilize or demobilize them. Thus, on the one hand, regimes seek to tame military organizations as a way to coupproof, but also draw them into serving key governance functions, but within certain thresholds. On the other hand, military organizations can seek to capture regimes to overcome obstacles to their expansion. This delicate balance is critical in shaping the contours of civil-military relations, as close proximity can pose a threat to regime security, while an exclusionary strategy can potentially trigger civil war (Roessler 2016). Regime proximity varies along a spectrum and civil-military relations play out on a continuum. On one end, proximate military institutions are those that a regime will seek to bring into the orbit of its control through co-optation, accommodation, or subordination. For instance, Amos Perlmutter and William M. LeoGrande (1982) found that high levels of regime proximity are often present in Marxist-Leninist political systems, where vanguard parties have hegemony over all state institutions. In the African context, political ideology may be the mechanism that drives regime proximity, but it is more often about the overtly politicized or covertly embedded informal networks of a regime’s ruling elites, thus blurring the line between the realm of military activity and that of political engagement, the ruling party, and the military establishment—for better or worse. Alternatively, military organizations that are less proximate to or distant from prevailing authority networks can reflect the mode of civil-military relations that Huntington (1957) envisioned, with a national army institutionally siloed from, but accountable to, civilian rule. While this is empirically

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possible, low levels of regime proximity most likely reflect scenarios where a regime has failed to tame its military, which plays out through a process of omission or commission, neglect, or deliberate subterfuge. The key insight here is that regime proximity as a key constituent dimension of civil-military relations occurs in various forms along a spectrum, irrespective of coups d’état. This speaks to the need to portray civilmilitary relations as about something other than the hard, institutional boundaries between civilian political authority and military power. Regime proximity conceptually captures the nebulous sources of political authority associated with illiberal regime types that characterize much of Africa’s politics. Its utility is partly in providing a way of framing civil-military relations that constitutes the pivotal political and military structures that live in centrifugal and centripetal tension with one another. While we do not explicitly seek here to lay out granular indicators, regime proximity allows for further methodological refinements in measuring and marking out the nodes of complex joint interactions. Moreover, developing sharper indicators of where civil-military relations sit on this spectrum allows the comparison between and within cases over time. Social embeddedness captures the complex relations between Africa’s military organizations and the ordinary civilian populations they ostensibly protect. Here, we portray civil-military relations as entangled with a broader set of societal relations, connections, and networks, and they are not necessarily simply existing behind the institutional ramparts of military professionalism. Thus, on the one hand armies must maintain some structural emancipation and autonomy from wider society to operate unencumbered, yet on the other hand many individual commanders or soldiers invariably become tied to the civilian networks that surround them and in which their very effectiveness is embedded. These social dynamics complicate any standard assumption that draws a line between professional soldiers and civilian publics. Military organizations and the individuals who occupy them share joint interactions with the societal networks that produce and sustain them, which plays out at several levels of engagement. This dimension should come as no surprise since, historically, African armies have been instruments of internal political order and tasked with putting down domestic opposition, therefore guaranteeing a formidable role of civilian populations in civil-military relations (Kandeh 2004). This means that armies seek to dominate networks of social control at the macro level. Yet, at both meso and micro levels of analysis, soldiers must negotiate norms of reciprocity with civilians within the territories they occupy. This is especially apparent with militaries that emerged out of guerrilla movements whose survivability depended considerably on forging hospitable relations with the civilian public. And on the ground, soldiers must interact with civilians daily through the mundane, ordinary

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tasks of protecting political elites in urban areas, or manning checkpoints up country (Dwyer 2017: 72). Social embeddedness also varies along a spectrum. In cases where armies are more socially embedded, individual officers in the field and the soldiers under their command may seek to develop informal power bases that run parallel to or behind their formal institutional remit, which depends on local bargains with civilians who in turn depend on soldiers for protection. This range of reciprocal relationships also shapes the conduct of military personnel by bringing mundane social values into everyday professional life. This means that, on the one hand, soldiers may be reluctant to turn their guns against those with a shared social identity (Johnson and Thurber 2020). On the other hand, the recent populist turns in comparative political systems suggest that civilians may increasingly support the role of the military in politics more generally (Kurlantzick 2018). Social relations can involve the use of military power to build intelligence networks, but they can also extend to the establishment of informal status hierarchies or control over formal and illicit local economies that tie private actors to the military at the command level and among the boots on the ground. In contrast, less socially embedded armies that maintain key aspects of orthodox professional boundaries between soldiers and their immediate societal environment serve not as conduits for individual patronage networks, but as administrative containers for a state’s military power that is projected within a given territory. While officers and soldiers still may build relationships with civilians for intelligence gathering, this takes place for strategic ends and not for the benefit of individuals within a given military organization, and not so much for broader societal needs as for the narrow interests of the state. Again, like regime proximity, social embeddedness seeks to capture a key condition of civil-military relations—armies can vary in their degree in this factor. This is undergirded by the direct empirical observation that for many members of Africa’s military organizations, their perception of civilmilitary relations is not so much about the relationship between civilian political authority and military power, but between the army and wider society. In rethinking civil-military relations in Africa, it is therefore essential to incorporate this key dimension, particularly because there is significant variation in social embeddedness and the extent to which armies have social organic roots. One concrete outcome here stems from the outsized role in army mutinies of junior officers, whose grievances tend to be less political (which are associated with coups) and more a reflection of nonelite societal networks impacted by economic hardship (Dwyer 2017). The rank and file are less likely to obey orders when they have a strong affiliation with the public based on shared material grievances (Pion-Berlin, Esparza, and Grisham 2014).

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In some cases, armies fulfill their goal of protecting civilians. In others, however, they prey on civilians during war and in peacetime. Alternatively, armies can sin by omission rather than commission, neither offering protection for civilians nor directly abusing them while they pursue other agendas. This approach allows comparisons not only between cases, but also within cases, as levels of social embeddedness vary along key dimensions such as urban versus rural or domestic versus regional operations. One implication of social embeddedness is on postconflict peacebuilding, where the granting of amnesty for rebels, or their integration into state militaries, depends on their acceptance by political actors as well as wider society (Glassmyer and Sambanis 2008). To build an analytical framework, we can configure the key structural dimensions of regime proximity and social embeddedness to map out where they intersect in the broader space of civil-military relations (Figure 1.2). Placed on a rudimentary spectrum between high and low levels of each dimension, we seek to highlight exemplars that reflect ideal types. This effort builds on and slightly modifies our previously developed conceptual typology delineating varying modes of civil-military relations in Africa (Khisa and Day 2020). Where regime proximity and social embeddedness are high sit states where military power is proximate to regime authority, serving as armed extensions of a ruler or a hegemonic political party, and where members of the military share cross-cutting links with the societies that generate them. Often there is an ideological foundation for such arrangements that simulConfiguring the Analytical Framework

Figure 1.2 Configurations of Regime Proximity and Social Embeddedness Social Embeddedness

Regime Proximity

Source: Authors’ own.

High

Low

High

Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda

Sudan

Low

Egypt

Central African Republic

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taneously legitimizes military power as a basis for regime authority, while also claiming fidelity to the public as the primary marker of successful civil-military relations. Tanzania, to take one example, slots into this configuration, with its military reformed after independence to be at once loyal to the ruling political class and at the service of ordinary Tanzanians (Parsons 2004). Rwanda and Uganda, each ruled by former rebels, maintain close control over their armies while also bringing into the construction of their regimes the Maoist approach to relying on civilians, which they deployed during their guerrilla struggles. In direct contrast, at the bottom right of Figure 1.2, where regime proximity and social embeddedness are both low, sit states with security forces siloed from incumbent regimes that are also somehow disconnected from societal networks. While membership in the armed forces may draw on different segments of society, their widespread and systematic use of violence against civilians precludes anything justifiably described as “socially embedded” as relations sever irreparably. In addition, rulers may surround themselves with private security forces from other states that have no loyalty to regime authority nor any restrictions upon using violence against the citizens of their host country. The armed forces in Central African Republic (CAR), often operating in competition with parallel presidential guards, have historically been little more than a site of elite rivalries that carried over from regime to regime, which worked to harden sectarian divides as soldiers autonomously preyed on ordinary citizens outside their own ethnic group (Mehler 2012). In addition, Chadian soldiers have played overt roles in supporting (and undermining) successive regimes in CAR, and have been accused of human rights violations in that country while ostensibly serving its rulers (Debos 2016a; Africa Confidential 1999; Human Rights Watch 2007). At the top right of Figure 1.2, where regime proximity is high but social embeddedness is low, one should expect to see civil-military relations characterized by political and military powers that are tightly fused. And while security forces may have a societal constituency, there are often patterns of military force against civilian populations that undermine linkages with societal networks. Countries ruled directly by military regimes, or by autocrats for long stretches of time, are illustrative of this configuration. Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir, both a long-surviving autocrat and someone who came to power via a coup d’état, often deployed armed force against non-Northern Sudanese civilians as a strategy of undermining the guerrilla war economies of rebellions. Where the armed forces were made up of the same ethnic group targeted for counterinsurgency, as was the case of Darfur in the early 2000s, a dominant strategy was to foster and exploit interethnic tensions and use local militias as proxies against rebels and the civilians. This strategy also allowed the armed forces to remain proximate

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to regime authority while sidestepping any mechanisms of accountability vis-à-vis the public. Finally, where regime proximity is high and social embeddedness is low, sit states whose civil-military relations are characterized by institutional divisions between political authority and military power. This approximates the Huntingtonian model of effective civilian control— although low levels of regime proximity can occur in both democracies and autocracies. And while armies in these countries maintain a distinct corporate identity, they nevertheless do not sever their ties from the societal networks that produce soldiers. This also approximates the Janowitzian ideal of armies reflecting the values of wider society, while remaining professionally siloed from political authority. Most armies in these countries perform conventional tasks of national security, as opposed to regime security, and are seldom deployed against domestic rivals. For instance, Egypt’s military, which has historically been viewed as a modern professional force, joined with the Arab Spring’s civilian protestors of 2011 and helped usher in regime change as part of a grassroots movement. This analytical framework of civil-military relations based on regime proximity and social embeddedness accomplishes three key goals. First, it avoids the problematic binaries of coup versus no coup and stability versus instability. It cuts through the circular argument that professional militaries ensure stable civil-military relations, and that civil-military relations are stable when the military professionalizes (Bruneau 2018: 347). This theoretical direction accommodates the fact that military involvement in politics does not necessarily translate into political instability and the absence of direct military intrusion does not signal diminished military influence. Second, this framework moves toward integrating the international, macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis as outlined earlier in this chapter. Because regimes are essentially the programming of state machinery, they sit at the nexus of institutional conditions that give rise to certain kinds of organizations, which in turn promote or constrain the interests of individual actors that operate within them. In many cases, regime politics is not structurally differentiated from state-society relations, which means that military organizations coincide with the social networks that sustain political authority. This approach also speaks to how international and regional dynamics are factored into the multilevel institutional milieu, as structural conditions and sources of power instrumentalized by perceptive political and military actors (Reno 1999; Clapham 1996). Finally, the regime proximity and social embeddedness framework provides a comparative anchor that allows civil-military relations to serve as either an outcome of interest requiring causal inference, or as a causal factor in its own right for explaining other phenomena such as the range of puzzles we laid out at the beginning of this chapter. In what follows, we

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outline five theoretical levers that extend our consideration of regime proximity and social embeddedness. Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in Africa: Five “Theoretical Levers” To situate the changing nature of civil-military relations in Africa, we advance five theoretical levers which, taken together, provide a comprehensive interpretation of the transformations that have transpired on the continent in the past few decades. These levers grow out of the two theoretical dimensions—regime proximity and social embeddedness—outlined above and the empirical puzzles laid out earlier. While far from exhaustive, they represent what in our view is a necessary starting point for identifying the range of factors that have shaped and that are shaping contemporary civil-military relations in Africa. These theoretical levers are ideological providence, experiences with warfare, changing patterns in military recruitment, changing domestic institutional context, and changes in regional and global norms. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was heightened military intrusiveness, praetorian behavior, and pervasive political decay in Africa, which produced two sets of political challengers in a number of states. One group comprised political insiders that challenged the status quo as reformist coup makers. Often, these were junior officers. They sought to sweep aside the existing order, including the military establishment, and institute revolutionary change, denouncing colonially inherited militaries as patently “anti-people” and thus setting out to rearticulate wholly new and decidedly different ideological orientations aimed at attuning the military toward being “pro-people.” This new ideological posture was not purely rhetorical; it in fact brought about a fundamental transformation in relations between the public and the uniformed personnel in countries such as Burkina Faso and Ghana. The other group, comprised largely of outsiders, followed the guerrilla path to overthrowing the prevailing political order and installing a new revolutionary order, shaped by an extensive and deep experience with Maoiststyle guerrilla warfare carried out largely in the countryside (Reno 2011; Fisher 2020). Once in power, victorious rebels worked with the ideological predisposition developed during guerrilla insurgency, which often required cultivating ties with civilians to develop a guerrilla war economy and recruit followers. This was critical in shaping civil-military relations where relations with civilians, not civilian authority, was a defining feature. Prominent examples of the first group include Jerry Rawlings in Ghana and Thomas Sankara in Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) and the second category comprises Isaias Afwerki in Eritrea, Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia, Fred Rwigema Ideological Provenance

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in Rwanda, and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda. While they pursued different paths, both groups drew inspiration from Marxist-Leninist thought about violent revolutionary change and emerged in the throes of military dictatorships and one-party autocracies of the 1970s. On seizing power, they reoriented state military institutions as seamless extensions of regime authority and as a broader project of national renewal and social transformation. In fact, such ideological orientations have historical antecedents. Colonial militaries were oriented toward total allegiance to the white colonial administrators, while simultaneously being repressive toward the public. By independence, colonial administrators had tried to model African militaries along the lines of European professionalism, with officer corps trained to be subordinate and loyal to the state and government (Parsons 2003; Reid 2012). This loyalty was transferred to new African leaders who Africanized the officer corps through rapid promotions and training in elite military academies in Europe and the United States. Yet, they retained the nature of their colonial antecedents as tools of repression rather than protectors of civilians (Day 2019: 24). Although short-lived, the resulting ideological orientation of new (African) senior officers and commanders duly paid allegiance to their civilian masters, developing a corporatist identity insulated from the mundane everyday of other state institutions, particularly civic interactions with the civilian public. Why does ideological provenance matter to civil-military relations? From the perspective of regime proximity, it fundamentally shapes how regimes integrate or insulate the state security apparatus vis-à-vis the extant political authority structure. In terms of social embeddedness, a regime’s ideological tenor also plays a role in the armed forces’ orientation toward civilians, by engaging in cooperative or coercive behavior. Historically, because the postcolonial military was the key coercive instrument in defense of the state, military leaders had close proximity to state power and saw themselves not just as protectors of the ruling class but, in fact, as part of it. In the event of friction with civilian political leaders, the immediate course of action by military commanders was to launch coups. Since independence, the scope, scale, and types of armed conflict have varied across Africa. Much attention has been on the nature of armed groups challenging incumbents—their internal cohesion and organizational strength, their ideological orientations, their access to material resources, and the role of regional geopolitics (Weinstein 2006; Reno 2011; Day 2019). Motivations and goals range from wars of liberation to reformist wars of the “second liberation” and warlord conflicts (Clapham 1998; Reno 2011; Williams 2016; Roessler and Verhoeven 2016). Many regimes facing down these challenges have experienced long, extensive, and protracted civil wars (e.g., Angola and Experiences with Warfare

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Sudan), while others have had low-intensity and episodic conflicts (e.g., Mali and Kenya). Some countries have had no experience with large-scale civil wars (e.g., Botswana, Ghana, and Tanzania), others have had interstate wars (e.g., the Ethio-Eritrea war, 1998–2001), and clandestine cross-border support of armed groups by state sponsors has turned many internal conflicts into regional “conflict systems” (Roessler and Verhoeven 2016; Reno 2011). Liberia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have each been the eye of regional storms that have pulled multiple countries into proxy wars. In some cases, war has been a catalyst for state reconstruction and social transformation with significant implications for civil-military relations (e.g., in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda). The rebel groups that captured power in these countries engaged in new ways of courting the civilian public and articulating a different civil-military creed before and after ascending to power. In other countries, however, the curse of war produced cyclical conflict and the attendant corrosive place of the military in civilian life, the DRC and Central African Republic being prime examples. More generally, countries that did not undergo independence or postindependence armed conflict tended to evolve a distinct form of relations between the armed forces and civilian authorities and the civilian public compared to those that experienced different forms of warfare. Botswana and Tanzania are representative of the first category that contrasts with Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, and a good many others in the latter pool. How, then, does experience with warfare matter to civil-military relations in Africa? Warfare has long reflected the political context, and the types of wars fought have often reflected the nature of states and the modes of authority that shape regime proximity (Reno 2011, 2018). The actual performance of African militaries against the various threats they face has been given short shrift (Herbst 2004). But their experiences with warfare play crucial roles in shaping the organizational outlook and orientation of armed forces in their relations with civilian authorities and publics. From the perspective of social embeddedness, it is important to note that during internal warfare, civilians invariably get caught between belligerents as extensions of counterinsurgency strategies, as unfortunate bystanders, or as targets in and of themselves (Day and Reno 2014). Either way, militaries make wars, but wars also make militaries, and wars vary along myriad social, political, and economic dimensions. This variation, in turn, informs the terms of relations between regimes and militaries, as well as between militaries and civilian publics. Relations during wartime have implications for peacetime relations. Ethnic identity has long been salient to African politics and society, serving as a key marker for the structural issues that historically situate different Changing Patterns in Military Recruitment

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groups within political society and its institutions. Correspondingly, Africa’s militaries have been microcosms of sectarian divisions, with patterns of recruitment directly reflecting regime strategies. The relationship between ethnic identity and military power has shaped how regimes construct powersharing agreements among ethnic blocs, creating permissive conditions for what Roessler (2016: 5) has called the “coup-civil war trap,” where too much accommodation positions rival elites to harness military institutions to launch coups, and where too much exclusion pushes these rivals into open rebellion. Nathaniel Allen (2020) has also observed that “ethnic stacking”— when regime elites recruit coethnics into the state security apparatus—in fact serves a range of functions that include coup-proofing at the officer level, but also the ability to carry out irregular counterinsurgency at state peripheries through the lower echelons of the military hierarchy. A closer look shows that such patterns have certainly persisted in some African states, while they have become markedly nonsectarian in others. There is plenty of historical evidence pointing to sectarianism within Africa’s armies. For instance, in the 1970s the Ugandan military was the primary mode of advancement for Idi Amin’s coethnics, creating what Ali Mazrui called a military ethnocracy that tripled the number of commissioned offers, 68 percent of which came from Amin’s West Nile region (Mazrui 1975; Omara-Otunnu 1987). In Samuel Doe’s Liberia of the 1980s, the once marginal Krahn ethnic group found its way into the corridors of politico-military power, sparking off a period of violent political upheaval that had decidedly ethnic contours (Ellis 2006). In CAR, André Kolingba (1981–1993) stocked the Central African Armed Forces (FACA) with members of his Yakoma ethnic group. His successor, Felix Patassé, who created a 3,000-strong praetorian guard drawn from his northern Ouham-Pendé region, replicated this pattern. But there are also cases where strategies of ethnic stacking have been abandoned in favor of more deliberate efforts to build integrated national armies, or at the very least sidestep the problems of sectarianism. To this latter point, CAR’s Patassé and his successor-by-coup François Bozizé, having seemingly learned from the country’s coups and countercoups, sought to build an additional layer of coup-proofing by surrounding themselves with Chadian troops. In Uganda, the National Resistance Army (NRA) came to power with an explicitly nonsectarian agenda although its command structure was dominated by individuals from Museveni’s Ankole ethnic group. On its victory in 1986, the renovation of Uganda’s army involved forming new battalions based on patterns of communal integration developed while rebelling, which included incorporating fighters from a range of ethnic groups (Kuteesa 2006; Ori Amaza 1998). How do these patterns relate to contemporary civil-military relations in Africa? A clear implication is on social embeddedness, where the anatomy

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of armed forces either reflects sectarian divides or obviates them. To be sure, none of this is to say that recruitment has necessarily transitioned from sectarianism to ethnic-neutral meritocracy in all cases. However, there is some evidence that as Africa’s armies modernize and professionalize, there is an expectation that emergent modes of civil-military relations are prioritizing a code of professional ethics that is replacing tribal and parochial interests, particularly as militaries are increasingly reflecting broader patterns of institutionalization of African states. In the context of SSR, particularly in postconflict environments, building security forces that are representative of a given state’s ethnic anatomy is viewed as a strategy of conflict prevention. In recent decades, the domestic institutional context of most African states has undergone major changes, with important consequences for the place of their armed forces in political processes and social engagements. While much of the scholarly attention has traditionally focused on Africa’s patronagedriven informal institutions, a recent turn in the literature has reconsidered how formal institutions have progressively placed a range of constraints on African rulers, reshaping prevailing conceptions of Africa’s weak states and the everyday lives of the societies that occupy them (Cheeseman 2018). One form of these changes has been in political institutions—legislatures, judiciaries, and electoral commissions—where divergent trajectories of democratization may well be associated with corresponding outcomes in civil-military relations. Another form of institutional change has been economic. Against stalled and, in some instances, even negative growth in the 1970s and 1980s, the economies of several African countries have rebounded to show significant periods of sustained economic growth, with implications for power dynamics between politicians and soldiers. Consider the changes in political institutions. As the Cold War wound down, Botswana and Gambia were designated as Africa’s only two Free countries in Freedom House’s 1989 ranking (Freedom House 1990: 17). Until then, most African states were ruled by single-party or military regimes in varying and shifting combinations, which gave way to a wave of democratization in the early 1990s (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). Since then, at least six states have acquired sustained democratic governance and a considerable level of democratic consolidation (Freedom House 2019: 16). And although most of the continent is still considered only Partially Free by these same metrics, military rule as a mode of illiberal democracy has eroded substantially. From the vantage point of economic institutions, van de Walle’s comprehensive survey from two decades ago 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 Changing Domestic Institutional Context

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international assistance and domestic patronage politics (2001: 44). Since then, countries such as Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, and Ghana managed growth rates of over 6 percent by the mid-2010s (World Bank 2019: 108). The size of Ethiopia’s economy quadrupled in twenty years, sustaining one of the highest growth rates in the world. How might such patterns of institutional change shape civil-military relations? Politically, democratically consolidated countries have built professional national armies that approximate the conventional pattern in institutionalized democratic political systems, which reflect Huntington’s (1957) “objective civilian control.” Ghana’s political development illustrates this shift from the era of coups d’états (1966–1981) amid continued economic decline and political instability. It reflects a more “proper” mode of civil-military relations, but much of the continent has shown alternative patterns and pathways. In this sense, then, in systems with more democratic accountability, we would expect to see a mode of civil-military relations with low levels of regime proximity, but the trajectory of social embeddedness less clear. If economic decline ran parallel to the engagement of armed forces in politics, in some cases total disintegration of political order, these conditions have also diminished though they have not dissipated. 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 in the past, because rising middle classes are more difficult for military rulers to govern. Alternately, militaries 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. Where Africa’s regional and global normative environments may have once created permissive conditions for certain modes of civil-military relations, they have since changed in ways to constrain them. As mentioned earlier, the coup d’état no longer represents the widely available viable path to power that it once did, running afoul of AU proscriptions on noninstitutional means of assuming power (see Chapter 3) and the international coup taboo (see Chapter 4). Indeed, there was a time when coup makers easily captured power in the city by taking over the radio station, the airport, and the executive mansion. Occupying these simple sites in a national capital somehow meant securing the right to claim legitimacy on the international stage and the use of whatever value and benefits that came with international recognition. Christopher Clapham termed this “letterbox sovereignty”: whoever opened the letterbox in the presidential palace had the invitation to go to the UN and meetings of other international bodies and fora (1996: 20). This occurred irreChanges in Regional and Global Norms

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spective of actual internal administrative efficacy and empirical statehood. Today, there is a fundamental departure from bestowing external legitimacy to whoever falls backward into controlling the government—thus representing an end to “capital city rule” (Roessler 2016: 309). Yet, normative shifts have changed the nature of civil-military relations in ways that stretch beyond the coup. Evidence from Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire is particularly illustrative. As “a pure product of the Cold War,” Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja (2002: 142) pointed out, Zaire reflected geopolitical survival strategies that flourished within permissive normative conditions of the period. Mobutu was a key Western ally and his rule epitomized personal rule that worked well within the imperatives of the Cold War. To maintain his status as a US ally, he ensured that the military was a fraternity under his direct, personal control. Predatory behavior of the army and militias, including the frequent act of paying themselves, was often tolerated by their patron, whose behavior was in turn unchecked by Cold War external patrons. As the Cold War wound down, changing norms considerably upended this style of transactional politics, and the Zairean military soon embodied general state decay, so corrupt that fighter planes were personalized by individual commanders for commercial profiteering (Bayart 2009: 235–236). Civilmilitary relations in present-day Democratic Republic of Congo, much like in other countries in the region, are now underpinned by a different set of domestic political calculations, local bargains that include militia activities, warlord actors, and regional geopolitical dynamics. What are the implications of norm transformation for civil-military relations in Africa? The assumption is that militaries silo themselves from regime proximity and networks of social embeddedness. Yet, in what we observe as changing organization and behavior of Africa’s armies in domestic and regional politics, there has been a corresponding increase in foreign training programs and participation in peacekeeping missions ostensibly designed to reinforce these new norms. The conventional view of security sector reform has been that injecting resources into African militaries through foreign training or support for peacekeeping operations will transfer norms that decrease the likelihood of military interference in politics and maintain professional distance from the public. Yet, SSR often occurs without a nuanced appreciation for the political context in which civil-military relations occur, and foreign training can yield distinct outcomes in interaction with prevailing practices and norms, acting as an accelerant and not a retardant vis-à-vis modes of regime proximity and social embeddedness (see Chapter 7). Why This Book? Like many intellectual pursuits, the genesis of this book was in the field. As we quickly burned through a seed grant that funded several trips to Uganda and Rwanda, it soon dawned on us that our initial research goals, which

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included conducting surveys of African military officers in an ambitious continent-wide study, were unobtainable in the short term. These trips nevertheless confirmed our starting intuition that civil-military relations in Africa needed a solid rethink. This led to a one-day workshop at North Carolina State University in the fall of 2018, where we invited a group of scholars to participate in a collective rethinking exercise. The contributions were so many that they provided the basis for not one, but two, interrelated projects: a special issue of the journal Civil Wars and this book, which bears the workshop’s title. It is our goal here to make several key contributions to the study of civil-military relations in Africa. The first is to try to jump-start a literature that seems to have stalled out somewhere in between historical work and more recent policy-oriented research. As we have shown, there is a deep reservoir of scholarly work on African militaries, but much of it tends to be theoretically one-note and temporally static, fixated on the coup d’état and fizzling out toward the turn of the century. We view the prevailing scholarship as stranded in a place that has blown past key markers on the road to understanding African politics and society. To date, there is no corresponding conceptual and theoretical language to help navigate the normative expectations of Africa’s militaries and their actual practices in contemporary politics, or how and why civilmilitary relations on the continent have changed over time. It is therefore our intention to provide an essential bridge over these gaps and hopefully lead the scholarship to new territory. The second contribution is how we quite deliberately situate civilmilitary relations in a fairly distinct African context. What we think we know is that states do not necessarily institutionalize uniformly. We suspect strongly that a given state’s mode of civil-military relations is a close reflection of internal processes of institutionalization. To be sure, scholars and practitioners alike have been historically drawn to Africa’s patterns of political instability and the associated human costs for normative and empirical reasons. This has fostered an orientation toward solving the “problem” of Africa’s civil-military relations without paying sufficient attention to how politics and society work in African states at fundamental theoretical and empirical levels quite apart from Western expectations. In fact, what to many observers appears as malfunctioning civil-military relations is something we view as an extension of the politics of the ordinary rooted in social networks and historical experiences. This perspective also means taking the longue durée view of Africa’s experience with the uneven historical development of the international state system more generally. Finally, we seek to provide a baseline for new directions of research that help illuminate previously unforeseen gaps in the prevailing scholarship. There are multiple opportunities to examine civil-military relations not just from the perspective of the military’s role in regime politics, but also as a

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function of state-society relations. Here, Africa’s armies sit along two spectra—one of embeddedness within political institutions, and another of embeddedness within societal institutions—the boundaries between which are not always crisp and clear, but fluid and malleable. Equally, Africa’s civil-military relations are not simply bound by domestic politics, but also have significant regional and international dimensions. Here, the security concerns of multiple actors intersect with changing and continuous authority structures, resource flows, norm construction, and norm maintenance to create new institutional configurations that require scholarly attention. It is therefore our hope that this collection’s chapters outline what we see as a significant repositioning of the study of civil-military relations in Africa. Organization of the Book The remainder of this book is roughly divided into two trios of chapters. The first trio revisits the range of relationships between the changing nature of the coup d’état and Africa’s civil-military relations at domestic, regional, and global levels of analysis. It begins with “Political Legitimacy and Military Interventions” (Chapter 2), where Michael Ohene Aboagye and John F. Clark consider contrasting trajectories of either increasing or decreasing legitimacy as key to the likelihood of coups in Africa. Legitimacy is chiefly defined by prevailing studies as a combination of political liberalization or high economic development performance, particularly during the post-1990 era of political reform. Since that time, however, there has been growing disaffection with the results of democratic reform in Africa. Accordingly, the chapter tests the proposition that declining political legitimacy correlates with a higher incidence of coups, and the obverse. We then turn to the regional and global perspectives. “The African Union and the ‘Good Coup’” (Chapter 3) by Erin Damman and Christopher Day, examines the African Union’s role in the changing nature of coups in Africa. Given the sharp decline of coups on the continent, the chapter argues that the African Union has become a useful partner (wittingly or not) in coup-proofing incumbent regimes regardless of the legitimacy of these regimes. More broadly, the authors look at the African Union’s role in civil-military relations through the promotion of professional armies, the expansion of peacekeeping missions, and the transmission of norms where soldiers are socialized into becoming “guardians” of good governance. In “The ‘Coup Taboo’ and Authoritarian Politics” (Chapter 4), Moses Khisa analyzes the deepening of the norm against military coups, which has taken on the status of a taboo, simultaneous with parallel military actions that imperil democratization processes. Khisa argues that a coup taboo in international relations has led to the decline in coups, but has also created permissive conditions for antidemocratic practices through the power of the military, including unorthodox coups.

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The second trio examines some of the consequences of such changes, moving beyond the coup d’état to consider other aspects of civil-military relations in contemporary Africa. It begins with Jahara Matisek and William Reno’s “African Militaries and Contemporary Warfare” (Chapter 5), which focuses on the development of African militaries over time, outlining changes in their institutional capacity that also trace the shift away from coups and toward more robust counterinsurgency and increasing participation in regional peace operations. In “Military Effectiveness: The African Alternative” (Chapter 6), Jahara Matisek surveys conceptions of military power and effectiveness to highlight why African military effectiveness needs to be reconceptualized to speak to the particular contexts of African states. He argues that variations in military effectiveness are driven by the distinct security environment in specific African states, characterized by civil wars and peacekeeping operations. “Security Sector Reform and Civil-Military Relations” (Chapter 7) by Louis-Alexandre Berg analyzes the implications for civil-military relations of external assistance and institutional reform programs, a topic that has received little attention in the literature. Taking up two features of the SSR agenda—its emphasis on looking beyond the security sector to broader political dynamics, and its emphasis on external involvement—the chapter shows the incongruence between on the one hand donors’ operational short-term objectives, and on the other the domestic political context. Finally, in “Beyond the Coup d’État?” (Chapter 8), Erin Damman, Christopher Day, and Moses Khisa revisit the major outlines of the book and how the different chapters speak to the regime proximity–social embeddedness framework laid out in Chapter 1. Part of Chapter 8 highlights the unfinished business of understanding civil-military relations in Africa and the different directions of new research, ranging from the statesociety interface, patterns of recruitment, and SSR. The chapter also deals with foregrounding the distinct African context and how to liberate the study of civil-military relations from the straitjacket of Western normative assumptions and prescriptions. 1. Part of our recent work reconfigures the analytical tools to move beyond the binary conceptualization of “coup versus no coup.” See Khisa and Day (2020); Day, Khisa, and Reno (2020). 2. This observation is based on the authors’ analysis of curated data downloaded from The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, https://acleddata .com/data-export-tool/ [last accessed January 22, 2022].

Notes

2 Political Legitimacy and Military Interventions Michael Ohene Aboagye and John F. Clark

The legitimacy of the leadership depends on what that country thinks of its leaders.

—Zbigniew Brzezinski

Of all the potential wellsprings of contemporary Africa’s civil-military relations, changes in domestic political institutions provide an essential vantage point from which to examine things on the continent. While there has been a notable shift from informal authority networks to more robust formal institutions (Cheeseman 2018), it is not so much this move away from “institutionlessness” that matters to Africa’s civil-military relations. Rather, it is the concept of political legitimacy as a key component of Africa’s evolving democratic institutions that provides the most analytical leverage. That is because it sits at the intersection of the two theoretical dimensions of civil-military relations introduced in Chapter 1: regime proximity and social embeddedness. Legitimacy tempers the proximity of armies to regime authority by emancipating governments from having to politicize state militaries to control them. And legitimacy provides a distinct mechanism through which the social embeddedness of armies constrains their intervention in politics by way of democratic accountability. In this chapter, we argue that African regimes enjoying high or increasing levels of political legitimacy are far less prone to instances of military intervention in politics than others. Although this idea is completely intuitive, it contradicts the thinking of some other scholars about the incidence

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of military interventions against African regimes. In particular, it argues against the notion that the “control” of African militaries can be achieved through institutional arrangements or effective surveillance over the long term. It also questions the view that economic conditions are the principal determinants of military intervention, or the contrary. Economic growth and improving living standards are surely elements of political legitimacy, but they are not the most important ones: democratic legitimacy,1 or the legitimacy derived from public expressions of support through free elections, is central to the kind of durable legitimacy that insulates regimes from military intervention over time. Formerly democratic African regimes that lose legitimacy become much more vulnerable to military interventions than those (regrettably few) that consolidate democratic institutions and otherwise maintain legitimacy. This chapter does not contend that illegitimate African regimes will necessarily experience military intervention; abundant evidence suggests the opposite: many authoritarian regimes, often of military provenance themselves, have persisted for decades. The regimes of Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaïre), Muammar Qaddafi (Libya), and Gnassingbé Eyadéma (Togo) are among the military-derived authoritarian regimes that lasted thirty years or more, and Omar al-Bashir (Sudan) missed the mark by only three months. Some others, such as the regimes of Paul Kagame (Rwanda) and Yoweri Museveni (Uganda), are following the same path. All of these regimes made some claims to political legitimacy in their early years, based on ideology (Qaddafi), the restoration of order (al-Bashir, Mobutu), or economic performance (Kagame and Museveni). As the regimes wore on, however, they showed themselves to be personalist authoritarian regimes at their core, and all had to rely on surveillance of the military and other controls to prevent their intervention into politics. For personalist rulers coming from the military, this involves rigorous counterintelligence against coup plots and loyalist praetorian guard units. For civilian rulers, would-be coup makers have either been bought off with generous patronage, as in Kenya under Arap Moi, or threatened with foreign intervention against them, as in Gabon under Omar Bongo (Decalo 1998b). Many of these autocrats, however, like al-Bashir, Qaddafi, and Mobutu, faced insurgencies, civilian uprisings, and military interventions, once their respective grasps on power began to wane. In short, low or falling legitimacy is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for military interventions to take place. Nor do we maintain that highly legitimate regimes are completely impervious to military interventions. High or increasing levels of political legitimacy make military interventions unlikely, but not impossible. African countries remain largely underdeveloped and underinstitutionalized. With only a few exceptions, South Africa being one, military inter-

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ventions against prevailing authority remain a “thinkable” possibility in African polities. In this chapter, we implicitly argue against some more conventional notions about military interventions in African politics. For instance, we challenge the view that the military intervenes as a modernizing force, with the goal of stimulating rapid development; the view that the “corporate” interests of the military—real though these are—are the “cause” of military interventions; the view that the military has class interests, favoring either the bureaucratic bourgeoisie or the embattled masses; and the view that the individual ambition of officers is the key to understanding military interventions (see Horowitz 1981: 3–6; see also Chapter 1 this volume). Corporate military interests exist everywhere, as do ambitious soldiers and officers. In contemporary Africa, however, low and falling legitimacy is the most important context in which these interests and ambitions result in military interventions. The remainder of this chapter is divided into three substantive sections and a short conclusion. In the next section, we present the theoretical argument that legitimacy serves as a bulwark against military intervention and discuss the meaning of some key terms that we use. In the second section, we examine the record of military interventions in African politics from 2008 to 2018 in terms of the political legitimacy of the target regimes. We begin with a short discussion of the methods used to select the cases and identify the “hard cases,” or those that seem to be at odds with the theory. We briefly discuss the theory-conforming cases before tackling the hard cases one by one; a closer examination of each shows that most do conform to our theory, prima facie evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. These cases do cause us to provide some caveats. The final section of the chapter offers some brief concluding reflections. Political Legitimacy and Military Interventions: Theory and Prior Evidence In this chapter, we argue that African regimes with high or steadily increasing levels of legitimacy are relatively insulated against military interventions in politics, whereas those with declining legitimacy are particularly vulnerable to them. This argument builds on previous work by Staffan I. Lindberg and John F. Clark (2008) and John F. Clark (2007). In this section, we begin with a discussion of the theoretical link between political legitimacy and military interventions in African polities. The main argument requires that we perform some modest unpacking of each of these key terms, legitimacy being especially contested. Then, we review some of the key evidence in the literature on the link between legitimacy and military intervention from independence through 2007.

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The Theoretical Argument for Legitimacy as a Bulwark Against Intervention

Since soldiers and officers in armies around the world have regular access to arms, nothing in theory prevents them from attempting to seize power. In principle, all that is required is a practical plot by a sufficiently large group of soldiers or officers, and unwillingness of other military figures to defend civilian authorities. In the countries of Western Europe and North America, however, officers would never consider such actions. Further, those under their command would not reliably obey if ordered to assault civilian institutions. Why is this the case? The obvious answer is that military service members in the latter countries are psychologically conditioned to obey civilian authorities and to refrain from overt intervention in politics. Essentially, the political culture of the service members of Western militaries makes it virtually unthinkable for them to intervene directly in politics. This culture of obedience to civilian authorities was gradually inculcated into the minds of military personnel over decades. The process began in the late eighteenth century for the United States and Great Britain, after World War II for France and Germany, and only in the 1970s for Greece, Portugal, and Spain. This is evidently not the case for the officers and soldiers of African countries, however. An account by Patrick J. McGowan (2003: 345) showed that only six of sub-Saharan Africa’s forty-eight independent states avoided successful or attempted coups d’état from independence to 2001. Of the six, three (Eritrea, Namibia, and South Africa) had been independent or under majority rule for only a few years by that time; the other three were Botswana, Cape Verde, and Mauritius, among Africa’s rare longtime democracies. This empirical evidence shows on its face that there is a culture of military interventions across the African continent. Clark’s (2008) study of Congo-Brazzaville in the 1990s attempted to show, through a case study, that the real problem with the Congolese army after the democratic transition of 1991 was one of attitudes (i.e., political culture), and not an economic problem or an ethnic structure problem. It was the lack of moral commitment to the republic that led the army to split and join opposing sides of the civil war in 1997. Their moral commitment had been eroded by the growing illegitimacy of the Pascal Lissouba regime between 1992 and 1997. Further, not only officers, but even military “subalterns,” or soldiers in the ranks, have felt entitled to intervene in African politics when they were aggrieved, inclined, and likely to succeed (Kandeh 2004). The biggest source of their grievances was the evident corruption of the civilian political classes. In turn, rampant corruption is what destroyed the legitimacy that rulers had previously gained as a result of winning elections. By political legitimacy here, we simply mean the consent of the population at large to be ruled by a given regime at a moment in time. Unfortu-

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nately, however, legitimacy cannot be reliably measured or objectively determined in the fashion that quantitative political scientists would prefer. The closest proxy for assessing political legitimacy would be a public opinion poll asking whether a specific regime had the right to rule for some given period. Following Lindberg and Clark (2008: 88 and note 6, 104), we reject the notion that political legitimacy can be objectively determined on a legal or mechanical basis from the outside. Rather, political legitimacy is (only) a subjective feeling in the population. Although this subjective feeling can be measured through polls, such as those helpfully conducted by Afrobarometer, it is noteworthy that public opinion sometimes changes rapidly in response to political circumstances. For instance, when presidents remain after the end of their constitutionally mandated terms, democratic legitimacy can evaporate quickly. Below, we discuss some of the bases for political legitimacy, and how it can be lost. This commonsense understanding suggests three further features of political legitimacy. First, as the public polls illustration suggests, legitimacy is always a matter of degree, rather than being a matter of wholesale presence or absence. Western democracies generally have the concurrence with a large majority of the population of their legitimacy, but hardly that of every single citizen. A loss of legitimacy is almost always the precursor to “democratic breakdown” in industrialized countries, as in Africa. Authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, may well suffer from low legitimacy, but this is not to say that they enjoy none at all. Some regimes that have arisen through nondemocratic means may even enjoy a great deal of legitimacy, even though it is not democratic legitimacy, or that based on recognized democratic political processes. Second, and by extension of the first point, the level of legitimacy of any particular regime is usually either waxing or waning. This fluctuation in legitimacy levels may be well above the threshold that allows its adherents to feel relaxed about the possibilities of regime-destroying civilian uprisings or military interventions. Or, the fluctuation in levels of legitimacy may be below that threshold, in which case the foregoing possibilities become existential threats to regime survival. In Africa, where postcolonial institutions are new in general, and democratic experiments are newer still, the range of fluctuation in legitimacy tends to be wide. Oftentimes, the level of legitimacy continues either upward or downward over lengthy periods of time. In these cases, there is a trajectory to the level of political legitimacy: personalist regimes may become more arbitrary and repressive over time, leading to a steady loss of legitimacy (consider the Mobutu regime from 1967 to 1990); or a new multiparty regime may accrue legitimacy as each successive election becomes more free and fair (consider Ghana between 1992 and 2000). Such trajectories matter for military interventions, as discussed below.

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Third, success in competitive democratic processes is one way, but not the only way, in which regimes can gain or maintain public legitimacy. Before 1990, multiparty democratic political systems were extremely rare in Africa, and yet some regimes enjoyed considerable legitimacy over long stretches of time. They could do so because African publics did not necessarily expect their leaders to compete in multiparty contests for power— this, too, was a feature of political culture in Africa, particularly before 1990. Samuel Decalo (1998b) made a plausible case that the regime of Hastings Banda in Malawi enjoyed great public legitimacy, based on the ruler’s “traditional authority,” in spite of his repression of opposition forces. He behaved in some ways like a precolonial chief, and the public (arguably) accepted him as their leader on that basis. More generally, alternate sources of legitimacy are not particular to Africa, and they are in fact universal. There are goods that all human beings crave more than either civil liberties or the right of political participation, and chief among these are physical security and economic sustenance. If we were to apply Abraham Maslow’s (1943) “hierarchy of needs” to whole human societies, a voice in political life would sit at the top of the pyramid, representing the equivalent of “self-actualization” for the individual. For national populations, as for individuals, physical security and sufficient economic resources to sustain life are more fundamental needs than freedom. Accordingly, for regimes to maintain their legitimacy, they must first provide for the public order and general security of the population. A regime that fails to protect most citizens from predation either from armed civilians or rogue elements of the security forces eventually loses legitimacy, just as Thomas Hobbes (1968) argued centuries ago. Further, regimes must establish economic systems that allow the population to meet their basic economic needs for sustenance. This view of legitimacy suggests that political legitimacy is contextual; it depends in particular on the levels of physical and economic security for the population. In the industrialized countries, populations can generally take these collective goods for granted, but not so in Africa. In the past decade, several African countries including Central African Republic (CAR), Libya, Somalia, and South Sudan have been “shattered by civil war,” to use the Freedom House (2019) phrase. The restoration of public order and the cessation of rampant predation by armed groups of the civilian population would have to precede free and fair elections in these countries. Thus, political legitimacy might (temporarily) accrue to any regime that could achieve these goals. Other African countries— Ethiopia, Malawi, and Niger spring to mind—have experienced either food insecurity or outright famine. Political legitimacy in these countries would logically, if temporarily, accrue to any regime that could end such life-threatening perils. Once basic sustenance and security can be taken

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for granted by most, the exigencies of democratic legitimacy gradually become stronger. Finally, we should examine legitimacy from the opposite angle, and ask how regimes lose legitimacy and make themselves vulnerable to being overthrown. Our understanding of legitimacy suggests four ways in which regimes can lose legitimacy. We have already discussed the first three; namely, by failing to provide basic protection to people, by failing to organize the economy to provide basic economic sustenance, and by using repression rather than other acceptable means to stay in power. Regimes can also lose legitimacy in one further way, however, that is more subtle: through the paralysis of government institutions that results from institutional stalemates. Institutional crises typically result from disputes between central and regional governments or between different branches of government, as when the judiciary delegitimizes the executive or when the executive and legislature refuse to cooperate on the basic purposes of government. In Europe, such an institutional crisis led to the end of the French Fourth Republic and was accompanied by an overt intervention of the military in politics. Institutional crises in Africa have usually involved stalemates between legislatures and presidents where a semipresidential system has been in place. When institutional stalemates cannot be resolved or contained by the political class, they result in an inevitable erosion of the legitimacy of governments, sometimes leading to military interventions. This understanding of political legitimacy frames a restatement of our basic proposition: we expect military intervention to be more common for low legitimacy regimes than for high legitimacy regimes. Although legitimacy cannot be measured precisely, the public popularity of regimes and the presence of free and fair elections are useful, if partial, proxies for legitimacy. When regimes lose legitimacy with the public—for instance, by organizing fraudulent elections—they become more vulnerable to military interventions. In addition, the trajectory of legitimacy has an impact on the likelihood of military interventions: when legitimacy wanes for an extended period of time, military actors are more likely to try intervention than otherwise, even when the overall level of public legitimacy may be far from rock bottom. This observation is particularly important for the many partly free regimes in Africa; those that are partly free but become more repressive are much more vulnerable to military intervention than those partly free regimes that are liberalizing (Clark 2006). Regimes that lose legitimacy for other reasons discussed above are all more vulnerable to military interventions. The theoretical argument here may seem tautological. That is, we claim that legitimacy is the key to preventing military interventions, but we acknowledge that legitimacy cannot be precisely measured. A skeptic of our view might therefore claim that a military intervention is the only

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real definitive proof that a regime has become illegitimate and, therefore, our basic reasoning is circular. But this is not the case. We acknowledge that regimes can suddenly lose legitimacy (as when a sitting president announces a constitutional change to stay on for an extra term), or gradually lose legitimacy (as in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe beginning in 1980) without necessarily triggering an intervention. We argue only that such regimes become more vulnerable to military interventions and must take greater precautions to preclude them. On the other hand, regimes that are gradually gaining in legitimacy, even when starting from a relatively low base, are far less vulnerable to military intervention. Military personnel know that their attempts to seize power or lead a succession are far less likely to succeed in these conditions. The latter aspect relates to the notion of social embeddedness while, on the other hand, the idea of less vulnerability speaks to proximity, the two conceptual pillars introduced in Chapter 1. Legitimacy and Military Interventions in Africa: Evidence Through 2007

What is the evidence for the proposition that regimes with low or falling legitimacy are more prone to military interventions than those with high or rising legitimacy? Answering this question is tricky in the absence of reliable measures of legitimacy, the problem noted above. Although the leaders of the Afrobarometer project have done brilliant survey work in Africa, they have conducted surveys in only thirty-seven of Africa’s fifty-four countries so far. Many of the most coup-prone countries, such as CAR, Chad, CongoBrazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Mauritania, and South Sudan, have been excluded from their surveys. Finally, the surveys are too infrequent to determine whether a given regime is enjoying rising legitimacy or the converse. In a qualitative fashion, however, outside observers can make reasonable judgments about the decline of legitimacy. For instance, if a country that is enjoying order and stability suddenly faces a new insurgency or secession attempt not emanating from the military, and the regime shows no ability to contain such a rebellion, legitimacy will surely decline. Likewise, if a regime is not able to deal with food insecurity that turns into famine, it will begin to lose legitimacy as the crisis worsens. In terms of democratic legitimacy, regimes lose legitimacy when they stage fraudulent elections, when they arbitrarily change constitutional rules to create “electoral authoritarian” systems, or when they fail to manage conflicts among different branches of government (i.e., when they fail to manage institutional crises). In the absence of such circumstances, we expect military interventions to be rare. Another challenge in evaluating our main proposition is in assigning meaning to the term military intervention. The term military intervention is preferable to the more conventional term coup d’état because it includes two

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categories of action by the military that can lead to regime change—and regime change is the main outcome that should interest students of African politics. Besides the classic coup d’état, another form of military intervention in politics is the launching of insurgencies from areas outside the capital city by military personnel; although rarer than the usual coup, military-led insurgencies do sometimes lead to regime change. These should be included in the analysis of military interventions. Second, prolonged civilian uprisings that challenge prevailing authorities create situations in which the military essentially “intervenes,” no matter how it acts. In many instances, civilian uprisings can be handled by police or paramilitary forces (e.g., a gendarmerie or civil guard), especially if the uprising is minor. In such cases as these, there is no military intervention. In cases where such uprisings are larger or more prolonged, however, the regular military is forced to intervene, and it does so whether it moves to sustain the regime in power or to nudge it out of power. Even inaction by the military in the face of rising civilian protests constitutes a form of intervention in politics—implicitly, the military recognizes the legitimacy of the claims of civilian protesters when it fails to defend the institutions of a prevailing regime. Under our theory, we would expect the military to intervene in favor of civilian uprisings more often when such uprisings target regimes that have squandered their political legitimacy. We are all-too-well aware, however, that militaries often protect illegitimate, authoritarian regimes, particularly when the rulers have themselves come from the military. There is no denying that illegitimate regimes can persist in power for long periods with military backing. Returning to the meaning of “military intervention,” another problem with the literature on coups d’état is that it often suffers from the opposite problem identified above, in including too much. Namely, many broad studies of coups d’état include data on and analysis of “coup plots” (e.g., McGowan 2003). This is highly problematic for three main reasons. First, there can never be any consensus on what constitutes a “coup plot” since any negative or threatening conversation among a group of soldiers or officers could conceivably be considered a coup plot or even a “coup attempt.” Second, for every coup plot that becomes public, and entered into a coding scheme, many more coup plots never come to light. Third, authoritarian regimes regularly use the specter of a coup plot as a pretext to purge potential opposition figures or those suspected of disloyalty from the officer ranks. Even some publicly announced coup attempts are unreal creations of ruling authoritarians who use them as pretexts to pursue suspected power seekers, as documented by Fiona Shen-Bayh (2018). Thus, not much should be made of either alleged coup plots or even coup attempts, unless there is public evidence of the attempted coup. With these specifications in mind, what does the evidence from the beginning of independence suggest about the relationship between legitimacy

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and military interventions? One way to examine the evidence would be to review the number of military interventions decade by decade, beginning with the 1960s. McGowan (2003) conducted such a counting exercise in his overview of military interventions, specifically tabulating the number of “successful and failed coups” for every five-year period, starting with the 1956–1960 period, and ending in 2001.2 McGowan counted the following numbers of coups or coup attempts by decade: thirty-six for the 1960s, fifty-seven for the 1970s, forty-two for the 1980s, and forty-one for the 1990s, with the average per decade being forty-six. On its face, these numbers would seem to disconfirm the theory that legitimacy can inoculate against military interventions. The 1960s was a decade of falling legitimacy for a great many African regimes, most of which started their existences with competitive elections organized by colonial powers. By the end of the decade, most were either de facto or de jure one-party states, with authoritarian, often revolutionary, regimes in vogue. Further, one might have expected more coups or coup attempts in the 1980s, as economic decline and structural adjustment brought escalating public dissatisfaction with authoritarian regimes. Most surprising of all, a “legitimacy theorist” would have expected many fewer military interventions in the 1990s, given the rapid spread of new, multiparty constitutions that coincided with the third wave of global democratization. Yet, the actual number for that decade (forty-one) was only slightly below average. There are, however, alternative ways to interpret these data. For instance, it could be the case that the illegitimacy of the independence era regimes only became manifest in the 1970s, which might explain the high level of coup events in that decade. If one looks at the five-year periods, there was a steady increase in the number of coup events from 1961 to 1965 (thirteen coup events) to the 1976–1980 period (thirty coup events). These steady increases could be explained by a diffusion of the culture of coup making in Africa, but also secular declines in levels of legitimacy during this period. Turning to the 1990s, we should recall that only sixteen regimes of the forty in sub-Saharan Africa actually experienced a democratic transition, defined as the introduction of a new multiparty system and the advent of a new presidential leader (VonDoepp and Villalón 2005). Some of these transitions, such as that in Mali in 1991, involved military interventions to displace long-standing dictators. In addition, some of the regimes that were elected, such as the Lissouba regime in Congo-Brazzaville, soon lost legitimacy, inviting military intervention (Clark 2008). Finally, it is also notable that, according to the database of Monty Marshall and Donna Marshall (2018), there were only twenty-five coups or coup attempts in Africa between 2001 and 2010. Arguably, as more regimes gained legitimacy in this period, the numbers of coups and attempted coups declined.

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Some published research during this period suggested specifically that African regimes benefiting from rising democratic legitimacy experienced fewer interventions. Clark (2007) showed that the trajectory of democratic legitimacy, based on Freedom House scores, was related to the incidence of successful coups d’états: few regimes with good (and stable) scores for Civil Liberties and Political Rights, or regimes with steady improving scores in these categories, experienced successful coups from the outside of the political reform era until the mid-2000s. Lindberg and Clark (2008), using somewhat different categories, subjected the same basic ideas to statistical tests. They divided African regimes into “electoral democracies,” “liberalizing regimes,” and “electoral authoritarian regimes” based on their Freedom House Civil Liberties scores over time; the middle category was composed of regimes whose Civil Liberties scores were improving in the two years before elections. They found that Africa’s electoral democracies, regimes with relatively consolidated democratic systems, had less than a two percent chance per year of experiencing a military intervention (2008: 94) in a given year; meanwhile, “liberalizing regimes” had a 6.5 percent chance of a military intervention in any given year, and electoral authoritarian regimes had a 14 percent chance. The sole case of a successful coup against an established electoral democracy was that in Gambia in 1994; there were four other coup attempts against such regimes between 1989 and 2004. In general, (illegitimate) electoral autocracies were more than seven times more likely to experience a military intervention. During the next three years, there were two additional successful coups in Africa (in Togo and Mauritania, both in 2005) and two failed coup attempts (in Chad and Guinea, both in 2006). Of these, all were in autocratic countries, and that in Mauritania was in against a long-reigning dictator, Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya. Thus, the period from 1989 through 2007 was one of a declining number of military interventions in general, and of few interventions against politically legitimate regimes. The Linkage Between Legitimacy and Military Restraint: Evidence from 2008 to 2018 In this section, we review the evidence for a connection between political legitimacy and military restraint, or nonintervention in African politics, over the past twelve years. We follow up on the literature of the mid 2000s cited above, and cover a period following 2007, a year in which Africa saw no recorded coups or coup attempts (Marshall and Marshall 2018). This period provides us with an opportunity to see whether the patterns observable in the earlier period of political reform persisted into the second, more troubled, period of political liberalization. By the start of this period, about nine African countries had emerged as stable multiparty democracies, with

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regular, free and fair elections. These included the three West African states of Benin, Ghana, and Senegal; the three southern African states of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa; and the three island countries of Cape Verde, Mauritius, and São Tomé and Príncipe. All were consistently ranked Free by Freedom House through the period. Tunisia went from Not Free to Partly Free in the 2012 survey, and then to Free in the 2015 survey, where it has remained. Lesotho wavered back and forth between Free (in 2008–2009 and 2013–2015) and Partly Free (in 2010–2012 and 2016– 2019) in the Freedom House rankings, as did a few other African states. The remainder of African states were roughly split between those ranked Not Free or Partly Free, with some movement between the two categories. There was thus a range of environments against which to test the proposition that military intervention against legitimate regimes remains rare. We used the Freedom House rankings as the best available measure for political legitimacy, bearing in mind that legitimacy moves along a continuum and can vary in democratic and nondemocratic systems. The remainder of this section is divided into two parts. In the first part, we examine some of the broad tendencies in civil-military relations on the continent during this period that broadly confirm the pattern established for the earlier period by Lindberg and Clark (2008). One of these is that coups and coup attempts against legitimate, democratic regimes remain rare; another is that “good coups” against authoritarian regimes can be welcomed by national populations and the international community, often leading to greater political freedoms; and a third is that the military is likely to abandon authoritarian regimes and join with the public in the case of persistent, determined civilian uprisings. In the second part of this section, we examine five “hard cases,” which do not on their face support the thesis of legitimacy serving as an inoculation against military intervention. These hard cases are divided into two groups. The first group, including the cases of the coups in Mauritania (2008), Mali (2012), and Egypt (2013), comprises cases in which democratically elected regimes arguably lost legitimacy due to their behavior in power. The second group, the cases of Guinea (2008) and Guinea-Bissau (2012), are harder still to explain in terms of legitimacy. They serve to remind us that countries with a strong culture of military rule or interference may experience military interventions even when legitimate regimes are in power. From a liberal perspective, military intervention in politics is almost always undesirable. In the cases of legitimate and democratic regimes, liberals consistently prefer that political outcomes be determined through free and fair elections whenever possible. Where illegitimate regimes prevail, liberals prefer that such regimes be overturned through demonstrations and passive resistance, rather than through military interventions. Unfortunately, some autocrats are simply not responsive to civilian demonstra-

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tions. Accordingly, some liberals (notably Varol 2017) have realized that legitimate democracies can sometimes be established or reestablished through military interventions. In fact, in the cases where autocrats are determined to retain their power, even at the cost of hundreds or thousands of civilian deaths, military intervention may be the only practical way to restore or establish legitimate and democratic government. Turning to the military interventions in Africa over the past decade, a majority of these have been against illegitimate regimes; these include regimes that had come to power through insurgencies or military coups themselves, or regimes that began to behave in an autocratic fashion after coming to power in (more or less) free elections. There were also a surprising number of cases where militaries intervened on behalf of civilian uprisings that sought to supplant autocratic regimes. To begin with the coups and attempted coups in Africa, Marshall and Marshall (2018) enumerated twenty attempted coups and six successful coups from 2008 to 2018 (see Table 2.1). Interestingly, five of the six Table 2.1 Coups or Attempted Coups in Africa, by Freedom House Ranking, 2008–2018 Coups/Attempts Against Not Free Regimes Result Burundi (2015)

Gambia (2014)

Failed

Guinea-Bissau (2012-second) Mali (2012-second) South Sudan (2013) Sudan (2008)

Failed

Burkina Faso (2015) Central African Republic (2013) Egypt (2013) Guinea-Bissau (2008-first) Guinea-Bissau (2008-second) Guinea-Bissau (2009) Guinea-Bissau (2010) Guinea-Bissau (2012) Madagascar (2010)

Failed

Niger (2010)

Chad (2008) DRC (2011) DRC (2013)

Failed

Coups/Attempts Against Partly Free Regimes

Failed

Failed Failed

Equatorial Failed Guinea (2009) Eritrea (2013) Failed Guinea (2008)

Succeeded Failed Failed

Mauritania (2008)

Source: Authors’ own. Note: DRC = Democratic Republic of Congo.

Result

Failed

Failed

Coups/Attempts Against Free Regimes Result

Lesotho (2009) Failed Lesotho (2004) Failed

Succeeded Mali (2012)

Failed Failed

Failed

Failed

Succeeded Failed

Succeeded

Succeeded

Succeeded

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successful coups were carried out against civilian governments, and these five are examined in detail in the section below. Most (but not all) of the failed coup attempts were against illegitimate and autocratic regimes, and they were conducted without support from civilian populations. Eleven of the failed coups were attempted against regimes that were rated Not Free by Freedom House at the time of the attempted coup;3 these included the regimes in Chad (2008), Sudan (2008), Equatorial Guinea (2009), the DRC (2011 and 2013), Mali (2012—after successful coup of this year), Guinea-Bissau (2012—after a successful coup of the same year), Eritrea (2013), South Sudan (2013), Gambia (2014), and Burundi (2015). None of these regimes could make even the faintest case that it was legitimate. The successful coup in a Not Free country was the 2008 seizure of power by Moussa Dadis Camara in Guinea following the death in office of Lansana Conté. Eleven other coup attempts were carried against regimes rated Partly Free by Freedom House, including attempts against regimes in Mauritania (2008), Guinea-Bissau (two attempts in 2008, plus attempts in 2009, 2010, and 2012), Madagascar (2010), Niger (2010), CAR (2013), Egypt (2013), and Burkina Faso (2015). Despite its Partly Free ranking, Guinea-Bissau has clearly been caught up in a cycle of recurrent military interventions that have prevented any government from gaining lasting legitimacy. Madagascar in 2010 was in the hands of a ruler who had come to power through an unconstitutional process, through which the parliament had been suspended; its ranking for Political Rights was a six out of seven (seven being the lowest score). As for the CAR, Freedom House had the following to say in its (precoup) 2013 report: “The CAR is not an electoral democracy. The 2011 presidential and parliamentary elections were marked by irregularities and criticized by opposition candidates as unfair.”4 Any of these regimes could quite easily have been rated as Not Free rather than Partly Free. The more interesting cases of Burkina Faso and Egypt are discussed below. Finally, there are the anomalous cases of the two coup attempts (the first more of an assassination attempt) in Lesotho, rated as Free, in 2009 and 2014. Although each intervention unfolded in a tense political environment, after disputed elections, both serve to remind us that military interventions against governments enjoying political legitimacy are rare but not unknown. There was one clear case of a “good” (i.e., pro-democracy) coup during the past decade, that in Niger against the regime of former president Mamadou Tandja. Tandja had been freely elected in November 1999 following the end of a preceding military regime and had subsequently been reelected in an uncontested vote in November 2004. As the end of his second (and last) constitutional term approached in 2009, however, Tandja began to float the idea of a constitutional referendum to allow him to

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remain in power. When this idea was resisted in the National Assembly and the Constitutional Court, Tandja dissolved each institution in May and June 2009, respectively, and announced that he would rule by decree (EIU 2010). Tandja then organized the referendum that would have allowed him to serve additional terms in power; the measure passed in an August 2009 poll, though it was boycotted by the opposition and highly contested. This was the political context in which Lieutenant General Salou Djibo seized power the following February 2010. Djibo headed a government that organized free elections in January (first round) and March (second round) of 2011, leading to the election of the current president, Mahamadou Issoufou, who was reelected in 2016. It remains to be seen whether the military interventions that supplanted Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe, December 2017) and Omar al-Bashir (Sudan, April 2019) will prove to be good coups, but at least they modestly opened the political space for the opposition and civil society in each country. There were many other cases of the military backing civilian protestors who brought down illegitimate regimes over the past decade. Typically, the military backs civilian protests only when these were determined and sustained. The first such cases happened during the so-called Arab Spring protests in 2011, when the Tunisian military stood by without assisting the police, who unsuccessfully tried to protect the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali regime; in the case of Egypt, the military likewise refused to join the police in defusing public protests, and then belatedly took control of the country after Hosni Mubarak resigned under extreme pressure in February 2011. In Libya, part of the military revolted against the rule of Muammar Qaddafi, the country’s ruler for over forty-one years, and won power with the backing of the the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Since the Arab Spring, civilian uprisings have displaced two other longtime dictators from power; namely, Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso (2014) and Omar alBashir (2019). In the Burkinabè case, a coup attempt in 2015 was thwarted when the civilian population again turned out to back the interim government that was then organizing free elections. The civilian protestors in Sudan showed enormous determination and resilience, refusing to allow the military cronies of al-Bashir to succeed him when he stepped down in April 2019. Instead, civilians continued their demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience until reaching a complicated power-sharing agreement with military authorities in July 2019 (EIU 2019: 4). Many of the patterns of the past decade, then, tend to confirm the theory of military forbearance in the face of legitimate rule. Hardly any of the many attempted coups d’état in recent years have been against legitimate governments rated by Freedom House as Free, the two in Lesotho and that in Mali being the exceptions. In a few cases, the military has even ended regimes that had become illegitimate (as in Niger 2010) and

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allowed civilians to organize new free elections. Most heartening of all, many African militaries have declined to join the police in ending civilian protests through the vigorous use of violent force. Civilian protesters have overthrown illegitimate regimes in Tunisia (2011), Egypt (2011), Burkina Faso (2014), and most recently Sudan (2019) with the tolerance of military establishments. Thus far, relatively stable democracy has evolved only in Tunisia following these changes in power. Moreover, the Sudanese military has shown extreme reluctance to return power to a purely civilian government. Yet, the recent refusal of African militaries to use extreme force to quash civilian movements bodes well for the expansion of free and legitimate governments in Africa. Hard Cases: Coups Against Regimes that Appeared Legitimate In this final section, we examine five hard cases for our theory, cases of coups that were unexpected from a democratic legitimacy perspective. In two of the cases, those of Mauritania (2008) and Egypt (2013), newly elected regimes that had been in power for about one year were overthrown through military intervention. In these cases, the elected regimes had been preceded by authoritarian rule. A third case, that of Mali in 2012, is even harder to understand in terms of our theory since the military intervention of that year overthrew an apparently well-established and democratically elected government in power for nearly ten years. In two further cases (Guinea 2008 and Guinea-Bissau 2012) the military interventions occurred against interim regimes soon after the deaths in office of two sitting presidents. The Guinea-Bissau case poses a greater challenge to the “illegitimacy theory” of coups. At the end of this section, we take stock of the lessons of these coups against regimes with reasonable claims of legitimacy. Among the cases that appear to undermine our thesis is that of the 2008 coup in Mauritania. The advent of multiparty institutions and elections there in 2007 should have ensured legitimacy for the new regime for at least several years. But a close examination of the details reveals that the new regime never really consolidated power, and it lost legitimacy relatively quickly after coming to power. Before 2005 Mauritania had been the scene of a series of military interventions, beginning with the 1978 coup that overturned the rule of Mokhtar Ould Daddah, the country’s first president. After a further series of coups and countercoups, Colonel Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya (Ould Taya) took the reins on December 12, 1984, and remained in power until his overthrow in August 2005. The leaders of the military junta that ousted the long-serving dictator Ould Taya set about returning the country to civilian rule, culminating in the March 2007 pres-

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idential and legislative elections (Freedom House 2007). The presidential contest was won by Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi (Ould Abdallahi), whose election was arguably the first free and fair presidential election in Mauritania’s entire political history (N’Diaye 2009). Ould Abdallahi’s election ushered in a democratic experiment that was widely hailed by many as a good example. This phase of Mauritania’s political history, however, was short-lived; after just fifteen months of being in power, Ould Abdallahi was overthrown by the military on August 6, 2008 (Hochman 2008). On its face, the coup is puzzling since the coup makers of 2005 had set Mauritania on a liberalizing trajectory, culminating in President Ould Abdallahi’s election. Nonetheless, two plausible explanations for the coup can be offered that do not contradict our theory. The first explanation is that the Ould Abdallahi regime was not allowed adequate time to firmly establish its legitimacy. President Ould Abdallahi was overthrown in barely fifteen months of being in power by the head of the Presidential Guard, General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz (Hochman 2008). Even though General Abdel Aziz was clearly motivated by his self-seeking political ambitions, the Ould Abdallahi regime had not had enough time to consolidate the country’s new democratic institutions. In its early 2008 report, Freedom House (2007) had given Mauritania only a rating of 4 for Political Rights and another 4 in Civil Liberties (where 1 is the best score, and 7 the worst), and hence its Partly Free designation at that time. If the Mauritanian people had had more time to absorb the new democratic culture, Abdel Aziz and his plotters might have been deterred from their plan of ending the democratic experiment for their personal gains. The second explanation is that the little legitimacy that had accrued to the new Ould Abdallahi regime withered away quickly as a result of an institutional crisis that quickly engulfed it. The crisis pitted the new president, on one hand, against the legislature and the military establishment on the other. The immediate cause of the putsch was President Ould Abdallahi’s move to dismiss top military leaders—including the leader of the putsch, General Abdel Aziz—on the morning of the day the coup took place (Freedom House 2009). The military was deeply involved in politics during the short-lived democratic experiment, and this became a constant source of distress for the president, as the activities of some of them, especially those of General Abdel Aziz, tended to undermine his presidential authority. For instance, Abdel Aziz was thought to be trying to influence cabinet appointments and, also, to be offering support to some members of a pro-presidential party (Pacte National pour la Démocracie et le Développement, PNDD) who were rebelling against the president (N’Diaye 2009). Feeling hamstrung by the activities of these military figures who remained in the corridors of power after the 2007 transition, President Ould Abdallahi finally made the fateful move of dismissing four of the military top brass. This precipitated

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his overthrow. Also, the president included in his government hardline Islamists and former members of the Taya regime, drawing criticism from the military leaders and even from members of the PNDD (Freedom House 2009). Under the threat of a parliamentary no-confidence vote, Ould Abdallahi’s government resigned in June 2008, and he formed a new one. This time, the new government included only members of the PNDD. Yet, this move failed to gain the confidence of the National Assembly. On August 4, 2008, forty-eight members of Ould Abdallahi’s Assembly quit the party, offering some impetus to the military intervention that happened two days after. In short, the coup came in the context of a political crisis that had enveloped a fledgling democratic regime. Clearly, this military intervention in Mauritania at a moment when the country had embarked on a democratic journey undermines the notion that legitimacy insulates against such interventions. But the case also suggests that new democratic institutions may have to withstand some tests before they imbue elected regimes with enough legitimacy to deter military interventions. Further, when new transitional democratic regimes suffer from institutional crises and elite disagreements, like that which developed between the executive and the legislature/military establishment, they open the door for military interventions, as happened in Mauritania and Niger in previous decades. The Egyptian case is another one of a transitional democratic regime being expelled from power after little more than one year in power. On July 3, 2013, President Muhammad Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, was ousted from power by the military, having taken office on June 30 of the previous year. Prior to Morsi’s presidency, Egypt had had a long history of military rule, beginning with Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954, and continuing under two other former army officers, Anwar Sadat (1970– 1981) and Hosni Mubarak (1981–2011). Following popular protests that toppled Mubarak’s authoritarian regime in February 2011, the Egyptian military continued to rule on an interim basis until June 2012. Morsi was elected on the ticket of the Freedom and Justice Party, an Islamist political party with strong links to the Muslim Brotherhood, by a slim 52–48 percent margin (Freedom House 2014). Morsi had received only 25 percent of the vote in the first round, only 1 percent more than Ahmed Shafik, who had served as Mubarak’s last prime minister. Turnout was low in both the first round (46 percent) and second round (52 percent) of the elections, reflecting the uncertainty of an electorate unused to competitive electoral contexts. Despite Morsi’s historical election, Egypt’s Freedom House scores were only 5 for Political Rights and 5 for Civil Liberties at the outset of 2013 (Freedom House 2014). On June 30, 2013, just a year into Morsi’s presidency, thousands of Egyptians took to the streets to demand that Morsi step down (Arafa 2014:

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865). The Egyptian military seized the opportunity to intervene after issuing an ultimatum that essentially gave the politicians forty-eight hours to meet the demands of the demonstrators. After the expiration of the ultimatum, on July 3, 2013, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi—the current president of Egypt and the then minister of defense—announced the ouster of President Morsi on television (Osman 2015). Following the intervention, the military installed the president of the Supreme Constitutional Court, Chief Justice Adly Mansour, as acting president. Among other things, Mansour was charged with forming a technocratic government until a new presidential election was held. These events took place in May 2014 under a pall of heavy repression and opposition boycotts, leading to the election of al-Sisi as Egypt’s sixth president. Morsi’s removal certainly represents a challenge to our thesis that legitimacy insulates against military intervention, especially in light of the fact that he was Egypt’s first democratically elected president. Yet it is notable that the military acted only in the context of a large civilian uprising that called for his resignation.5 We have already noted that major uprisings against authoritarian regimes create an enabling environment for the military to intervene. In the case of authoritarian regimes, the military is mostly guided in such circumstances by the calculus of likely punishments and rewards for supporting a dictator. For transitional democratic regimes, though, the question is whether the new regime is accruing or losing public legitimacy. In the Egyptian case, it is instructive to note that Morsi’s presidency was characterized by many illiberal tendencies, which appear to have precipitated the civilian uprisings. Thus, in the eyes of the public, Morsi was not accruing legitimacy so as to insulate himself against possible military overthrow. As Arafa (2014: 865–866) succinctly put it, “The fundamental concerns for demanding Morsi’s stepping-down comprised allegations that he was gradually pushing through a totalitarian, Islamist program without regard to liberal adversaries or the rule of law.” One of the moves that greatly eroded Morsi’s political legitimacy was the claim he made to “extensive executive powers in a decree he defended as necessary to ensure the adoption of a new constitution in a chaotic political environment’’ (Freedom House 2014: 1). This new constitution that he sought was seen by many as undermining basic freedoms and violating universal rights (McDonnell 2016). Given the closeness of the 2012 poll, Morsi started his presidency with a slim margin of legitimacy, and he squandered some of what he had by further alienating the opposition to his regime. Thus, whereas the Egyptian case may appear to disconfirm our theory at first glance, a deeper analysis suggests otherwise. In terms of our theory of legitimacy, the 2012 military intervention in Mali is on its face even more problematic than the Mauritanian and Egyptian coups for two important reasons. First, it happened at a time when Mali

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was held up as a model of democracy, even a consolidated democracy. Second, the intervention took place just five weeks ahead of a planned presidential election. The military intervention, beginning as a mutiny and culminating in a coup d’état, disrupted nearly twenty years of multiparty elections in Mali dating to 1992 (Bleck and Michelitch 2015). The president at the time, Amadou Toumani Touré (often called “ATT”) was nearing the end of his second and final legal term and, therefore, was not participating in the 2012 presidential election. In fact, most observers expected the election to provide a peaceful transfer of power from one civilian president to another (Wing 2013). Freedom House’s (2013b: 3) report on Mali noted that “freedoms of assembly and association were respected prior to the coup, and nongovernmental organizations operated actively without interference.” Mali’s scores were an impressive 2 for Political Rights and 3 for Civil Liberties. Since ATT’s administration appeared to be enjoying adequate democratic legitimacy at that critical moment, further investigation of the circumstances of the coup is warranted. The main catalyst for the intervention was the Malian president’s inept handling of the security situation that had developed in the north of the country. Following the Libyan revolution in 2011, Tuareg soldiers who had fought for ousted Libyan dictator Qaddafi returned to Mali, having been empowered by the outpouring of arms resulting from the Libyan implosion (Wing 2013). Around the same time, Tuareg fighters in Mali formed the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), demanding independence for northern Mali (Wing 2013). The returning Tuareg fighters joined the MNLA, bringing new weapons and equipment from Libya (Freedom House 2013b). The MNLA then launched an armed insurgency against the Malian state in 2012. Though this was not the first time the Tuareg had launched a rebellion, it was a momentous development. In addition to the MNLA, other groups were also competing, or sometimes even cooperating, with the MNLA for power (Bruneau and Matel 2014). Notable among them was the Ansar Dine jihadist group, which was also established in 2011 with the goal of imposing sharia across the Sahel. Other jihadist groups included al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO). The Tuareg and jihadist Islamist rebellions proved extremely challenging for the Malian military to bring under control. On January 26, 2012, in one of the encounters between the rebels and the Malian military, the rebels killed fifty soldiers, leading to a huge public outcry about the military’s lack of logistics to quell the rebellion (Freedom House 2013b). Many army officers were frustrated and indignant about ATT’s government’s failure to allocate sufficient resources to address the fragile security situation in the north of the country. As a result, on March 21, a rebellion against ATT broke out in the capital, and the next day a group of junior officers led by

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Lieutenant Amadou Konaré deposed the president in what had begun as a mere registration of frustration and anger (EIU 2012b). The fact that this coup was against a regime that was renowned for its democratic legitimacy may appear, without further interrogation, that the Malian case of 2012 runs counter to our argument; however, it is important to note that ATT’s regime’s inability to handle the security situation in the north had affected the regime’s political legitimacy. According to Afrobarometer (2012), ATT’s popularity had fallen from 81 percent in 2005 to a (still respectable) 65 percent in 2008. Before the coup, the country was apparently growing frustrated by ATT’s inability to quell Salafi groups in northern Mali. In late 2012 (after the coup) 38 percent favored “warfare with armed groups” as a solution to the problem, and another 12 percent favored “a strong state.” Only 29 percent favored “dialogue with armed groups” (Afrobarometer 2012). At the time of the survey, 67 percent of Malians still trusted the military, but only 43 percent trusted the civilian (interim) president. The Mali case thus reminds us that any regime that fails in its responsibility to provide the essential public good of order exposes itself to the attendant perils of loss of legitimacy; namely, military intervention. When the state is weak, as in Mali, even legitimate regimes may struggle to provide such public goods. The failure to provide essential public goods, security, and basic social services imperiled ATT’s regime and fueled insurgency culminating in the military overthrowing an otherwise democratic government. Clearly, as in the cases of Egypt, Mauritania, and Niger discussed above, the military overthrew ATT at a time when his legitimacy was declining. Turning to the case of the 2008 coup in Guinea Conakry, this military intervention, like that in Guinea-Bissau in 2012, was unusual in that it happened during a political interregnum. As the intervention was not aimed at an established regime, legitimate or otherwise, it creates problems for our argument. Central to our argument is the view that military interventions against legitimate regimes are rare, but those against illegitimate regimes can be deterred only through military surveillance and active anticoup activities. The case of the Guinea coup is an ambiguous one because the outgoing ruler had no serious claims to legitimacy, whereas the announced interim president would at least have represented adherence to the rule of law. On the death of President Lansana Conté on December 22, 2008, Aboubacar Somparé, head of the National Assembly, was expected to be appointed interim president, following the Guinean constitutional arrangement at the time. Under the constitution, Somparé would have been charged with a responsibility to organize an election for Conté’s replacement within sixty days. Instead, a group of young army officers, calling themselves the National Council for Democracy and Development (CNDD), and led by

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Captain Dadis Moussa Camara, took power in a bloodless coup the day after Conté’s death (EIU 2009). The junta appointed a new government led by a civilian economist, Kabiné Komara. The junta promised to organize elections in two years and hand over authority to a civilian administration (EIU 2009). Conté’s regime had greatly dissipated its legitimacy between 1984 and 2008, though it is often credited with the maintenance of order. President Conté had himself taken power in a coup after the death of Guinea’s first president, Ahmed Sekou Touré, in circumstances similar to the 2008 coup. Following his coup, Conté suspended the constitution and banned political activity. Under pressure from the international community and following the collapse of communism, Conté began a transition to multiparty rule in the early 1990s (Africa Research Bulletin 2008). Beginning in 1993, he won a series of multiparty presidential elections of dubious legitimacy. Conté’s regime became notorious for patronage, corruption, and rent seeking (Picard and Moudoud 2010). In 2007, a crackdown of civilian protests against the Conté’s regime left many people dead. The strike was organized by Guinea’s trade unions ‘‘to protest corruption, bad governance, and deteriorating economic conditions’’ (Human Rights Watch 2007: 3). As Human Rights Watch noted, the Guinean government’s own figures indicated that the brutal crackdown resulted in, at least, 129 dead and over 1,700 wounded. During Conté’s reign, Guinea came to be known as one of the most corrupt countries in the world (Transparency International 2006). Within this context, some (e.g., Picard and Moudoud 2010) contend that Guineans wished for a “good military intervention” to dislodge the corrupt regime of Conté. One may argue, therefore, that the loss of legitimacy of Conté’s regime provided the impetus for the 2008 military intervention in Guinea. For the army officers, the death of Conté certainly provided them with the opportunity to realize their own ambitions that Conté had previously foreclosed. Nonetheless, we do believe that if Conté’s regime had not suffered from a near-complete lack of legitimacy, the likelihood of the 2008 intervention would have been lower. In this regard, we offer as examples the deaths of President John Atta Mills of Ghana in 2012 and President Umarau Yar’Adua of Nigeria in 2010. The regimes of these two leaders enjoyed relatively higher political legitimacy than that of President Conté, and their respective deaths in office saw seamless transitions to their constitutionally prescribed successors. By contrast, the Conté regime’s dearth of legitimacy provided no bulwark against another military intervention in politics after his death. Somewhat similar to the Guinean case, the 2012 military intervention in Guinea-Bissau happened during a transitional period between the death of then president Malam Bacai Sanhá and a presidential election to determine his replacement. Following the death of President Sanhá, the leader of the National Assembly and a leading member of the ruling African Party for

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the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Raimundo Pereira, became interim president. According to the constitution, a free election for the office of president should have followed within sixty days (Freedom House 2013a). The election took place as planned, and the leader of the PAIGC, Carlos Gomes Júnior, garnered 49 percent of the valid votes cast, trailed by a former president of the country, Kumba Yalá, with 23 percent. As none of the presidential candidates were able to obtain a majority of over 50 percent of the votes, a second-round election was scheduled for late April 2012 between the two leading candidates. Although the first round of the elections was widely considered free and fair, Kumba Yalá alleged that it was fraudulent and called for a boycott of the second round (Freedom House 2013a). On April 12, 2012, less than three weeks before the presidential runoff, Major General Mamadu Ture Kuruma led a group of soldiers who seized the headquarters of the ruling PAIGC and the national radio station (EIU 2012a). These soldiers deposed the interim president, Raimundo Pereira, suspended the National Assembly, and arrested Gomes, the leading candidate for president following the first round of the presidential election. The coup appears to have been calculated to thwart Gomes’s likely win in the runoff to avert a crackdown on corrupt army generals, a project that Gomes had publicly advocated (Salihu 2020). If elected, Gomes had planned to implement a reform of the security sector, which would have included reducing the size of the armed forces. Kumba Yalá, on the other hand, enjoyed strong support within some factions of the army. It was within this context that the coup took place. This is the most troubling case for our theory. Sanhá was in power for only two and a half years, but he was widely viewed as a legitimate figure, despite his strained relations with Gomes, who was then his prime minister. His poor relations with Gomes, coupled with his ill health, negatively affected his capacity to bring about greater political stability (EIU 2012a). One can hardly view this coup as an indication of a loss of legitimacy of the Sanhá regime. Neither can it be seen as a response to waning legitimacy of the interim government, as that government had met its most important constitutional expectation of organizing a presidential election within sixty days after Sanhá’s demise. This case serves to remind us that political legitimacy does not completely insulate African regimes from military interventions in all cases. Countries with a long history of military interventionism tend to have proclivities for military interventions, even when legitimacy is being built. As students of West Africa know well, Guinea-Bissau has a long history of coups and political instability. Indeed, José Mário Vaz, who ended his five-year term as president on June 23, 2019, was the first president of the country to complete a full term. In November 2019, he was elected to a second term in office, after serving as interim president between his two terms.

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Conclusion In broad terms, the evidence from the period between 2008 and 2019 confirms the patterns of multiparty politics in Africa that Lindberg and Clark (2008) identified between 1990 and 2004: military interventions against legitimate regimes and those on a clear trajectory of legitimation were rare, but not totally unknown. There were no coups or attempted coups against the nine African regimes consistently identified by Freedom House as Free during this period. Military interventions against Unfree and Partly Free regimes, on the other hand, continued to be rather frequent. In a number of cases, militaries intervened against long-standing authoritarian rulers— sometimes reluctantly—after such rulers showed themselves unresponsive to civilian demands. Yet, the cases of the failed coups against regimes rated Free in Lesotho, and the five hard cases examined above, remind us that the pattern of military forbearance in the face of legitimate or legitimizing regimes is no iron law. Many African countries are like Lesotho in that they have regular, mostly free elections, but have never fully consolidated their democratic institutions. In the face of institutional crises in such weak and partially consolidated democratic states, military intervention does still occur to settle issues within an obstreperous political class. The successful coup against President Ould Abdallahi is an even clearer case of institutional paralysis leading to a military intervention. But such situations are hardly confined to Africa: even the well-consolidated French Fourth Republic regime ended with a (brief) military intervention in 1958, returning Charles de Gaulle to power. The case of Egypt reminds how exceedingly fragile democratic experiments can be, and how vital wise leadership is in an immediate postmilitary rule environment. With his slim electoral mandate, Morsi’s subsequent heavy-handed behavior took civilian rule for granted and virtually invited a military intervention. In the case of Guinea’s 2008 coup, civilian politicians might well have behaved responsibly, but they simply had no time to put new institutions in place before the military reasserted its claims to political primacy. Guinea has been ruled since 2010 by a civilian president, Alpha Condé, albeit one with a dubious democratic record. The military intervention in Guinea-Bissau following the death of Sanhá was troubling from the democratic legitimacy point of view, but not particularly surprising. GuineaBissau has a long history of military interventions that could not be erased by one short-lived elected regime. The single most troubling case from the liberal perspective is that of the Mali coup of 2012. By that date, Mali was twenty years into what had been a successful democratic experiment. Its second freely elected president was on the verge of stepping down, having served his two legal terms. The Malian military used the rebellion in northern Mali as a shabby pretext to retake power, merely making the political situation in Mali worse. The only

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silver lining in the Mali case was that the country returned to civilian rule in 2013 under Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, only to be overthrown by the military in August 2020, followed by another coup against interim President Bah Ndaw in May 2021. While coup plotters took advantage of the situation, the 2012 and 2020 coups in Mali happened in the context of popular dissatisfaction with the government and waning legitimacy due to elite corruption and the failure to provide basic goods and services to the public. More than the other cases, that of Mali reminds us that military intervention is still possible in many African countries, even if democratic legitimacy or a democratic trajectory make it far less likely. What we have shown in this chapter is that legitimacy is an important variable even though it does not account for every case. The theory that we developed and tested does not explain every case of attempted and failed coups, but it does cover substantial empirical ground in the cases of military interventions over the past decade or so. 1. The term democratic legitimacy is used in Lindberg and Clark (2008) in this fashion. 2. An oddity of McGowan’s (2003) tabulation is that his last time period actually covers six years, from 1996 to 2001, whereas all the others in his table cover five years (e.g., 1986–1990). This disconformity makes the last period appear excessively coup prone, since there were five coups or attempted coups in Africa in 2001. We excluded the coup events of 2001 from the decade-by-decade analysis in this paragraph. 3. Some scholars have criticized the quality of the Freedom House (FH) data, pointing out that some regimes continue to get a ranking of Free even as the quality of respect for “civil and political rights” has begun to decline. Nonetheless, the FH data has become a standard used by many students of democracy; we have noted below where we have qualms with the FH rankings. Here, we have generally used the FH ranking for the year of the coup because the rankings are issued at the beginning of the year. In the cases of a successful coup in a given year, followed by another coup or coup attempt before the next ranking exercise, we have used the ranking for the start of the following year. 4. This quotation may be found in Freedom House, “Freedom in the World Report 2013: Central African Republic,” 2013 5. The size of the late June 2013 demonstrations in Egypt is contested, however. The New York Times, like the Egyptian military, has suggested that the numbers were in the millions in its coverage on June 30, 2013, and in other articles in July 2013.

Notes

3 The African Union and the “Good Coup” Erin Damman and Christopher Day

One hand does not kill a louse.

—Swahili Proverb

In recent years, African coup makers have increasingly found themselves as uninvited guests to the African Union’s (AU) regional cocktail party. Yet for the first fifty years of independence, the forceful transfer of power within African states had become a widely accepted norm. To underscore this key point, more than half of the chairpersons from the AU’s predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), were brought to power via a coup or civil conflict.1 A stark example is Joseph Arthur Ankrah’s 1966 coup that overthrew Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah, one of the OAU’s key architects, a move that also allowed Ankrah to assume the regional organization’s chairmanship in Nkrumah’s place without fanfare. But when the AU replaced the OAU, coup makers faced a new reality. In 2003, when a popular coup overthrew President Felix Patissé, Central African Republic was immediately suspended by the AU. Successful coups in Mauritania and Togo received similar condemnation, revealing that the AU would treat all coup attempts as equally illegitimate regardless of popular support (news of the coup in Mauritania led to widespread celebration and was viewed as a step toward better governance, while the Togolese coup was widely seen as an elite-driven process to keep power in the hands of a single family) (BBC 2005; Sakyi-Addo 2005; Meldrum 2005). Since its inception in 2002, the AU has suspended members sixteen times for coup activity or for political crises over transfers of power. Recently, the AU has come to view the coup

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d’état with greater nuance, even when at odds with emergent normative prohibitions on coup makers entering domestic politics. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s election brought Egypt back into the AU despite his role in the 2013 coup, while Zimbabwe was not suspended over its military’s political interference in 2017. Sudan was suspended only after the military’s violent response to protestors in June 2019, rather than immediately following the April coup. One way to view these events is as reflections of the politics of the ordinary, where African armies continue to loom large through the coup d’état as a defining feature of African politics. One of the most common empirical observations of the first decades of Africa’s independence was that the coup was a dominant and widespread mechanism of regime change. An alternative perspective, though, might consider these episodes as outliers, occurring against the backdrop of a downward trend of coups on the continent ushered in by a wave of democratic transitions of the 1990s, and reinforced by the emergence of the AU in 2002 and the normative shift from noninterference to nonindifference (Souaré 2014). Still another view is that this anticoup norm is already beginning to fade as states place strategic interests over normative ones (Tansey 2017). A more nuanced approach is to frame these events as two interrelated puzzles. The first interrogates the sanguine view that coups in Africa have been on the decline. In his study of West Africa from 1955 to 2004, for instance, Patrick J. McGowan (2005, 2006) found that coup activity—that is, attempted coups that failed or were thwarted—had not necessarily dropped. Indeed, data from the Integrated Network for Societal Conflict Research (INSCR) supports the observation that though coups have declined, they have done so at rates that do not fully support a new, fully fledged norm against coup activity (Thyne and Powell 2016). A look at the INSCR data on coups d’état shows that, while there has been a slight dropoff, there has been nothing to indicate that a norm against coup activity has formed across the continent (INSCR 2018).2 The second puzzle considers what happens after successful coups in Africa. Not only have the AU’s responses been inconsistent, as illustrated above, but successful coups in Africa are becoming more associated with subsequent and accelerated democratic transitions. In this chapter, we take on three tasks. First, we address the divergent paths between the decline of successful coups and more persistent rates of coup attempts, which suggests that regimes have developed effective coupproofing strategies. We argue that through the normative proscription on seizing power by force, the AU has become a useful partner (wittingly or not) in supporting the coup-proofing efforts of incumbent regimes, regardless of their legitimacy. Indeed, since 2005 the AU has suspended member states for coups, leading incumbents to know that the regional body will side with them if a coup is even attempted.

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Second, we examine the political aftermath of successful coups in light of the AU’s willingness to sanction the new regimes that have come to power through unconstitutional means. We argue that because suspensions have become more common, the few successful coups in Africa are more likely to generate elections quite quickly, elections that since 2007 have been required by the AU to exclude the coup makers themselves. As such, Africa’s would-be coup makers have on balance winnowed themselves down to those that view themselves as stewards of a state’s constitutional order, repurposing military interference in politics as the “good coup.” To be clear, we are not suggesting that such coups are desirable, or even effective in building democracies over time. Rather, when coup makers package their actions in this manner, they are more likely to avoid being sanctioned by the AU (Miller 2011; Tansey 2017; Omorogbe 2011). Finally, we discuss the implications of these observations for the AU’s role in Africa’s civil-military relations. The AU’s promotion of training member state armies develops their capacities and promotes professionalism, while the expansion of peacekeeping missions and other security operations provides arenas to put this training into practice, and allows officers and soldiers to foster operational cohesion relatively independently of government oversight. Above all, the AU as a repository and transmission belt of norms has the potential to turn soldiers into “guardians” of good governance where, unlike the past, they are more likely to support even an unpopular president than launch a coup. To date, the literature on Africa’s civil-military relations and its regional institutions has been divided into scholarly silos. Much of the early work on Africa’s armed forces attributed military rule on the continent to colonial institutional antecedents (First 1970; Welch 1970). As coups became more common, quantitative studies sought to identify their ultimate causes (McGowan 2003) and engaged with explanations that considered the permissive conditions within Africa’s weak state institutions, the organizational characteristics of African armies, and the psychological idiosyncrasies of coup makers (Decalo 1998a). Much contemporary work has shifted to examining the military’s role in Africa’s broader security environment (Howe 2001; Hutchful and Bathily 1998), its place in Africa’s democratic transitions (Barany 2012), the need for security sector reform (Reno 2018; Jackson 2011), and the military as a stabilizing force in Africa’s domestic politics (Ojo 2009; Ehwarieme 2011). In contrast, a good deal of scholarship on Africa’s regional organizational development has focused on the corresponding evolution of its peace and security architecture (Engel and Porto 2010). One area of attention has been changing regional norms. Here, the principle of noninterference in the domestic affairs of member states, associated with the OAU, has transformed into a more robust interventionist role by the AU, a normative shift

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institutionalized by the creation of the Peace and Security Council (PSC) (Williams 2007; Sturman and Hayatou 2010; Kioko 2003). A key focus here has been on the relationship between Africa’s regional peace and security structures, conflict, and what conditions of political violence merit AU intervention (Van Walraven 2010; Akuffo 2010). Efforts to pull these two strands of scholarship together have been uncommon, though there have been some interesting contributions in this area. Some scholars have made a compelling argument that the AU has served as a norm entrepreneur against coups, and much of the decline in coup activity can at least partially be attributed to AU actions on unconstitutional transference of power (Souaré 2014; Powell, Lasley, and Schiel 2016). There have also been some critical responses to this approach, particularly since the Zimbabwe coup of 2017 (e.g., Phakathi 2018). Others (Dwyer 2015; Schiel, Powell, and Daxecker 2020) have made a connection between military mutinies and peacekeeping activities, showing some unintended consequences of the AU’s rising presence on the continent and civil-military relations. We seek to build on these efforts by taking a more cohesive look at the ways in which the AU has affected civil-military relationships through norm expansion, institution building, training, and responses to recent coup activity. In this chapter, we tackle the interrelated puzzles of outlier coups and the rise of regional military operations, and the theoretical lever of changing regional norms. We also engage the framework introduced in this book’s first chapter by suggesting that if regional norms do indeed constrain certain political uses of the military at the domestic level, they do not necessarily work to fundamentally alter patterns of regime proximity, which has implications at the regional level. This speaks to the main insight of this book, which states that the absence of coups does not mean a “course correction” for civil-military relations, but more a repurposing of the relationship in ways that reflect persistent regime interests that play out within changing normative environments. And while this chapter does not directly interrogate the social embeddedness dimension of civil-military relations, the participation of African soldiers in regional peace operations raises important questions about norm transmission that takes place not just between armies and domestic political authority, but between individual soldiers and societal institutions in their home countries and the civilian populations of host countries. In what follows, we begin by situating the coup d’état within the longer historical context of Africa’s regional relations and the OAU from 1963 to 2001. We then examine two ways the AU has, since 2002, come to reduce the rate of successful coups, as well as narrow the range of possible outcomes of those coups that do occur. As such, we discuss the emergence of the AU’s normative constraints, along with its actual peace and security

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interventions, on military interference in Africa’s domestic politics. We then consider the rise of the “good coup” in Africa, those successful coups that ultimately result in accelerated elections. We conclude with a discussion about how these key changes in Africa’s regional relations shape broader patterns of civil-military relations on the continent. The Historical Role of the OAU in Fostering Coups To begin, we anchor the trajectory of Africa’s civil-military relations and the associated coup behavior within the historical context of the continent’s regional relations. The Organization of African Unity was founded in 1963 as an institutional expression of pan-African unity and solidarity. While it reflected the interests of African leaders, the OAU was also the steward of key principles intended to condition and constrain these interests. The mutually reinforcing principles of “sovereign equality” and “non-interference in the internal affairs of Member States” (OAU 1963, Article 3 [1–2]) were designed to support internally weak and externally vulnerable states and their operators. Of course, adherence to these norms was seldom seamless, and the OAU’s role as a silent observer to conflicts eventually promoted changes in how the body addressed them. Yet, the permissive conditions of noninterference and the OAU’s unconditional support for any and all African leaders had the unintended consequence of narrowing the options available for the forces of political opposition, therefore decreasing the costs of coups for African militaries. For the OAU, the primacy of sovereignty and territorial integrity ensured the stability of a diplomatic system that banked on intact juridical statehood. And while the principle of noninterference fit well within this institutional framework, it interacted differently with other OAU principles. For instance, noninterference dovetailed with the OAU’s “unreserved condemnation . . . of political assassination as well as of subversive activities” (OAU 1963, Article 5[3]) but it had to reconcile the contradiction between noninterference and “absolute dedication to the total emancipation” (OAU 1963, Article 3[6]) of African territories, which supported anticolonial insurgents by way of the OAU Liberation Committee. This was handled through African leaders’ use of the principle of self-determination. Meanwhile, noninterference sat uncomfortably alongside the “peaceful settlement of disputes by negotiation, mediation, conciliation or arbitration.” And the OAU’s capacity to manage Africa’s growing conflicts was limited to a series of ad hoc measures of uneven success that were ultimately hamstrung by the norm against meddling (Gomes 2008). This normative straitjacket became even tighter when the Cold War ended. As the number of armed conflicts within its member states grew, the OAU watched its “moral authority” dissolve. Responses to conflicts were

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largely orchestrated by the United Nations, regional African organizations such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), or individual states—foreign and African (Schraeder 2003). These wars prompted reforms to the OAU’s approach to conflict management. The 1993 Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution (the Mechanism) was the institutional outcome of the Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa (CSSDCA) of 1991, also known as the Kampala Document. Yet, these efforts stayed faithful to the noninterference norm (Muyangwa and Vogt 2000). It is notable that the term coup d’état appears neither in the OAU declaration establishing the Mechanism (OAU 1993), nor in any of the Kampala Document’s four “calabashes” (African Leadership Forum 1991). Another effort at institutional reform that brushed up against nonintervention was in response to the growing record of human rights violations committed by a number of African regimes. Bad behavior bolstered the image of the OAU as a “club of presidents” that could act with impunity behind the normative ramparts of sovereignty (Welch 1991). Three regimes in particular worked to degrade the OAU’s regional and international credibility: Jean-Bedel Bokassa of Central African Republic, Francisco Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, and Idi Amin of Uganda (Clapham 1996). While these were extreme caricatures of authoritarian rule in Africa, their distinct modes of personalized violence became an albatross around the OAU’s neck (Decalo 1989b). Bizarrely, Amin served as chair of the OAU from 1975 to 1976, after years of violent ethnic purges of Uganda’s army and exiling 50,000 South Asians from the country. In response, the OAU’s African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights (known as the Banjul Charter), which went into force in 1986, was an African analog to prevailing UN human rights treaties. Operationally, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights served as a dissemination, monitoring, and reporting network with no real enforcement mechanisms. Most leaders who violated the Banjul Charter were ignored at best or at worst met with mild disapproval, as the Commission was not equipped to hold regimes accountable. To be sure, the renewed orientation on human rights violations committed by the Ngueumas, Bokassas, and Amins of the world was an important step for rethinking the principle of nonintervention. Yet, the effort ultimately sidestepped the ways in which each of these leaders were ultimately removed from power, which was militarily. It was only in the late 1990s that representatives of the OAU began to speak out against coup activity in a meaningful fashion. At the Harare Summit of 1997, for example, Robert Mugabe stated, “We are getting tougher and tougher on coups. . . . Democracy is getting stronger in Africa, and we now have a definite attitude against coups” (Meldrum 1997). The Harare Summit was followed by the Algiers Declaration on Unconstitutional

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Changes in Government, AHG/Decl.1 (XXXV) (OAU 1999), which also paid special attention to democratization on the continent and, particularly, the Lomé Declaration for an OAU Response to Unconstitutional Changes of Government, AHG/Decl.2 (XXXVI) (OAU 2000b), which was the first time the OAU formally condemned coup activity. Despite these declarations, ongoing conflict and persistent human rights violations in Africa continued to underscore the limits of the OAU’s modest institutional adjustments. The body’s ongoing need to maintain regional diplomatic stability also reinforced the principle of “intervention by invitation only.” This meant insulating itself from the authoritarian tendencies of its member states. During this period, the dominant pattern of regime politics was the concentration of power through personal rule networks, single-party political systems, and the rejection of federalism (Young 2012). Regimes expanded bureaucracies, dissolved parliaments and judiciaries, and eliminated rivals they could not co-opt. This mode of rule was of course made possible through the expansion of the state’s coercive apparatus, which accelerated conditions for once weak armies to become driving forces in African politics. As Patrick J. McGowan observed (2003), from 1956 until the end of OAU’s tenure in 2001, there were 188 attempted coups in Africa, 80 of which were successful. While the explanations for coups vary—weak institutions, social breakdown, personal aggrandizement—these dynamics nevertheless played out within the context of a regional system of states that remained agnostic toward those who sat in the executive mansion and how they got there. To gain recognition, the OAU never required rulers to acquire any degree of legitimacy, nor to even demonstrate effective territorial control within state boundaries that were also guaranteed by the territorial integrity norm. Instead, anyone who controlled the capital city was immediately protected by the imperatives of sovereignty and inoculated by the principle of noninterference (Herbst 2000: 110). “Capital city rule” therefore incentivized savvy military entrepreneurs to intervene in regime politics by lowering the costs of coups (Roessler 2016: 86). For African militaries, the formula to capture the state therefore became quite simple. As Paul Nugent (2004: 205) has noted, it required only a relatively small, but cohesive, band of plotters to make their way from the barracks across town to the executive mansion. Sufficient muscle was needed to round up members of the ancien regime and to occupy the airport and symbolic physical structures like palaces (De Bruin 2020), while seizure of the radio station allowed putschists to announce and justify the coup as a fait accompli (Singh 2014; Bleck and Michelitch 2017). Control over these rudimentary bottlenecks of capital city rule generally meant the rest of the armed forces would accept an outcome that was further reinforced by the OAU’s not-so-deafening silence. Coups that occurred against the backdrop of civil wars were particularly illustrative of capital city rule. For instance, in June 1989, junior military

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officers led by Omar al-Bashir overthrew the Sudanese government of Sadiq al-Mahdi. At the time, Sudan was in its sixth year of civil war and Khartoum had virtually lost control of Southern Sudan as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) gained the upper hand against a poorly equipped and highly demoralized army (Africa Confidential 1988). Three years later, a similar story unfolded in Sierra Leone, when a group of warfront junior officers led by Captain Valentine Strasser overthrew the regime in Freetown (West Africa 1992: 788). Upcountry, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) had made battlefield gains against an army that had gone unpaid for months, was stranded in the bush with poor equipment and insufficient ammunition, and drove vehicles borrowed from the Ministry of Works.3 In both cases, conflict, coup, and control over territory were linked. In Sudan, al-Bashir sought to displace a shaky coalition government that had entered into a dialogue with the SPLA that al-Mahdi himself sought to undermine by excluding the army (Africa Confidential 1989a, 1989b). Similarly, Strasser’s coup in Sierra Leone was largely in response to the deprivations the army experienced while fighting the RUF, during which Strasser himself was wounded and abandoned on the frontlines (West Africa 1992b). Years later, a palace coup replaced Strasser, led by officers who sought peace talks with the RUF (West Africa 1996). Yet, for the OAU, such conflicts represented Africa’s “crisis of security” that required resolution, while their concurrent coups were the mere politics of the ordinary that required accommodation. In sum, decades of capital city rule in Africa illustrated how early decisions during the OAU’s construction, in this case the debate over whether to tolerate coups (Akindele 1988), became durable features of Africa’s regional institutional environment. Over time, the unintended consequence of the OAU being little more than a “government’s trade union” (Clapham 1996: 114) was the exposure of the body’s fundamental weaknesses. In addition to being chronically resource scarce, the contradictions between noninterference and the imperative to manage peace and security on the continent became impossible to ignore, especially given how widespread coups upended the stable expectations that regional organizations require to function. As the OAU transitioned into the AU, the regional rules of the game that had enabled coups gave way to a normative recalibration, which dismantled noninterference but created a fresh set of permissive conditions for military involvement in African politics, a set of issues to which we now turn. The AU’s Nonindifference Policy as Coup Proofing The normative terrain began to shift toward the end of the 1990s, with significant consequences for how coups were treated by Africa’s regional political institutions. The deficiencies of the OAU in responding to continent-

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wide problems, and the ineffectiveness of its stopgap measures, now prompted open reflection and ready acknowledgment of the regional body’s shortcomings (Packer and Rukare 2002). In addition, the end of the Cold War ushered in changing economic and political conditions. No longer capable of gaining easy patronage by playing the superpowers against each other, African leaders needed new strategies for bringing aid back to their governments in a setting where democratic reforms had become requirements of Western aid packages (Bayart and Ellis 2000; Dunning 2004). Enter the Constitutive Act of the new African Union (OAU 2000a), which reflected these broader regional and international changes. In this document, the most important departure from the OAU was the replacement of the key principle of noninterference with a new principle of nonindifference. This principle served as a new regional mechanism for allowing the AU to manage internal conflict and coup behavior within member states while formally signaling to international actors a normative move toward good governance protections (Tieku 2004). Specifically, Principle 4(h) of the charter gave the AU the right to intervene in the domestic affairs of a member state in “grave circumstances,” including war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and “a serious threat to legitimate order” with the intention “to restore peace and stability to the Member State” (AU 2003: 2). Several key episodes revealed that the AU intended to live up to this new charter. Madagascar, suffering from a political crisis at the time, was not allowed to attend the African Union’s founding meeting in South Africa, and was suspended by the new AU until the country held elections in 2003 (Ploch and Cook 2018). In March 2003, Central African Republic (CAR) was suspended when a coup brought General Francois Bozizé to power, an act now considered to be an unconstitutional change of government (The New Humanitarian 2005). When the Togolese military attempted to put the deceased president’s son into power in 2005, the AU suspended Togo until an election was held later that year. Since then, as Table 3.1 shows, many AU member states have been suspended following a successful coup or when a regime has refused to leave office following an election. The key insight here is that AU actions against coup activity have had the effect of bringing about elections, but not in consistent or obvious ways by virtue of the principle of nonindifference (Souaré 2014). At first, putschists were able to get around AU sanctions by simply holding an election in which they stood for office, gaining the legitimacy offered by the voting procedures outlined in their respective constitutions, and bringing them back into compliance with AU stipulations. The adoption of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ACDEG) by the AU in 2007 presented fresh obstacles to such blatant subterfuge. Article 25 reads, “Perpetrators of unconstitutional change of government shall not be

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Table 3.1 AU Actions Against Unconstitutional Changes in Government When

2001 Mar. 2003

Feb. 2005 Aug. 2005 Aug. 2008 Dec. 2008 Mar. 2009 2010 Feb. 2010 Mar. 2012 April 2012 Mar. 2013

July 2013 Sept. 2015 June 2019

Country

Madagascar Central African Republic Togo Mauritania Mauritania Guinea Madagascar Côte d’Ivoire Niger Mali Guinea-Bissau Central African Republic Egypt Burkina Faso Sudan

Unconstitutional Act Political crisis Coup

Coup Coup Coup Coup Political crisis Problem of transition Coup Coup Coup Civil conflict

Coup Coup Coup

AU Reponse

Suspended until 2003 Suspended briefly

Suspended until elections in May 2005 Suspended until March 2007 Suspended until July 2009 Suspended until January 2011 Suspended until January 2014 Suspended until 2011 Suspended until elections held Suspended until October 2013 Suspended until June 2014 Suspended until April 2016

Suspended until June 2014 Suspended briefly Suspended until September 2019

Source: Authors’ own, utilizing ACLED data (Raleigh et al. 2010).

allowed to participate in elections held to restore the democratic order or hold any position of responsibility in political institutions of their State” (AU 2007, Article 25, section 4). With the exception of Egypt in 2013 and Zimbabwe in 2017, the AU has since enforced this regulation on military coups consistently (Roessler and Abi-Falah 2017). Soon however, incumbents began manipulating the constitutional orders of their regimes to maintain their hold on power. Officially, these “constitutional coups” (Roessler and Abi Falah 2017) run afoul of Article 23 of the ACDEG, which makes clear that a change to legal institutions is “an infringement on the principles of democratic change of government” that is forbidden and that the PSC has the responsibility to monitor such actions (AU 2007, Article 25 (5) and Article 24). Yet, the AU has generally been far more lenient when constitutional coups have occurred. Since the adoption of the ACDEG, several states have lengthened terms for presidents, increased the number of terms a president may serve, and in at least four cases removed term limits altogether (Wiebusch and Murray 2019). While the AU has been critical of these steps, it has yet to invoke Article 23 or suspend any member state for such constitutional amendments (Roessler and Abi-Falah 2017; Wiebusch and Murray 2019). In at least three instances, suspensions from the AU only followed coups that were direct responses to regimes invoking constitutional amendments designed to abolish term limits (Niger in 2010, Burkina

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Faso in 2015, and Burundi in 2015). This has led several observers to revive the former critique of the OAU and claim that the AU remains a club of incumbents and is effective only at protecting the interests of these undemocratic regimes already in power (Omorogbe 2011; Omotola 2011). The key observation here is that the AU’s consistent preference for supporting incumbents, combined with its proscriptions against unconstitutional changes of government, amounts to nothing short of coup-proofing (Omorogbe 2011; Powell, Lasley, and Schiel 2016). This is an extension of the standard definition of coup-proofing that focuses on domestic political strategies of managing the potential political ambitions of national armies by creating “structures that minimize the possibility that a small group can seize power” (Quinlivan 1999: 133). In practice, these strategies involve exploiting ethnic or familial loyalty, where sects are played off of one another in order to factionalize the military and undermine its competence. However, by establishing formal rules through the AU that prohibit coups as a regional normative practice, African leaders have effectively delegitimized what has historically been the main source of contestation for presidential power. Now, anyone who comes to power via coup d’état faces immediate sanctions and suspension from the AU. Moreover, with the entry into force of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance in 2012, those committing the coups are now rendered ineligible to stand in elections (AU 2007, Article 25[4]).4 In other words, African leaders through the AU have raised the costs associated with attempting a coup while also lowering the costs of regime protection, and they have done so continent-wide. This complementary set of regional institutions that bolsters a regime’s coup-proofing strategies also has the potential effect of prompting regional intervention. If the putschists are unlucky enough to have their coup attempt drown in the mayhem of a larger civil war, the AU’s nonindifference clause also means that they can reasonably expect to face not just forces still loyal to the government, but AU peacekeepers as well. This was the case of Mali in 2012 and nearly the fate of Burundi in 2015. In the past, having a force within the military that was better trained, better armed, and loyal to the president was useful but not sufficient to forestall a coup. Under the AU’s current Peace and Security Architecture, such a force needs only to be able to hold off coup makers long enough for international and regional reinforcements to arrive. With this strong possibility in mind, potential coup makers must calculate the odds of success in a radically different way in an era of AU interventionism. The cases of Burundi and Niger exemplify the principle of nonindifference as a coup-proofing mechanism. Consider first the case of Burundi, which has a long history of conflict and forceful transfers of power, with five successful coups since independence (Nkurunziza 2018). After a decade

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of civil war in Burundi, in 2003 the AU finally proved itself willing to intervene in Burundian affairs, deploying just over 3,000 peacekeepers to the country (Williams 2006: 25). As the peace process came to an end in 2005, Burundi’s postconflict government came to power under very different regional norms. Pierre Nkurunziza was the first president brought to power under a new Burundian constitution that came into force in 2005, and in accord with the requirements of the peace agreement signed in 2000. Both documents clearly limited the executive to two terms in office. After being reelected for a second term in 2010, Nkurunziza was again chosen as his party’s candidate to stand in Burundi’s presidential election in April 2015. Protests erupted across the country in response as this decision, which appeared to transgress the presidential term limits outlined in Article 96 of the 2005 constitution (Tertsakian 2015; Reyntjens 2015). Those loyal to the president pointed to an obscure technicality—that Nkurunziza had initially been elected by a parliament that was serving in the capacity of an electoral college—and that because Article 96 called for universal suffrage in the election of a president, Nkurunziza should be allowed to run a final time. The case was taken up by Burundi’s Constitutional Court, which ruled on May 5 that Nkurunziza had the right to stand for reelection (Bouka 2016). Despite this decision, protests continued and quickly became violent. Then, on May 13, while the president was attending a summit in Tanzania, Major General Godefroid Niyombare, once a high-ranking member of Nkurunziza’s inner circle, led a coup attempt. The coup was described by Niyombare as a direct response to the “unconstitutional environment into which Burundi has been plunged,” stating in his radio broadcast to announce the coup that “the masses vigorously and tenaciously reject President Nkurunziza’s third-term mandate” (BBC 2015a). The coup makers faced immediate resistance from the police and forces loyal to the president, who prevented them from taking the presidential home and retook the airport from the putschists within a matter of days. The coup attempt ended in failure. Nonetheless, demonstrations against Nkurunziza continued to grow and turn violent, and soon conflict spread across the country (BBC 2015c). In the face of these events, the AU released a series of responses. While Nkurunziza was still considering a third-term run, the chairperson of the AU Commission, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, urged everyone to respect the Arusha Agreement and Constitution of Burundi. While this statement was pointedly aimed at Nkurunziza, the AU never explicitly condemned him for deciding to run a third time (AU 2015a, 2015b). Rather, the AU chose to support the decision of the Constitutional Court, and Chairperson Zuma turned her attention to trying to keep the protests from getting out of hand by asking the Burundian government to postpone the elections (Bouka 2016; AU 2015c). In other words, Nkurunziza faced tepid disapproval for his third-term bid, but because he had the stamp of approval from

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the Constitutional Court, he was never fully out of compliance with Article 23 of the ACDEG. In contrast, when news of the coup broke, it was immediately condemned by the AU with Chairperson Zuma referencing its stance on unconstitutional changes of government (Peace and Security Council of the African Union 2015). Above all, as the unrest intensified, the AU Peace and Security Council authorized a peacekeeping mission to Burundi (McCormick 2018). However, when this action was rejected by the Burundian government, the PSC backed down (Bouka 2016), again revealing a preference for supporting the interests of the incumbent regime even in the face of what many observers were labeling a possible genocide as violence escalated (BBC 2015d; Jones 2015; FIDH 2016). Now, consider the case of Niger, which shares several common characteristics with Burundi. The Nigerien constitution had long been clear on two terms for presidents. But in 2009, President Mamadou Tandja began to make a strong push for removing term limits from the constitution. When the courts rejected his proposed amendment three times, he simply abolished the court and appointed a new set of judges (Gounden 2010). In response to these machinations, the subregional body, ECOWAS, sanctioned Niger. Although the AU supported the ECOWAS response, the PSC did not suspend or sanction Niger over Tandja’s moves. Following several months of public protests that did nothing to sway the president’s decision to alter the Nigerien constitution, the military intervened and seized power, claiming to be freeing the country from a corrupt and undemocratic leader. Within a day of this coup, the AU suspended Niger and condemned the actions of the Nigerien military (Wiebusch and Murray 2019). Perhaps the most ironic part of this narrative is that when the Nigerien military handed the reins of power back to a civilian government, it reinstated even stricter presidential term limits than what had existed before 2009 (Wiebusch and Murray 2019). These cases demonstrate that the AU has tended to support incumbent regimes, with states facing suspensions solely for military interference. The nonindifference clause and Article 25 of ACDEG have been invoked not only in the case of Burundi and Niger, but in all of the cases of coup attempts listed in Table 3.1. However, the AU has been conspicuously silent on rigged elections and constitutional changes designed to keep incumbents in power. As a consequence, the AU has made a stance against any and all coups, even those in the service of upholding democratic institutions such as those in Mauritania in 2005 and 2008, in Niger in 2010, in Burundi in 2015, and in Zimbabwe in 2017 (Roessler and Abi-Falah 2017). Under these conditions, it has been possible for African governments to rely on the principle of nonindifference and the ACDEG to work alongside their own civil-military maneuverings and coup-proofing activities to help protect their hold on power.

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The African Union and the Rise of the “Good Coup” In the early years of the AU, successful coup makers made little effort to sell their activities as legitimate. The 2005 Togo episode, for example, shows that the stakeholders interested in placing Faure Gnassingbé in power made only the shallowest of institutional cover-ups by holding elections. Indeed, research on coups during this period shows that such interventions—even when targeting highly corrupt or autocratic leaders—tend to have had a negative impact on democratic institutionalization over time (Miller 2011). Yet as the AU has gotten stronger through the ratification of the ACDEG, putschists who arranged elections have been compelled to step away from power afterward. As Table 3.2 shows, the effect of coups under conditions of the AU institutions often had a substantive effect on democracy in these countries, especially in the cases of Mauritania, Guinea, Madagascar, Niger, and Guinea-Bissau.5 This has once again raised the notion of the “good coup,” defined as “coups against dictatorships that pave the way for democracy” (Derpanopoulos et al. 2016: 1). While there remains reason to be concerned with the long-term effects on a country’s institutions, as Andrew C. Miller (2011) and Philip Roessler and Layla Abi-Falah (2017) argue, more recent scholarly work has found that in the aggregate, coups are statistically likely to improve a given country’s level of democratic transition, particularly since the end of the Cold War (see Table 3.2; see also Thyne and Powell 2016). Those successful coups that have occurred in Africa since the advent of the AU, and particularly since the ACDEG came into force, thus pose several interrelated questions. Have coup makers been constrained to act in ways that support democratic transitions? Or is their main concern simply regime change? And has the AU softened its categorical stance on coups as it has grappled with the apparent democratic motivations on the part of coup makers? In this section, we examine a range of cases to highlight how coup makers have increasingly found civilian allies (either in the government or broader society), nuanced their rhetoric, and turned quickly to election timetables to conform with AU institutional requirements. Importantly, these cases of sanctioned good coups show that when putschists can offer the organization a plausible connection to protecting the will of the people, the AU has increased its willingness to consider the role of public opinion when labeling something an “unconstitutional” change in government. That is, whatever the long-term institutional effects may be, the AU seems to be assessing coups from the perspective of motivation rather than behavior alone. When the Mauritanian military took over in August 2005, it did so with the support of ordinary Mauritanians (Campbell and England 2005). The presidency of Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya (Ould Taya), who had been in Mauritania: A Mixed Moment

The African Union and the “Good Coup” Table 3.2 Effect of Coups on Democratic Standing Country

Central African Republic Togo Mauritania Mauritania Guinea Madagascar Niger Mali Guinea-Bissau Egypt Burkina Faso Zimbabwe

Date of Coup/ Popular Suspension Support

Suspension Lifted/ Election Held

Mar. 2003 Feb. 2005 Aug. 2005 Aug. 2008 Dec. 2008 Mar. 2009 Feb. 2010 Mar. 2012 Apr. 2012 July 2013 Sep. 2015 2017

Mar. 2005 May 2005 Mar. 2007 July 2009 Nov. 2010 Jan. 2014 Mar. 2011 Oct. 2012b May 2014 May 2014 Sept. 2015 None

No No Yes No No No Yes Yes No Yes No Yes

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Polity Scoresa

Polity Precoup –1 –4 –5 –5 –1 0 –3 0 (–77) 1 –4 0 4

Polity Postelection –1 –4 4 –2 1 6 6 5 6 –4 6 4

Source: Authors’ own, utilizing ACLED data (Raleigh et al. 2010). Notes: a. Polity scores are a quick numerical measure for how democratic a country is based on a score from –10 to 10 (Marshall, Gurr, and Jaggers 2019). b. Without election.

power since 1984, had enjoyed military support thanks to a familiar pattern of patronage and fear that lasted until the early 2000s (N’Diaye 2009). Ould Taya’s popularity soon dwindled among top military personnel following economic problems, systemic corruption, and his willingness to work with the US government. Consequently, while most international actors condemned the coup, inside the country it was met with approval. A common speculation was that the coup was simply an attempt to right the ship that Ould Taya had steered off course rather than usher in a full-blown overhaul of the political system. Yet, within hours of taking power, the Military Council for Justice and Democracy (MCJD) junta released a plan that called for a return to civilian rule within two years, but without the participation of any junta members or civilian transition leaders in the forthcoming elections (N’Diaye 2009). Boubacar N’Diaye (2009: 137) has asserted that “there is no doubt that this early decision, which the junta was forced to make under the unsympathetic gaze and pressure of the international community and the mild demand of the political opposition, guaranteed that there would be no outright power grab by the military.” This proved accurate, at least in the short term, when the military returned to the barracks. Many hailed this as a “miracle” (Sage and Weddady 2007), while others praised the move for setting a new standard of power transfer in West Africa (Zisenwine 2007). In accordance with Miller’s (2011) findings, it was, however, a short-lived miracle,

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as the military again took power in late 2008, and this time allowed those responsible for the coup to come to power via an election in 2009. Since this activity occurred prior to the ratification of the ACDEG, the AU institutions at the time accepted the 2009 elections as fulfilling the requirements of a return to constitutional rule. Despite this return to politics as usual, the rise of the Third Republic in Mauritania should be understood as very much shaped by the new regional framework that the AU was creating on unconstitutional changes of government. The Nigerien case of 2010, briefly discussed in the section above, also reveals the role that those regional institutions play in constraining how coups unfold. Niger’s was a military action that observers called a “corrective coup” (Baudais and Chauzal 2011: 299), a “good coup” (Armstrong 2010: para. 3), and a “democratic coup” (Trithart 2013: 112). Given that it was perpetrated against the backdrop of an overt and controversial power grab by then president Tandja, such labels line up with what Samuel P. Huntington (1968) termed the “guardian coup” and reflect the political context within which the coup occurred, perhaps even more so than the potential motives behind it. However, these motives, or at the very least what the coup makers portrayed publicly and to the international community, are equally salient. Lisa Mueller (2013) has established that ordinary Nigerien citizens were more concerned with their fading economic prospects than with a dwindling democratic state. The putschists were therefore able to effectively use public dissatisfaction to confer legitimacy on their coup activities. Importantly, however, the putschists quickly gave substance to their rhetoric for committing their coup. Within weeks afterward, the junta leader Major Salou Djibo had the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy appoint a civilian transitional government (though Djibo remained the de facto head of state). This transitional government, then, began the process of drafting a new constitution and established a new Transition Constitutional Council to replace the Constitutional Court that had been corrupted in the final months of Tandja’s rule (Freedom House 2012). The new constitution was completed mere months after the coup and ratified by a popular vote in October 2010. Elections, in which none of the members of the junta or transitional government were allowed to take part, were held in January 2011, bringing to power a civilian government with strong constitutional limits on the executive branch (Baudais and Chauzal 2011). Such actions provide ample evidence that the putschists were sincere in their intentions to rectify governance issues in their country, and that they were willing to risk subregional and regional condemnation to do so.6 The counterfactual regarding whether or not the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy would have behaved similarly without the Niger: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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regional constraints against the coup makers can best be understood by looking at what similar military juntas did before the creation of the AU. In nearly all instances of successful coups in the pre-AU era, such military councils tended to rule for years on end, rather than transferring power back to civilian hands (Powell, Lasley, and Schiel 2016). In Niger, specifically, juntas had already ruled on several occasions, including from 1974 to 1991, and again from 1996 to 1999 (Baudais and Chauzal 2011). It is reasonable, therefore, to argue that because the AU did not waver in its condemnation, suspension, and sanctioning of the 2010 junta, it was effective in guiding the actions of the putschists (Trithart 2013). Moreover, the Nigerien experience reinforced the message to other African militaries that they would be unwelcome in any bid to take power, and their country would be allowed to rejoin the AU only if coup makers facilitated a civilian government to retake the reins of power via elections. The Niger case also highlights the role of public support for Tandja’s removal in helping frame the putschists as legitimate actors, a message not lost on potential coup makers elsewhere. When the Egyptian military chose to overthrow the Morsi regime in 2011, it was with the full knowledge of the AU’s rules of the road and the multiple examples of the PSC’s willingness to act when these rules were broken. However, Egyptians had also been watching the AU’s reaction (or lack of one) to changes of government caused by popular uprisings. And they had witnessed the ways in which public support had colored the actions of the Nigerien military during and after their overthrow of the Tandja regime. Whereas most military interventions inevitably led to suspension or at the very least condemnation, neither Tunisia’s experience with regime change in 2011 nor Egypt’s in 2011 brought anything more than praise and support from the AU. This was underscored in May 2013, when the AU’s 50th Anniversary Solemn Declaration included that it “recognized the right of our people to peacefully express their will against oppressive systems” in a statement that otherwise rejected unconstitutional changes of government (AU 2013b: 6). It is therefore unsurprising that the Egyptian military couched their subsequent takeover in 2013 as “led by the people” and only, secondarily, as supported by the military (Peace and Security Council of the African Union 2014b). This particular line of logic had the PSC in a bind: How were they supposed to judge this coup (Peace and Security Council of the African Union 2014a)? Egypt was suspended in accordance with institutional requirements. However, in deference to Egyptian assertions that it was truly a reflection of the people’s desires, the AU chairperson created a high-level panel tasked with ferreting out the legitimacy of the new regime’s claims (AU 2013a).7 After meeting extensively over a series of Egypt: A Turning Point

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months with various domestic and international stakeholders, the panel came to the conclusion that while the initial suspension had been correct, allowing al-Sisi to go unchallenged in the 2014 election was both in line with popular sentiment and politically expedient given the power that Egypt held on the continent (Peace and Security Council of the African Union 2014b). Added to this, neither the UN Security Council nor influential international actors such as the United States condemned the Egyptian military for its action, putting the AU in an awkwardly lonely position (Tansey 2017). The panel made it clear that the ACDEG should apply consistently, but also allowed for the political reality that Egypt’s status and relative power complicated this. To rationalize the choice, the panel relied on an administrative sleight of hand, reasoning that because Egypt had not formally ratified the ACDEG, there was some wiggle room in its application (Peace and Security Council of the African Union 2014b). The above episode in Egypt signaled a turning point for the AU. Having made the decision to conflate coup activity with popular will, the AU reopened the possibilities to African military actors capable of finding political cover by selling their coup activities as merely supportive of popular movements. This was put in even sharper relief by the events in Zimbabwe in 2017. When Robert Mugabe began making plans to position his wife, Grace, as his successor, this created a split in his Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party, pitting a faction backing Grace against a faction that included the current vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, and the chief of the army, Constantino Chiwenga (Dendere 2017). In an attempt to undermine the Mnangagwa-Chiwenga faction, Mugabe fired Mnangagwa in early November 2017 (Raleigh 2017). But Mugabe had underestimated the power held by this particular militarypolitico faction and a week later, it sent tanks rolling into Harare. BlessingMiles Tendi (2020) has argued that what followed was essentially an ideologically driven “vote of no confidence” in Mugabe by these veterans of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle in the 1970s, who were placed in key command positions. President Mugabe and his family were placed under house arrest, where Mugabe signed and released a letter of resignation, formally ending his thirty-seven-year rule (Dzirutwe, Brock, Cropley 2017). As Steven Gruzd (2019) wrote, “It looked and smelled like a coup, but the military and ZANU-PF went to great pains not to call it one.” While army officers announced the house arrest of the Mugabes on state television, they claimed it was for their own protection against supposed “criminals” surrounding the president (BBC 2017). When his resignation was made public, it was sold as a voluntary response to the vote of no-confidence and a forthcoming vote for impeachment by the ZANU-PF (Corcoran 2017). Zimbabwe: “This Is Not a Military Takeover”

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This fast-paced set of events provided institutional (and constitutional) cover to the use of military force and made the AU chase a moving target. On the day that Mugabe was removed, the AU chairperson, Alpha Condé, stated that the event in Zimbabwe “seems like a coup,” and labeled the military commanders as “clearly soldiers trying to take power by force” (Press TV 2017). A week later, however, following an increasingly large show of support for the change in leadership in Zimbabwe, the AU seemed to wholeheartedly accept that Mugabe’s resignation was voluntary as the new government in Zimbabwe claimed. In a press release, the AU Commission chairperson welcomed Mugabe’s resignation and lauded him for making a such a positive “act of statesmanship,” stating that the AU “recognize[d] that the Zimbabwean people have expressed their will that there should be a peaceful transfer of power in a manner that secures the democratic future of their country” (AU 2017). Thus, what might otherwise have been painted as a coup by the AU was, instead, portrayed as a peaceful change in government and supported. The AU and Broader Civil-Military Relations in Africa The historical prevalence of coup d’état has long been considered the primary measure of civil-military relations in Africa. Yet, as has been argued in this book, the decline of the coup over the past decades does not necessarily signal the withdrawal of the military from politics on the continent. As this chapter has shown, the OAU and the AU have played significant roles in either promoting or constraining coup behavior of member states. As Antonia Witt (2020) has argued in her examination of Madagascar, the AU’s efforts to “undo” coups are not only about norm diffusion and democracy promotion. Rather, these efforts are also part of a fundamental power reconfiguration taking place within African states’ domestic constitutional orders, and their relationships to regional politics. It follows then, and as this book seeks to show, that Africa’s regional institutions continue to influence civilmilitary relations in ways that extend beyond the presence or absence of coups. In fact, the range of causal relationships between regional institutions and domestic politics are multidirectional. While the AU shapes political outcomes in member states, these states’ civil-military relations also impact the regional body in significant ways. Where regimes are the primary drivers of civil-military relations within states, these relations also occur within a regional political environment that regimes help construct, which has rules to which they subject themselves. While maintaining hard sovereignty has always been a central imperative, such regional cooperation can soften it. As a more practical matter, this coevolution involves explicit professionalization of African militaries as regional entities that can be deployed on peacekeeping missions (AU 2006).

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It therefore follows that a way of understanding the relationship between the AU and civil-military relations is to consider how regimes and regional institutions have coevolved within the broader context of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). As the PSC has increasingly strengthened regional peacekeeping continent-wide, the steady march toward an African Standby Force (ASF), the pinnacle of this coevolution, signals a deepening symbiosis between regime security imperatives and the AU’s institutional interest in being an effective steward of regional peace and security. While the AU has suffered from myriad challenges, African soldiers are now being brought outside the confines of their national militaries and trained to work together as cohesive, subregional forces (AU 2006). These soldiers will thus wear two hats: as a member of an AU operational unit and as a member of their own national military. If these battalions ever get fully established, they have the potential to deeply redefine the role of the soldier in Africa and play into dynamics of civilmilitary relations within their home countries. The potential upside of these moves toward symbiosis is that professionalization and training programs, along with the provision of field missions where soldiers may be deployed to be battle tested and socialized in a protector’s ethos, provide the AU with a reliable, rapid deployment force while the African states get exceptionally well-trained, professional soldiers on their return home. Yet, there are also two potential downsides to such trends. First, it has been shown empirically that foreign military training can actually lead to coups, as soldiers who are trained in good governance return only to political contexts that are underinstitutionalized or highly personalized (Savage and Caverley 2017; Wilén 2018). Maggie Dwyer (2017) has observed that at least one-quarter of army mutinies in Africa have been carried out by soldiers returning home from deployments in peace operations. Consequently, as suggested in the second half of this book, moves toward foreign training that mirror Western models may ultimately be destabilizing. Second, poorly trained and unprofessional soldiers now have the cover of legitimacy that allows for the perpetuation of bad behavior (see, e.g., Sotomayor 2014; Menon 2016). In recent years, many African militaries have evolved from destabilizing forces to sources of stability. Harkening back to the expectations at independence, many national armies now appear to be modernizers that protect instead of prey on ordinary citizens, supporting incumbents instead of undermining them, democratic and authoritarian alike (Ojo 2009; Ehwarieme 2011; Bah 2015). Of the potential factors that explain this change in the patterns of Africa’s civil-military relations, the role of regional institutions has often been overlooked. While the actions taken by How the AU Shapes Civil-Military Relations

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the AU impact the immediate cost-benefit calculations of military and civilian leaders, over time these can rearrange civil-military relations in fundamental ways. And while the AU generally makes moves that shift the civilmilitary balance in favor of the civilian government, this is not always the case and sometimes they carry with them unintended consequences. One of the key routes for African militaries to “professionalize” is through access training and assistance by way of contributing troops to one of the many peacekeeping missions on the continent deployed by the AU. Since this training is generally provided by the United States, the United Kingdom, or France, it generally includes instructions designed to increase the capabilities and effectiveness of these forces, as well as training in international humanitarian law and efforts to socialize soldiers into what is considered “appropriate behavior.” Consequently, states that choose to send troops to AU missions can expect to have their militaries receive formal training that boosts their fighting abilities and exposes their soldiers to ideas about respecting the rule of law and playing an apolitical role in domestic settings (US State Department 2013). As the case of Rwanda shows, becoming an AU peacekeeper can have dramatic effects. Following the genocide, the Rwandan military was little more than a rehatted rebel force. Staffed mainly with former Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) soldiers, the new Rwandan government military’s willingness to use excessive force against citizens, wreak havoc in the subregion, and maintain blind loyalty to Paul Kagame and other RPF elites, gave it a bad reputation (Des Forges 1999; Reytjens 2013; Damman 2015). Yet, contributing troops to the AU’s peacekeeping mission in the Sudan in 2004 created a new image for the Rwandan armed forces, while the training and battle experience that accompanied the troop contribution molded the Rwandan Defence Force into one of the most well-trained and professional armies on the continent, which in turn gave the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) a force that was able to effectively last until the UN could take over in 2008 (Damman 2015; Beswick 2010). In other words, the AU gave the government short-term mechanisms for pacifying potential military rivals and methods for creating a stronger esprit de corps. In the case of Burundi, the effects of the training and professionalization that arrived with the opportunity to join the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) was less clear-cut. In the short term, joining the peacekeeping mission in Somalia gave the Burundian military the ability to redirect itself away from a politically charged history of domestic conflict and rebuild itself as a national army (Wilén 2018). While in training and deployed to Somalia, these troops adopted a mantle of professionalism that helped the AU show it could intervene in a conflict and take on peace enforcement and peacebuilding elements in addition to traditional peacekeeping (Fisher 2012; Wilén 2018). But when they returned to Burundi and

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entered a political scene marred by corruption on the part of the civilian government, they struggled to maintain themselves as apolitical actors (Wilén 2018), leading to the coup attempt discussed above. Contributing to AU peacekeeping has thus been shown to cause disruptions in the civil-military relationship, particularly through the rise of mutinous behavior on the part of peacekeepers. Dwyer (2015, 2017) showed through careful analysis of several West African states that junior soldiers can become unhappy with their deployment conditions and pay, causing tensions between those on the front lines and the senior officer cadre and civilian leaders at home to intensify. Building on these insights, Rebecca Schiel, Jonathan Powell, and Ursula Daxecker (2020) found that while UN peacekeeping did not have an effect on soldier disobedience, AU involvement did. The reason for this is that AU and subregional missions often do not compensate soldiers as well as the UN does and pay is frequently delayed due to inadequate staffing and training in accounting at the AU level. For example, in 2012, Nigerian soldiers deployed to the mission in Sudan threatened to mutiny if they were not paid and repatriated to Nigeria within a matter of days (Mukhtar and Bashir 2012). In other words, while increased exposure to peacekeeping can help stabilize civil-military relations through better training and exposure to military norms of professionalization, it can also destabilize civil-military relations over conditions on the ground once forces are deployed. In other cases, the AU serves as a conduit for stripping militaries of nearly all their power, which may in the short term give a civilian government the chance to reestablish control, but in the long run risks creating a security vacuum. Central African Republic is a prime illustration of this. Historically, CAR’s armed forces have played an outsized role in regime politics (Bouckaert and Bercault 2007). As the country now tries to regain its footing in the aftermath of its 2013 civil war, its Central African Armed Forces (FACA) has been effectively defanged by a UN-led arms embargo and struggles for political relevance as national security remains in the hands of UN peacekeepers (UN Security Council 2013, 2020). The AU’s ongoing willingness to defer to the embargo in CAR has rendered the country’s military—already weak and unprofessional by all standards— deeply dependent on regional institutions and actors. While the AU cannot take direct action against the incumbent regime, the destruction of the FACA’s autonomy is a form of temporary stability that is nevertheless untenable long-term. While this can be a formula for political stability, there is no guarantee that those regimes gaining such stability as a result of AU actions are not authoritarians who have simply figured out how to use the AU’s new rules and mechanisms instrumentally. Indeed, studies of Rwanda (Beswick 2014) and Uganda (Fisher 2012) have shown that the AU has provided an avenue

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for entrenched authoritarianism in these countries. Moreover, as the cases of CAR and the rise of mutinies on the continent reveal, AU interference may do little to institutionalize patterns of stability for the long term. Although the AU has its own independent institutional structures, it is comprised of member states, and thus a repository for how these different states conduct business.8 This is particularly true in the realm of peace and security, where national militaries staff regional peacekeeping operations. These units, therefore, bring with them different modes of civil-military relations that can potentially influence how the AU behaves as a collective regional security organization. On the one hand, as discussed above, there is ample evidence of how military intervention in regime politics has shaped changes in regional norms. That is, it was in no small part due to the bad behavior of national armies that the AU was compelled not only to reorder its approach to the domestic matters of member states, but also to provide an institutional framework to intervene. On the other hand, states whose militaries exhibit good behavior can provide relatively reliable soldiers for the AU to credibly carry out its peace and security functions. And rulers of troop-contributing states may take leadership roles in shaping the nature of regional interventions. The creation of the task forces provides a good example of how the AU has adapted to the military structures and interests of its member states, while also acting in the service of regional peace and security (Brubacher, Damman, and Day 2017). The Regional Task Force (RTF) and the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) were established to counter specific transnational threats of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and Boko Haram, respectively. And although they were each comprised of several national armies, the organization and behavior of each task force largely followed the contours of a dominant force. In the case of the RTF, the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF) took the lead, while the Nigerian army was at the center of the MNJFT coalition. In both cases, the civil-military relations in Uganda and Nigeria had already been tied to each homegrown insurgency before they spread regionally. While officially operating under the auspices of the AU, the distinct modes of civil-military relations associated with Nigeria and Uganda, neither of which have ever corresponded to Huntingtonian “objective civilian control” or noncoercive relations with civilian populations, were allowed to persist with a larger degree of autonomy than other AU forces (Khisa and Day 2020). This means that, for instance in the Uganda case, the UPDF did not act as an independent arbiter of regional security. Rather, it was an extension of President Yoweri Museveni’s regional political interests because Uganda’s national army is effectively “fused” with the country’s dominant political party, the National Resistance Movement (Khisa 2020). How Civil-Military Relations Shape the AU

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For the Nigerian military, abuses of civilians associated with the task force’s operations against Boko Haram occurred with impunity. Whereas the Nigerian military was roundly criticized for these humanitarian abuses in their pre-2015 fight against Boko Haram (Nossiter 2015), this seems to have dissipated since becoming part of the MNJTF, despite their continued use of overly aggressive tactics against communities in Boko Haram–controlled territory. The AU has had a difficult time adequately responding to these sorts of problems because institutionally the task of monitoring and prosecuting misconduct falls to the troop-contributing countries themselves. The abilities of these troop-contributing countries to follow through on investigations vary widely as does their political will to do so (Human Rights Watch 2014). The implication here is that states that contribute more to regional peace missions may have an outsized say in the development of the AU’s security institutions, directly and indirectly. Directly, by advocating for certain types of mandates such as peace enforcement provisions or the task force model, countries such as Uganda and Nigeria have been able to push AU structures down an institutional path that it might otherwise not have gone. In other words, with the task forces, the AU’s security role in Africa is no longer restricted to peace operations but has now taken on an active combat dimension where member states assume a war footing. The upside is that actors directly responsible for peace and security in Africa (i.e., the militaries that are conducting the peacekeeping) have a responsive institution through which to work, and many of the creative solutions that this has generated have been successful. The ability of AMISOM to go after al-Shabaab in 2010 under a peace enforcement mandate, for example, was a direct response to Ugandan Museveni’s call to action, but it was also the first time that the mission might have had any chance of making headway against a real threat to peace and security in the Horn of Africa (Burgess 2013; Fisher 2020; Ninshaba 2019; Williams 2016). Indirectly, it is possible that states with more professional models of civil-military relations may serve as examples for other militaries. Through the rising number of African-run training institutes, countries that have been vetted through their peacekeeping behaviors and trained by Western militaries are increasingly training other African forces. The downside is that when individual states have this kind of influence, it may breed instability in the AU, as these states may increasingly demand new types of mandates or control over AU actions. For example, in the case of the RTF, Uganda had been given a high degree of autonomy over the mission and placed as its operational leader (Prah 2019). When Uganda no longer found playing such a role in its best interests, it simply pulled out of the task force. This left its partners to fend for themselves in a hunt for the LRA that they were woefully underprepared to do, and left the AU to take the blame for a failed mission against a regional threat. Moreover, there is no guarantee that the model of civil-military relations passed from state to

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state via AU-sponsored mechanisms would be those preferred by the AU for fulfilling its broader goals of building good governance across the region. Stability and peacekeeping ability are independent of regime type— authoritarian regimes with armies as extensions of single parties can still be politically stable and reliable troop contributors. Conclusion In this chapter, we have tracked the institutional evolution of the African Union with the changing nature of the military’s role in African politics, with an emphasis on the coup d’état as a bellwether for broader patterns of civilmilitary relations. Despite substantial transformations, Africa’s regional normative environment has nevertheless created and sustained permissive conditions for two interrelated phenomena. First, as the AU has shifted from the norm of noninterference to nonindifference, Africa’s rulers have learned to instrumentalize the regional condemnation of seizing power via unconstitutional means. This means governments—of any regime type—have an additional protective layer atop their domestic strategies to coup-proof against rivals, particularly disgruntled military leaders with political ambitions. Second, while the AU has developed an aversion to constitutional changes that allow rulers to extend their tenure, when push comes to shove coup makers have some wiggle room if the ultimate outcome of their intervention in state politics is democratic transformation.9 So long as junta leaders hand over power to civilian rulers and do not stand in elections, Africa’s good coups have somewhat alleviated regional handwringing over military interference in politics. Observers are split on whether such trends will eventually undermine the spirit of the AU’s instruments for holding coup makers accountable for unconstitutional changes in government (Roessler and Abi-Falah 2017). Indeed, the precedent set in the Egyptian case was consolidated in Zimbabwe. These developments go beyond the coup d’état as a defining metric for the role of the military in Africa. A key insight is that although the AU has helped tamp down military interference in domestic politics, African armies still loom larger than ever as players in regional security, which has implications for civil-military relations and for broader patterns of militarism. In Africa, the era of weakly institutionalized armies taking over weakly institutionalized states may very well be ending (Hutchful and Bathily 1998). Yet, civil-military relations must continue to consider the changing boundaries between coups and other modes of political transformation associated with military force now deployed on behalf of the AU in ways that reflect the coevolution of regional norms and regime interests. If militarism is understood as the “preparation for war, its normalization and legitimation” (Stavrianakis and Stern 2018: 4), it is important to understand how African armies continue to serve key functions within the so-called security-development

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nexus (Gelot and Sandor 2019) at domestic, regional, and increasingly global levels (Abrahamsen 2018, 2019). This opens up avenues for future research. One key direction is to examine more closely the relationship between the AU’s evolving peace and security architecture and the externally oriented politics of security sector reform driven largely by donors with their own security interests in Africa. Reforming and strengthening the coercive capacities of African security institutions may very well facilitate AU peacekeeping missions and counterinsurgency operations continent-wide. And it may enable the AU to increasingly reconcile its evolving norms with the principle of nonindifference, and thus confer legitimacy on its institutional responses to the myriad domestic crises of member states. But as the AU embraces increasingly militarized strategies for managing the continent’s peace and security, and as Africa’s armies become increasingly indispensable, it remains unclear how such processes will feed back into patterns of civil-military relations at the domestic level, particularly in light of uneven democratization across the continent. Opportunities exist to develop and extend such research in the future, but only if scholars and practitioners alike take more seriously the relationship between the AU’s evolving peace and security landscape, Africa’s militaries, and democratic transitions. To be sure, fewer coups are good. And at least for now, good coups seem even better. 1. For a list of OAU chairpersons, see the appendix on page 349 in Kinni (2015). 2. For a more detailed look at how coup rates have dropped since the advent of the AU, see Powell, Lasley, and Schiel (2016). 3. Confidential interview, Sierra Leone armed forces colonel, Freetown, January 2009. 4. While Egypt’s election of al-Sisi appears to counter this, as we discuss, the AU went to great lengths provide institutional cover for this. 5. It is important to note that the coup in Burkina Faso was short-lived and worked in opposition to the election that brought about greater political rights in this location. 6. This is not to argue that these transitions were the best mechanisms for achieving durable democratic change, but rather that, in the short term, space was created in which democratic institutions could be established. 7. The panel consisted of former president of Mali, Alpha Oumar Konaré, former president of Botswana, Festus Mogae, former prime minister of Djibouti, Dileita Dileita, and a grouping of experts. 8. A tempered understanding that institutions often (though far from always) serve as expressions of member interests is widely accepted (North 1990; Hall and Taylor 1996) but this is especially true for the African Union, which gives central decisionmaking power to African heads of state (Tieku 2004). 9. In this regard, geopolitical contexts can also make a large difference. Part of the reason that al-Sisi’s election was not condemned had to do with international support for taking the Muslim Brotherhood from power (Tansey 2017).

Notes

4 The “Coup Taboo” and Authoritarian Politics Moses Khisa

Sing your praise of progress and the doom machine the naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen.

—Bob Dylan

On September 16, 2015, members of Burkina Faso’s presidential guard detained the interim president, prime minister, and cabinet members. The leader of the presidential guard, General Gilbert Diendéré, announced a coup d’état only weeks before general elections, scheduled for October 11. General Diendéré was a loyalist of former president Blaise Compaoré, deposed in a popular uprising in 2014 and forced to stealthily “flee in haste in a car with tinted windows” to seek refuge in Côte d’Ivoire (SylvestreTreiner and Benjamin 2019). Compaoré’s ousting was a culmination of popular protest against an attempted political maneuver that in the past two decades became pervasive on the African continent: constitutional amendments to remove term limits on the presidency in order to legally prolong an incumbent’s hold on power. While many incumbent African rulers have found their way around term limits to cling to power, Compaoré’s attempt was unsuccessful as citizens rose up in street protests that included torching the national legislature. In attempting the coup route, General Diendéré may have intended to bring back his erstwhile boss, exiled across the border in Côte d’Ivoire. However, his putsch was short-lived, arguably the shortest time that a military junta has held power in an African country—it lasted only six days. Within a week, “when it became clear they [the coup makers] did not enjoy

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popular support and after an ultimatum from the regular army to step down or be ousted by force, the RSP [the presidential guard] withdrew from the capital” (BBC 2015b). In the end, popular opposition, regional pressure, and rejection by the country’s wider security forces forced General Diendéré to surrender. When in 2018 he appeared before a military tribunal with his coconspirators, he confessed that carrying out the coup was the “biggest mistake” of his career (Day, Khisa, and Reno 2020: 157). In January 2022 the military in Burkina Faso yet again overthrew a civilian elected president, and the country’s governing arrangement remains uncertain. Yet the events of 2015 and others in recent years nevertheless underscore the hostile environment that coup-makers face in what is a markedly changed political and diplomatic landscape on the African continent and around the world. Between the early years of independence and up until at least the early 2000s, Africa was a continent of coups and countercoups, successful and unsuccessful, popular and unpopular. The coup phenomenon was by no means exclusive to Africa; other regions such as Latin America and Asia experienced numerous military interventions in politics that overthrew civilian and democratic governments. However, Africa’s coup frequency surpassed that of any other region of the world, making the coup the signature form for military meddling in otherwise civilian authority and the primary focus of scholarly debates. Since the early 2000s, however, there has been a dramatic departure from the practice of the routine military takeovers characteristic of the Cold War era, pointing to a fundamental norm transformation in international relations and international law. Both the frequency of coups d’état and the duration that military regimes stay in power have drastically declined, a global trend but one that is more pronounced in Africa. Surprisingly, this crucial aspect of international law—the evolution of the norm against coups and other unconstitutional changes of government—has not received ample attention and systematic treatment from scholars of international relations. Yet, it is arguable that in this realm of military coups, we can find a remarkable deepening of an international normative standard, which has exacted relative influence in shaping and influencing domestic political behavior. In line with the general theme of this book and the theoretical outline in Chapter 1, in this chapter I analyze the remarkable but also contradictory transformation from routine military takeovers to the rarity of overt military coups, marking the deepening of a critical norm that is regional and global. However, I argue that this norm transformation and the emergence of a taboo against coups has happened in quite contradictory ways, as there has been a simultaneous growth in alternative forms of military intrusions that have contributed to the rollback of democratization, with implications for civil-military relations.

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The chapter makes two sets of arguments. First, I argue that there has emerged something approximating to a coup taboo in international relations, a universal normative standard against the overt use of military putsches to capture state power. I adopt Nina Tannenwald’s (2005: 8) definition of a taboo as “a particularly forceful kind of normative prohibition that is concerned with the protection of individuals and societies from behavior that is defined or perceived to be dangerous.” A taboo stands above the common norm that characterizes informal international law and the respect that norms get from state and nonstate actors. While coups still take place, they are now treated with far more opprobrium than in the past. It is important to clarify that taboo is used here not to denote a total absence of a practice but, rather, the fact that an act is generally construed as unacceptable by the wider global community of states and nonstate actors. Second, although the evolution of the coup taboo was somewhat contemporaneous with the global spread and embrace of democracy, which picked up pace at the turn of the past century, the deepening of the coup taboo has with time run parallel to stagnation and even rollback of democratization in Africa. This raises an intriguing empirical puzzle: why has the decline in military takeovers, which are outrightly undemocratic acts, not correlated with further acceleration in democratization? We would expect that, all else being equal, fewer coups, more civilian governments, and peaceful transfers of power would represent growth of democratic norms and institutions, and that Africa would gradually become more, and not less, democratic. The prevalence of military coups, in Africa and elsewhere, from the 1960s through to the end of the last century constituted one of the biggest antidotes to the quest for democratic governance. Regimes that captured power through coups often went on to become entrenched military dictatorships, infamous for venality, malfeasance, dysfunction, and institutional decay. Most military regimes engaged in egregious human rights violations and undertook actions that constricted the space for civilian political engagement. They repressed the citizenry and undermined the growth of free and open societies. From the late 1990s, following a range of transitions from authoritarian rule and military dictatorships, there appeared to have been an emerging and promising democratic trajectory. It would have been expected that the democratization wave of the 1990s could receive further impetus with a precipitous decline in traditional coups, starting in the mid-2000s, and related violent forms of changes of governments. Yet, quite to the contrary, in recent years the African continent as a whole has on average been less democratic than during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The deepening of the coup taboo and the associated drop in overt coup incidents, in turn, spawned other ways that in practice amounted to coups and

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abuse of power through military means. This, in effect, contributing to torpedoing democratic governance albeit in a manner that does not directly offend the norm against military coups. In other words, if the African continent has experienced a decline in traditional military coups (and there is ample empirical evidence to this effect), the continent has simultaneously witnessed an increase in unorthodox coups as well as “civilian coups” and what Erin Damman and Christopher Day (this volume) refer to as the “good coup.” On the one hand, the norm against military changes of governments deepened and coups dramatically declined in 2000s and 2010s (Clark 2007; Lindberg and Clark 2008; Souaré 2014). On the other hand, however, democratization during the same period has showed signs of retrogression and rollback (Diamond 2008; Diamond and Plattner 2010, 2015; Khisa 2019). It is arguable that the decline of the traditional coup has simultaneously given rise to new forms of “coups” that depress democracy, albeit in less overt ways than the old modus operandi of direct seizures of power by the armed forces. In countries such as Cameroon, Togo, and Uganda, authoritarian rulers depend on controlling the military to stay in power. In others such as Egypt, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, the military leadership covertly overthrew incumbent rulers without formally announcing a coup, as had been done in the past. This chapter proceeds as follows. First, I provide a brief overview of the coup phenomenon and how it came to define the African political landscape, followed by a theoretical outline of the evolution of the coup taboo, tracing its global origins, dimensions, and remarkable deepening at the regional (African) level. I then turn to an analysis of the ways in which the coup taboo is manifest, outlining the range of actions and developments that underscore the emergence of what we can characterize as a “taboo stance” against military coups. After that, I develop two mechanisms that account for the contradictory effect of the coup taboo on African politics; that is, the decline of overt military takeovers at the same time as the continent’s democratic stagnation. This teases out the implications for the coup taboo on civil military relations. Finally, I provide some concluding reflections. The Anatomy of Africa’s Coups d’État The international norm against violent and unconstitutional changes of government, primarily through the coup d’état, has come a long away, especially with respect to the African continent. There has been a remarkable shift from coup rampancy to relative coup rarity. Consider that from the first coup on the continent, in Egypt in 1952, to the onset of the wave of democratization in 1990, Africa experienced at least sixty-eight successful military coups and more than twice this number of unsuccessful coup attempts (McGowan 2003; Souaré 2014; Young 2012; Carbone and Pellegata 2020). On average, the

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African continent had approximately twenty-two coups per decade during the first three decades of independence—the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. These three decades, characterized as they were by rampant coups, inevitably made writing on African politics predominantly a domain of studies about military interventions whose signature method was the coup (Bienen 1978: 3). Across the continent, the descent into praetorianism reflected an early breakdown of postdecolonization politics, placing many countries on a path of incessant instability and insecurity (Young 2012: 123). Several of the countries that attained independence during the decade of independence—the 1960s, together with the three 1950s cases of Egypt, Ghana, and Sudan—were in quick succession afflicted by the coup culture that entailed coups and countercoups, happening in some cases within the first five years of attaining sovereign statehood. The frequency of military putsches was startling. By 2001, after less than a half-century of independence, according to one estimate, there had been at least eighty successful coups d’état and close to ninety by 2012 in more than thirty different African states (McGowan 2003: 351; Souaré 2014: 75). The coup phenomenon in West Africa was particularly instructive. In Benin, soldiers overthrew fellow soldiers in quick succession, and to devastating effect. Between 1963 and 1972, a period of less than ten years, Benin had six successful coups (Bienen 1978: 8). During that period, coups in Benin happened with “almost revolving-door regularity” (Reid 2012: 154). Ghana, the first country to gain sovereignty in Black Africa under Kwame Nkrumah, had five successful coups between 1957 and 1981, and at least half a dozen failed coups in a short period of two years between 1982 and 1984, following a coup by junior officers on December 31, 1981. For the most part, across West Africa, one group of uniformed men turned against another as junior officers took the turn to overthrow senior officers in countries such as Burkina Faso, Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. By the mid-1960s, only a few years into independence, “the military coup had emerged as the primary vehicle for regime displacement and a vector for deciphering politics in the continent” (Young 2012: 141). This remained so until well into the wave of democratization in the 1990s. During the 1990s, the continent experienced fifteen successful coups, a significant drop from an average of twenty-two per decade in the preceding decades (Souaré 2014: 85). This drop in the 1990s coincided with the continent-wide wave of democratization that made landfall in Africa in 1989, in the shadows of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. A further downward trend in successful coups continued in the 2000s, with about eight successful coups. From 2010 to 2019, the actual count of successful coups was eight, although the African Union (AU) and other bodies did not recognize several of the coups during that decade, so the official count was roughly four coups: Niger in 2010, Mali and Guinea Bissau in 2012, Egypt in 2013, and Sudan in

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2019. This raises the question of coup measurement and what should count, a question widely discussed in the existing literature (see McGowan 2003). Whatever the actual number, there is little doubt that Africa has experienced a remarkable turnaround in the incidents of attempted coups and the count of successful military coups. What was once a routine occurrence became less prevalent in 2000s and 2010s, although the coups in Mali in 2020, Mali again and Guinea in 2021, and Burkina Faso in 2022 appear to have recast the coup specter. A great deal of the Africanist scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s focused not on why coups happened, but on why a few states had avoided the general trend of military destabilizations. Samuel Decalo (1998b) captured this in the notion of the “stable minority,” about one-third of the continent that had not suffered a single successful coup well into the fourth decade of independence, toward the end of the 1990s. While coups were a routine feature of the majority of African states, a minority (about one-third) were able to avoid the track that others had taken. In sum, from the decade of independence (the 1960s) through to the 1980s, military intervention primarily through the coup d’état was the biggest threat to the quest for stable and democratic government across the African continent. Scholarly consensus presented the coup as a predominantly African problem, despite the phenomenon playing out in other regions of the world (Williams 2007: 271). From 1962 to 1990, all violent changes of government on the African continent were through military coups except in two countries: in 1978 and 1982 in Chad when Hissen Habre’s rebel National Liberation Front (FROLINAT) took over; and in Uganda in 1979 when Tanzania invaded its northern neighbor to remove dictator Idi Amin, and again in 1986 with the rebel National Resistance Army (NRA) capturing power through decisive military victory. As I argue below, the trends and trajectory of coup incidents had a lot to do with the politics of the Cold War. Yet, even with the end of the Cold War, the “coup culture” did not change significantly in substance or appearance. Rather than subside, successful coups accelerated, although the rate of success started to decline markedly at the start of the twenty-first century. The post–Cold War international order brought about a turn toward outlawing the coup, but the actual impact was not instant because regional and international norms take time to be internalized, institutionalized, and localized. The process of norm internationalization tends to be gradual, and the impact can take a long time to take effect. What is more, the process of shifting from a normative standard to a taboo status is not straightforward, considering that a taboo is generally associated with a stronger and more developed normative prohibition than a norm (Tannenwald 1999: 436). At any rate, while the global norm against coups did not start in Africa, it nevertheless had its biggest impact in this continent given the practical steps that the regional continental body took to chart a new normative stan-

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dard. The Organization of African Unity (OAU) was normatively agnostic about coups, but its successor (the African Union) made significant contributions to the regional deepening of a global norm by constitutionalizing and institutionalizing the norm against military coups (see Chapter 3). The Evolution of the Coup Taboo For long, the coup d’état constituted the foremost form of military intrusion in politics in African states. As an action of seizing power through the barrel of the gun, sometimes with widespread killings and protracted violent conflict, coups d’état were by far the major source of instability and destabilization, and an impediment to the deepening of democratic governance. Coups and countercoups, partial and failed coups that took place across the continent almost always involved wanton killings, mass displacements, and descent into protracted civil wars with enormous long-term damage to state systems and the social fabric. Governments that came to power through coups d’état attracted both successful and unsuccessful countercoups. In some cases, coup-proofing strategies inadvertently set off protracted armed rebellion (Roessler 2016; Powell 2014). All these aspects and features gave the coup a largely deleterious status. Coups have the uncanny tendency of being cyclical and path dependent. Some countries with previous coup experience tended to suffer repeat coups. In other countries, coups initiated a chain of activities that spawned armed rebellion. In both sets of phenomena, with coups begetting coups and coup-proofing giving rise to rebel activity to challenge governments, actions of armed actors in and outside government fueled social disorder and wrought untold suffering on civilian populations across the African continent. Institutionally, coups took a toll on a state’s intelligence and security agencies because they tended to disrupt the military’s organizational growth, impede its professional evolution, and imperil the credibility of the armed forces as a whole, thereby undermining state-society relations as well as state-building processes. These different negative outcomes made coups perhaps the biggest threat to political progress and stability, even as they remained a pervasive tool in the service of domestic and international interests. This backdrop gave rise to an anticoup norm that took shape and grew into a taboo as analyzed below. For the most part, coups had a rather contradictory presence among African publics, at some point loved and loathed in more or less equal measure. At the height of gross misrule in the 1970s and 1980s, a period of predominantly one-party dictatorships and fascist-military regimes, coups were widely considered a popular mode of overthrowing venal and repressive rulers. For International and Regional Dimensions of the Anticoup Norm

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the most part, the public desired and celebrated the overthrow of such regimes through military putsches. In other words, these were popular coups. What is more, in the context of the Cold War calculus, the West and the Soviet Union, variously and to differing effect, encouraged or directly sponsored military coups as a somewhat “legitimate” foreign policy tool for overthrowing regimes construed as hostile to either of the antagonistic Cold War camps and their self-defined interests. In a sense, then, coups d’état had a certain degree of domestic popularity and were at the same time upheld at the international level as a worthwhile optional tool in the repertoires of external interventions in African politics within the context of Cold War muscle-flexing between the two superpowers and their respective allies. This state of play made coups acceptable and justifiable as standard practice. It was more of a rule than the exception that Western powers either sponsored or covertly supported coup makers. This was all the more ironic considering that in the old and established Western democracies, military praetorian behavior had long ceased being a political problem and the civil-military problématique had not included the proclivity of armed forces seizing power. In the new democracies and authoritarian states of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America, by contrast, capturing power through the force of arms and conspiratorial military maneuvers became a decidedly established tradition of the second half of the twentieth century, in part backed and buttressed by Western powers. However, a drastic change was to occur in the post–Cold War global order that, among other things, entailed the universalization of a democratic process as the only acceptable route to state power, through the ballot and not the bullet. The Organization of American States (OAS) took the lead in undertaking measures aimed at outlawing the coup and establishing an anticoup norm in the Western Hemisphere (Tansey 2017: 146). The OAS had the support and solidarity of the UN in what was a major departure from past practice. The end of the Cold War meant the partial loosening of veto politics in the UN Security Council. It was therefore possible, for example, that in the wake of the 1991 coup in Haiti when the General Assembly condemned the military’s overthrow of a democratically elected government, in 1994 the Security Council adopted a resolution authorizing the use of all means to force out the junta and restore the legitimate government (Tansey 2017: 146). But the OAS took a rather measured and incremental approach compared to what was to subsequently transpire under the aegis of the African Union. The latter took a more ambitious and unparalleled approach that started in the late 1990s in the twilight of its predecessor, the OAU. The 1990s was a decade of political liberalization across the African continent as part of a less-acknowledged curl of Samuel Huntington’s (1991) “third wave” of democratization around the world. The cascade swept aside long-surviving one-party regimes and military dictatorships or

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those that had initially ascended to power via coup fiat but had somehow transitioned to civilian garb such as Ghana under Jerry Rawlings or Benin under Mathieu Kérékou. Yet, ironically, even as this democratization wave swept across the continent, successful coups remained a firm phenomenon along with an upsurge in violent armed conflict that was partly fueled by the easy proliferation of weapons following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This contradictory trend—of a democratizing wave simultaneous with increased coup incidents—was to change dramatically at the turn of the twenty-first century when coups declined significantly. However, unlike the 1970s and 1980s, the military coups of the 1990s were not merely a matter of the military overthrowing autocratic rulers or different factions of the armed forces that launched coups against others (e.g., as happened with junior officers toppling military generals). There was something else that proved crucial. With the new wave of democratization, some of the coups in the 1990s were in fact against duly elected civilian governments. This overthrow of elected governments, and blatant subversion of democracy, proved to be a critical catalyst in the emergence of an anticoup norm and its subsequent evolution into a coup taboo. The trigger was in the West African nation of Sierra Leone. The genesis of what has become a fairly entrenched norm against unconstitutional changes of government in Africa, including the use of coups d’état, can be traced to a set of measures put forward in 1997 by the OAU’s Council of Ministers with respect to the need for the restoration of constitutional order in Sierra Leone. It is not clear why Sierra Leone provided such a crucial turning point, but it merits pointing out that the country was emerging out of a violent armed conflict when the military overthrew a duly and democratically elected president, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah. The coup against Kabbah came at a most inopportune time. Sierra Leoneans were struggling to pick up the pieces of social healing and recovery after a long and brutal civil war that had created deep wounds and social devastation. In the wake of the coup in Sierra Leone, the OAU’s Council of Ministers made several recommendations. Arguably, the most important was for the OAU and its member states to take an unprecedented stance of not recognizing the military leaders who had overthrown a democratically elected president. This was, in effect, to deny the coup makers international legitimacy, a major departure from previous practice when, for example, still in Sierra Leone the earlier coups by Captain Valentine Strasser and Julius Maada Bio did not attract condemnation or any form of sanction. In fact, among ordinary Sierra Leoneans, Strasser’s 1992 coup was of the highly popular kind (Opala 1992). Subsequent to the 1996 coup and acting on the recommendations of the Council of Ministers, the OAU initiated a chain of actions and processes that contributed to the deepening, strengthening, and institutionalizing of the norm against coups.

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The OAU, and subsequently the AU, instituted several legal and institutional measures the culmination of which was an explicit prohibition of seizure of power by force of arms among member states of the continental body. First, in response to the coup phenomena on the continent, but specifically in the wake of the events in Sierra Leone, the OAU passed the Lomé Declaration of 2000, which explicitly outlined the different unconstitutional changes of government that were considered unacceptable. Subsequently, in a bolder move the legal document establishing the African Union, the Constitutive Act, and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ACDEG) passed in 2007 had explicit provisions against unconstitutional changes of government. The AU’s Constitutive Act of 2001 provided the first strong institutional grounding for the emerging norm against unconstitutional changes of government. The norm received further deepening in the ACDEG, and was further defined, expanded, and institutionalized within the AU’s African Peace and Security Architecture (Omotola 2011; Souaré 2014). Initially, the AU outlined four types of unconstitutional changes of government: military coups d’états, armed rebels seizing power militarily, hired mercenaries overthrowing governments, and (very instructive) incumbents refusing to hand over power once they are defeated in free and fair elections. In 2007, the ACDEG expanded the definition of unconstitutional changes of government, under Article 23(5), to include the use of constitutional or legal provisions in ways that undermine the principles of democratic change of government—in other words, the manipulative use of the law to cling to power and undermine genuine democratic practice, which can result in political instability. This additional provision in the ACDEG was crucial in broadening and emboldening the regional norm against abuse of power and use of force in ways that do not involve the traditional military coup d’état, yet nevertheless undermine democratic governance. The move to address democracyinhibiting practices that went beyond the coup spoke, particularly, to the rising tidal practice of African incumbents who cling to power through a variety of legal maneuvers, constitutional engineering, and institutional manipulations. Most notable are the removal of presidential term limits or extension of stay in office after an incumbent’s term expires. Such machinations have the net impact of subverting democratic consolidation and undermining the deepening of constitutionalism, which can contribute to conditions of political instability and threaten peace and security. In fact, the AU construed such practices, which on paper are legal and legitimate within a sovereign state, as having the potential to create conditions leading to political instability and, in effect, posing threats to regional peace and security on the continent. Through a combination of legal instruments and concrete measures, since 2002 the African Union has performed the role of “norm entrepre-

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neur” against different forms of unconstitutional changes of government, but especially via the coup (Souaré 2014). The norm has arguably evolved to the standard of a taboo with respect to overt military coups, but not so in other unconstitutional changes of government. In fact, Africa incumbents continue to use legal and constitutional maneuvers to cling to power; for example, by the deleterious actions of removing term limits, conducting fraudulent elections, shrinking the space for political competition, and repressing opponents. While the AU sought to entrench a norm against unconstitutional changes of government (UCGs), the norm and the resultant taboo took deep effect on coups, and not so much on other UCGs, in part because of the heavily tainted history of military interference in politics, the terrible record of military rulers, and the ugliness that comes with seizing power through the barrel of the gun. The coup taboo has evolved through the force of several factors that are internal and external to the African continent. I have labeled it a “taboo” because it has grown beyond a mere legal norm to something more widely empirically upheld as unacceptable and subject to real actionable steps when violated, including intervention using force in a manner that is generally rare in international politics. This is worth underscoring because, at the international level, it is often difficult to enforce legal norms even when they are fully enshrined in legally binding instruments such as treaties and charters (including the UN Charter). By contrast, taboos in international relations are often de facto prohibitions even when not backed up by explicit legal provisions (Tannenwald 2005: 10). A policy or practice is tabooed after it has been shown to bring about adverse or devastating consequences for the human community and the environment. This is the case with the use of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. In the case of the coup taboo, what started as a codified legal norm has deepened and transcended the status of a norm to become something seen not just as unacceptable, but also as something to be swiftly sanctioned. The coup taboo has both a legal basis and a strong normative currency that make enforcement possible. It is backed by legal provisions, as well as practical actions of disapproval and concrete measures taken against coup makers. Manifest actions and patterns of conduct in reaction to coup incidents point to something that has become more sacrosanct than just a regular norm in international relations—a taboo. This shift is particularly intriguing considering that in a not too distant past, coups were prevalent and implicitly accepted, rarely condemned, and in fact in some instances used as a mundane tools of foreign policy. The dramatic turnaround and precipitous decline in military coups is necessary, but not sufficient, evidence to conclude that there has emerged a From the Coup Norm to the Coup Taboo

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taboo against coups. Other pieces of the story have to be considered. What is it that made coups d’état come to be seen as a practice not to be entertained or countenanced? And when they do happen, why are coups often treated with swift condemnation? When they happen, coups are now more likely to be carried out in disguise. The point is not that coups no longer take place or that Africa has entered a postcoup era. Coups still have taken place recently, as the case in Guinea Conakry in September 2021, in Mali in August 2020 and again in May 2021, and Burkina Faso in January 2022. Rather, the point here is that coups have become less and less prevalent and, when they happen, coup makers increasingly have to disguise their coup actions. Yet, when they do happen, the wider African community (including the AU) is coy to name a coup act as a coup even when it carries hallmarks of one. All this points to an overall normative environment where coups are construed as patently unacceptable, as taboo. Several reasons account for this. First, the record of military regimes on the African continent during the 1970s and 1980s painted an overwhelmingly negative picture (Young 2012: 121). At their nadir, the military’s overthrow of civilian autocrats was almost always greeted with sporadic celebrations in African capitals and in the countryside, as civilian rulers were carted away by the very military machinery that had helped protect them. Coup makers always justified their actions on account of undemocratic behavior, human rights violations, and corruption scandals by the overthrown, often civilian (and, in some cases, democratically elected) governments (Onwumechili 1998: 39). However, with the exception of a few cases such as Ghana in 1966 and 1979 and Nigeria’s 1983 coup, in the majority of cases military rulers were no more than a bunch of self-seeking and power-hungry autocrats who, once in power, were not different from the authoritarian rulers they had overthrown (Decalo 1973: 118–120). Economic mismanagement and decay at the behest of military dictatorships in countries such as Congo-Zaire, Ghana, and Uganda made clear the fallacy of a benevolent dictatorship. Economic performance on the continent was generally dismal when most countries were under one type of military rule or another: countries experienced negative gross domestic product (GDP) and per capita growth from the mid1970s through the end of the 1980s (van de Walle 2001: 5; Easterly 2006). Indeed, economic collapse and harsh living conditions peaked precisely during the period of pervasive military rule. Worse still, the military rulers who took power through coups between the 1960s and early 1990s were among the most brutal and venal on the continent: Sani Abacha in Nigeria, Idi Amin in Uganda, Gnassingbé Eyadéma in Togo, Juvénal Habyarimana in Rwanda, Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia, Jean-Bedel Bokassa in Central African Republic, and Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, to mention only a few. In all, the historical record showed that military rulers “govern” no better than elected civilians in Africa—often

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much worse—and military-instigated political instability had a negative impact on the rate of improvement in human development between 1970 and 1985 (McGowan 2003: 340–341). Unlike in the past, in recent years coup makers have met with popular public protests as well as external condemnation. It is still the case, though, that there are incidents when coups are received with popular approval. Second, the role of Western powers, primarily the United States and the European Union (EU), within the context of the post–Cold War international order was crucial to promoting civilian competition for power rather than propping up military dictatorships as client states against perceived rival powers, the latter having been the case for much of the Cold War period. During the Cold War, supporting coups and military dictatorships was part of the game of political counterbalancing that played out across the globe. The Cold War politics conditioned Western powers, particularly the United States, to tacitly sponsor coups and embrace governments comprised of and constituted by coup makers, which is what happened in countries like Congo and Somalia (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002; Meredith 2005). This was part of the broader US foreign policy of staving off perceived Soviet influence around the world. Early on in independent Africa, for example, the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and his brutal assassination had the heavy hand of Belgium and the United States, the latter wary of Soviet influence in central and southern Africa particularly with respect to South Africa where the fight against apartheid took on a Cold War dimension. It is instructive that the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the time was to later publicly admit that the United States had overrated the Soviet danger in the Congo (Meredith 2005: 113). At any rate, as a major departure from the post–Cold War era, rather than sponsor coups the United States and the EU have been more inclined to support democratization, although the imperatives of the war on terror since September 11 have tended to undercut the United States’ normative commitment to the democratization agenda around the world. The changed post–Cold War geopolitical calculus played an important role in replacing support of coups with promotion of democratization as a tool of foreign policy by the United States and other Western powers. Third, it is arguable that through foreign training and peacekeeping missions there has been a global diffusion and internalization of the norm of subordinating officer corps to civilian authority as part of the professional orientation of the armed forces (Day, Khisa, and Reno 2020). Over time, African militaries have had experience with peacekeeping operations and, especially, foreign training programs by the United States, the UK, France, and other Western powers eager to propagate a military ethos that can promote stability and security partly to serve the strategic interests of those Western powers on the African continent. In addition, regional and

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international peacekeeping missions of the African Union and the UN have increasingly involved more troops from African states. The US Africa Command (AFRICOM) has developed into a huge presence and a towering influence on the African military landscape with military bases across the continent, from Niamey to Djibouti. AFRICOM’s African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program trained more than 350,000 troops from over two dozen countries in the decade since AFRICOM was established. And it is estimated that US military assistance grew from less than $100 million annually in the 1990s to over $1 billion by 2013 (Burchard and Burgess 2018: 341; Allen 2018: 659). Quite different from the armed forces of the immediate postindependence period, African officer corps of the past two to three decades have had the advantage of receiving training from senior officer war colleges at home and abroad, with experiences that include inculcating an ethos of professional conduct. In these “modernized” African militaries of recent years, one finds a core of senior officers who are graduates of prestigious war colleges such as Sandhurst in the UK and Fort Leavenworth in the United States. The actual impact of peacekeeping missions and training in war colleges is difficult to pin down conclusively, and it is fair to say that it has perhaps been a mixed bag. For example, in their empirical study, Jesse Dillon Savage and Jonathan D. Caverley (2017) found that the US military training programs for different countries around the world between 1970 and 2009 increased the probability of coups by altering the balance of power in favor of the military. However, it is also true that, for some countries, training and peacekeeping experiences have had a role in professional transformation, norm diffusion, and ultimately the making of the coup taboo as a normative standard. This is the impression I got from interviews with senior officers and analysts when I did fieldwork for a broader civil-military relations project in a range of countries, including Ghana, Rwanda, and Uganda, between 2016 and 2018. Advanced training in modern military professionalism has contributed to orienting commanders and officers to behave in less praetorian ways, which in some countries has made a difference compared to the military commanders of the 1960s. For example, in the early 1980s in Ghana a Sandhursttrained officer, Major Courage Quashigah, gained the reputation of leading the charge against coup attempts and maintaining the status quo in ways that contributed to stabilizing a volatile situation following the second junior officer’s coup of December 13, 1981. In addition to specialized training, participation in regional and international peacekeeping missions contributes to shaping the attitudes, ethos, and professional traits of senior commanders and junior officers, the latter having dominated coup plots, especially in West Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, because they tend to be those in direct command of actual troops. Exceptions to this remain, as evident in the colonels

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who recently seized power in Mali in May 2021, Guinea in September 2021, and Burkina Faso in January 2022. Last, and arguably most important, is the role of intergovernmental regional communities, chiefly the OAU/AU working with subregional organizations like the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and international multilateral organizations, primarily the United Nations, in developing and deepening legal instruments against military seizures. As noted above, this trend of regional organizations taking a progressive stance started in the Americas in the early 1990s, supported by the UN Security Council, but it became more pronounced on the African continent under the OAU and subregional bodies. ECOWAS has been, by far, the biggest actor in exacting diplomatic pressure and taking actions against coup makers. The sanctioning power of membership admission and revocation or suspension in the event of violating the established norm contributes to compelling member states to respect and abide by an evolving international norm. This has been the case with the norm against military coups. The evolution of the coup taboo is in no small measure due to the strong stance, albeit not always done consistently, taken by the community of nation-states against military overthrow of civilian governments. The OAU and the AU, working with subregional bodies, made military coups unacceptable to the community of African nation-states by taking firm steps to condemn and sanction governments that assume power militarily (Day, Khisa, and Reno 2020). The AU/OAU’s position and actions against military coups emerged out of the initiatives and activities of regional member bodies, particularly ECOWAS, which harshly intervened or threatened to intervene in member nations to topple governments that had come to power through coups or those that attempted to subvert constitutional order using manipulative legal means. As noted in the opening paragraph of this chapter, in 2015 the AU and ECOWAS threatened to intervene, thereby helping force out of power the coup makers in Burkina Faso. In Gambia in 2017, after an ECOWAS intervention force crossed the border from Senegal, incumbent Yahya Jammeh heeded the warning of an impending use of force against him for refusing to accept election results in which he had lost to opposition challenger Adama Barrow. Jammeh promptly fled the country to seek refuge in Equatorial Guinea. In addition to such regional intervention initiatives, the AU has more generally fostered norm transformation through a series of protocols and diplomatic moves aimed at deepening democratic governance (Souaré 2014). The irony though is that the democratization trajectory has not proceeded in the same direction as the decline of coups and deepening of the coup taboo as I argue below. The AU’s norm-fostering role also depends a great deal on the UN and powerful (Western) states in the international system that confer recognition and juridical sovereignty, an important currency for African governments.

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For example, the Security Council’s decisive stance against the 1997 coup in Sierra Leone contributed to emboldening the OAU to move away from indifference to condemnation of coups (Williams 2007: 272). With the diplomatic and logistical backing of the UN and major Western powers, the OAU’s actions with respect to the situation in Sierra Leone in 1997 crystalized into formalizing the process of outlawing coups, starting with the Lomé Declaration of 2000, and subsequently under the auspices of Article 4 of the 2002 Constitutive Act of the African Union (Souaré 2014: 77). Relatedly, the changed international environment of the post–Cold War era was such that adhering to international norms became an important prerequisite for access to foreign aid for African governments. Coup makers of the post–Cold War era could not be assured of Western aid, a major policy departure from what had transpired at the height of the Cold War. During the Cold War, as part of the geostrategic calculations, rulers such as the Congo’s Mobutu enjoyed US “military largesse” purely on account of being a regional ally (Joseph 1998: 58; Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002:142). Taken together, the above four factors contributed to shifting the political and diplomatic landscape decisively in the direction of an environment that is less welcoming of coups and, ultimately, explicitly prohibits them through codified law as well as practical steps that are taken when they happen. But as I argue below, and this is the paradox and puzzle at hand, precisely because traditional overt coups have become taboo, coup makers among the military hierarchy and incumbent rulers have devised different ways of conducting the business of capturing or securing power without offending the norm against coups. The net outcome of this dramatic change is that while traditional coups d’état have significantly decreased, democratic government in Africa has regressed or at a minimum not progressed as would be expected if we consider that rampant coups in the past constituted a drag on democratization. Rather than contribute to propelling further democratization, the coup taboo has instead existed side by side with authoritarian persistence as civilian and military actors use the military to pursue actions that undermine democracy just as coups would. It is to this that I turn next. The Underbelly of the Coup Taboo: Authoritarian Persistence Several indicators and empirical observations point to how coups have come to be perceived in ways that depart from the era when they were a central feature of African politics. To reiterate a key point in this chapter, a normative standard against military seizure of power and the use of force of arms as an unacceptable practice has taken root among the international community of nation-states and nonstate actors. The obvious empirical evidence, as noted at the outset of this chapter, is the marked quantitative decline in incidents of coup attempts, successful coups, and the duration that governments of coup makers last.

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The decline in coups is in part a consequence of norm diffusion at the international level, but also domestic institutional changes within individual states. On the one hand, the precipitous decline in coup incidents arguably points to a certain conscious belief by would-be domestic coup makers that this route to state power is unviable and untenable because of a hostile regional and international environment. This includes credible threats of use of force against anyone who militarily topples a sitting government, particularly a democratically elected one as ECOWAS and the AU have demonstrated in quite a few cases in the recent past, including in Burkina Faso and Gambia. On the other hand, ruling groups in specific countries, either as individual actors or as established political institutions such as political parties, have gradually cultivated measures of coup-proofing that ameliorate conditions conducive to coups or that make them undesirable as a path to power. Decalo (1998b: 18) made the case for understanding the absence of coups in a minority of African countries, during the decades when coups were pervasive, as a result of “neutralizing” the military. That is, proactive actions were taken by incumbents in a manner that nipped coups in the bud. However, looking at the decades when coups were rampant, this latter scenario applied to only a few cases of countries that successfully avoided overt military interventions and overthrow, especially of civilian administrations. Thus, domestic coup-proofing measures to “neutralize” the military were successful in only a minority of countries that did not experience coups. For the majority of cases where coups were rampant, although transformation of domestic institutions and coup-proofing may have made a difference, it is plausible to argue that the gradual decline in coup incidents was in large part because domestic political and military actors were conscious that international disapproval could bring about moral opprobrium and material sanctions. In addition, transformation in the ethos of officer corps, in part through training programs and peacekeeping missions, also has contributed to changing the behavior of military personnel, despite contradictory evidence showing that US training in particular has led to an increase in coups (Day, Khisa, and Reno 2020; Savage and Caverley 2017). In addition to the precipitous decline in the number of successful coups every year and per decade, marking a dramatic turnaround and departure from the coup culture that dominated the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in Africa, there also has been a sharp decline in the duration of the governments that came to power through coups. An instructive example is the 2015 Burkina Faso coup referenced at the beginning of this chapter: it lasted only six days. In the past, coup makers would cement their hold on power until either overthrown by other coup makers or stampeded out of power by a contagious wave of citizens’ popular demands for democratization. By contrast, increasingly over the past two decades, any seizure of power through a military coup immediately has attracted not just condemnation and

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sanctions, but also pointed demands for a quick return to civilian government. This combination of internal pressure and external condemnation along with sanctions and threats of intervention has had a significant impact in markedly reducing the life span of African governments formed out of military coups. For example, the average duration of coup-created governments in the 1990s was twenty months. This decreased to eleven months between 2000 and 2012, with only one out of ten governments lasting more than two years (twenty-five months) and more than half of the coup governments holding power for less than six months (Souaré 2014: 85–86). Related to the relatively short life span of coup governments in recent years is another notable break with past practice: while in the past new military rulers took pride in remaining dressed in their military garb as a symbol of power and prestige, now they have shifted to quickly adopting a civilian look once in power. They have abandoned their military fatigues for business suits as though to surreptitiously put behind their military identity and civilianize themselves. Rather than maintain their military identity and the power symbolism of the military, coup makers in recent years have sought to display a civilian demeanor and to somewhat disassociate from their actual corporate origins in the military. In the past military rulers displayed their power by donning their camouflage attire, their distinct khakis being signatures of their identity and the basis for portraying a sense of invincibility. But now, as much as possible, coup makers are in a rush to deflect attention away from what is considered an unacceptable act of capturing power by coup d’état. One important way to deflect that attention is to quickly discard their uniform, an otherwise cherished corporate marker. In what is a particularly instructive trend, the overthrow of rulers and change of governments in a manner previously aptly characterized as “bloodless coups” has in recent instances received a completely different interpretation, reaction, and naming. Coups were previously construed as acceptable practiced and justifiable steps to right wrongs, but in recent years they have come to be seen as repugnant. Thus, both those who engage in coups and the outside world, especially Western powers such as the United States, are reticent to call the actions by the military that lead to removal of incumbents by what they were previously rightly called—coups d’état. This was the case with the 2013 ouster of Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi and, most recently, the takeover in Chad by Mahamat Déby, son of Idriss Déby, following the latter’s sudden death in April 2021. In the Egyptian case, the Barack Obama White House and the State Department deliberately avoided referring to Morsi’s overthrow as a coup (Hudson 2013; Tansey 2017). Per the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, the United States is supposed to suspend aid to a country where a government comes to power by coup. During the Cold War, however, for the most part

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US foreign policy tended to sidestep this law. By contrast, in recent years, US government officials have been careful not to interpret a change of government as amounting to a coup in countries where there are perceived substantial national security interests at stake (Fisher 2013). Because Morsi was seen as an Islamist, at least tacitly, the United States ostensibly viewed him as a threat to its interests in the Middle East. Thus, in the past his ousting was something US government officials would have welcomed, something they might even have openly supported or sponsored. But this time around, they could not overtly support the ousting of Morsi, they could not even openly acknowledge that they supported the outcome, which is that Morsi had been overthrown—through a coup d’état. Yet, this is precisely the kind of modus operandi that the United States had no qualms about supporting during the Cold War era. In the past, the United States was not shy to associate with a military ruler who had overthrown a government perceived as a security threat. Between 1947 and 1989, for example, by one estimate, the United States participated in at least seventytwo incidents of change of governments around the world, through coups and meddling in elections, and succeeded in at least twenty-six cases (O’Rourke 2016). In the 2013 Egyptian case, the Obama administration exhibited remarkable ambivalence in welcoming what was clearly a coup government. This reflected a major transformation in the way the United States perceives coups, considering that coups were a major tool of US foreign policy during the Cold War. For better or worse, the coup taboo has reconfigured the political landscape and transformed civil military relations in significant ways. From Unconstitutional to Constitutional Coups The third wave of democratization brought about considerable transformation in regime types across the African continent. It birthed new constitutional arrangements and democratic institutions, the subject of a substantial Africanist literature (Wiseman 1993; Bratton and van de Walle 1997; Joseph 1998; van de Walle 2001). For a continent heretofore predominantly ruled by military autocracies and one-party dictatorships, at least up until the end of the Cold War, it was notable that in less than a decade of the democratization wave, from 1991–1998, there were at least sixteen countries in Africa that met the standard of “relatively democratic” (Young 1998: 27). At the turn of the twenty-first century, Africa appeared to have turned the democratic corner with a majority of the countries on the continent having embraced multiparty elections and displayed considerable commitments to constitutional government. Looking back at the political developments throughout the 1990s, scholars came to some consensus that as the twentyfirst century unfolded, African countries were on average more democratic than they were in 1990 (van de Walle 2001: 246; Englebert 2009: 219;

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Young 2012: 222). The majority of states had moved from being Not Free to being at least Partly Free, according to the annual rankings by Freedom House. In 2010, for example, at least twenty-four countries, representing close to 50 percent of all African states, could be characterized as either fully consolidated democracies or semidemocratic (Young 2012: 208). The trend toward democratization in the 1990s and a somewhat gradual decline in military coups and other forms of unconstitutional changes of government contributed to painting a generally positive picture of the governance and democratization landscape on the continent up until at least the mid-2000s. Africa’s overall political development also appeared headed in a positive direction considering that another major source of instability and insecurity—long-running civil wars—had receded in the wake of an end to decades of wars in Angola, Mozambique, Sudan, and Uganda, among others. With the decline in military coups and the absence of changes of government through rebel activity, we would expect that peaceful changes of government and constitutional processes had become entrenched, thereby signaling the deepening and spread of democratic governance. At face value, if this trend held true and robust, it would mark a fundamental transformation in African political development and, specifically, civil-military relations. Yet, an empirical assessment points to a less sanguine picture. There has not been a complete shift away from military praetorian behavior and the array of traditional military intrusions in civil political processes. Instead, military influences on politics have taken on new forms quite different from the traditional coup d’état. In the 2010s, Freedom House ratings for Africa underscored an ominous trend. By about 2015, on average the continent was estimated to have been about ten percentage points less democratic than it had been a decade earlier in the mid-2000s (The Economist 2016). According to Freedom House, as of 2019 only 14 percent of African states were characterized as Free, with 49 percent Partly Free and 37 percent Not Free, a significant reversal of the outlook at the end of the twentieth century. Scholarly consensus in recent years has pointed to democratic backsliding and a general rollback of liberal democratic norms and practices around the world. Some of the gains made during the third wave of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s have suffered a kind of counterwave, although some scholars have cast doubt on this conclusion (Bleck and van de Walle 2018). From the analysis earlier in this chapter, we know that from the 1960s to the end of the 1990s the predominant method of change of government and leadership was via the military coup d’état and other related unconstitutional forms such as rebels fighting their way to power. All such forms entailed the use of force and violent activities, which were all undemocratic. During the 1980s, for example, more than half of all changes of government were by military coups (Carbone and Pellegata 2020: 103). However, with the global norm against coups and especially the regional commitment

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by the African Union to uphold the norm against military takeovers, changes in governments and personnel at the top are now largely decided through legal, constitutional, and peaceful processes. There is no doubt that, today, more African leaders leave power peacefully and through some kind of democratic path, however flawed, than at the height of the coup culture of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. There has been remarkable progress in institutionalizing African politics through, among other measures, the institution of presidential term limits and other forms of constitutional limits on chief executives and the peaceful transfer of leadership (Carbone and Pellegata 2020; Posner and Younger 2018). The decline in incidents of coups means there has been an increase in peaceful transfers of power through established legal and constitutional processes, which by extension means we would expect more democratic consolidation on the continent. However, in practice and quite ironically, the African continent was arguably less democratic at the end of the 2010s than it was during the early 2000s (Khisa 2019: 344). How, then, do we account for the paradox of the decline of the coup d’état at the same time that there has been democratic stagnation and even backsliding? I propose two explanatory mechanisms. First, over the past decade, there have been numerous incidents of actual coups but which have not officially been characterized as such by the African Union and other international actors, including Western powers such as the United States and the EU. This is in line with what I have observed as the deepening of the coup taboo that has led local and international actors to refrain from conceding that a coup d’état has indeed taken place, even when in fact it has. Because it has now become a global norm to construe coups as something morally unacceptable, reprehensible, and out of the realm of ethical political conduct, domestic actors, the African Union, and the international community writ large have been reticent to acknowledge coup incidents when they happen. This means that incidents that actually undermine democratic practice, such as soft coups, are allowed to fester and find cover under the coup taboo. So, while the official count of coups has gone down, the reality of military intrusions through indirect coups actually persists. For example, when in November 2017 the military ousted Zimbabwe’s long-surviving autocrat, Robert Mugabe, who had been in power for close to four decades, in what was clearly a putsch, the reaction by both the coup makers and the outside world was quite revealing. The generals who overthrew Mugabe vehemently denied that what they had done was a coup against a nominally legitimate civilian president. On its part, the AU backpedaled and equivocated. In the early stages of the coup, the AU Commission chairperson conceded that the crisis unfolding in Zimbabwe “seems like a coup” (Daily Nation 2017). However, in a subsequent switch of position, the AU backed off its initial suggestion, instead concluding that the incident was not a coup. In the end, the AU did not condemn this coup

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against Mugabe in the same way that it has done with other seizures of power by the military since 2002. Consequently, Mugabe left power, but in a carefully choreographed and well-managed manner, demonstrating that coup makers have increasingly become wary of international opprobrium and sanctioning (Burke 2017). Yet, one notices an interesting contrast between the AU’s reaction to Zimbabwe in 2017 compared to how it treated the Egyptian case in 2013. In the latter, while the United States and the EU refrained from condemning the coup in Egypt, the AU on its part was forthright in denouncing and suspending Egypt from membership in the continental body (Reuters 2013). In the one case the AU demonstrated its uncompromising stance against coups, while in the other it sought to sweep under the carpet a similar act precisely because it was considered unacceptable. These contradictory reactions speak to the same logic: that coups are prohibited. The coup in Zimbabwe underscored an emergent trend where African incumbents, the military hierarchy, and other actors who wield state power have found ways of subverting democratic procedures and capturing or retaining state power in ways that nevertheless disguise the appearance of an orthodox coup d’état. The second related mechanism is that to avoid offending the coup taboo, actors can now turn to the use of other forms of extraconstitutional and legal maneuvers to seize or strengthen a grip on power. This is not exactly new, but it has become a more widely used course of action by authoritarian incumbents or their chosen successors in the era of the coup taboo. It constitutes a shift from unconstitutional to constitutional coups, which entail manipulating constitutions and legal provisions and rigging elections to stay in power or taking advantage of political transition situations for the military to seize power (as happened in Chad in 2021). Legal and constitutional manipulations became pervasive across the continent from the mid-2000s, from Burundi to Burkina Faso and Cameroon to Congo, as incumbents engaged in dubious constitutional amendments that not only subverted democracy, but also defeated the very spirit of the coup taboo—prohibiting seizure or retention of power through military actions. To put the Zimbabwean coup mentioned above, and other related extraconstitutional acts, in a broader perspective of democratic practice on the continent, Philip Roessler (2017) summarized it this way: “Through the violation of term limits, the emasculation of free and fair elections, and the persecution of their opponents, rulers are eviscerating the institutions that are essential to building a new political equilibrium in which the use of force is not needed to hold incumbents accountable.” Many long-surviving authoritarian rulers such as Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, Cameroon’s Paul Biya, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, and Chad’s Idriss Déby (before his death in 2021), among others, rely heavily on the use of the state’s coercive apparatus to sustain themselves in power even as they maintain a facade of regular multiparty elections and some semblance

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of political competition. They use and abuse military power peppered with legal and constitutional engineering. In all, through a range of constitutional engineering and legal maneuvers, African incumbents and other actors commanding military have been able to practically achieve the same outcome of capturing or retaining state power, without resorting to the traditional coup, and by so doing they have been able to avoid the international sanctions that come with overt coup actions. Authoritarian incumbents who repress their opponents by using the military and police, clamping down on independent media, curtailing civic space, and rigging elections are in reality no different from others who in the past launched coups to grab power. The former are also engaged in power grabs, in coup making, but of another version; they are just doing it differently to avoid offending the coup taboo. While the coup taboo constrains the armed forces from direct intervention by using the traditional coup route, this state of play creates room for the military to be used in less overt ways by incumbent rulers and others holding executive authority. In sum, the two mechanisms discussed above (along with other factors) help account for why there has been a notable contradictory decline in de jure coups that has occurred simultaneous with stagnation, if not altogether a regress, in the overall democratic rating for the African continent. Conclusion A lot has changed about African politics since the end of the Cold War. One of the most important transformations, regionally and internationally, has been the evolution of the norm against military coups and other forms of seizure of power through the might of military force. I have attempted to argue in this chapter that this transformation has gone beyond the conventional standard of an international norm to a higher bar that approximates a taboo—an action or practice widely abhorred and considered unacceptable, whose violation attracts stern condemnation and wide sanctioning. This has had enormous implications for domestic political behavior, particularly for civil-military relations. For one, the militarism of old has been replaced with new forms of authoritarianism that are nevertheless aided by the use and abuse of military force. Even for civilian rulers without a military background, their stay in power depends on their control of the military through patronage and other forms of coup-proofing. In a sense then we observe change, but also continuity, in African civilmilitary relations with the military less praetorian in the old way it was known for, but nevertheless still crucial in either defending the cause of democratic governance or protecting authoritarianism. Indeed, in countries such as Egypt in 2011, Burkina Faso in 2014, and Sudan in 2017, where the military kept on the side of protests against authoritarian rulers, the latter were

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forced to depart. This contrasts with what happened in Egypt in 2013, Zimbabwe in 2017, and Mali in 2020, where the military moved to overthrow authoritarian incumbents in the face of protests in the streets. The status of taboo that the coup d’état appears to have gained does not mean that coups no longer happen. In fact, they do. Mali had two coups in less than a year, one in August 2020 and another in May 2021, a coup in Guinea Conakry in September 2021 while the latest coup, at the time of this writing, was in Burkina Faso in January 2022. The difference is that coups d’état have become far fewer and governments that ascend to power through coups now have a short life span. This is a major transformation and shift in Africa’s civil-military relations. Even more instructive and worth underlining is the fact that coup makers have to drape and disguise their coup actions to give the outside world a reason to believe that something other than the conventional coup has taken place. In the case of Zimbabwe, the official position was that Mugabe had resigned on his own even when, in fact, the military had put him under house arrest and forced him to resign. The analytical positionality for this book as a whole is rethinking civilmilitary relations and providing new theorizations on the changing roles of the military in African politics and society over and above the coup idiom that informed much of previous scholarly and policy debates. The inspiration for the project that culminated in this book was the traditional focus on coups d’état in much of the scholarly work influenced by the classic canons of Samuel Huntington, Morris Janowitz, and others whose empirical points of departure were rooted in Western polities and societies. For a long time, the coup was the signature feature of the military meddling in otherwise civilian politics and, therefore, it formed the central focus for studying civil-military relations on the African continent. However, the pushback against coups in the post–Cold War era helped propel a regional and global norm outlawing military seizures of power. I have suggested in this chapter that this norm has evolved into a taboo. Coups still occur and militaries engage in praetorian behaviors but, as coup incidents have declined significantly and as the coup taboo has deepened, there have emerged different and disguised ways of doing precisely what traditional putsches accomplished in the past. This has enormous implications for civil-military relations writ large. On the one hand, the destabilizing force of military takeovers is no longer the threat to peace and security that it was in the past. We cannot as of yet speak of a postcoup Africa, but it is plausible to say that the continent has decisively moved away from the pervasiveness of overt military intrusions in politics, as happened in the first four decades of independence. Yet, on the other hand, the use and abuse of military power remains central to the African political landscape such that control over the armed forces determines the way that civilian authority is managed and exercised, something that greatly imperils democratic practice.

5 African Militaries and Contemporary Warfare Jahara Matisek and William Reno

A military without political training is a potential criminal.

—Thomas Sankara

As the wave of independence in Africa gathered in the 1960s, most militaries on the continent reflected colonizer preferences, be it for internal suppression of colonial subjects or earlier support for military operations during World Wars I and II in Africa, Europe, or East Asia (Headrick 1978; Koller 2008). From independence to the end of the twentieth century, a casual observer of armed forces in Africa might conclude that, as these militaries were freed of their colonial masters, their conduct of warfare was against their own people and, in a departure from colonial practice, against their own governments. However, many African militaries now exhibit dramatic shifts in their conduct and behavior. This change is a byproduct of regime politics, but also due to regional pressures and international expectations that militaries have some veneer of professionalism and modern institutions. Many governments in Africa have accepted (and often interpreted in their own ways) such internationally imposed norms. The outcome has been distinct African forms of civil-military relations, which in turn shape how these armed forces are organized and conduct warfare. The twentieth century continental pattern of fragmented armed forces in which personal ties overshadowed formal lines of command and where members competed openly for political influence and power has become increasingly rare in the twenty-first century. Most importantly, many of these contextually professionalized armies have overcome the civil-military

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problématique; namely, the balancing of military effectiveness and coupproofing by political leadership (Feaver 1996). The present situation comes closer to the core idea in Samuel Finer’s (1962) seminal work on civilmilitary relations, The Man on Horseback, of a role for the military as a capable institution in helping an underdeveloped state function in the modern era. There is a mutually self-reinforcing cycle between an underdeveloped state investing in the armed forces as a way of supporting economic and societal development that, if effective, benefits both with increased resources and improved legitimacy. A military can sometimes be the driving force of modernization. This is usually a function of members of the military internalizing notions of universal professionalism that influence the armed forces’ institutional development. Particularly in bureaucratically weak states, the military may be the only institution with the necessary human capital to operate complex organizations. As a result, these armed forces may be the only capable institution in an otherwise ineffective state. Military interventions in politics, particularly coups d’état, are historically associated with political instability and economic decline (Luckham 1994). These interventions in Africa were common, as best illustrated by Patrick J. McGowan (2003). A more recent dataset at the Center for Systemic Peace (2020) identified 91 successful coups out of 255 coup attempts in Africa. Scholars have identified correlations between aid from external actors and coup activities on the part of recipient military actors. These scholars specifically implicate foreign military assistance in antidemocratic behavior by military personnel (Savage and Caverley 2017). Other researchers have identified links between deployments as peacekeepers and subsequent interventions in domestic politics on returning home (Schiel, Powell, and Daxecker 2020). Increasing capacities of armed forces in many African political contexts, such as regimes that politicized security services and armies in which personal loyalties override formal lines of command, have contributed to the coercive capacities and autonomy of the recipients of this assistance to challenge civilian rulers (Gutteridge 1969). However, there remain several notable cases in Africa of countries that have not experienced any coups d’état since independence, specifically Botswana (1966), Cape Verde (1975), Djibouti (1977), Mauritius (1968), Namibia (1990), and Senegal (1960). These states are effectively what Samuel Decalo described as “the stable minority” (1998b: 10). The nature of warfare on the continent increasingly diverges from twentieth-century experience, and civil-military relations have transitioned away from the prevalence of crude power grabs. Counterinsurgency operations against terror groups in the Sahel, Niger River basin, and Horn of Africa have significantly reconfigured and shaped the way military doctrines are conceived, not to mention how professional soldiers view their position in society. This shift has important implications for civil-military

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relations. For example, in 2012 the Malian military justified its removal of the civilian government because the political leadership had explicitly failed to organize a strategy and equip the military properly in the fight against separatist Tuareg rebels in the north (Wing 2013). This was significant, first, because Mali had long been praised as an important bastion of stable and effective democratic power sharing (Moestrup 1999). But, secondly, because the Malian army’s actions occurred in the era of anticoup norms (Souaré 2014). Previously, coups were rarely orchestrated under conditions of elected leaders failing to prosecute a war. However, changes in warfare stemming from forms of professionalization are new foundations that have transformed civil-military relations. Hence, the Malian military supposedly intervened because the government could not defend the state against a threat that the many international actors took as a serious challenge to their own interests, which generated narratives of a “good coup” (Derpanopoulos et al. 2016). How are different forms of professionalized militaries emerging across Africa? This trend is at odds with democratization promoters that champion the imposition of a Western template of a professionalized military on underdeveloped states (Barany 2012). They advance the proposition that a professional military can exist only in democratic African states, and that subservience to an elected civilian government is a necessary element of military professionalism. Some scholars (Miller 2011) treat all coups as negative. But these arguments ignore alternative conceptions of military professionalism that focus more on the armed forces’ relationship to state capacity rather than a specific regime type (Williams 1998). In this chapter, we argue that a significant number of militaries in Africa have reached a critical juncture. Armed forces in several countries have rapidly rising levels of institutional stability and professionalism, reflecting wider trends in the institutionalization of these states. Though their regime types differ, ranging from consolidated democracies such as Ghana to authoritarian rule in Rwanda (with the veneer of democracy), their respective militaries are subordinate to incumbent political leadership. At the same time, they are becoming increasingly effective in their use of resources and skills to be technically capable in the conduct of warfare, including outside their national borders. Outside of warfare, some militaries are utilized in support of domestic projects such as Botswana’s use of armed forces for civil defense against poachers that harm the country’s important safari tourism industry (Henk 2005, 2006). Elsewhere, the Egyptian, Ethiopian, and Rwandan governments use military officers with talented managerial skills to run corporations and manage joint ventures with foreigners to build large infrastructure projects. Each of these armed forces have distinct notions of professionalism that are reflective of the types of regimes they serve, and they differ considerably

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from how most armed forces looked around the time of independence. In many cases, one of the many core functions of these armed forces is behavior and duties that benefit regimes, and these regimes define societal interests. Their contextual form of professionalism differs from that of liberalized democracies because professionalism is considered in explicitly political terms and is tied to regime interests. These varieties of military professionalism incorporate elements of Western ideas about it such as technical expertise, combined arms maneuver doctrine, and formalized subservience to hierarchical power structures and relations. These differences reflect regime legacies and how militaries have been integrated into various regional and international organizations, leading to the creation of effective military institutions in states that lack effectiveness elsewhere in governance. Through it all, old-style coups are declining, while different types and forms of professionalized armed forces are emerging in Africa. These observations dovetail with Chapter 1’s notion of regime proximity and underscore its linkages to the dual theoretical levers of a military’s experiences with warfare and the institutional development of African states. There are two principal drivers of this shift in African militaries. The first is connected to increasing institutional capabilities and political stability of many states on the continent, and the place of their armed forces in that process. The second driver is connected to evolving frameworks of regional cooperation that these states use to address security challenges. Interaction between different African militaries and external actors (e.g., UN officials, foreign military advisers) brings an element of informal socialization on how effective organizations are managed and coordinated in pursuit of a certain goal and vision. Both drivers fit into a wider global framework of what members of armed forces consider to be the pillars of a professional soldier. This process is mutually reinforced and conditioned by interactions with outsiders and other technocrats. These actors are not immune to influences of corruption and political factionalism, but operate in what amounts to a professional enclave. While some scholars look skeptically on security force assistance (SFA) from overseas, and African soldiers’ participation in peacekeeping operations beyond their borders, these factors reinforce this contextually dependent professionalism in some African countries. This outcome is compatible with more conventional expectations that increased capacities of armed forces can lead to coups. The key point in this argument, however, is that the domestic and international context in which capacities and, particularly, professional practices and attitudes are imparted can play a part in broader processes of increased state capacity. Following this overview, in the next section we take up the transition from colonial military orientations to postindependence transformation. We then turn to the heart of the chapter that analyzes

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two processes that link warfare to changes in African militaries and civilmilitary relations: first, how domestic war activity, especially counterinsurgency, shapes military institutionalization and effectiveness; and, second, the engagement of African militaries in regional and continental security architecture. The final section of the chapter connects these domestic and external security engagements to the notable rarity of interstate wars to complete the circle of the contours of contemporary African warfare. We wrap up with a brief conclusion. From the Vestigial Colonial Armies to Modern African Militaries After several disgruntled soldiers who did not gain employment in newly independent Togo’s small military led a coup in January 1963, coups d’état spread across the continent. Many new military leaders announced that they could run their newly independent states more efficiently than civilian leaders, as military education and training prepared these officers to run complex state bureaucracies above politics (Carbone and Pellegata 2020). These claims turned out to have little merit, as many military rulers in the first decades of independence engaged in corruption, ethnic favoritism, and factional infighting to even greater degrees than those they overthrew (Kposowa and Jenkins 1993). Some coup leaders appeared to be more committed to state transformation; for example, the army captain, Thomas Sankara, made himself president of Burkina Faso (1983–1987) with a revolutionary vision for his people and society (Sankara 1989). However, in most cases, military takeovers reflected the fragmented political systems that preceded them, as civilian rulers used the armed forces to eliminate political rivals, and distributed patronage to officers and enlisted ranks in return for political support. Most coups simply were bids to take over these patronage systems directly, as with General Idi Amin’s rise to power and rule in Uganda (1971–1979). Regardless of intent, most coups in Africa up to the end of the twentieth century caused damage to state institutions and economies. These armed forces frequently used violence against their own citizens (Taylor and Botea 2008). The deaths of up to some quartermillion citizens under Amin’s rule in the 1970s was a prominent example of serious atrocities following a coup (Kyemba 1977). This conduct of warfare against domestic populations remains. For example, Amnesty International (2017) documented how 101 individuals were held incommunicado and tortured by Cameroonian security forces. Despite the elite Rapid Intervention Battalion (Battalion d’Intervention Rapide [BIR]) and other Cameroonian security forces receiving humanitarian law education as part of their technical training from Western militaries, they have

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engaged in brutal counterterrorism operations and are responsible for burning homes and executing civilians in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions (Knowles and Matisek 2019). Sudan under the rule of Omar al-Bashir (1989–2019) provides an example of a leader of a dominant ethnic group using security forces to commit atrocities (e.g., the Darfur genocide) against suspect ethnic groups (Allen 2020). These outcomes suggest that the conduct of most armed forces reflects more the domestic political context in which they are located rather than foreign advice and training. The relationship of Africa’s armed forces to domestic politics and the conduct of warfare looks very different in the twenty-first century, reflecting a broader change toward more capable and durable state institutions in some notable African countries. For example, Ghana experienced five successful coups d’état in the fifteen years from its first in 1966, but has had none since 1981. Moreover, Ghana has maintained a record of free and competitive elections since 1992, and its military accepts subordination to civilian leaders as appropriate with democratic norms appearing to be widely accepted among its members (Salihu 2020). Ghana also hosts a major international facility for professional military education, the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre, and its own armed forces have participated in UN peacekeeping missions across Africa and beyond (Asante 2020). Peacekeeping is not a panacea for military reform or increasing effectiveness. Ghana’s last successful coup in 1981, according to a leading figure of that coup, was planned during a deployment to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL): “We planned that coup during a UNIFIL mission in 1980 because we were dissatisfied with the developments in the country since the 1979 coup. We executed the coup a year later when we returned” (quoted in Agyekum 2020: 56). Three decades later, Ghanaian soldiers in a much-different institutional environment expressed their shared identities in terms of their support for international norms of human rights and personal professional benefits from serving in a military under civilian control.1 Nigeria’s army overthrew incumbent governments six times between 1966 and 1993. Yet, since the death of General Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s last military ruler in 1998, that country’s military has accepted subordination to civilian leaders. Moreover, the Nigerian army has been a lead actor in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the biggest contributor of peacekeepers on the continent. But the Boko Haram insurgency that began in 2009 has exposed several flaws within the Nigerian armed forces. Repeated efforts to restructure Nigeria’s military have resulted in a smaller, but still ineffective, force against the Boko Haram insurgency. Despite reforms aimed at sharing intelligence and coordinating Nigerian army operations with local police and security agencies, the military lost the trust of local residents as soldiers and police engaged in unlaw-

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ful killings, arrests, and extortion. This behavior added to these communities’ insecurity alongside the threat from Boko Haram (Okunade and Ogunnubi 2020). The weak role of merit in Nigerian promotions across the ranks has led to a military organization more concerned about rent seeking than effectively seeking out Boko Haram (Campbell 2020). Thus, unlike in postcoup Ghana, military effectiveness and professionalism in postcoup Nigeria appear to have substantially declined since 1999: top military officers protect their personal interests, and various presidents have been unable to exert the necessary leadership to end the Boko Haram insurgency (Bappah 2016). As detailed in an International Crisis Group (2016) report, there are seven issues that are most prominent within the Nigerian armed forces: minimal oversight by military and civilian leadership, limited budgeting, corruption and lack of accountability, inadequate military equipment and logistical support, training and education gaps, poor relations with political authorities, and destitute working conditions and late pay (including “delayed” pensions). All of this has undermined the effectiveness of the Nigerian armed forces but, at the same time, the military remains reluctant or unable to intervene in domestic politics through a coup d’état. Benin experienced five successful coups between 1963 and 1972 and at least five attempts in the following twenty years. Sierra Leone had five coups between 1967 and 1997, and no attempts thereafter. Both countries built democratic political systems from the 1990s with considerable international assistance in reforming their armed forces. The presence of foreign military trainers and developmental specialists in these countries has played a significant role in providing soldiers with ideal types of how a professional soldier should behave. Some of this political stability came through co-opting military “warlords” and rebel group leaders who were then rebranded “peacelords” when they participated in competitive election cycles (Themnér 2017). The personal ties remained important among combatants integrated into Sierra Leone’s postwar army from 2001, but with time the reform of security sector institutions and overseas military training provided new recruits with a different set of secondary affiliations that reduced the politicization of the army and strengthened reference points for military professionals (Needs 2020). Coups still occur in Africa: Sudanese soldiers led by a former vicepresident forced president Omar al-Bashir from power in 2019; Zimbabwe’s Defense Forces forced long-serving president Robert Mugabe to step down in 2017; a lieutenant colonel took over Burkina Faso after President Blaise Compaoré fled the country due to massive public riots against him in late 2014; and an army captain led a successful coup in 2012 to unseat Malian president Amadou Toumani Touré, and yet another coup in that country took place in 2020. Though Tunisia’s military has remained on the sidelines since the 2011 transition to a democratic government, by

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contrast Egypt’s military in 2013 overthrew the first democratically elected government because it viewed the new political leadership as being too religiously doctrinaire and therefore a threat to the military and the way the state was organized (Nassif 2015). In September 2021, Colonel Mamady Doumbouya left a US Green Beret training course to overthrow Guinea’s president (Walsh and Schmitt 2021). Elsewhere in Africa, armed forces have played overt political roles as rebels-turned-governments. Some of these governments established a modicum of stability, with former insurgent groups remaining cohesive for long periods of time once in power such as Uganda (1986), Eritrea (1991), Ethiopia (1991), Rwanda (1994), and South Africa (1994). Each case demonstrates ways in which militaries might view their top-down or bottom-up role in supporting society and governance. Founding rulers of these regimes survive in power as of 2021 in Uganda, Chad, Eritrea, and Rwanda, raising the issue of whether these regimes are stable enough to survive the deaths of those who led them to power. All these regimes do, however, focus on building institutions to monitor and discipline members, and devote considerable attention to entrenching the founding party in politics and establishing expectations for military personnel. Armed groups of various types play integral roles in the politics of socalled failed states, such as Central African Republic (CAR), Libya, Somalia, and South Sudan, each the site of long-running conflicts. Armies still target citizens of their own countries, but overall attacks on civilians peaked in the 1970s and 1980s (Straus 2012). Current and recent largescale human rights abuses of this sort are now much more likely to be associated with counterinsurgency campaigns on the peripheries of these countries. For instance, the highly professionalized Senegalese armed forces have fought separatists in the Casamance region since 1982, with minimal international criticism of this longest-running civil war in Africa (Matisek 2019). In any event, these interventions of armed forces in politics, or military operations in the periphery, do not obscure what appears to be a decisive shift toward greater institutional stability in the relationships between the continent’s armed forces and governments. Institutional Capacity and Warfighting: From Coups to Counterinsurgency Through the first several decades of independence, many governments in Africa systematically excluded large portions of their populations from effective political participation and governed them in brutal and exploitative ways (Zolberg 1968). When armed insurgencies continued after independence, as in Mozambique and Angola from the mid-1970s, and then in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Liberia, and Somalia in the early

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1990s, armies still routinely targeted broad swaths of civilian populations (Clapham 1998). This reflected their incapacities to accurately identify active insurgents, which left disorganized and undisciplined armies incapable of applying violence in a discriminate fashion, and led to most civilians being perceived as legitimate military targets by soldiers and rebels (Kalyvas 2006). Attacks on civilians did not directly harm insurgents, but at least denied insurgents the claim of protecting civilians and hindered insurgent capacities to a establish stable presence in civilian communities. Similarly, rebel attacks against civilians proved that the government could not protect them either (Weinstein 2006). The conduct of counterinsurgency operations in some countries was governed through personal networks and patron-client ties rather than through formal bureaucratic institutions. Personal networks and patronage reflected an armed form of elite circulation. In this version of counterinsurgency, the targets were former government officials and local strongmen who previously were part of a governing coalition, but had taken up arms in efforts to raise the price for their reincorporation on new terms (Day 2019). These army commanders and heads of security agencies become “rebels” for the purposes of bargaining. In this type of warfare, anyone is an acceptable partner, no coalition is permanent, and a bargaining position depends on one’s command of combatants (de Waal 2015). Warfare ceases when all sides agree that there is a “fair” distribution of military positions and weapons, a sort of “armed pluralism” that describes well the relationship between warfare and the highly personalist, fragmented system of governance in Chad, for example (Debos 2016b). Alex de Waal (2015) described this pattern of warfare as a form of armed bargaining for power, in which the blurred distinctions between “rebel” and “government” reflect the contingent and constantly renegotiated coalitions of violent personalist regimes. The pursuit of such an equilibrium between different forms and types of power to project violence is reflective of the limited access orders, in which these societies negotiate politics, with fragmented armies reflecting such bargaining processes (North et al. 2013). A new dimension of counterinsurgency warfare has developed alongside this first dimension of counterinsurgency. This new element draws much sharper distinctions between state and insurgent forces that reflects the greater state reliance on institutions for governance, rather than ad hoc elite coalitions and patronage networks. Such shifts are reflected in armed forces with greater levels of organizational cohesion. It was also, at least in part, a function of the imperatives of rebel survival that are dependent on forging convivial relations with civilians, as the National Resistance Army (NRA) did under Yoweri Museveni’s leadership in Uganda. This cohesion provides armed forces with the discipline to apply violence in a more discriminate fashion that suppresses the older practice of large-scale and often

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intentional targeting of civilian communities in wartime. While personal relationships may still matter a great deal in security force cohesion, this response to insurgency may serve as a catalyst to building more stable institutions. Effective counterinsurgency of this sort requires reliable means to collect information and incorporate it into operations. This process does not presuppose a particular regime type—democratic, or authoritarian, or otherwise—but it does portend greater state capacity to collect information and use it to support state authority. Uganda’s army demonstrated such a shift to a focused counterinsurgency strategy during the 2000s in its fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF)—with most of its top leadership formed from the original core of NRA fighters—and local militias used a classic counterinsurgency strategy of concentrating populations as a counter to insurgents. These actions denied the LRA access to civilians, isolating them from insurgents who had typically relied on them for recruits and other resources (Branch 2011; Day and Reno 2014). Counterinsurgency also has occurred in tandem with development projects designed to increase state surveillance of populations and integrate security forces into communities (Anderson 2014). Senegal illustrates this mastery of effective counterinsurgency strategies in a more democratic context. While Senegal’s army has fought a low-level campaign against a separatist Casamance insurgency in the southern part of the country since 1982, the military demonstrated a capacity to effectively identify insurgents and limit indiscriminate violence against civilians. Senegal was able to pursue a dual-track approach to the Casamance insurgency, relying on infrastructure projects and military patrols with local security forces to engage in local dialogues to dissuade civilians from participating in the insurgency over time (Matisek 2020). This approach successfully isolated and delegitimized the separatist cause. In Nigeria, the “institutionalized instability” of the Nigerian government has undermined military campaigns against Boko Haram since 2008 (Matfess 2016). Poorly implemented land reforms confirmed perceptions of corruption and distrust of political leaders in Abuja. Legacies of commanders pursuing schemes to get rich instead of pursuing military effectiveness continue to undermine Nigerian counterinsurgency efforts (Mickler, Suleiman, and Maiangwa 2019). Observers have described systematic corruption in military supplies procurement, with legislators requiring kickbacks in exchange for appropriating military expenditures, and durable topdown military patronage networks profiting from the diversion of these expenditures (Africa Confidential 2020). These institutional failures throughout the ranks of Nigeria’s military have led to a cheaper and slightly more effective solution: organic resistance movements to Boko Haram. Locally armed self-defense groups under the broad label of the Civilian

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Joint Task Force (CJTF) have been empowered by Abuja to serve as proxies to drive Boko Haram from rural communities. Like any other organic militia, typical problems persist. CJTF fighters have been accused of abusing their positions of power and taken their place as claimants for payouts from Nigeria’s central government (Wilkins 2017). A similar CJTF concept has precedence, as it was successfully employed in northern Uganda. At the height of the LRA insurgency, local militias known as “arrow boys” (and empowered by the UPDF), took on the challenge of defending communities against rebels and cattle rustlers. A final important development is the intervention of armed forces in domestic politics to support democratic processes. A coup of this sort differs from coups of the 1960s through the 1990s, when military elites intervened under the guise of removing an autocrat but ended up remaining in power. Fear of coups led incumbent regimes to draw officers from ethnic groups that supported the regime. This produced some protection from coups, but at the expense of further ethnicizing armed forces and drawing them into factional politics. These armed forces tended to block challenges to power and undermine democratic transitions, as in Chad and Sudan (Allen 2019; 2020). Likewise, Cameroon’s military is ethnically tied to supporting Paul Biya and his removal of presidential term limits is tolerated among military leaders who want a coethnic ruling the country (Harkness 2017). This is not absolute insurance against a coup, as the ethnically stacked military of Sudan did remove a coethnic president, Omar al-Bashir, who had become an international pariah and obstacle to international aid (Lynch and Gramer 2020). Multiethnic armies, on the other hand, are more likely to back democratic and peaceful transitions of power, as in Senegal when army leaders informed President Abdoulaye Wade that he had lost the 2012 election and needed to peacefully transfer power to the winner (Matisek 2020). While viewed as not conforming to Western notions of military professionalism, sometimes the only checks and balances on executive power that exist are in the armed forces. Hence, sometimes the exercise of military authority and power to support constitutional measures may function as an alternative mechanism for limiting abuses of power such as ignoring term limits to remain in power indefinitely. These developments mark a shift from the use of armed forces to attack civilians considered to be political threats. In its place is a greater range of behavior and outcomes, from failed states with fragmented security forces, to authoritarian states (usually with regimes that came to power as effective insurgencies) that use their organizational discipline to incorporate meritocratic criteria in promotions. They also expand their tasks to include infrastructure development and commercial operations that contribute to state capacity. Here, militaries are distinctive in terms of purpose, effectiveness, and linkages to societal and political elites. For instance, the militaries of

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Botswana and Namibia have never attempted a coup and they undertake civil defense tasks, with a specific focus on policing nature reserves and stopping poachers. In all, state efforts to manage challenges to security throughout the continent involve closer collaborations between civil and military leaders, compared to the past. This trend is reflected more broadly in the politics of security cooperation at a regional level, which has emerged as the second major driver that has changed the nature of warfare on the African continent. Regional Organizations and Security Problems Regional organizations have had a significant impact on how and for what purpose Africa’s militaries fight. These regional organizations, such as the Economic Community of West African States, founded in 1975, and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), founded in 1986, were intended to promote economic cooperation. Nevertheless, by the 1990s these and other regional organizations played significant roles as frameworks to coordinate multinational interventions of African armed forces in conflicts in their regions. Security cooperation that involves the armed intervention of African states in each other’s domestic affairs is a significant departure from past practice. After independence, most African governments jealously guarded their sovereignty. The Organization of African Unity (OAU) explicitly identified “non-interference by any Member State in the internal affairs of another” as a core principle, to include the inviolability of colonial borders firmed up in the 1964 Cairo Declaration. Thus, major outbreaks of violence, such as Nigeria’s 1967–1970 civil war, passed with little more than diplomatic finger wagging from other African states. However, the OAU did set a precedent of collective intervention through its Liberation Committee to fight the vestiges of colonial occupation and apartheid in southern Africa. Though some states provided rear bases for armed anticolonial movements, the armed forces of independent states almost never engaged in direct action across their borders to assist these anticolonial struggles. This reluctance to be seen openly intervening in a neighbor’s affairs, even out of anticolonial solidarity, despite occasional subversion and support for cross-border proxy forces, reflected a general unwillingness among Africa’s leaders to sacrifice any of their domestic authority in the interests of international organizations. This reticence to intervene also reflected a shared understanding among most African leaders that intervention of one weak state in the affairs of another weak state risked a reciprocal response. Moreover, risks of empowering armed forces were high, as well over half of leading politicians in the first three decades of independence were assassinated, imprisoned, or driven into exile, often at the hands of their own armed forces (Wiseman 1993).

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The 1970–1982 civil war in Chad provided the setting for the first effort at cooperation among purely African armed forces in intervening outside their borders to address a conflict in another African state. The OAU sponsored a peace plan in 1979 that included the deployment of 8,000 OAU peacekeepers. Executing this deployment plan lagged until Libya’s occupation of Chad’s northern Aouzou Strip, followed with Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s announcement that all of Chad would “merge” with Libya. At this point, the offer of French and US financial support and fears among African leaders about the precedent of Libya’s armed seizure of the territory of another African country were sufficient to convince the governments of Zaire, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire to contribute troops to a Nigerian-led operation that began in 1981. Ultimately, only 4,000 troops were deployed, and reliance on foreign funding did not match levels committed, underscoring the operation’s dependence on nonAfrican support (Hollick 1982). This African peacekeeping force, known as the Inter-African Forces (IAF), attempted to broker a peace agreement between Chad’s two main armed factions responsible for much of the civil war violence. This first venture at African peacekeeping suffered from an ambiguous mandate, lack of factional cease-fires, poor logistical support, and an ineffective and disorganized command structure. The IAF shuttered in June 1982—despite attempting to act neutrally. Setting a pattern for future African multilateral interventions, the IAF ultimately empowered one of the faction leaders, Hissan Habré, to seize the capital city of N’Djamena, allowing him and his associates to develop legitimacy as the new rulers of Chad (Sesay 1989). The institutional shortcomings of the IAF informed the development of future African peacekeeping forces. Nigerian leadership of the IAF was an important factor in planning when ECOWAS created the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) in 1990 to intervene in Liberia’s civil war. Similar to the IAF, ECOMOG was justified in terms of jointly deploying military force to intervene in African states that violated human rights, rule of law, or democratic principles (Hartmann and Striebinger 2015). The actions of Charles Taylor leading his rebel forces, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), to invade Liberia from Côte d`Ivoire created a severe regional crisis in December 1989. With minimal international outcry or attempts to stymie this gross violation of international law, ECOWAS officials tried to engage Taylor’s NPFL in negotiations. A Ghanaian officer, Lieutenant General Arnold Quainoo, was chosen as the first joint force commander to help allay Taylor’s concerns after he accused Nigeria of favoring Liberia’s incumbent government. Thus, an ECOMOG force of 3,000 troops was sent into Liberia in August 1990 “to oversee the implementation of a cease-fire, the disarmament of the warring factions, the cessation of arms imports and the release

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of prisoners” (Tuck 2000: 2). Mission creep set in, as ECOMOG forces expanded into Sierra Leone to provide stability, and brought in contingents from Tanzania and Uganda, contributing over 700 troops each in 1995 to the ECOMOG deployment (UN Reference Paper 1995). The intervention was perceived as successful because it provided “protection of humanitarian aid, disarming of factions, cantonment, mediation, and peace enforcement” (Tuck 2000: 2–3), despite resource, logistical, and sustainment issues, and sporadic payment of soldiers’ salaries. In the face of these problems, the ECOMOG deployment was adapted to the complexities of what became a multisided conflict in Liberia and Sierra Leone, making it a blueprint for future African peacekeeping operations. These lessons informed later ECOMOG deployments to Guinea-Bissau (1998–1999), and Côte d’Ivoire (2002–2004) for peacekeeping military operations that have been described as “restorative intervention” attempts (Ramsbotham and Woodhouse 1999). The ECOMOG experience in West Africa encountered numerous operational challenges, but led to a remarkable degree of cooperation among the armed forces of ECOWAS member countries. They gained experience dealing with serious problems such as massive displacement of civilians and the ad hoc role that the intervention force played in protecting and coordinating aid for civilians who fled to areas under their control. They grappled with the dilemmas of host state governments that were in various states of collapse, and the proliferation of armed groups and criminal gangs focused on exploiting civilians and various illicit economic opportunities. These difficulties were serious enough in Sierra Leone, for example, such that Brigadier General Maxwell Khobe of Nigeria served as Sierra Leone’s chief of defense staff.2 ECOMOG emerged as one of the world’s more successful multilateral interventions in conflicts related to state collapse, and as a vehicle for soldiers and especially field commanders to develop a shared definition of military professional conduct and goals. ECOMOG experiences informed curricula at institutions such as the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra, and the Nigerian Armed Forces Command and Staff College near Kaduna that train soldiers from across the continent.3 Moreover, the armed forces of Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal went on to provide significant contingents to UN peacekeeping operations elsewhere in Africa and beyond. These experiences in warfighting and its impacts on how members of these West African militaries pursue their professional goals and interact with their governments arguably have contributed to the overall trend toward the institutionalization of clearer boundaries between military and civilian tasks in many African countries. The idea that Africa’s armed forces should play a significant role in multinational efforts to resolve conflicts found wide acceptance among offi-

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cials in many African countries. Frustrated with slow regional responses to growing crises, such as the complex multisided conflict in Congo (at its most intense from 1998 to 2003), the OAU’s transformation into the African Union (AU) in 2002–2003 presented an opportunity to add an element of AUdirected military missions. With the AU established firmly in 2003, a political consensus emerged around the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) and the creation of the African Standby Force (ASF) to support Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the AU (2000). In practical terms, the AU provision marked a major departure from the earlier independence era experience with Africa’s armed forces as a tool that regimes could use to violently repress their domestic opponents or as perpetrators of coups. In particular, Article 4(h) grants the AU the power to intervene in member states without their consent to restore basic peace and stability; to prevent war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity; and to respond to “threats to legitimate order,” which can include coups d’état against constitutional authorities. The Constitutive Act of the AU (2000) did not instantly change realities on the ground and it has many broad mandates, such as supporting gender equality, that have not translated into substantial action. Likewise, the creation of the ASF, to be comprised of five different regional forces from the military, police, and civilian bureaucracy, expresses broad panAfricanist aspirations to resolve African problems through African solutions.4 Regardless of shortcomings of implementation, the AU’s inclusion of a continental role for Africa’s armed forces has changed the terms of warfighting in substantial ways. The success and influence of these regional bodies and the OAU/AU have been largely driven by regional economic and security groups with the power to exert influence, although effective use has been mixed. The AU security mechanisms and policymaking were tested in 2004 with an outbreak of hostilities and ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s Darfur region. The ASF was not operationally ready, and instead the AU created the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS). This became the first AU peacekeeping mission, which began with about 150 Rwandan troops in 2004, but by 2005 had over 3,000 troops and other personnel from other AU member states (Boshoff 2005). AMIS was designed to place African troops on the ground to monitor a cease-fire through pay-and-equip initiatives from the United States and several European Union (EU) countries. Inefficiencies plagued these deployments, and the US government stepped in to provide logistical support and build AMIS camps through the contractor Pacific Architectural Engineers, which had operational experience in Liberia alongside ECOMOG forces several years earlier (US Government Accountability Office 2006). Despite these shortcomings, AMIS provided officers and enlisted soldiers from various African armed forces with a collective mission and set of professional reference points that pointed to a

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very different image of warfighting, compared to a generation earlier. This established the foundation for the 2007 United Nations–African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID) with the intent of providing more resources and peacekeeping troops to ensure compliance, monitor peace, and support stability (UNAMID 2020). The AU’s role in African warfighting was tested again in 2006 with the collapse of Somalia’s Islamic Courts Union (ICU) when Ethiopian forces invaded to expel the ICU forces in Mogadishu. Elements of the ICU emerged as an insurgency known as al-Shabaab, which then attacked the new Somali government that had been installed by Ethiopian troops (Williams 2018a). The deteriorating security situation provoked the deployment of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). This force, organized in 2007, is one of the largest and longest-lasting peacekeeping forces in the world, frequently exceeding 20,000 troops, with large contingents from the armies of Uganda, Burundi, Kenya, Djibouti, and Ethiopia. Many of the contributing states have received substantial commitments of long-term US military training and help from numerous Western governments to equip and support their armies. In the case of Burundi, AMISOM deployments presented an opportunity to solidify the integration of opposing forces into a new national army after a civil war. Moreover, deployment to Somalia offers troops higher salaries than they would earn at home and keeps them busy abroad (Williams 2018b). Although these reasons for the different contingents’ participation do not necessarily fit the normative narrative of the AU’s regional security framework, participation in AMISOM fits a developing pattern of multilateral African missions solidifying a much more professional warfighting ethos that is in accord with global norms of clear institutional relationships between militaries and their states’ political leaders. Despite the deployments of AU member forces in multinational operations, the idea of a dedicated standby force has encountered serious obstacles. The inability of the ASF concept to come into fruition by 2013 led to the creation of the African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises (ACIRC). While not meant to compete with the ASF, the ACIRC is a response to the failure of any of the five ASFs to become operational (Warner 2015). A defining element of the ACIRC is its voluntary nature to act as a rapid response force until the ASFs can mobilize and deploy. While the East African Standby Force (EASF) proclaimed operational readiness in 2014 (the rest of the ASF was declared operational in 2015, at least on paper), the inability to intervene during the 2015 Burundi civil disturbances demonstrated the basic dilemma of collective military operations when facing objections from the government of a member state targeted for intervention (Darkwa 2017; Apuuli 2019). However, willingness and ability to intervene was not an issue in 2008 when the AU formed a joint force of

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troops from Comoros, Senegal, Sudan, and Tanzania to invade the Comoros island of Anjouan to oust Colonel Mohamed Bacar, who refused to step down after losing an election (Pham 2011; Day, Khisa, and Reno 2020). Though poor funding and logistical problems continue to plague cooperation among Africa’s armed forces, political considerations pose a greater barrier to cooperation. Sovereignty remains a paramount consideration, despite the growing willingness of many governments to commit armed forces to multinational operations. The EASF considered a deployment to Sudan after the 2019 military coup removed President Omar al-Bashir, for example, but this was not possible due to the Sudanese government and military rejection of the EASF’s mission. Nonpermissive engagement was not an option, as Sudan’s armed forces had the capacity and political will to fight back. Moreover, EASF lacked the operational capability to forward deploy troops into the areas needing protection and lacked the logistical network to support them (Apuuli 2019). The future of ASF military operations is thus dependent on “adapting Western peace support practices and doctrine in ways that are more suitable for African conditions” (Robinson 2014: 20), but constrained by limitations of the AU’s principles for intervention over domestic interests of the target of intervention. Peacekeeping also comes with material incentives, as demonstrated with Burundi’s substantial troop contributions to AMISOM in return for extensive US training and equipping of these soldiers (Brosig 2017). These operations also keep deployed forces busy abroad and out of domestic politics. The peacekeeping as busywork thesis has credence in that increasing evidence points to the dependencies many militaries have on providing a higher quality of life for their troops through peacekeeping reimbursement schemes (Lundgren 2018). These efforts to use peacekeeping as a tool to manage capable armed forces in the context of political instability and weak institutions does not always succeed. An example is the attempted military coup in Burundi in 2015, when Burundi’s army general Godefroid Niyombare announced the dismissal of President Pierre Nkurunziza while the president was visiting Tanzania, justifying the coup in terms of preventing the president (who also faced considerable international pressure to step down) from serving a controversial third term in office (Africa Confidential 2015). This action indicates that the classic dilemma of balancing military capacity with the danger of armed intervention in politics remains, but that professionalized militaries increasingly want to act as checks and balances when it comes to leaders trampling constitutions. In this instance, the coup failed as the military turned on Niyombare, arresting him and his loyalists (Vircoulon 2015). Despite these political considerations, these missions have an important socialization effect for the participants. Those in complex military operations are exposed to the professionalism of other militaries and the bureaucratic

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way in which missions are coordinated. Troops are exposed to the complexity of logistics and sustainment operations as they adapt to conduct peacekeeping operations in failed states, with scant infrastructure. This can be a substantial challenge to modernized Western militaries used to conducting low-risk expeditionary operations, but most African soldiers quickly learn that they must compensate through working with local communities to collect information and gain access to resources that they need to sustain their missions. Many civilians admit that they prefer the idea of African forces rather than interloping soldiers that are Mzungu/Toubab/Oyinbo/Ferengi (foreigners). Thus, many African military officers prefer to work with other African militaries in preference to UN peacekeeping operations that deploy more riskadverse contingents.5 The trend toward greater cooperation among African states in their uses of armed forces is reflected in the increased interests among non-African governments to use African forces as proxies to fight insurgents and terrorists. The United States and many European countries pushed for the creation of regional counterterrorism forces in the 2010s. These efforts produced two multinational African security organizations. More so than the AU operations, foreign advisers and resources play central roles in the creation and sustenance of these organizations. The Group of Five (G5) Sahel Alliance—comprised of soldiers from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger—was created in 2017 to jointly deal with complex security threats of the Sahel region (Rupesinghe 2018). In the Lake Chad Basin area, the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) is a regional counterterrorism organization of West African countries—Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria—that receives some funding from the African Union and much more from the EU. The MNJTF is specifically designed to combat Boko Haram. The external creation of these coalitions brings another element of professionalism as these militaries learn how to coordinate complicated military operations with other countries. How do we know regional bodies are an important and defining aspect of African politics and militaries? Take, for instance, the Venezuela crisis (June 2010–present), which has become a regional security and humanitarian emergency in South America. Similar crises of lesser and great threat have occurred over past decades in Africa and have been increasingly addressed in the AU Assembly or by regional cooperative bodies, resulting in economic, diplomatic, and military involvement—to varying degrees— by various African countries. The same coordination is absent in Latin America to address the important role of Venezuela in creating a regional crisis as its domestic instability still leads to massive refugee flows and supports illicit commercial networks. This comparison highlights the remarkable shift in the uses of Africa’s armed forces, and how this reflects an unusual degree of cooperation among a large and diverse collection of

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states. Albeit, further work is needed in places such as CAR, South Sudan, and Zimbabwe, the AU seems ready and willing to address each problem if funding, support, and logistics can be secured from international donors. Ordinarily, one would expect cooperation to be easier among the smaller number of Latin American states, particularly given shared culture and language, not to mention their long history of coordination on diplomatic and economic issues through regional associations. One cause of this difference may be that Africa’s governments and armed forces are more willing to accept external assistance and close advising in multinational operations, including from former colonial rulers. This openness to external assistance, often for the practical reasons connected to regime survival and maintenance noted above, has a cumulative professionalizing and capacitybuilding effect on Africa’s armed forces that, in turn, has a major impact on how Africa’s militaries fight wars. Various African leaders have espoused pan-African ideals to explain their decisions to contribute troops to multinational missions. President Museveni of Uganda has referred to the cause of pan-Africanism when announcing deployments of troops in support of AU peacekeeping missions (Apuuli 2017). His soft power actions demonstrate a willingness to risk military personnel in pursuit of a politically and ideologically advantageous pursuit of African solutions to African problems (Shule 2016; Apuuli: 117). Museveni has spoken publicly about the problem of “political balkanization” on the African continent. Addressing the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Summit in Kampala on November 24, 2012, he argued that “integration should have two dimensions—economic and, where possible, political integration” (Barigaba 2012). The trend toward the involvement of national armed forces in multinational security operations is thus likely to continue despite resource constraints, particularly when the international community proves willing to fund and support African cooperation to resolve security issues. This includes looking the other way when the military supports democratic reforms and social movements against the backdrop of recalcitrant authoritarian leadership. A critical feature of the African warfare landscape has been the rarity of interstate wars, to which we turn next. Interstate Wars: Where Is All that War? Why has interstate warfighting—the classic path to stronger (winning) state institutional capacity—been so rare in Africa? As noted above, most governments of African states have recognized that they shared an interest in refraining from tit-for-tat boundary conflicts that would expose their own domestic weaknesses and imperil their existence. The exception to this principle in the early independence period were instances of (limited)

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military assistance to insurgents who fought against non-Indigenous African regimes, such as the Portuguese colonies that were not independent until the mid-1970s, and the apartheid regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa. Even with these proxy operations, interstate war has been remarkably rare, as Table 5.1 shows (the exception being Egypt’s conflicts with Israel). Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara can be linked to colonial wars of independence and their aftermath (Fearon and Laitin 2003). Moreover, between 1950 and 2010 there were 27 “proxy war” events in Africa that had rebel partnerships with African states, of which 101 nonstate armed actors were sponsored by one or more African states (Craig 2012). However, those conflicts did not challenge existing international borders. Most of Africa’s interstate conflicts reflected the failures of at least one of the antagonists to maintain domestic order. The 1977 Somali invasion of Ethiopia, for example, occurred amid violent revolutionary turmoil in Ethiopia that Somalia’s leader sought to use to consolidate his grip on power against determined domestic opponents. Ugandan president Idi Amin’s incursions in Tanzania in 1978 also reflected that regime’s domestic strategy to consolidate power. Eritrea fought Ethiopia over a disagreement about border demarcation, though that war also accompanied the Eritrean government’s efforts to tighten domestic control and eliminate opponents. Except for Morocco’s unilateral annexation of Western Sahara (which caused Morocco’s suspension from the OAU), Africa’s contemporary boundaries have uniformly been inheritances from the colonial era.

Table 5.1 Large-Scale Wars Between African States, 1946–2020 Conflict

Years

Morocco–Western Sahara Somalia-Ethiopia

1975–1990

1977–1978

Uganda-Tanzania

1978–1979

Chad-Libya

1978–1987

Burkina Faso–Mali Congo War

1985 1997–2003

Eritrea-Ethiopia Eritrea-Djibouti

1998–2000 2008

Source: Authors’ own.

Description

Morocco unilaterally annexed the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara. Somalia invaded ethnic Somali regions of Ethiopia and proclaimed annexation before Ethiopian forces drove them out. Tanzania responded to incursions of Ugandan leader Idi Amin’s army with an invasion of Uganda to overthrow him. Libyan invaders annexed a northern portion of Chad and then declared a Libya-Chad merger before Chadian forces drove them out with French assistance. One-week border conflict. Intervention of African armies (Angola, Burundi, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe) in the Democratic Republic of Congo civil war. Protracted border conflict with estimated 70,000 casualties. Brief Eritrean military incursion.

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The broader picture of African warfighting reflects the history and nature of governance in Africa that at independence minimized interstate war, with militaries that instead engaged in domestic politics through coups. External actors played a role through the provision of SFA, though often it was not the intention of these adviser missions to prepare militaries to launch coups. As noted above, post–Cold War external assistance has been geared much more toward support for African armed forces’ participation in multinational intervention forces, and more recently toward counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. Such SFA involves arming, advising, assisting, training, and equipping a host nation’s military to deal with disaster response (e.g., health, floods) and mainly the problems of insurgency, terrorism, and other violent nonstate actors engaged in transnational crime. The reality is that some countries will use SFA to curtail opposing factions and rivals, while providing SFA as patronage to loyal units. The provision of SFA also reflects European concerns about prestige and the problem of failing states across the Sahel as refugee flows from these areas into Europe strain state welfare resources and polarize domestic politics (Gegout 2018). Such concerns translate into EU missions on the African continent as a way of directly engaging with local security services and the recipient government. Three different forms of engagement have occurred. First, there are civilian-political missions in Libya (2013–present) and Niger (2012–present), meant to diplomatically support political reforms and facilitate dialogue. The second variant is a blend of diplomatic engagement SFA training missions, as in Mali (2013–present) and Somalia (2010–present). Finally, a pure military mission of SFA is taking place in Central Africa Republic (2016–present), meant to develop capable security institutions locally and at the national level. In any event, these assistance programs are important contributors to the professionalization of the recipient forces, even if assistance is used for purposes other than what providers intend. Moreover, they create new institutional linkages to external governments and organizations, socializing certain managerial practices and bureaucratic procedures, not to mention a host of educational and training opportunities. Conclusion In this chapter, we outlined how pressures to professionalize armies and other security actors on the African continent tend to come from within (e.g., desires to mimic foreign models), laterally between fellow African military personnel (e.g., coordination), and externally from the EU, UN, and United States. While military-led coups remain a threat, they are in decline and, when they occur, they tend to include an exit plan for the military. Of course, such exit plans can be cynically drawn up, as shown in

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Mauritania. The 2008 military coup by General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, led to him “retiring” and running for president in 2009, an election that he handily won. In a somewhat bureaucratic fashion, General Aziz complied with constitutional term limits, and in 2019 he did not run for president, as a fellow coup supporter, General Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, retired and ran for president, easily winning as well. Despite the recession of coups, insurgency, rebellion, and terrorism, each of these threats remain and could return. We have shown in this chapter that the nature and character of security threats on the African continent, combined with scarce resources to unilaterally use military forces to intervene, have translated into varying types of collective security organizations, sometimes organized by regional blocs, other times by the AU, and often created, funded, and supported by various international actors. One consequence has been professional socialization through coordinating operations with other militaries. In that manner, Africa’s militaries have contributed to the broader process of building stronger institutions in many African states. This process is particularly notable in countries such as Ethiopia and Rwanda, where professional skills of militaries are applied to joint ventures with foreign firms in large infrastructure projects and military involvement in the provision of social services. This change in African warfighting challenges late-twentieth-century expectations that Africa’s process of decolonization and the weak capacities of newly independent states foreclosed the role of warfighting as a driver in classic historical processes of building strong states (Jackson 1990; Herbst 2000). While non-Western in character, this creates contextually professionalized armed forces in each country as they collaborate and manage various security threats, while acting as a modernizing and professionalizing force on the state—all without needing to engage in coups d’état. Will this process of military professionalization and its role in strengthening state institutions continue without interstate warfighting? The global shift toward multipolar great-power competition has begun to challenge the regional system of multinational interventions with Western logistical and financial backing. China and Russia act unilaterally on the continent seeking influence through supporting regimes (with aid to their armed forces) that provide access to natural resources and new consumer markets (Matisek 2020). It is conceivable that intensified competition between great powers could be pursued through proxy battles between contending African states. While such a future is possible, this model will have to contend with the possibility that regional cooperation to address security threats through multinational interventions will lead to greater autonomous capacities among African leaders to define their own strategic environments. This may be accomplished through intensified regional military professional ties to assist coordinated African responses to external pressures of great-power

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competition. Most importantly, the AU may prove helpful in harnessing and aggregating collective African positions in the interactions with the different foreign powers jostling for a foothold in the continent, making such proxy competition productive for state formation strategies, rather than causing state deformation as seen during the Cold War. In sum, changes in African warfighting are integral to the changing character of states and civil-military relations in Africa. This change trends toward greater institutional capacity and stability in many of Africa’s most important countries. While challenges remain, warfighting in Africa has shifted from drivers of instability to drivers of stability (professionalization through multinational coordination) and the pursuit of a more internationally legitimate state system. William Reno acknowledges the support of funding from the Research Council of Norway under the Peace Research Institute Oslo project “SFAssist” (project number 274645). 1. Authors’ interviews, Teshie Camp Ghana, 2019. 2. Brigadier General Khobe (2000) and Lieutenant Colonel Aboagye (1999) presented candid views and assessments of their ECOMOG operations. 3. Authors’ observations and discussions onsite 2018–2020. 4. North African Regional Capacity (NARC), ECOWAS Standby Force, Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) Standby Force (also known as Force Multinationale de l’Afrique Centrale [FOMAC]), Eastern Africa Standby Force (EASF), and Southern African Development Community (SADC) Standby Brigade. 5. Authors’ fieldwork interviews, 2018–2020.

Notes

6 Military Effectiveness: The African Alternative Jahara Matisek

INTERVIEW QUESTION: How do you think your military is able to be effective compared to stronger militaries like the United States? I think because of the difference in the size of our militaries we are forced to generate more generalist soldiers and officers and train more “free thinking” soldiers. This potentially makes us more effective at adapting to uncertain environments and situations. The challenge for us, as a small military, is how we maintain a competitive advantage against national power which far exceeds our own. I think the key is focusing on developing the individual, regardless of rank.

—Australian military officer October 16, 2017

You Americans have it all. Ethiopians are very inspired by how American troops look physically [he pokes his chest], weapons, and discipline. We are nothing like your military. Your military is a machine; we are a “political animal.” Your way of fighting is too mechanical . . . you’re too focused on killing people. . . . The ENDF [Ethiopian National Defense Forces] has few resources. . . . We prefer fighting only when we have to. . . . [We] would rather solve the reasons of why they are fighting us in the first place. If we copied your military it would be dangerous to Ethiopia.

—Ethiopian military officer August 8, 2017

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What does it mean to be militarily effective? Australia and Ethiopia have fundamentally different systems of governance, institutions, cultural and historical legacies, and economic development. Yet, given their specific contexts, each military officer in the epigraphs above understood how their militaries coped with a common shortcoming (e.g., lack of resources) and described their own distinctive notions of military effectiveness. Their different definitions, rooted as they are in their specific contexts, are at odds with a conventional US definition of military effectiveness.1 When the question about military effectiveness was posed to a US Army officer, he revealed it as “accomplishing the objective with minimal guidance, resources, and effort but simultaneously utilizing joint interoperability ensuring optimal results” adding “see[ing] positive results with minimal guidance dependent on the situation” (personal communication 2017). These three definitions all emphasize the centrality of “resources,” but each in a different way. Because the US definition of military effectiveness is perceived as a universal standard, as observed in over 100 interviews with non-US military personnel, such a consensus is valid as they acknowledge that limited resources make it difficult to emulate the United States.2 The perceived dominance of the US military template has consequences in the context of military assistance and other security sector reform programs. It percolates into the dominant definition of military effectiveness and yet if we accept that history, tradition, power dynamics, and context drove this definition for the United States, then why should it be accepted that militaries in Africa cannot have their own pathway to military effectiveness? Moreover, it points to how there can be effective armies in Africa when a substantial literature points to it not being possible, not to mention that many of these militaries organize and operate in ways different from the West but are contextually more effective. This important element is often overlooked because professionalism and military effectiveness are conflated with one another. Without understanding the political context in which a military functions, external observers might conclude that such an organization is “unprofessional” for appearing politicized or personalized, even though it is a highly effective military. As I broadly argue in this chapter, military effectiveness (and professionalism) in Africa should be understood as distinctive and not reducible to Western templates, which broadly assess an army as ineffective when it has been politicized or personalized. Moreover, apolitical armies should not be considered the gold standard in Africa because it is more a problem of an army choosing to be partisan that stages a coup for personal gain and power. This chapter answers the call from Risa A. Brooks (2019) to consider the multidimensionality of civil-military relations in authoritarian regimes, particularly the trade-offs they must make between governance, coupproofing, and military effectiveness. Ulrich Pilster and Tobias Böhmelt

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(2011), for instance, argued that in the context of interstate conflict, coupproofing degrades military effectiveness by undermining the quality of military leadership. However, the paucity of interstate conflict in Africa requires an approach rooted in the notion of regime proximity introduced in Chapter 1, which captures how the effectiveness of Africa’s armed forces reflects their political uses by regimes whose authority is largely based on patronage. This also dovetails with Chapter 1’s sister notion of social embeddedness insofar as how regimes manage civil-military relations as a function of state-society relations, particularly when it comes to the nonpolitical roles often taken on by armies, which require a distinct orientation toward civilian publics. This chapter proceeds with a theoretical dissection of civil-military relations to highlight alternative pathways for military (in)effectiveness and (un)professionalism in Africa, and critique Western assumptions of effectiveness. First, I survey the overly Western focus on military power and effectiveness to illustrate how the creation of military enclaves in Africa represents a new pathway for military effectiveness. Identifying this emphasis demonstrates how the contexts of African politics and institutions are not reducible to Western templates, which lack explanatory power in Africa. This proceeds to a discussion of how military effectiveness in Africa is being redefined by international trends and shifts in domestic politics, which has led to the creation of effective military enclaves in several countries on the continent despite Western assumptions that this should not be possible. Such elements support my final section on how this is moving toward a newly institutionalized African way of war. The key ontological point of this chapter is that the study of military effectiveness is too often tied to Western templates of professionalism that confuse organizational considerations, such as impersonalism, subordination to civilian rule, and political noninterference, with force capabilities. Thus, just because some African militaries are politicized and personalized does not mean they are ineffective—as is the tendency in applying Western military models to the African context. Transitioning to a Post-Huntington View of Military Effectiveness in Africa Differences on understanding the role of political and military leaders in a political system stem from Samuel Huntington’s (1957) ideas about civilmilitary relations. Many Westernized governments exercise objective control over their military because they have been professionalized, whereas less democratic states are more likely to assert subjective control over their armed forces to limit their autonomy because they are viewed with suspicion. This strain of thinking drives most of the literature and analysts toward ascribing the need for underdeveloped countries to develop Western

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templates of civilian control over the military, centering on trying to avoid coups. However, it might be that such an attempt at creating alien-like civilmilitary structures to avoid a coup not only neuters military effectiveness, but actually might induce a coup because of the fragile political contexts in which many African states operate and the grievances this might create in a military that feels an obligation to the state and development. A better explanation for understanding military effectiveness in African terms comes from Morris Janowitz (1960). His arguments veered away from notions of exerting control and focused on the mutually reinforcing ways in which the state socializes the military, and how the military socializes the state. Samuel Edward Finer’s (1962) investigation of militaries in the underdeveloped world led him to view the rule of the “man on the horseback”; namely, how military leaders have more of a vested interest in military institutions and are more likely to pursue rule of a country when economic development severely lags. However, in contemporary times, political and ideological shifts have driven civil-military changes due to “the spread of the call for democracy around the world. Although armed forces remain primary political actors in most states, their direct political roles have been reduced” (Welsh 1993: 71). This has led scholars such as Stephen Biddle (2006) to denote what it takes to organizationally achieve military power and effectiveness, with Zoltan Barany (2012) ascribing it to the achievement of democratic forms of civil-military relations. Again though, such modernist arguments miss the contextual realities that authoritarian regimes can and will be able to create professional armies under certain conditions and that they will be militarily effective (Talmadge 2015). The existence of non-Western templates in Africa is crucial, given the most telling response of the Ethiopian officer in the second epigraph. He admits that it would be “dangerous” for his government if the ENDF copied the US military model. Such distinction between Western militaries and African armies is important. Military officers in African states think more about their relationship to the polity when it comes to effectiveness, especially how their military relates to society and the state. This view of civilmilitary relations was best espoused in an article titled “Military, Politics Are Bedfellows,” by Colonel Shaban Bantariza (2013) of the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF). In his article, Bantariza (2013) identified the dangers of an apolitical army in Africa, providing numerous examples of how difficult it is for an apolitical military to work with political leaders in Africa. Thus, Bantariza (2013) specifically contended, “So, with hindsight, we must shield the military from national partisan politics, but to shut it out of politics completely we can only do that at our own cost and peril . . . but a military officer who is subordinate to civil authority out of political consciousness and mutual respect, is more dependable, reliable and deployable for national defense.” The thoughts of Colonel Bantariza are echoed by mil-

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itary members from other African countries, speaking to the point that due to the particular evolution of African states and their armed forces, some level of political awareness and desire to contribute to overall nation and state building is a part of the context. Most importantly though, Bantariza (2013) argues for keeping the military out of “partisan politics,” which suggests a role for African militaries in development and domestic politics, as long as such political involvement is done in pursuit of “national defense” and in deference to “civil authority.” On the opposite of the spectrum are Western militaries. They think in more technical terms, with assumptions that the military is (and should be) apolitical, never to disobey government policies and orders, nor to intervene in domestic politics. Such Western logic drives ideas of efficiency concerning the application of material resources and training in pursuit of military effectiveness. Such Western capability is defined in ways that do not consider the alternatives of conceptualizing a military’s relationship with its domestic political system and various stakeholders. However, African capability is defined pragmatically in terms of socializing elements between the state, elites, citizens, and, in many cases, foreign donors providing security force assistance (SFA) to make that military more effective.3 In many cases, a third form of military can emerge that is not political or apolitical, but is instead personalized with direct informal links to various power brokers due to the realities of neopatrimonialism. Such personalized militaries are rarely theorized in the broader study of civil-military relations, not because they do not exist, but because they are consistently viewed as being unprofessional and militarily ineffective. This is a problematic assumption because some militaries in Africa are highly capable precisely because they are personalized by their leadership. The US military model is unworkable in the African context, mainly due to costs but also because of the character of the average regime threat. Thus, exerting control—an amalgamation of political, social, and security—over a territory and population in Africa is more important than fighting against adversaries that are too fluid and dynamic to pin down for a pivotal Clausewitzian-style battle (Von Clausewitz 1989). Traditional army notions of mass and maneuver against a weak point of an adversary are nearly nonexistent when fighting rebels. As most warfare in Africa trends toward insurgency and offensive peacekeeping (i.e., as became prominent with African Union [AU] peacekeepers in Somalia after 2011), conventional warfighting is not conducive to dealing with rebels that choose to blend with civilians, never giving regime forces an opportunity for a key battle to change the course of the war. This compels elites in these African countries, be they political, military, or societal, to consider the role and nature of their armed forces and how they may redefine military effectiveness in pursuit of national and regional goals. This creates a distinct

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African template of professionalism and military effectiveness that is context dependent, but also relies heavily on how the political system interacts with security institutions. As the remainder of this chapter demonstrates, military effectiveness and professionalism are being redefined by African political and military leaders, by matching the particular contexts of their respective state. Most importantly, the African pathway of military effectiveness is still a reflection of civil-military relations and the institutional ability to operate in a politically effective fashion. In many ways, military elites have the most difficult job of balancing military objectives with political interests, seeking out avenues of alignment that reduce friction points and the likelihood of being purged by a political leadership that views the military with suspicion. Alternatively, military leadership also has to contend with ensuring that their political leaders abide by some veneer of governance and institutionalized rule; otherwise, the regime might be labeled “illegitimate” or “a pariah state” by the international community, making the army guilty by association. These activities should be considered with respect to how state elites see amicable modes of relations within the domestic political system and how informal institutions inform the exercise of control and authority. Those with personal experience, such as Rocky Williams (1998)— who worked first as an outsider (rebel leader of the armed wing of the African National Congress) and later as an insider (South African military officer)—contended that due to the particular environment in most African states, Western models of civil-military relations are untenable, and that greater political and military effectiveness could be achieved through the blurring of the two toward a greater strategic purpose. Thus, depending on the particular path taken by a regime, it can lead to the development of militaries that, to varying degrees, are decrepit patrimonial armies or bureaucratically efficient “military enclaves” that generate effectiveness in ways that are familiar to most Western observers, but through processes that are different and unfamiliar (Matisek 2019). Regardless, effective militaries can be politicized, apolitical, or personalized, in a way that reflects the state and society. The variance in how military effectiveness is achieved is driven by the security environment in Africa—that has minimal interstate warfare—with most combat being irregular (e.g., civil wars, peacekeeping missions). Hence, most African armies operate vertically and laterally as shown in Figure 6.1, where a blending of political and military desires results in certain balancing efforts with varying outcomes, which alter notions of objective and subjective control. Thus, many coup-proofing efforts undermine nation and state building, but depending on regime interests, their armed forces can still be professional and militarily effective assuming the regime promotes some level of equality and meritocracy within the ranks (Lyall 2020).

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Figure 6.1 Vertical and Horizontal Aspects of Military Effectiveness in Africa Effective COIN/Peacekeeping

Coup-Proofing

State-Building

Ineffective COIN/Peacekeeping

Source: Authors’ own. Note: COIN = counterinsurgency. In this context, COIN is considered as being synonymous with peacekeeping, as it encapsulates the bulk of military activities performed by militaries in Africa.

While Western military institutions are informed by a long history and experience with large-scale interstate/international warfare, African militaries and indeed African states do not have such a history and experience undergirding military institutions.4 Thus, military doctrines of African militaries cannot be lifted from the West. Such a context drives the logic of what a military should do. Where pockets of efficiency can exist, they must align with political and personal interests, and balance with what is possible given limited resources. In practical terms, some militaries in Africa exhibit clear hierarchies of authority and allocate resources in a rational fashion that enables them to operate more effectively as an organization, be it for counterinsurgency (COIN) or for supporting development. This mastery of bureaucratic procedure leads these militaries to “punch above their weight” relative to other state institutions. Such outcomes point to the puzzle of: How does the leader of an otherwise institutionally weak state tolerate an effective military, defined in these terms? This is primarily grounded in concerns about the military becoming effective without being a threat to its own regime, as best described by Peter Feaver (1996) as the “civil-military problématique.” This is an afterthought in the West since most militaries become institutionally embedded within the state and can operate autonomously because of their professionalism; this translates into apolitical loyalty to the government (Matisek 2017). But in the average African state, there may exist tensions between the government, informal power brokers, and the military, not to mention those about how the military is used, and whether the armed

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forces have been rendered ineffective due to coup-proofing or fragmented for patronage purposes. For example, in Niger, the military is effectively neutered by the political system, specifically the Customs Department. Customs agents extort the Nigerien military by preventing them from accessing weapons, ammunition, and supplies, seeking bribes in exchange for releasing this war materiel from impoundment (personal communication 2020). Such a scenario turns Feaver’s (1996) civil-military problématique upside down, as the people with the guns (i.e., the Nigerien army) are held hostage to a corrupt Nigerien Customs Agency, a situation that they feel helpless to solve. The political context in which militaries are embedded can result in alternative pathways to effectiveness. Leaders in some countries may permit the development of military enclaves, which define institutions and risk, and the absorption of foreign aid (primarily military assistance) in different ways. Less successful states on the continent have leaders who politicize or personalize their armies in ways that do not contribute to effective COIN or state-building efforts, thus failing to utilize these elements in an effective fashion. However, just because an army is politicized or personalized does not automatically mean it has been coup-proofed or that it is militarily ineffective. With the proper strategic vision and necessary ideology, such militaries can be contextually effective, given the right conditions to permit the creation of a professionalized military enclave that can serve the purposes of the state and society. The penultimate form of a personalized army can be a rebel group that lacks any coherent political ideology, other than devout followership to a charismatic rebel leader. In most cases in Africa, the only institutional difference between a rebel leader and a military commander is that that the latter has the veneer of international legitimacy. Perceptions and subsequent decisions make the military effectiveness path dependent on the strategic vision of regime elites, translating into culturally and contextually effective armies, assuming they serve a grander role for the state. Thus, most civil-military relations scholars (see, e.g., Talmadge 2015) would consider a coup-proofed military in Figure 6.1 as being ineffective at anything other than regime protection. However, military enclaves can (and do) exist, such as in Chad, where the “Chadian warrior” concept was highly institutionalized by President Idriss Déby (who died in 2021 and was replaced by his son). His personalized army displays high degrees of military effectiveness despite the way Déby organized and divided it (Debos 2016a). While this can be somewhat explained by recent historical experiences with civil wars and regional rebel activities, Déby promulgated a vision for his army, enabling it to be effective, whereas other states in the region with similar insurgency experiences (e.g., Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC], Central African Republic [CAR]) lack the political willpower to effectively organize their armed forces, using the army as

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a tool of patronage rather than in pursuit of nation and state building. A country can have militarily effective forces, but only because their fate is tied to the survival of the executive. This requires an acknowledgment that armies have agency, too, when it comes to determining their ability in being militarily effective within certain constraints. Rethinking Military Power in an African Context While I interviewed numerous Western officials responsible for implementing security policies in Africa, I found that one quip by many was the desire to get some African militaries up to the standard of “Africa Good Enough.” Such a statement, while demeaning, is indicative of how the West views the threats facing the African continent, but also demonstrates that these officials harbor low expectations of the militaries with which they work. Some scholars have exhibited similar views about achieving military effectiveness in Africa. Herbert H. Howe (2001) addressed ideas of military power by stating that “militaries often reflect national political values” (15) and that “military capabilities are relative—that is, an African military only needs to be mediocre by first-world standards when facing manifestly incompetent opponents” (3). Howe provides a different lens in which to view most African militaries and risks (i.e., insurgents) to each regime, and how various security institutions work into that equation. At the same time, there is a level of folly in trying to judge other people and their institutions using one’s own home-nation standards. Such neocolonial views and Eurocentrism lead to a misjudging of Africa without understanding political contexts and informal institutions. Regardless, it is indeed the case that militaries in Africa have often been shaped by the type of security threats they face. This is a corollary to William Reno’s (2011) argument that the nature of rebels in Africa often reflects the nature of the states they fought against. Hence, there is good reason to redefine African military effectiveness based on context to include organizational attributes and institutions. African militaries face completely different domestic, regional, and international conditions relative to most Western- and Eastern-styled militaries. In the vein of redefining conventional notions of military effectiveness, French colonel Michael Goya (2010) noted that winning in wars is more dependent on human qualities and the ability of armies to rapidly adapt and evolve to varying threat environments, something technology cannot be solely relied on to overcome. Goya (2010) found that “scrappy” militaries—combat units lacking resources—can be surprisingly effective against stronger and better equipped adversaries if given full autonomy to operate on the battlefield. Equally important, Goya (2010) and others believe that other resource-constrained militaries can be militarily successful in Africa by accepting more risk through deploying more ground

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troops, which are needed to fill the vacuums of insecurity that plague the continent (Desportes 2015; Shurkin 2018). These differing explanations about the particulars of conflict in Africa extend to the reason why rebel groups with less resources can fight and defeat a state military that has more resources at its disposal. The dominance of conventional Western narratives on how to create military power and be effective highlights the need to investigate how African militaries are circumnavigating the problem of military effectiveness. While there are structural arguments that contend that instrumental variables—geography (Collins 1998), weather (Winters and Reynolds 2001), demographics (Morgenthau 1960), disease (Charters 2009), and others (e.g., Krasner 1982; Mansfield 1995)—can influence military effectiveness and capabilities because agential aspects of effectiveness are more controllable and measurable. However, there is not enough battle data, given the lack of interstate wars in Africa, to consider which African states were consistently more effective in terms of actually fighting and protecting a state. However, based on specific battle data and other indicators, Libya’s military under Muammar Qaddafi, for instance, consistently underperformed (Burr and Collins 1989; Pilster and Böhmelt 2011; Gaub 2013). That is to say, Libya’s military was quantitatively formidable in its region by Western material standards, but it consistently underachieved. This case highlights the importance of political context. In this example, a paranoid leader who wanted his military to perform in battle, but feared that it could “perform” by overthrowing him, led Qaddafi to undermine his own military’s effectiveness such as limiting their access to ammunition, training, and communication capabilities. Such coup-proofing measures prevented the achievement of almost every Libyan foreign policy aim, though as the 2011 Libyan Civil War demonstrated, defectors that formed antiregime groups were almost completely destroyed by Qaddafi’s loyal units, but turned the tide only when US and allied airpower intervened. Evaluating African militaries is even more problematic when considering the numerous coups that have happened on the continent. These events typically lead to reshuffling of security services, institutions, and personnel, where loyalty is typically preferred over competence. This is “good” in terms of a regime’s concern to manage domestic risk, but “bad” in conventional (i.e., Western) conceptualizations of effectiveness. There are different ways that insecure rulers pursue coup-proofing, including fragmentation of defense and security agencies as well as ethnic stacking in the military (Harkness 2017; Allen 2020). At the same time, most of the literature asserts that coup-proofing undermines military effectiveness as armies become increasingly politicized and personalized (Khisa 2020). Yet, the highly personalized armies of Cameroon, Chad, and Mauritania are apolitical and effective at COIN. Similarly, the Ethiopian military defines itself as a “polit-

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ical animal,” and is similarly effective at COIN, not to mention playing a substantive role in the economy and development. Moreover, the Ugandan army exhibits both traits of being highly political and personalized by Museveni, which are fostered through ideological notions of pan-Africanism, with the UPDF being one of the biggest AU peacekeeping contributors (per capita). Each of these countries exhibit the traits of military enclaves that still permit military effectiveness by institutionalizing professionalism, despite coup-proofing measures inherent in the system. A Western-Dominated Discussion of Military Effectiveness Conventional material capabilities of states and societies dominate discussions about military effectiveness. Paul Kennedy (1987) asserted that national economic strength translates into military strategy since economic productivity translates into efficient uses of resources during wartime. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin’s (2003) highly influential argument on civil wars made the case for gross domestic product (GDP) being a proxy for military strength, but this proxy misses the importance of institutions. Libya had a high GDP under Qaddafi’s rule, yet consistently underperformed militarily with a veneer of political ideology via his eclectic ideological manifesto, The Green Book (Qaddafi 1975). Similarly, Equatorial Guinea has Africa’s highest GDP per capita (due to oil), but President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo depends on the machinery of his personalized army for his protection, as seen with their robust defense against a mercenary coup attempt in 2018 (Sundiata 2019). Kenya is the biggest economy in East Africa with an apolitical military, but it struggles to be militarily effective due to corruption. On the other hand, its neighbor Tanzania has had a politicized army since 1964 that was clearly defined as an explicitly political tool by President Julius Nyerere to build a particular kind of state (Omari 2002). Eritrea and Ethiopia have large armies despite their relatively small economies, but their militaries are heavily involved in state-building activities, with the Ethiopian military explicitly politicized and the Eritrean army more personalized by President Isaias Afwerki. Hence, considering African militaries that are better managed and organized is robustly more important than GDP. Michael Beckley (2010) argued that economic development was the best predictor for battlefield outcomes between 1898 and 1987 because more state resources allowed for the creation of larger and more effective militaries. He concluded that democracies degrade the capability of militaries because voters are reluctant to allocate resources to them when this would result in economic pain at home. Most importantly, Beckley (2010: 74) asserted that “military effectiveness cannot be bought; it must be developed,” where effective systems bring economic surplus and wealth,

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supporting the creation of military systems reflects the economic power of the state. An effective system in this context means that the government can be efficient and capable of limiting waste (e.g., corruption). This lends credence to ideas that an effective military cannot be artificially created—even with substantial SFA—in a state unless there are the desire and political willpower to do so. Thus, in countries with a relatively low GDP, such as Senegal, an effective military can be produced that is apolitical and also plays a role in state-building activities precisely because political leaders want the military to be part of the state-building process. In conjunction with long-term SFA from France, the United States, and many others, Senegal has created a military enclave that has absorbed such aid effectively and developed institutional effectiveness, all despite having several features of patrimonialism. Such contrasts speak to how military relations are coordinated by regimes and whether they are considered viable institutions beyond simplistic notions of short-term regime survival. Substantial merit is typically given to quantitative explanations for military strength. Great military minds—going back to the seventeenth century—would speak of “Dieu est toujours pour les gros battalions” (God always favors the big battalions) (Carlyle 1865).5 This contributes to an understanding of how the Ethiopians, with an army eight to ten times larger than the expeditionary Italian force, led to a massive rout at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 (Jonas 2011). But the mass of one army (i.e., sheer numbers) does not guarantee the defeat of a smaller military that is more capable. Only four decades later, the Italians returned to Ethiopia with a small force armed with advanced armaments (e.g., tanks, aircraft) and chemical weapons, quickly devastating the much larger Ethiopian military, which lacked modern weapons systems (Barker 1971). While material capability is a good starting point in analyzing any sort of capacity in projecting force, we must understand how the material and masses are employed. This requires us to be skeptical of structural-realist arguments that contend two states will fight wars through optimal utilization of resources (Glaser and Kaufmann 1998). Many African countries have their own conception of what is “optimal” in terms of waging war, which is generally overshadowed by their own perceptions of risk. The creation of optimal military force in Africa depends in large part on political context and choice. A host of other qualitative explanations have been considered in the literature concerning military effectiveness and war outcomes (see Mearsheimer 1985; Reiter and Stam 1998; Knox and Murray 2001; Luttwak 2001; Coker 2002; Reynal-Querol 2002; Van Creveld 2010; Jungdahl and Macdonald 2015). Moreover, technological and scientific advancements can provide new weapons and tactics for war, which generally increases firepower (Bousquet 2009). For example, the 1879 Battle of

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Rorke’s Drift in South Africa exemplified the “quality over quantity” argument, where about 140 British troops with their Martini-Henry rifles (fastfiring with longer range) repelled an attack of over 3,000 Zulu warriors— equipped primarily with spears and low-quality muskets—during the course of a two-day battle in South Africa (Lock and Quantrill 2005). 6 Similar gallantry was displayed by Hendrik Witbooi, a chief of Namaqualand nicknamed “!Nanseb Gaib Gabemab” (the snake in the grass), who fought against German occupiers in modern-day Namibia. He waged a lengthy and effective guerilla war against the colonizing force until he was killed in a battle with German troops at the village of Vaalgras in 1905 (Gewald 1999; Averill, Rengura, and Hilse 2018). While there might be arguments for the power of ideas in making strong armies, without the right tools (i.e., weapons) to close the “fighting gap,” technologically advanced militaries typically have an edge in war (Lynn 2008). However, this assumes that they are provided the necessary conditions to be capable and have the backing of their political counterparts so that they can follow through on military objectives. Despite the merit of quality only arguments, they are not universally applicable. In August 1998, the Rwandan military led an invasion of the DRC, with UPDF troops and Congolese defectors, known as Operation Kitona. This daring military action led by Rwandan colonel James Kabarebe against its neighbor involved an audacious airlift operation into the Kitona airbase 300 miles west of the capital of Kinshasa, with the intent of expelling DRC president Joseph Kabila with a force of several thousand troops. Kabarebe’s military force made it within twenty miles of the capital until Kabila salvaged a last-minute alliance with Angola and Zimbabwe, which dispatched overwhelming firepower against the Rwandan-led force that had fought and marched almost 300 miles in less than 4 weeks. The change in events demonstrated the power of unforeseen alliances in besting a well-executed plan. However, Kabarebe’s force managed to make a cautious retreat. While defeated, the Rwandan-led force slipped into Angola, seized an airbase, and spent two months lengthening the airfield, which enabled them to airlift home almost 3,000 troops (Stejskal 2013). The one common thread that links military effectiveness in Africa is agential political choice by leaders within the social structure. Social and political context, and formal and informal institutions interacting in appreciable ways, each exert substantial influence on the organizational capacity of militaries and their ability to employ combat power effectively, or at least provide the perception of credible military force. This is especially true when considering state-society relations and their impact on state capacity. Stephen Peter Rosen (1995: 5) contended that different cultures and types of societies generate different amounts of military power:

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Jahara Matisek First, people in a political unit can identify themselves with social structures in ways that can create divisive loyalties within the political unit. This can create fissures in the unit that reduce the effective military power of the unit as a whole. Moreover, internal divisions can increase the amount of military power needed to maintain internal order, reducing the surplus of offensive military power that can be projected abroad. The fissures in the unit can create defensive vulnerabilities that can be exploited by invaders. Second, the social structures that create fissures in the unit at large may extend to the military organizations of that unit. Under circumstances that can be specified, those social structures can carry over into the society’s military organizations in ways that reduce the amount of military power that can be generated from a given amount of material resources.

Considering how military force is employed, Stephen Biddle (2006: 28– 51) provided a comprehensive theory based on the ability of militaries to adapt to increasingly lethal battlefields, dubbing it the “modern force employment system.” However, this style of warfighting is not easy to adopt, as it is complex and poses political and organizational issues such as a decentralized military system that gives significant autonomy to lowerranking military personnel. Ideas of this sort would be seen as unacceptably risky to regimes that exercise authority in ways different from the modern states that are at the center of Biddle’s (2006) analysis. Such thinking might even be institutionally repulsive. For instance, an Ethiopian officer removed his troops from a training course conducted by the Kenyan military when they attempted to teach his unit how to retreat, which he and his men considered to be “shameful” behavior (personal communication 2017). The distinct configuration of the state and power relations in Africa alters the milieu of military power. These outcomes reflect active efforts to compensate for and work around obstacles, just as a more lethal battlefield compels the US military to consider possibilities that would have seemed strange to observers rooted in a different and earlier way of warfare. Indeed, Victor Davis Hanson (2007) observed that war remains culturally contextualized over time. Hanson’s most important finding, however, is that military organizations become the most institutionally effective when they develop ways of rationalizing warfare to the point that it overcomes traditional norms that generally interfere with combat operations. Such ideas suggest that militaries in Africa can become effective if they are given the agency to behave and operate in a fashion that deviates from cultural norms in a society. Thus, Kabarebe’s initial airlift operation against the DRC defied expectations and was highly unusual, but was executed with high levels of effectiveness so that, when forced to retreat, his evacuation operation was just as bold and successful (Cooper 2013: 24–33). Such a notion of installing a Western military template that overrides culture and tradition—to make something better—is the biggest fallacy of modernization theory (Scott 1998). It also suggests that coups might be an

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externality grievance for a military that is driven to modernizing without the political system or society accompanying such modernization, as possibly seen in the 2012 Malian coup d’état. In another case, a military officer from Burkina Faso lamented that his apolitical military is “involved somehow in politics” and because of this historical legacy, their military is tasked with “critical mission[s] with very limited resources.” They are forced to be “adaptive . . . flexible,” but due to the fragmented political context, the Burkinabe armed forces find it “difficult to find a room where we could be really better [sic]” (personal communication 2018). This is illustrative of the sort of subjective control of tensions and grievances that exist between the regime and its army, and the military’s inherent desire to professionalize but is unable to do so because the government sees no interest in having a professional military. In sum, this survey highlights the centrality of the weight of local context in shaping how leaders and members of military organizations define and pursue “military effectiveness.” It also indicates that material and quantitative strengths contribute but are not, in and of themselves, sufficient to support military effectiveness. Understanding how the context in Africa is significantly different requires us to reexamine how this came to be, and why some militaries can defy the odds by becoming effective. A Special Form of African Warfare? There are a number of different approaches to defining a particular African characteristic of warfare. The controversial mercenary Eeben Barlow (2016) wrote Composite Warfare, contending that there is a specific nature and character to African styles of warfighting.7 To Barlow, composite warfare is different from that of the more modernized and industrialized countries in the West and East. Instead, it is a mix of political and military operations, blended between bouts of conventional and unconventional warfare. Within this amalgamation, achieving government legitimacy is more important than winning battles at the tactical level. Barlow’s (2016: 8) Africanist view of war was based on “determining the most efficient, realistic, sustainable, and viable manner by which to deploy forces, engage hostile forces, and meet national security objectives while securing, protecting, and defending the Pillars of State.” This line of reasoning is in tune with Mary Kaldor’s (2013) new wars versus old wars argument. Her new wars thesis illustrates how civilians are much more involved in warfare in Africa, significantly more than anywhere elsewhere in the world. This reality means that conventional Western military strategies and tactics are unworkable in the social and political context of African wars and politics; thus, African political and military elites define “effectiveness” differently. The work of Ugandan general Muhoozi Kainerugaba (2010) supports such

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notions of there being a special form of African warfighting. Specifically, Kainerugaba (2010) found closer parallels to the way of fighting in the East, specifically the maneuver warfare advocated for by Maoist guerilla warfare. In considering this, key variables of organizational strength, discipline, and cohesion contribute to socialized-interpersonal “endowments” (Weinstein 2006: 294) that result in a unique African way of war rarely seen elsewhere (Kainerugaba 2010). This confirms a similar approach that an Ethiopian general (personal communication 2017) described about how he and other rebels fought against the Derg regime—and how they have attempted a similar approach (i.e., setting up local political units to exert control) in Somalia in the fight against al-Shabaab. If anything can be concluded from the various Africanists who have considered war in Africa, it seems, then, that the most effective form of warfighting in Africa is pragmatism combined with local-level politics. Since resources are a constraint in waging war, for many African countries this has a paradoxical effect on the state and society. A decade before World War I, Otto Hintze (1994) suggested that modernizing the tools of warfare (i.e., getting away from ground armies) would make the state more liberal and modern. However, this is problematic in an African context, where ground troops are needed to fill the volume of territory to create “troop density” instead of seeking pivotal battles against local “big men” through high-tech weaponry. Many African countries cannot afford to purchase or maintain the type of military weaponry seen in the more industrialized world and, when they do increase their modernization of arms, it is usually pursued in defense of regime elites and not because of hostile neighbors (Mandrup 2015). Thus, it should not be a surprise that some African countries effectively become authoritarian police states because the army assumes a role as the primary power player in society. This is an important facet to understand since each military service—ground, naval, aerial, and so forth—has their own agential cultural interests in how government and security policies work (Donnithorne 2018). But if the army receives the bulk of resources, relatively speaking, then it generally becomes dominant in discourses with government over national security policies and strategies. If we accept that most African states lack the resources to wage extensive Industrial Age warfare, then this means that they cannot sustain extensive aerial operations, which are considered costly and resource intensive. With a lack of resources in most African countries to purchase, support, and sustain expensive navies and air forces, to include typically a lack of domestic industrial capacity, most of the countries become army centric by default. This focus on cheap foot soldier armies is a product of three conditions. A Dominance of Ground Forces in Africa?

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First, it is simply cheaper to have ground troops. They generally require little training, and nothing more than AK-47 assault rifles and just enough monthly pay to not mutiny. In more extreme situations, even without monthly pay, the average African soldiers find innovative ways of extracting pay from the locals they guard to support themselves (and their families), or they set up checkpoints to act as “toll stations,” as is the current situation of the Somali armed forces (Matisek 2018). This style of selfsustenance was best reified by Zairean dictator Mobutu’s comments to his army: “You have guns; you don’t need a salary” (Stearns 2012: 116). Such comments implied that Mobutu expected his military to seek out informal alternatives (e.g., smuggling, checkpoints) to support themselves. Second, because of the issues of geography (i.e., low population densities), more soldiers are needed to cover more ground. This type of situation results in the recruitment of many informal army troops—essentially state-sanctioned militias—that have not gone through all of the training that urbanized recruits have had because most regimes cannot afford the costs associated with centralized training for every single recruit. This can result in uneven training in countries that do not make it a priority to integrate all ethnic/tribal (i.e., identity) groups and regions of the country into a unitary military training facility. At the same time, such informal armies can support coup-proofing, acting as checks and balances to the other security services of the state. Finally, because most threats to a state emanate from nonstate groups, such as insurgents and criminal groups, these problems require more intelligence than firepower (Lyall and Wilson 2009). As John A. Lynn (1996: 505) noted, “Navies and air forces make poor tools for internal control, coup d’état, or revolution, whereas armies are expert at all three.” We should consider how much this structural difference in African militaries compares relative to most militaries in modernized and developed states, which have military budgets big enough to field (and support) significant naval and aerial forces. This might also mean that a more balanced military will likely experience fewer coups because the army is unable to dominate domestic politics and interactions with regime elites. African warfare is an incredibly complicated and nuanced process that cannot be solved through revolutions in military affairs (Hashim 1998). During the Cold War, stronger militaries from the West and East typically intervened and assisted African armies in wars (Westad 2005). In the post–Cold War era, the West (and to a much smaller extent in the East) has continued to dabble in various conflicts throughout the continent. Operation Turquoise was a French-led military operation in Rwanda in 1994 that attempted to stymie Tutsi rebels’ advances (despite the Tutsi attempt to stop the genocide Complications of African Military Operations

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against fellow Tutsis) under a UN mandate (Fleitz 2002: 156). US Marines landed in Liberia in 2003 to assist an African military force composed of Nigerian soldiers operating as UN peacekeepers (Weiner 2003). The British military intervened (Operation Palliser, 2000–2003) in Sierra Leone (Connaughton 2002), and there have been other British interventions in Africa (Rayne 2015). And there are current French, German, and Spanish military deployments to various parts of Africa (Diatta 2020). Too many external militaries are involved in military operations in Africa to list here: the Turkish military and many other countries have opened military bases in Somalia (Hussein and Coskun 2017) and Sudan (Moubayed 2017); and China has established a naval base in Djibouti, a twenty-five-minute drive from the Djibouti airport, which hosts a coalition base of militaries from France, Japan, and the United States (Newsweek 2017). Such involvement from these external militaries is justified under the geopolitical fallout of the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the subsequent US global war on terror (later renamed “overseas contingency operations”). This has inadvertently increased the spread of religiously motivated insurgency across Africa, giving “space” to other violent nonstate armed actors, with Western militaries operating under the premise of maintaining stability and to remove safe havens for terrorists. However, as one senior official at the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) admitted, “These European countries are primarily motivated in creating states that will stop the flow of immigrants into Europe, which they see as a bigger threat than the actual problems and instability in these African countries” (personal communication 2017). He added “the more interesting aspect is that the Europeans somehow managed to convince the Americans to help them stop the flow of African refugees into Europe by helping create strong host nation security forces throughout Africa” (personal communication 2017). Indeed, the securitization of Africa has not been for altruistic purposes either. European leaders have increasingly viewed the refugee flows from Africa as a security threat (BBC 2016). Hence, European governments concern themselves with helping to create effective security forces in many African countries, to better control their boundaries, which by their assumption stems the flow of refugees into Europe. This creates a situation of foreign aid creating the facade of effective militaries in Africa, but not necessarily rooted in local context—let alone solving the roots of the instability that lead to migration of refugees (Matisek 2020). While many of these aspects and considerations point to structural features that affect choices about African militaries, one still finds a wide range of outcomes that show how decisionmakers in Africa manage these challenges, and sometimes manipulate structural forces in their own favor at the expense of overall state formation in the long term. The Western observer would do well to keep this in mind, as the provision of resources

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and advice will work out in a variety of ways, depending on how African actors see their needs and adapt to conditions. This ability to adapt is similarly grounded in perceptions of political survival. As Joel S. Migdal (1988) noted, regime survival strategies in underdeveloped countries include undermining and fragmenting their own institutions enough to prevent them from being strong enough to challenge the regime. According to Migdal, the three most common practices include the shuffling of competent technocrats, nonmerit appointments (i.e., choosing loyalty and kin first), and dirty tricks (i.e., making rivals disappear). This is a balancing act known as the “triangle of accommodation” as the regime cannot undermine its institutions too much, otherwise local big men will successfully challenge the state. Migdal (1988: 92) suggested a policy escape to this problem: there needs to be a “social dislocation experience” to “create new power” to allow for the creation of an “independent and skillful bureaucracy” that is free of “existing bases of social control.” This leads us to the conclusion that some critical junctures can—assuming elites are agential—develop new state competencies that escape the typical patrimonial traps that ensnared the old regime. However, if political and societal elites can agree on a strategic vision for the state, this possibly might include having an effective and professional military that is culturally contextualized in pursuit of state building or to rent out for peacekeeping missions abroad. “Military enclaves” are fundamentally different from prior literatures that considered the creation of strong militaries running the machinery of the state directly (or indirectly) as military regimes or as a Praetorian State (Perlmutter 1969). Neither are such military enclaves just an expression of how a military can be culturally and societally separated from the people it is derived from. Because governments and militaries define what sort of “effectiveness” they want with their armed forces, this requires a careful calculation. For example, creating an air force is capital intensive and demands substantial technical expertise. Thus, if we consider how wealthier states invest in technology to offset manpower costs, typically resulting in more liberalizing forces, then efforts by poor and underdeveloped states to build strong militaries with minimal naval assets and aircraft may be linked to the presence of authoritarian rule. Given this predisposition in most African states, and the particular form of warfare in Africa (e.g., armed non-state actors), then these economic considerations may drive many of these states to prefer ground forces. From this flows the logic of manipulating foreign security assistance to fit strategic priorities of regime elites, not what the donor states want. Moreover, because of the preference for armies in Africa, these enclave islands of military effectiveness can exist in a sea of patrimonial Military Enclaves with Bureaucratic Capacity

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armies. The utility of military enclaves is that they can exist in a divided and overlapping security force architecture of the state, translating into a specialized African form of military professionalism that is culturally and contextually dependent. Thus, while Angola and Nigeria are considered relatively rich but corrupt countries with weak institutions, the nature of the politics in their respective states results in two very different outcomes with their armed forces. The Nigerian military struggles with basic military capabilities and appears to perform peacekeeping missions for rent-seeking purposes, but its numerous organizational weaknesses are consistently exposed by failing to make gains against the Boko Haram insurgency. Angola, however, integrates its armed forces into robust foreign policy activity of the state, representing a military enclave where the government expects professionalism from its army—and it consistently exhibits high capabilities, unlike the army of Nigeria. This is because the Angolan political leadership uses its politicized army for state development and provides a vision for its military to develop niche bureaucratic capabilities that make it an effective military organization (Bernardino 2015). This similarly translates into high absorption capabilities of external security assistance in the Angolan armed forces (Seabra and Abdenur 2018). Having “created armed forces according to their own image” (Rupiya 2004: 21), Angolan civil-military relations trend toward providing more funding to its military with parliamentary oversight, while also tasking capable military officers to conduct contract negotiations and consult and advise corporations and telecoms (Ouédraogo 2014). Conversely, the Nigerian military relies on foreign military assistance to support patronage networks and schemes (Banini 2020). Worse, godfatherism within the Nigerian ranks is a sticky form of embedded corruption, where promotion is dependent on having a godfather sponsor, meaning that the armed forces spends more time on developing informal patron-client relationships than on trying to organize an effective military (Albert 2005). The military in Botswana also appears as an outlier because it has never attempted a coup, but it is still highly personalized by the regime, with most political and military elites coming from the Bangwato tribe. However, such personalization does not lead to it being repressive and, instead, its form of civil-military relations is highly cooperative in pursuit of defending regime interests, primarily civil defense of wildlife preserves because tourism revenue is so vital to the economy of Botswana (Bugday 2016). In addition, the government of Botswana invested heavily in Western military education for its officer corps in pursuit of professionalism, while also giving it the task of developing domestic infrastructure (Henk 2005). Most importantly, SFA from the United States has been instrumental in helping the military of Botswana establish an engineering corps that is almost identical in function and operation to the US Army Corps of Engineers.

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Conclusion Understanding military effectiveness within the political context and dynamics of a state is crucial to understanding how militaries think of their capabilities and role in society. Within the constraints of resources, there are a multitude of pathways and explanations for how certain militaries achieve combat power and effectiveness without having the materialist strength of an adversary. The particulars and ubiquity of conflicts and wars on the African continent indicate that the effectiveness of an African military should be based on such relative standards and not those of modernized Western states. This also points to getting past conventional notions of believing that the most effective military in Africa is one under democratic control. What it means to be a democracy is vague, and attempting to impose a Westernized form of civil-military relations is precarious given that more amenable forms of cooperation may exist between civil authorities that depend on informal power sharing. The existence of different degrees of civil-military coordination can be a function of whether the army is apolitical, partisan, or personalized. Regardless, each has their own forms of efficiencies and are practical depending on the context of politics in the regime, and how authority is exerted and exercised. Finally, in this chapter I introduced the concept of military enclaves as a way of describing the ability of a regime to create a bureaucratically effective military institution despite all other indicators—such as a political or personalized army—making such an efficient organization improbable. This idea leads us to contend with the problem that having a pocket of bureaucratic efficiency (i.e., a military enclave) in an otherwise corrupt and predatory state is the product of agential choices by regime leadership; it is not directly created via international assistance, strong patron donor states, or high GDP levels. The emergence of military enclaves in Africa, at least under certain conditions and in certain segments of some personalized and corrupt regimes, means that rulers are allowing military professionalization, be it for effective internal control or for international reasons such as looking like a more legitimate country. This means that military effectiveness does exist in many African countries, but that it is culturally contextualized within the strategic vision of regime elites, permitting various degrees of professionalism in the armed forces. Moreover, it means that an effective army in Africa can be political or personalized, despite the many scholars who advocate that only apolitical armies can be effective. Once we accept that effective and professional militaries come in all shapes and sizes, we can properly reconceptualize the traits and characteristics that make a military in Africa effective, rather than labeling them all ineffective because of their involvement in domestic politics. It also means that we can investigate the types and forms of corruption and partisanship that truly undermine a military and its ability to be effective.

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1. The US military by virtue of being a hegemon “owns” ideas on what military effectiveness means, to include ascribing professionalism as an indicator of effectiveness. Most militaries measure themselves against the United States, as do many datasets that focus on military power. 2. Working relationships with foreign military personnel, to include fieldwork and interviews, 2011–2020. 3. Security force assistance (SFA) is best described by actions taken by a donor country providing military assistance in the form of training, advising, and equipment to make the partner military more effective (Biddle, Macdonald, and Baker 2018). This strain of literature advocates that bigger SFA missions produce greater military effectiveness in a recipient country; however, it often misses the point that political leaders in an immensely corrupt country may not want an effective military, and that such SFA is only creating the veneer of effectiveness as seen in the collapse of Afghan security forces in 2021. 4. While considered relatively “new” by European standards, Huntington (1968) described how the United States informally adopted institutions from the Tudor system of British governance, without creating an overpowering monarchial state. Tudor institutions established norms and standards of behavior between the state and citizens, informing how the US military conducted civil-military relations. 5. Most attribute this expression to Napoleon. However, Voltaire used a similar expression in 1770, Frederick the Great wrote of big squadrons being favored by God in letters around 1759–1760, Roger de Rabutin of Comte de Bussy wrote of it in 1677, and the first documented evidence of the expression comes from Madame de Sévigné writing in 1673 about the French marshall general, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne of Vicomte de Turenne (1611–1675), who would commonly talk about the importance of having big battalions (Keyes 2007). 6. For a humorous and fictitious story of a non-materialist example of how leadership and small unit tactics can facilitate military victory, refer to Dunlop’s (1904) The Defence of Duffer’s Drift, which was an account of lessons learned by a British officer who fought in the Second Boer War (1899–1902). 7. Eeben Barlow became a warfare expert while fighting in defense of apartheid South Africa, making the rank of lieutenant colonel in the South African Defence Force (SADF). Following the war, he established the private military company known as Executive Outcomes and has worked as a security adviser and consultant to numerous African regimes (Singer 2007).

Notes

7 Security Sector Reform and Civil-Military Relations Louis-Alexandre Berg

He who pays the piper must know the tune.

—Anonymous

Security assistance to African militaries has undergone significant changes over the past two decades. Historically, security sector assistance has generally been associated with weak civilian control and a higher risk of coups d’état (Sullivan, Blanken, and Rice 2020; Savage and Caverley 2017; Bapat 2011; Sullivan, Tessman, and Lee 2011). Since the late 1990s, however, donor countries have increasingly adopted security sector reform (SSR) concepts in engaging with security forces. SSR programs aim to shift the focus of security assistance from operational capability toward greater attention to human security, and to the institutional architecture for civilian control, accountability, and public participation (Jackson 2011; Ball 2010; Ball and Hendrickson 2009; Brzoska 2003). The implications of the SSR agenda’s increasing prominence are far from clear, however. Research on SSR has emphasized the failure of SSR programs to bring about institutional change, due to incoherent objectives, overly technical approaches, or poor fit to the local context (Ansorg and Gordon 2019; Reno 2018; Sedra 2010a, 2010b; Scheye and Peake 2005). Yet, several countries have adopted institutional changes to civilian oversight and control with international involvement (Berg 2020; Detzner 2017; Bryden and Olonisakin 2010; Ball et al. 2007). As the amount of security assistance has increased over the past three decades, the African continent has experienced broad trends—including a decline in the incidence of coups d’état and human rights violations—that

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are consistent with SSR goals (Khisa and Day 2020, this volume; Clark 2007). These trends raise the question of whether the rise of SSR programming may have contributed to changing donor practice, and ultimately to shifting African civil-military relations over the past two decades. As Western donors have turned their attention to civilian control and oversight over the armed forces, they have confronted the core political struggles that underpin relations among civilians and militaries. This has important implications for the social embeddedness dimension of the framework introduced in Chapter 1. Understanding the role of SSR programming requires understanding how it has interacted with the political and the social dynamics of civil-military relations. While the literature on SSR highlights these obstacles, it has not conceptualized how security assistance interacts with internal political struggles or the implications for institutional change (Berg 2020). The literature on civil-military relations has devoted more direct attention to these tensions—especially in explaining military intervention, coups d’état, and civil war (Decalo 1998a; McGowan 2006; Clark 2007; Powell 2014; Roessler 2016). Taking internal political dynamics as a starting point shifts the focus of attention from examining the effects of donor programs, and toward understanding how different modes of civilmilitary relations shape the role of security assistance (Day and Khisa this volume). Yet, research on civil-military relations has given limited attention to the role or implications of external assistance—especially as it has expanded in size and in scope. This chapter explores the implications of SSR programs for evolving civil-military relations in Africa over the past three decades. I argue that the role of donor programs depends on a combination of internal political openings and alignment of donor resources. Reviewing cases of SSR programming in light of insights from the civil-military relations literature, I posit that SSR programs are most likely to contribute to change to civilian oversight institutions under two conditions. First, in the aftermath of political or postwar transitions that shift the internal balance of power and generate interests for institutional change among military and civilian elites; that is, when there are critical junctures. Second, when donors align their resources and objectives to these openings to balance internal opposition to reforms. By contrast, in the absence of political openings or ruptures, external resources tend to reinforce existing modes of civil-military interaction, and risk contributing to the military’s political interventions or abuses. An examination of trends in Western security assistance and civilmilitary relations in sub-Saharan Africa lends support to the argument that SSR programs have contributed to institutional changes after political transitions in some countries under certain circumstances, but it also suggests that, overall, SSR has not brought about significant shifts across the continent. Rather, donors have devoted most security assistance to con-

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texts with limited prospects for institutional change. Although security assistance has increased and Western donors have adopted SSR concepts in their policies, most programs have prioritized short-term, operational goals like counterterrorism and counterinsurgency in countries facing ongoing civil war—notably Somalia and its neighbors, and the Sahel. In countries that experienced political or postwar transitions—including South Africa, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Burundi—SSR programs have contributed to institutional change, but these contexts have received less attention and resources. In sum, while the SSR agenda has played a role in the evolution of African civil-military relations in a few countries, the analysis in this chapter suggests that the breadth of its impact has been limited. Donors have likely missed opportunities to contribute to changing civil-military relations. This chapter makes two contributions to the reconceptualization of African civil-military relations in this book. First, it sheds light on the role of foreign security assistance in the changes that have occurred over the past three decades. Contrary to prevailing approaches, I suggest that the effects of foreign training and assistance stem less from shifting norms or coercing recipients, than in interacting with internal political dynamics that shape civil-military relations, which dovetails with Chapter 1’s concept of regime proximity. Foreign resources may reinforce status quo distributions of authority, but they can also underpin shifts in power and enable institutional changes to arise from those shifts. I point to the need for further examination of how external resources interact with the political dynamics that shape civil-military relations. Second, my empirical review suggests that, overall, the rise of SSR programming has played a limited role in the evolution of African civil-military relations. The countries in which external donors have played a meaningful role after transitions have been few, as donors have shifted attention away from contexts in which their resources are most likely to contribute to institutional change. While this limited effect can be attributed to limited political openings, it also reflects donors’ priorities. As donor interests evolve in a globally competitive environment, their influence on civil-military relations is also likely to change. Security Sector Reform and Civil-Military Relations: Clearer Focus but Uncertain Effects The security sector reform concept arose in the late 1990s as multiple policy agendas converged to try to shift the way in which donors and international organizations engaged with security forces. The concept most directly reflects efforts by development actors to address the role of security sectors in achieving development objectives. Responding to increasing evidence of the detrimental effects of abusive security forces on economic

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and social development (Narayan et al. 1999), proponents argued for more engagement with security forces by development actors, and for broader scope of engagement by security actors (Ball 2010; Sedra 2010a). At around the same time, the expansion of multilateral peace operations increased attention by peacekeepers and donors to the role of security forces in ending civil war. From monitoring provisions in peace agreements that called for disarming, demobilizing, and integrating former combatants, peacekeepers broadened their attention to vetting, training, and restructuring armed forces to maintain peace (Paris and Sisk 2009). United States and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries also expanded their attention to civilian control as they sought to support democratic transitions in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Brzoska 2003). Military assistance programs therefore increasingly incorporated training and military education to instill norms of civilian control and human rights (Atkinson 2006). While not all of these efforts explicitly adopted SSR principles, they converged toward increased attention to civilian control and institutional change in engaging security forces. Thus, while SSR programs have broader goals and conceptual underpinnings, they have focused on civilian control and oversight of security forces as a core objective. Fundamentally, SSR aims to promote a “human security” approach that prioritizes the safety and well-being of individuals and communities (Paris 2001). According to this concept, security forces should aim beyond “national security” goals of stability, territorial integrity, and regime maintenance, toward protecting public safety. To promote a “peoplecentric approach,” SSR calls for greater engagement with the public to strengthen participation in defining security needs and holding security forces accountable (Sedra 2010a). It also entails strengthening institutions for civilian control, oversight, and administration to bolster democratic accountability and adherence to the rule of law, and to improve security forces’ responsiveness to the public (Jackson 2011; Ball 2010). One of the most widely used definitions of security sector reform, from a 2005 policy paper published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC), calls on donors to “increase partner countries’ ability to meet the range of security needs within their societies in a manner consistent with democratic norms and sound governance principles, including transparency and the rule of law” (OECD 2005, 2007). Taking a broad view of the “security sector,” SSR programs have frequently prioritized strengthening oversight bodies such as ministries of defense, as well as legislative committees, local oversight boards, and the whole range of laws, procedures, and organizational structures that affect the behavior of security forces (Ehrhart and Schnabel 2005; Ball 2010; Ball and Hendrickson 2009). The SSR concept—and its focus on civilian control and oversight—has resonated especially strongly for donors working in Africa. In the 1990s,

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donors sought to promote civilian control and military professionalism to reinforce transitions to democratic rule in Nigeria and Ghana (Ball and Fayemi 2004; Luckham 2003). Efforts to restructure armed forces in South Africa served as a reference point for these programs, especially as they encouraged public participation in the process of restructuring the security forces to reverse the legacy of apartheid (Bendix and Stanley 2008a). Yet, SSR concepts especially took root in the aftermath of violent conflict. Security forces across the continent had contributed to widespread insecurity through interventions into politics, collaboration with rebels, and involvement in corruption and abuse (Reno 1999). In focusing on human security and institutional change, proponents of SSR aimed to address underlying drivers of civil war and underdevelopment. The term security sector reform first emerged in the context of a UKfunded program to restructure the security forces in Sierra Leone.1 Like in South Africa, exclusion, repression, and abuse had played out especially clearly in the security forces—to the point that segments of the army colluded with rebels to abuse civilians and overthrow the government. After the UK government deployed troops to stabilize the country, it quickly broadened its engagement through a combination of military, diplomatic, and development resources aimed at overhauling the security forces and building a new civilian oversight architecture (Jackson and Albrecht 2010). Since then, donors have infused SSR concepts in broader assistance programs throughout Africa and supported “comprehensive” SSR programs in over a dozen countries (Detzner 2017). Yet, the actual effects of SSR programs on African civil-military relations are far from clear. Practitioners point to seminal cases such as Sierra Leone and South Africa, but there have been few efforts to systematically measure the effects of SSR programs even in these pioneering countries. A dearth of reliable measures of SSR outcomes have made it difficult to discern effects or compare across countries, especially for armed forces.2 Country case studies have tended to highlight the failures of SSR programs to achieve institutional change (Ehrhart and Schnabel 2005; Bryden and Olonisakin 2010; Detzner 2017). Critics have highlighted conflicts among donors’ multiple and conflicting objectives—especially between long-term goals of strengthening state institutions and short-term counterterrorism objectives (Sedra 2010b; Reno 2018). They have pointed to tensions inherent in donor attempts to promote institutional change from the outside, especially in such a politically fraught arena as the security sector (Ansorg and Gordon 2019; Schroeder and Chappuis 2014; Scheye and Peake 2005). Despite calls for greater sensitivity to local context, SSR programs have tended to favor technical approaches, and to devote insufficient attention to the needs of the public (Jackson 2018; Sedra 2018). Still, the implications of SSR programs for African civil-military relations appear more varied than the critiques suggest. Some countries,

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including Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Burundi, overhauled the composition of their armed forces and put in place new systems for decisionmaking, financing, and accountability—with substantial external involvement (Berg 2020; Ball 2014; Jackson and Albrecht 2010). Moreover, such changes appear to be more widespread than this handful of countries. The number of coups d’état, military interventions, and human rights violations have markedly declined over the past two decades, as discussed further below. The concept also appears to have infused security sector engagements beyond dedicated SSR programs. African multilateral bodies, including the African Union and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), have adopted formal policies on SSR and promoted the concept through their operations (Mlambo 2015). During this time, security assistance to the African continent has increased substantially. The United States, the largest provider of security assistance, increased its security aid to Africa more than tenfold from $137 million in 2000 to a high of $1.385 billion in 2016.3 To be sure, security assistance has a variety of objectives; in the absence of disaggregated data on assistance programs, it is difficult to assess given how widespread concepts of security assistance have become. Still, as I discuss below, the concept as a whole has increasingly been cited in both policy and practice. Yet, we know little about whether and how security assistance may have contributed to institutional change in individual countries, let alone across the African continent. Underlying the uncertainty and critiques surrounding SSR is the disconnect between donors’ objectives and approaches focused on training and procedural changes on the one hand, and the political struggles underpinning civil-military relations on the other. As donors have devoted increased attention to institutional change, they have confronted thorny political tensions among civilian and military elites. While the SSR literature refers to political obstacles, it has devoted less attention to conceptualizing them or to examining how external programs interact with them. Among policymakers and practitioners, the most common responses to political obstacles are either to wait for sufficient “political will,” or to prioritize “local ownership” of proposed reforms. Yet, donors rarely incorporate into their programming an understanding of how internal political struggles shape support or opposition to reforms (Ansorg 2017; Nathan 2007). When they call for local ownership, donors tend to vaguely conceive of it as apolitical, achieved through consultation and participation in planning and programming (Mobekk 2010; Bendix and Stanley 2008a). Institutional change almost always involves actors with “radically different conceptions of the security threats they face and the appropriate means to address them . . . [who] struggle to assert control over security sector reform processes in ways that serve their own interests” (Donais 2008: 10). Even if some individuals support institutional changes, there inevitably are losers with the capability to block, delay, or undermine them.

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The interaction of assistance programs with these internal dynamics are central to whether and how they achieve their objectives, and they point to a different approach to examining their implications for evolving civil-military relations. Attempts to examine effects of donor programming across countries runs into thorny selection problems—their roles and interactions depend on the initial conditions that brought donors to the country in the first place. Moreover, the outcome of programs rests fundamentally on internal political dynamics. A more relevant question is how changing political dynamics across the African countries may have contributed to the changing role of donors. The SSR agenda may have shifted this role by reframing donor objectives or promoting new international norms as the focal point for these interactions. Yet, it has done so in the context of changing political dynamics. Research on civil-military relations has focused more directly on political underpinnings of civil-military relations, but it has devoted little attention to the role of external assistance programs. The predominant explanations for institutional change in the civil-military relations literature emphasize the effects of external threats in distracting military officers from politics, or in persuading civilian elites to invest in strengthening formal oversight (Desch 1999; McMahon and Slantchev 2015). This explanation appears to be a poor fit for Africa, where internal security threats predominate. The increasing volume of assistance and attention to civilian oversight through SSR programming point to the need for greater attention to how security assistance may have contributed to shifts in civil-military relations over the past two decades. Doing so requires attention to how security assistance—and SSR programs in particular—have interacted with the political dynamics of civil-military relations. The Politics of SSR: Political Transitions and External Alignments In focusing on civilian control and accountability, SSR programs have confronted the core political tensions in civil-military relations. The “civilmilitary problématique,” as Peter Feaver (1999: 149) summarized it, involves how to “reconcile a military strong enough to do anything the civilians ask them to do with a military subordinate enough to do only what civilians authorize them to do.” Western democracies have confronted this problem through the establishment of formal organizations, such as military education, training, recruitment and promotion, ministries and legislative commissions, and administrative rules and enforcement mechanisms through which civilians align preferences, monitor behavior, and enforce policy goals (Feaver 2003; Brooks 2008; Avant 1994). By contrast, research on civil-military relations in Africa has emphasized the

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absence of authoritative formal institutions (McGowan 2006; Powell 2014; Decalo 1989b). Informal mechanisms of control, such as ethnic stacking, counterbalancing multiple forces, and rent distribution, have been associated with the prevalence of military intervention, coups d’état, and human rights violations (Roessler 2011; Harkness 2016; Berg 2020). In aiming to strengthen civilian control and oversight, SSR programs have therefore aimed to shift from informal means of authority to formal, institutionalized mechanisms that facilitate civilian oversight, accountability, and the rule of law. When, and how, do security assistance programs fit into these politically contentious institutional changes? Neither the SSR agenda nor the civilmilitary relations literature have provided clear explanations for how external resources contribute to internal political changes. Nonetheless, examining prominent cases of SSR in light of insights from the civil-military relations literature, points to two key factors. First, while the civil-military relations literature has focused on conflicts between political and military elites, the SSR agenda has pointed to broader roles of armed actors in African politics, economics, and society. To the extent that security forces are embedded in broader patterns of political authority, institutional change may therefore require broader transitions that alter those patterns. Second, while the civil-military relations research has devoted little attention to international assistance, the SSR agenda has assumed a predominant role for external actors. In the context of political transitions, where political shifts may engender internal opposition or backlash, intensive external resources help to mitigate internal opposition and enable institutional change. In the following section, I explore each of these dynamics and their implications for changes to civilian oversight and control. In emphasizing security forces’ roles in a broad range of political, social, and economic outcomes, the SSR agenda points to the importance of transitions in the conditions that underpin these roles. Research on civil-military relations has emphasized how patterns of political intervention and coups reflect tensions between civilian and military elites. To counterbalance the power of the military, political elites utilize informal coup-proofing strategies such as ethnic stacking, counterbalancing, and rent distribution (Biddle and Zirkle 1996; Quinlivan 1999; Belkin and Schofer 2003; Allen 2020). Yet, these practices, in turn, deepen tensions between competing networks in the armed forces and exacerbate the risks of coups and civil war (Powell 2014; Roessler 2016). Research on African civil-military relations has attributed these tensions to longer-standing ethnic or geographic divisions, often created or exacerbated by colonial powers and baked into state institutions through postcolonial transitions (Harkness 2016). In other words, prevailing patterns of civil-military relations are embedded in broader Political Transitions as Openings for Institutional Change

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political tensions that play out especially clearly in shaping relationships between military and civilian elites. At the same time, emphasis on coups and coup-proofing tends to obscure the broader functions of armed forces in African politics. A distinguishing feature of African civil-military relations is that the lines between military and civilian elites is seldom clear (Khisa and Day this volume). Armed forces play political roles not only in conflict with civilian elites, but often in support of their interests. Civilian elites employ tactics labeled as “coup-proofing” not only to manage tensions with the military, but also to deepen their own political power (Reno 2003). Armed forces serve as venues for political patronage, as politicians appoint supporters to top positions and deploy them to protect members of their networks (Heger and Salehyan 2007). Security forces mobilize voters, repress opponents, enforce commercial monopolies, and shield civilian elites from prosecution (Snyder 1992; Reno 2003). In turn, military officers draw on their political backers to build their own commercial and political networks. Indeed, the role of armed forces in political, economic, and social life remains an important feature of African societies—and an impediment to democratic governance—even as the incidence of coups has declined in recent decades (Clark 2007; Khisa and Day this volume). In emphasizing the effects of security forces on economic and social development, the SSR agenda has implicitly recognized these broader roles. The involvement of armed forces in political, economic, and social outcomes is fundamental to the SSR agenda’s human security concerns. For instance, the involvement of African armed forces in extractive industries and commercial monopolies limits economic opportunities for those outside favored networks (Bates 2008). The use of armed forces to mobilize or repress voters around elections directly affects public safety and increases the risk of conflict (Davenport 2007). The political and economic functions of security forces, in turn, shape institutions of civilian oversight and control, as logics of economic gain or political repression come to define officer appointments, budgetary allocations, and military deployments. To address these effects, SSR programs have sometimes looked beyond militaries and ministries of defense to address security forces interactions with the public. At one level is examining these connections to explain the frequent failure of SSR efforts. If officer appointment or financial practices underpin the ruling party’s political authority, attempts to alter these practices are likely to meet resistance far beyond the armed forces. Reforms that limit political elites’ discretion to manipulate military appointments, finances, and operations may threaten a core foundation of their authority. As a result, even in nominal democracies, where the armed forces are officially under civilian control, the military often remains opaque, exploitative, and

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abusive. In practice, moreover, most SSR and security assistance programs employ a limited set of tools, primarily focused on training, technical assistance, and equipment, that target individual skills and capabilities—even if the scope of recipients extends beyond the security forces themselves to oversight ministries or civil society. Thus, while they aim far to alter security forces’ broader roles in society, few programs have addressed the underlying political or economic patterns that shape them. At another level, highlighting armed forces’ broader political and economic roles points to potential explanations for institutional change—due to transitions that disrupt networks, parties, and patterns of authority in which they are embedded. Changes in political regimes, the end of civil wars, or economic openings often lead to such shifts. As the dominant network in the security forces lose their close connection to the party in power, or the main industry under their control is no longer viable economically, openings emerge for new institutional arrangements. For instance, when new elites come to power without strong networks in the armed forces, they often seek institutional changes as means to assert greater control over the armed forces and neutralize potential threats. Similarly, major changes to the economy—such as a drop in oil revenue or collapse of a key industry— could force political elites to reconfigure their base of support and seek to rein in the military’s economic autonomy. Political or economic transitions that lead to the rise of new elites or that reconfigure party networks thus may open opportunities for institutional change. The oft-cited cases of South Africa, Sierra Leone, Burundi, and Liberia all occurred in the aftermath of political transitions. In each of these cases, opportunity for institutional change arose from major shifts in the distribution of political power. These shifts disrupted the informal networks and practices that linked security forces to the regimes, generating a strong interest among newly empowered elites in reining in or restructuring forces associated with a prior regime. In South Africa, reforms occurred following the fall of the apartheid regime and the integration of a previously excluded segment of the population into state institutions. Reforms to the security sector focused especially on integration into the security forces, and on expanding opportunities for participation in planning and oversight (Nathan 2004). In Sierra Leone, the SSR process followed an electoral transition and peace agreement, and it underpinned an effort by President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah to broaden his political coalition and neutralize threats from hard-liners in his party following a successful coup (Berg 2020). The new oversight architecture established through the SSR program made sure that rival factions could no longer use the armed forces to threaten the regime. SSR programs in Burundi and Liberia similarly followed peace agreements that reconfigured political networks and shifted the balance of power. In each case, reforms adopted through SSR programs reinforced broader political shifts.

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In directing attention beyond the interactions among civilian and military elites, the SSR agenda thus points to the importance of political transitions in enabling changes to civil-military relations. The goals of SSR programs—to incorporate excluded groups into the security forces, to strengthen formal civilian oversight bodies, to increase transparency, and to expand opportunities for public participation—aim far beyond the skills or capability of military personnel. Such changes therefore hinge on broader political and economic shifts. To be sure, not all SSR initiatives have involved political or economic transitions. Further research on the changing political roles of security forces during and after political transitions could shed light on the types of openings that enable such changes. Still, this discussion points to a potential explanation for the broad trends in civil-military relations in Africa. The SSR agenda also departs from the civil-military relations literature in emphasizing the role of external actors. While a strand of the civil-military relations literature has examined the effects of security assistance, it has mostly emphasized its perverse effects. Cross-national studies have found that security assistance tends to exacerbate the risk of coups d’état and human rights violations (Sullivan, Blanken, and Rice 2020; Savage and Caverley 2017; Bapat 2011; Sullivan, Tessman, and Li 2011). Since donors typically prioritize short-term operational goals over civilian oversight or human rights, they often inadvertently reward abusive or exploitative elites who cooperate on operations. When donors prioritize oversight, they rarely have sufficient leverage to overcome opposition from recipient elites, due to multiple and competing goals, inability to monitor recipient behavior, and limited credibility in threatening to withhold assistance to enforce conditions on aid (Byman 2006; Ladwig 2016; Biddle, Macdonald, and Baker 2018). As a result, security assistance contributes to moral hazards by allowing recipients to stay in power while avoiding institutional reforms (Bapat 2011; Boutton 2019). The extent to which SSR programs have overcome these challenges is far from clear. Since SSR programs focus on institutional change, they may be less likely to contribute to moral hazards. Some studies have found that certain types of assistance—notably, programs focused on professional norms—are less likely to have adverse effects than those focused primarily on operational capability (Omelicheva, Carter, and Campbell 2017; Atkinson 2006; Ruby and Gibler 2010). Others have found that even these programs have contributed to coups or abuse (Savage and Caverley 2017; Watts et al. 2018). Yet, there is limited cross-national evidence on programs specifically focused on institutional change. Several case studies of SSR—including in Mali, Guinea-Bissau, Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic The Alignment of Donor Interests

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of Congo (DRC)—highlight failed attempts to increase transparency or broaden public oversight. Even when donors prioritize SSR goals, they often allow short-term objectives, such as counterinsurgency or stabilization, to take precedence over longer-term institutional change (Ehrhart and Schnabel 2005; Sedra 2010b). Programs directed toward institutional change also tend to promote approaches that are ill-suited to local needs (Ansorg 2017; Schroeder and Chappuis 2014; Sedra 2010a). Despite calls for a “secondgeneration” of SSR programming to address these issues, donors continue to pursue a state-centric approach that fails to incorporate local perspectives (Sedra 2018; Jackson 2018; Ansorg and Gordon 2019). Where countries have adopted changes to civilian oversight institutions, it is rarely clear whether and how SSR programs—or security assistance more broadly—have contributed to these outcomes. In addition to Sierra Leone, Burundi, and Liberia mentioned above, a far broader range of countries has adopted more modest, but meaningful, reforms to strengthen oversight ministries and accountability mechanisms while they receive external security assistance. A 2018 study of US security assistance to Africa found that while assistance generally had no discernible impact on peace, stability or human rights overall, it did have a positive effect on these outcomes in the presence of UN peacekeeping operations (Watts et al. 2018). Yet, it is not clear whether this relationship stems from the opportunities stemming from a transition, as discussed above, or from the role of external actors. Some countries with large-scale peace operations did not adopt such changes, while countries without peace operations did. The discussion of domestic political openings above points to a more nuanced explanation for when and how external involvement contributes to institutional change. Even when donors prioritize institutional change, their influence depends on political openings within the country. In an analysis of civil-military relations in Ghana, Eboe Hutchful (1997) recounted how the weak civilian government that came to power following a transition from military rule in 1979 sought support from the UK to manage the backlash of reforms aimed at strengthening civilian oversight. The UK declined to intervene, allowing a successful military coup to abort the reforms. Nonetheless, this case illustrates how political openings create opportunities for institutional change, and how external actors can play an instrumental role in enabling those changes to succeed. In contemporary postconflict settings, external donors are more likely to respond to such openings. In Sierra Leone, President Kabbah—who had just been exiled in a military coup— invited external support to help him neutralize the threat of an interventionist military. The UK not only provided technical assistance and training, but British advisers also monitored the armed forces and helped remove senior personnel who opposed reforms, thereby providing crucial political backing for the reforms (Berg 2020). In Liberia, the US program to restructure the armed forces similarly rested on the civilian governments’ desire to restruc-

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ture the coup-prone military, but robust US support enabled the government to resist pressure from politicians to insert their supporters in the army (Berg 2020). Similarly, in Burundi, Dutch advisers facilitated negotiations among competing factions, and intervened frequently to work through contentious issues in the restructuring process (Ball 2014). These cases suggest that SSR programs have contributed to institutional changes when external resources and objectives have aligned with internal political openings. Moreover, the examples above point to a somewhat different role of international security assistance than is typically understood. SSR programs have succeeded less due to persuasion or coercion by donors, than when they have enabled changes by protecting elites from internal backlash. In these cases, donor objectives had to be sufficiently aligned with internal openings to provide the necessary technical, financial, and political backing to facilitate reform and mitigate opposition. In backing elites—even those who benefit from institutional change— external actors reinforce a distribution of power that favors reforms. In short, the contribution of SSR programs reflects the interaction of internal political openings, but it also requires the alignment of external resources to these openings. Trends in SSR and Civil-Military Relations in Africa The discussion so far points to an explanation for whether and when the rise of SSR may have contributed to changes in civil-military relations across Africa. If regime or postwar transitions became more prevalent over the past three decades, and external resources increased their support for institutional change in these settings, SSR programs may have contributed to the overall trend. Even if SSR programs remained small and scattered, the influence of SSR on other security assistance programs may have been sufficient to align donor objectives in support of institutional change. If this explanation is correct, we would expect to observe institutional changes occur most frequently following transitions, especially in the presence of substantial external involvement. If SSR has indeed influenced security assistance more broadly, we would also expect to see security assistance increasingly directed toward SSR objectives in countries that experienced a recent transition. In this section, I examine empirical trends in African civil-military relations and Western security assistance to probe this argument. I suggest that institutional changes did occur most frequently in the context of transitions, but that most assistance resources were not aligned with the objectives and contexts most conducive to institutional change. While SSR programs contributed to stronger civilian oversight in some countries—especially in the aftermath of civil war—these cases appear to have been the exception rather than the rule. Most security assistance has not prioritized SSR objectives,

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and it has been directed toward ongoing conflicts where openings for institutional change have been less likely. Western donors embraced SSR principles in official policy, but in practice they focused on shorter-term operational capabilities to combat terrorism or insurgency. Attention to oversight, governance, or institutional change has been far less common. Most assistance has not focused on countries where political or postwar transitions are most likely to create openings for institutional change. To be sure, this analysis does not directly test the causal relationship between SSR or security assistance and African civil-military relations across the continent. Given the absence of disaggregated security assistance data across donors and the tricky inferential questions, such a test is beyond the scope of this chapter. Nonetheless, examining broad trends across the continent serves to nuance assumptions that SSR has been either broadly effective or entirely without impact. Rather, it points to heterogeneous effects across country contexts consistent with the argument that the role of security assistance reflects internal power bargains and broader political dynamics. It also points to the importance of two factors—political transitions and alignment of external assistance—that have received scant attention in research on civil-military relations in Africa. Broadly, the African continent experienced a striking trend toward stronger civilian control and oversight of armed forces, as illustrated in Figure 7.1. The incidence of coups d’état steadily declined from a total of thirty-six successful or attempted coups during the 1990s, to fourteen from 2010 to 2019 (Powell and Thyne 2011). Successful coups decreased from twentyone to seven during the same period. Coups d’état are an imperfect indicator of civilian oversight since militaries may remain autonomous, abusive, or politicized in the absence of coups. As noted in Chapter 1, the number of extrajudicial killings committed by state authorities, which captures other aspects of security forces’ behavior, similarly declined (Schrodt and Ulfelder 2016). The latter trend is especially notable since the number of civil wars—which are associated with high levels of extrajudicial killings—did not decline during this period (Gleditsch et al. 2002). To be sure, these trends obscure significant variations across the continent. Nonetheless, they point to a trend in the behavior of armed forces that is consistent with SSR objectives. These changes in the behavior of armed forces appear to be linked with institutional changes. The top line in Figure 7.1 displays the number of African countries in which at least one cabinet minister was a uniformed military officer in a given year. This serves as a rough indicator for the political power of militaries across the continent, and whether they are subordinate to civilian control (White 2017).4 The steady drop partly Political and Institutional Transitions

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20 15 10 0

5

Total Count per Total C o un t p er Year Year

25

30

Figure 7.1 Trends in Civil-Military Relations in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1990–2019

1990

2000

2010

2020

Year Year Coups C oup s d d'État 'État

Ki Killings ll ing s b by y St State ate Se Security curity F Forces, orces, iin n1 1000s 0 00 s

Civil Civil W Wars ars

C Countries ountries w with ith Mi Military litary O Officers fficers iin n tthe he C Cabinet ab ine t

Sources: See Powell and Thyne (2011); Schrodt and Ulfelder (2016); Nyrup and Bramwell (2020); Gleditsch et al. (2002).

captures transitions from military to civilian rule, as in Nigeria and Ghana. Yet, it also points to a broader and expanding practice across the African continent to not privilege military officers with formal political authority. While in some countries the presence of military officers varies from year to year, in other cases military officers have been permanently removed from civilian governments as part of institutional changes to the armed forces. In Liberia, for instance, part of the overhaul of the country’s defense system involved a new Defense Law, adopted in 2008, that strengthened the authority of the civilian Ministry of Defense and established a new military justice system. As noted above, such changes are most common in the context of postwar or political transitions that alter patterns of political authority. Figure 7.2 displays the average number of countries per year that shifted from the presence to the absence of military officers in cabinet positions since 1990, disaggregated by country context.5 On average, roughly three times more shifts from military to civilian control occurred in countries emerging from civil war than in countries not experiencing a democratic or postwar transition. Of the twenty-one such shifts during the 1990–2018 period, more than

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Figure 7.2 Mean Proportion of African Countries per Year That Shifted Toward Civilian Control, by Country Context, 1990–2018

Sources: White (2017); Nyrup and Bramwell (2020); Gleditsch et al. (2002). Note: Lines represent 90 percent confidence intervals.

half occurred in either democratizing or postwar countries, while only three occurred during civil war. The former countries include not only the seminal SSR cases, such as Sierra Leone and South Africa, they also include countries in which transitions from civil war resulted in substantial institutional changes such as Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Senegal, Mozambique, and Botswana. Not surprisingly, those experiencing ongoing civil war had the lowest proportion of such changes. The level of international involvement in these countries varied, however. For instance, countries that experienced shifts to civilian control include Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Burundi, where UN peace operations and international donors worked to restructure security forces after a peace agreement. They also include Cote d’Ivoire, for example, which adopted restraints on the military following a 1999 coup d’état, as well as Ghana that strengthened civilian authority following a transition from military rule. Meanwhile, several countries that experienced postwar transitions, including Angola, Uganda, the DRC, and Guinea-Bissau, adopted more limited changes to civil-military relations—despite substantial external security assistance. In the next section, I turn to evidence on the alignment of external actors in these cases.

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Turning to trends in security assistance reveals a mixed picture of donors’ attention to SSR objectives and opportunities. I posited that security assistance is most likely to contribute to institutional change in the context of transitions, and when it provides sufficient support directed at institutional change. Although donors have embraced SSR objectives and increased security assistance, disaggregating this assistance by context suggests that donors have not prioritized these objectives. Rather, they have focused on countries experiencing violent conflict, most often for counterinsurgency or counterterrorism objectives. At the policy level, Western donors and multilateral organizations have adopted SSR concepts, particularly with respect to civilian control and oversight over armed forces. This trend has been especially clear for multilateral actors, including the United Nations and the European Union (EU). Since the beginning of multidimensional peacekeeping operations in the early 1990s, the mandates of UN peacekeepers have expanded from disarming or integrating former combatants into the army, to full-scale restructuring of military and police forces. Especially since a 2008 UN Security Council resolution that explicitly emphasized SSR as a core element of peace operations, SSR units have become standard components of UN peacekeeping missions (Williams 2016). The EU has similarly embraced SSR concepts. Attention to these concepts originated in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development (DG DEVCO), although this agency has focused primarily on justice, police, and border forces. Military and defense engagements have fallen primarily under the EU Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), established in 2002. Thirty-five CSDP missions have deployed military, police, and civilian personnel to crisis situations or to support conflict prevention, peacekeeping, or international security worldwide, including eighteen to sub-Saharan Africa (Di Mauro, Krotz, and Wright 2017). In 2005 and 2006, the EU adopted policy frameworks that explicitly advanced SSR in development activities and CSDP missions. At least thirteen CSDP missions to Africa involved training, advising, and other forms of support to security forces as their primary objective. European bilateral donors have also embraced SSR principles in policy and taken steps to link development and security programs in practice. The major security assistance donors, including France, the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands, have all adopted explicit SSR principles in their assistance, and expanded their engagements in the security sector in Africa (Deneckere, Neat, and Hauck 2020). Several large programs in the early and mid-2000s explicitly prioritized institutional change objectives. The largest of these programs, the UK SSR program in Sierra Leone and the Netherlands’ support to Burundi, put into practice pooled funds and innovative delivery mechanisms to link security and development objectives in the security sector. The Alignment of External Assistance

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The United States adopted SSR principles much more slowly than its European counterparts, but it has also expanded its attention to civilian control, especially in Africa. Although the United States expanded efforts to promote norms of civilian control and human rights in military training and education after the Cold War, it was slower than European donors to adopt SSR principles explicitly. The first policy statement clearly referring to SSR, the 3-D Statement on SSR, was issued in 2009 by a working group of officials in the State Department, Defense Department, and US Agency for International Development (USAID) to call for greater attention to implementing SSR. Although it did not have high-level policy weight, it gradually filtered into operational guidance and programs (Hermsmeyer 2010). In 2013, the concept received higher-level support through a Policy Decision Directive on US Security Assistance (PDD-23) issued by the White House. This policy elevated “good governance,” including “transparent and accountable oversight of security forces” as a principal goal of security assistance and called for greater coherence and collaboration across agencies. Attention to institution building in the defense sector also expanded through a growing range of Department of Defense training and technical assistance activities focused on organizational capabilities such as strategic planning, public finance, logistics, and military justice (McNerney et al. 2016). These approaches consolidated in Africa with the establishment of the Security Governance Initiative in 2014, which prioritized governance and oversight in engaging six African countries in multisectoral planning and programming (Chalfin and Thomas-Greenfield 2017). Despite these official commitments, attention to SSR principles has been much less clear in practice. Despite the EU’s stated emphasis on SSR, only a third of CSDP missions to Africa included institutional or governance objectives in their mandates (Di Mauro, Krotz, and Wright 2017). Even missions with SSR goals have tended to prioritize short-term stabilization over longer-term institution-building efforts, and to resort to the provision of “training and equipment,” with little attention to oversight or accountability (Deneckere, Neat, and Hauck 2020: 7). Moreover, the majority of CSDP missions have deployed to countries facing ongoing civil war or conflict, as illustrated in Figure 7.3. While missions to countries experiencing ongoing civil war have sometimes attempted to strengthen military forces, they have done so primarily for counterinsurgency goals. Moreover, opportunities for institutional change have been limited in these contexts. For instance, the two costliest CSDP missions in Africa, in Somalia and Mali, have aimed to strengthen security forces, but they have done so primarily to support counterinsurgency efforts. Despite some rhetorical support for SSR goals, emphasis on counterinsurgency among donors and recipients has left little space for changes to civil-military relations. A recent study of security assistance to Mali found that fragmentation among donors and objectives especially undermined efforts to build capability and

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Figure 7.3 Number of EU CSDP Missions, by Country Context, 1990–2008

Source: See Di Mauro, Krotz, and Wright (2017). Note: EU = European Union; CSDP = Common Security and Defense Policy.

strengthen oversight (Marsh et al. 2020). Moreover, in the absence of such efforts, security assistance may have undermined civilian control (Savage and Caverley 2017). In Mali, in particular, years of operational support to the armed forces appear to have empowered the armed forces relative to civilian authorities and set the stage for three coups d’état between 2012 and 2021. Similar patterns have occurred in Niger and Chad, which have faced multiple coups or military dominance, despite ranking among the top recipients of US security assistance. The CSDP missions most explicitly devoted to SSR objectives, in Guinea-Bissau and the Democratic Republic of Congo, illustrate the challenges of SSR efforts in the absence of political opportunities. The EU Security Sector Reform Mission in Guinea-Bissau was launched in 2008 to support a comprehensive reform strategy. Over a decade after the end of a civil war and a peace agreement, there was little political opening for reform, as the military and its political allies opposed institutional changes that might reduce their autonomy to pursue their own political and financial interests (Embaló 2012). As one of the smallest CSDP missions with little bilateral donor involvement, the mission was not able to overcome this opposition. After a failed coup attempt in 2010, the EU ended the mission with few of the reforms adopted or implemented (Vines 2010). The EU Security Sector

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Reform Mission in the DRC began following a peace agreement and postwar transition, suggesting an opportunity for institutional change. The mission focused directly on SSR, starting with integrating former militias into the army, and moving to overhaul financial management and personnel systems to increase civilian oversight and control. Yet, the mission struggled with limited resources and incoherent objectives, especially as renewed civil war in 2006–2009 and 2012–2013 shifted donors’ attention to responding to humanitarian crises (Arnould and Vlassenroot 2016; Boshoff et al. 2010). More fundamentally, the program ran into political opposition as military and political elites subverted formal command and administration to exert influence over the armed forces (Baaz and Verweijen 2018: 578; Robinson 2012). The misalignment of donor resources and internal opportunities is even starker for the United States, the largest donor to African military forces. After 2001, the vast majority of security assistance to sub-Saharan Africa focused on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, with much less attention to institution building. As illustrated in Figure 7.4, the vast majority of this funding has been devoted to countries experiencing active civil war. In the mid-2000s, defense restructuring programs in Liberia, South Sudan, and the DRC pointed to a potential shift toward more attention to postconflict settings. Indeed, the top five recipients of US security assistance between 2000 and 2018 included countries experiencing ongoing conflict and their neighbors, Somalia, Kenya, and Uganda, as well as the postconflict countries of Liberia and South Sudan, although the latter reverted to civil war in 2013. Since 2010, however, the balance has shifted squarely toward ongoing civil wars. Security assistance to Somalia, Kenya, and Uganda—aimed primarily at counterterrorism and counterinsurgency—accounted for over half of US security assistance to Africa between 2010 and 2018. Adding the eight subSaharan countries in the Trans-Sahel Counter Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP), Niger, Cameroon, Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, and Senegal, accounts for roughly 75 percent of US security assistance to sub-Saharan Africa during this period. By 2018, only a third of Country Assistance Strategy programs in Africa included explicit SSR-related goals such as governance, civilian oversight, and the rule of law.6 Even the Security Governance Initiative, probably the most robust effort to prioritize SSR goals, struggled due to the absence of dedicated funding and had to cobble together existing funds for its programs in six countries (Chalfin and Thomas-Greenfield 2017). The top recipients of security assistance illustrate the risk that security assistance weakens civilian control and oversight in the absence of political transitions or opportunities for institutional change. In Uganda, the United States ramped up its assistance long after the end of the civil war and the Yoweri Museveni regime had consolidated its authority—in large part through the dominance of the military over civilian institutions (Khisa 2020). US security assistance increased from less $1 million in 2002, to an

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average of $35 million between 2009 and 2016, largely to strengthen the Ugandan military’s capability to participate in counterinsurgency operations against al-Shabaab in Somalia and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the Congo. During this time, the Museveni regime has ramped up the use of armed forces for internal political repression and allowed military officers to exercise substantial authority through appointments to positions across the government (Bareebe 2020). In Somalia, the United States has trained, equipped, and at times paid stipends to Somali National Army personnel to fight the insurgency despite the absence of functional administrative or oversight systems. After the US government found that the Somali government could not account for these funds or the soldiers who were ostensibly being paid, it cut off assistance to pressure the government to exert greater control.7 Yet, assistance increased several months later as the United States sought to bolster its counterinsurgency effort—despite little internal change. Of the top three recipients of security assistance in Africa, only Kenya arguably experienced a political transition that created opportunities for institutional change. In this case, however, security assistance prioritized

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counterterrorism objectives over bolstering civilian oversight. On the whole, Kenya maintains a fairly professional military with considerable civilian oversight compared to regional peers. In sum, while Western donors have adopted SSR principles in policy, their uneven prioritization of these objectives in allocating resources points to a limited effect on African civil-military relations. Although they have pursued SSR goals in a few countries, rhetorical support for these concepts in policy and programs has not translated into a meaningful shift in the goals or approaches of security assistance. In a few countries emerging from civil war, including Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Burundi, donors have prioritized civilmilitary relations and enabled transformative changes. In others, such as the DRC, Guinea-Bissau, Somalia, and South Sudan, donors have struggled to provide sufficient resources, or to align their objectives in support of institutional change. In many more countries, from Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire to Tanzania and Kenya, donors have devoted limited resources to pursuing SSR goals, despite potential opportunities in the aftermaths of political transitions. To be sure, this review of general trends cannot draw conclusions on the specific effects of security assistance programs, either in individual countries or across the continent. Still, the evidence suggests that especially over the past decade, donors have subordinated capacity, professionalism, and rule of law to short-term operational goals, specifically counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, and that they have not focused on the contexts most conducive to the institutional changes that affect civil-military relations. Conclusion: Prospects for SSR in Africa The SSR agenda has become part of the African security landscape over the past two decades. In directing attention toward civilian oversight and control, it has influenced the policy and practice of Western donors engaging with African armed forces. Yet, the implications for African civil-military relations have been far from straightforward. In this chapter, I have argued that the consequences of foreign security assistance programs reflect their interaction with changing internal politics that underpin civil-military relations. As SSR programs touch on institutions and practices that are central to political authority, their consequences for civil-military relations reflect evolving struggles among civilian and military elites. This relates to the two analytical lenses of regime proximity and social embeddedness discussed in Chapter 1 of this book. Focusing on the interaction of security assistance with internal political dynamics, I have identified two sets of conditions under which political elites are most likely to instrumentalize external resources in ways that contribute to institutional changes: (1) in the context of post–civil war or democratizing transitions that shift the internal distribution of political power; and (2) when security assistance resources are targeted toward enabling those changes and sufficiently robust to mitigate internal opposition.

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A review of empirical trends underscores the importance of political and postwar transitions and the prominent role of external actors in some cases. It also suggests that donors have made limited contributions to institutional change overall, as they have focused on operational objectives. Nonetheless, this chapter points to internal and external dynamics—political transitions and security assistance—that have received insufficient attention in research on African civil-military relations. In exploring the interaction of security assistance and broad empirical trends, this chapter contributes two broader insights to the reconceptualization of African civil-military relations. First, it helps to recast the role of foreign security assistance in the evolution of civil-military relations. Consistent with the themes of this book, I suggest that these effects are grounded less in persuasion or coercion by donors than in internal political dynamics. To a large extent, understanding the role of foreign security assistance entails focusing on internal power bargains and compromises. Examining how security assistance is instrumentalized for purposes beyond building capability requires greater conceptual clarity on evolving relations among civilian elites and armed forces. At the same time, security assistance interacts with internal political dynamics in complex ways, and it plays a role in influencing politics and institutions in some contexts. In some countries, security assistance appears to have reinforced existing patterns of authority as political or military elites have drawn on external resources and backing to consolidate their power. In others, however, external programs have facilitated changes in the distribution of power, enabling new elites to assert their authority over armed forces through changes to civilian oversight institutions while influencing those institutions. This conceptual approach highlights the political roles of security assistance programs, viewing them not as mere technical or material inputs, but as political resources that weigh on the political balance of power within countries. Second, in this chapter I have outlined empirical trends that point to the limited impact of the SSR agenda in transforming civil-military relations overall. The paucity of data and evidence of impact of SSR programs prevent a definitive assessment. Nonetheless, a review of donor policy, programs, and resources points to mixed commitments to SSR goals as donors have prioritized operational objectives and focused on contexts least conducive to institutional change. Of course, it is not surprising that donors would prioritize immediate security interests, and the adverse effects of this prioritization have become increasingly well established in the literature. Nonetheless, this review suggests that donors could play a more significant role in enabling institutional changes. Since donors have devoted scarce resources to such settings, they may be missing opportunities to contribute to institutional change. As suggested in Chapters 3 and 4, changing regional and global context will likely generate new pressures on civil-military relations in Africa, and

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it is probable that foreign security assistance will play a role. Over the past decade, Western donors’ focus on counterterrorism has shifted toward concern with geopolitical competition due to the growing influence of China. Rising fiscal pressure and domestic crises in Europe and the United States may further divert attention from African security challenges, and prevent sustained, long-term commitments. Engagements with African armed forces may become even more focused on short-term operational goals if Western countries curtail their presence to the minimum level to meet global threats. At the same time, a drive to maintain or expand Western influence may lead to efforts to build long-term partnerships. In this chapter, I suggest that such partnerships are possible in certain contexts, and that they can lead to improved stability and human rights. Efforts to strengthen civilian control and oversight, and to promote democratic civilian oversight more broadly, could serve as a foundation for sustained alliances and mitigate the predominant focus on short-term operational objectives. The SSR agenda has contributed to advancing these concepts in security assistance. While its consequences for African civil-military relations have been limited so far, its longer-term implications remain to be seen. 1. The term security sector reform reportedly was coined by Clare Short, UK secretary of state for international development in a speech, “Security Sector Reform and the Elimination of Poverty,” delivered at the Centre for Defence Studies, King’s College London, March 9, 1999. 2. A few recent studies have examined effects of programs focused on police forces, but there have been few such assessments in the defense sector (Karim 2020; Blair, Karim, and Morse 2019). 3. Data from the Security Assistance Monitor, which compiles all securityrelated assistance comprising “U.S. training and equipment provided to a given foreign security sector, including the military, police, and ministries associated with the control of the security forces,” which includes data on over thirty separate US security aid funding accounts or programs funded through the US Departments of State and Defense. See Security Assistance Monitor. 2018. Security Sector Assistance Database. Available at https://securityassistance.org/security-sector-assistance/. 4. This indicator follows White (2017), but his data ends in 2009. I therefore draw on data from the Who Governs dataset by Nyrup and Bramwell (2020), which includes a measure of the number of military officers in cabinet positions through 2017. 5. Shifts toward civilian control are coded in the first year in which military officers no longer hold ministry-level cabinet positions, given that they do not do so afterward (until the end of the data in 2018). 6. Assistance objectives are outlined in Country Assistance Strategies for each country. See US Department of State. 2018. Integrated Country Strategies. Available at https://www.state.gov/integrated-country-strategies/. 7. A 2017 World Bank Public Expenditure Review of the security sector uncovered detailed evidence of misappropriation of external resources allocated to the security forces. See World Bank. 2017. Somalia Security and Justice Public Expenditure Review. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Notes

8 Beyond the Coup d’État? Erin Damman, Christopher Day, and Moses Khisa

Conquering the world on horseback is easy. It’s dismounting and governing that’s hard.

—Genghis Khan

When we ask, “Beyond the coup d’état?” we really mean three things with respect to this book’s examination of contemporary civil-military relations in Africa. The first question is empirical. For a continent once awash with coups and countercoups, their dramatic decline presents its own puzzle that merits explanation. Yet, this also raises an associated question: With the coup d’état losing its role as a defining feature, what does the relationship between military force and political authority look like? In other words, empirically moving beyond the coup requires a closer look at the current political  roles  of African  militaries,  which  manifest  in  ways  not  always related to overthrowing incumbent regimes through military putsches.  The  second  question  is  conceptual.  Civil-military  relations  in  the African context capture a complex set of relationships that occur irrespective  of  coups  d’état. As  we  have  discussed  elsewhere,  the  relationships between military power and political authority are of equal importance to those between military power and wider society (Khisa and Day 2020). An appropriate reconceptualization therefore requires moving beyond the coup and a deliberate reorientation toward different modes of civil-military relations defined by varying configurations of these dimensions. These exist where  regime  authority  sits  at  international  and  macropolitical  levels  of analysis and where military actors sit within state-society relationships at

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meso and micro levels. The third question is theoretical. In light of significant transformations, the study of civil-military relations in Africa requires expanding  the  range  of  outcomes  of  interest  and  opening  the  analytical aperture  for  deciphering  the  empirical  terrain  as  it  has  evolved.  This requires  a  purposeful  theoretical  move  beyond  the  coup  to  examine  the causal  drivers  of  these  outcomes  and  the  downstream  consequences  of civil-military relations.  In this concluding chapter, we take up several tasks. First, we return to the analytical framework introduced in Chapter 1 and review its application to the substantive thematic chapters in the rest of the book. Here, we also provide a synthesis of why this framework is required to address the limitations of prevailing approaches, and how it modifies conventional theories of civil-military relations for what we consider to be a distinct African context. Then, we provide some directions for future research in this critical area of African political development, particularly regarding several key topics  we  introduced  while  building  an  analytical  framework  but  were notably omitted by the book’s substantive chapters. These include a more comprehensive investigation of what we have called social embeddedness, changing patterns of military recruitment in African militaries, and shifting patterns of security threats in Africa and corresponding efforts at security sector reform (SSR).  Finally, we reflect even further on what our fundamental reorientation of  understanding  civil-military  relations  means  for  the  broader  study  of African politics and society. More specifically, we revisit the default conceptual and normative assumptions that led us to juxtapose what we empirically  observe  in  Africa’s  civil-military  relations  with  the  prescriptions these observations generate that are largely designed to “correct” the problems  of  military  interference  in  politics,  a  presupposition  derived  from Western experiences.  Revisiting the Regime Proximity– Social Embeddedness Framework In  Chapter  1,  we  introduced  the  twin  notions  of  regime  proximity  and social embeddedness in an effort to reorient the study of civil-military relations. The authors of the subsequent thematic chapters showed to varying degrees the contested and consequential intersections between the armed forces on the one hand, and civilian authorities and publics on the other. These intersections occur at many levels of analysis. Most notable is that African state politics have long been conditioned by the nature of societal forces and organized or unorganized interest groups that place demands on, or contest, the state. This is particularly the case in thinking about changes in the role and place of the military as the foremost state institution. 

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So, how do we assess this book’s chapters against its framework? While some authors engaged it directly, others did so indirectly by highlighting key implications of civil-military relations connected to the empirical puzzles or the theoretical levers that were also introduced in Chapter 1. Taken together, Chapters 2–4 tackle the coup d’état directly at domestic, regional, and global levels. We do this to illuminate key changes in Africa’s contemporary civilmilitary relations and to show why the traditional focus on the coup should be  rethought  or  recentered.  Chapters  5–7  work  together  more  to  move beyond the coup at conceptual, theoretical, and empirical levels of analysis. We  do  this  to  help  advance  our  understanding  of  civil-military  relations beyond Western-centric views that cast Africa as aberrant for not sufficiently corresponding to Western templates. In Chapter 2, the authors reengage the puzzle of Africa’s declining rate of coups, attributing this to the political legitimacy of incumbent regimes, an argument that directly considers changes in domestic institutions and, by extension,  declining  patterns  of  state  violence  that  ostensibly  track  with increased legitimacy. The implication for regime proximity is that as incumbents become more legitimate, their institutional relationships with armies either harden in more Huntingtonian ways by virtue of decreased proximity or, alternatively, regimes instrumentalize their armed forces in the service of gaining legitimacy. The net outcome is more harmonious civil-military relations. Squaring this circle likely depends on the relationship between legitimacy and social embeddedness. So, while Chapter 2 does not directly consider this latter factor, the notion of legitimacy still suggests accountability to the public, where the military is either absent from the lives of ordinary people, or where soldiers are perceived as protectors and not predators.  Chapter 3 takes on the dual puzzles of outlier coups and the militarization of the African Union’s regional peace and security strategies. While regional norms may have come to constrain instances of coups on the continent, they also create permissive conditions for alternative forms of the military’s  political  roles,  domestically  and  regionally. This  suggests  that although  regimes  may  derive  coup-proofing  benefits  from  changes  in regional norms, this does not necessarily change the fundamental dynamics of a military’s proximity to regime authority. Rather, it only changes how this relationship is deployed in the service of regime authority, shifting the field of acceptable political uses of military power from the domestic to the regional terrain. And like Chapter 2, the authors of Chapter 3 do not set to out to directly interrogate the social embeddedness of civil-military relations. That said, there is important work to be done in investigating norm transmission from soldiers who serve in regional peace operations to the societies that provide them once they return home (Dwyer 2017).  Chapter 4 stays within the analytical orbit of the coup d’état in Africa, but  examines  the  divergence  between  their  decline  by  virtue  of  a  global

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normative “coup taboo,” and the persistence, or even rise, of authoritarian politics  on  the  continent.  In  contrast  to  Chapter  2’s  emphasis  on  legitimacy, this chapter underscores the contradictory coexistence of the decline in coups along with democratic retrogress. The author therefore engages the empirical puzzle of the “coups but not coups” phenomenon and other ways that military power negatively impacts democratic governance, identifying  patterns  of  harmful  military  proximity  to  political  authority  that endure  in  illiberal  regimes.  The  chapter  illustrates  the  key  insight  that while coups may have declined, institutional continuity in regime type is a strong  bellwether  of  civil-military  relations.  Here,  the  implications  on social embeddedness are not as clear. That said, the relationships between regime authority, military power, and wider society play out in the antidemocratic processes that the coup taboo camouflages. To get at this, future work could investigate linkages between social embeddedness and the politics of regime change.  Chapters 5 and 6 shift away from deconstructing the coup d’état debate to focusing directly on the changing organizational forms, behavior, and character of African militaries. Among the more forceful critiques of Westerncentric approaches to civil-military relations, these chapters work together to interrogate conventional notions of military professionalism and military effectiveness abstracted from military traditions in the West. In Chapter 5, the authors build a historical scaffolding to describe how changes in African  armies  over  time,  particularly  levels  of  professionalism,  have tracked  closely  with  other  key  theoretical  levers  of  experiences  with domestic and regional warfare, ideological provenance, and institutional development, hemmed in by the lack of interstate warfare associated with the initial construction of African states. Coming off this, Chapter 6 builds a reconceptualization of military effectiveness more suited to the specific circumstances of African states, where existing modes of political processes require alternative uses of armed force such as an outsized role of ground forces. The key implication, here, is that security sector reform strategies based on Western templates bypass this nuanced understanding.  Taken together, both notions of military professionalism and effectiveness dovetail directly with the concept of regime proximity, but not in expected ways. Where professional armies can bolster regime authority, so can military effectiveness be a measure of politically effective uses of the military, particularly as extensions of personal rule. Chapters 5 and 6 touch on social embeddedness indirectly in two ways. First, the persistence of personal rule as a durable aspect of regime politics suggests that vertical networks of authority are isometric with the way militaries are situated  in  wider  society.  Second,  the  nonpolitical  roles  taken  on  by African armies require different types of social compacts and embeddedness with the civilian public. 

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Carrying forward the theme of institutional development of African militaries and the intersection with imperatives of warfare, Chapter 7 applies the critique of Western-centric views toward civil-military relations to the more practical matter of security sector reform. As such, the chapter expands our understanding of critical puzzles around SSR while touching on the theoretical lever of institutional change, with implications on patterns of reform that  follow  from  foreign  training. The  key  takeaway  is  the  set  of  pitfalls associated with standard assumptions about civil-military relations in Africa. These do not consider the key dimensions of regime proximity and social embeddedness,  patterns  that  are  not  reordered,  but  likely  accelerated,  by how SSR is administered in its orthodox forms in most African states. Chapter 7 speaks to scholars and policymakers by providing a comprehensive survey of SSR in theory and practice. It is an explicit effort to reorient civilmilitary relations toward a range of outcomes directly associated with SSR, which remains poorly understood.  In sum, the chapters of this book have together sought to map out new directions for rethinking civil-military relations in Africa. This has required tackling the coup d’état head on in an effort to acknowledge its enduring relevancy and deconstruct it as an outsized phenomenon, but also to push beyond the coup idiom as the dominant metric of the relationship between political authority, military power, and civilian publics. While not all the chapters  seamlessly  mapped  directly  on  the  regime  proximity–social embeddedness framework outlined in Chapter 1, each nevertheless met the challenge of opening the analytical aperture, engaging a range of empirical puzzles and theoretical levers at several levels of analysis. In what follows, we advance our agenda by identifying gaps that remain unaddressed. We then  close  with  a  more  in-depth  discussion  of  this  book’s  primary  entry point,  which  is  that  prevailing  approaches  to  civil-military  relations  are largely extensions of Western expectations of how non-Western militaries ought to be organized and how they ought to behave.  Unfinished Business A  key  message  of  this  book  is  that  the  military  remains  at  the  center  of African politics and society in progressive and retrogressive ways. The military is at once a source of problems, but also a critical part of solutions to security, stability, and governance writ large. In analyzing African militaries, their organizational pillars and operational doctrines, efficacy, and professionalism, we have to pay close attention to history, context, and specificity. But yet, we seek to make generalizable claims about Africa’s civil-military relations across time and space. Here, we seek to highlight three substantive areas not sufficiently addressed in this book’s chapters, which touch on the above variables, and are worth taking up in future research.

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State-Society Interface: The Foundations of Civil-Military Transformation

To varying degrees, the different chapters in this book have underscored the contested and consequential meeting spaces and intersections between the armed forces on the one hand, and civilian authorities and publics on the other. This is the crux of civil-military relations. Like other major processes and  outcomes,  civil-military  transformation  depends  on  the  balance  of forces that play out in the realm of the state, but also in the sphere of society,  in  political  society  as  well  as  civil  society,  broadly  conceived.  The interactions and entanglements between state and society yield varied outcomes  that  reflect  historical  legacies,  power  distribution,  and  ideational influences. From military effectiveness and the behavioral attitudes of armed forces, from the fate of security sector reforms to the changing nature of the military’s political roles, variations in social structures and balance of power play critical roles in shaping these outcomes in fundamental ways. Equally crucial are historical ruptures and political openings for change and reform. African  states  and  political  processes  for  long  were  (and  remain)  conditioned and shaped by the nature of societal forces. This is particularly the case in thinking about changes in the role and place of the military as the foremost state institution, which is vested with enormous coercive power and, in some cases, is the best-organized agency and arm of the state.  Since the turn of the twenty-first century, African societies have increasingly  become  more  complex  and  contested,  with  rapid  urbanization  and demographic explosions as key driving forces underpinning political changes and societal transformation. There are now far more Africans living in urban centers than two decades ago and a greater share of the population comprises young, educated, and unemployed people with completely different aspirations, expectations, and demands than earlier generations. They aspire to a modern and rewarding life, but have to confront the pain of unemployment and inability to afford a decent livelihood.  These socioeconomic transformations have contributed to fueling new challenges to state authorities and have reconfigured the contours of security  in  quite  unprecedented  ways,  as  happened  with  the  2011  protests  in North Africa that forced out authoritarian rulers. From North Africa, this youth-powered contagion spread gradually southward, and in recent years resulted in the ousting of incumbents in Burkina Faso, Mali, Sudan, and Zimbabwe in ways that not too long ago seemed unthinkable considering that rulers in these countries had mustered firm control over the military for personal protection and regime sustenance. That they could be stampeded out  of  power  in  the  face  of  relentless  street  protests  underscores  the changed  landscape  and  unorthodox  ways  that  incumbent  rulers  are  now challenged. African incumbents who rely heavily on using the military as a handy political shield now have to contend with the trend of popular street

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uprisings that are difficult for the military to put down given the army of young, daring, and unrelenting protestors powered by social media and with unfettered access to mobile communication technologies.  Africa’s youth bulge and the unemployment conundrum have presented ready fuel that contributes to altering the balance of power in favor of spontaneous  protests  capable  of  forcing  out  incumbents.  Regimes  and  rulers now  have  to  respond  to  urban  popular  discontent  by  groups  of  militant young people in ways that depart from traditional methods of meting out brute force to quell insurgencies and protests. Incumbents who ordinarily would have relied on the armed forces to beat back opposition and successfully cling to power increasingly are finding that they cannot count on these guardians. In many cases of popular street protests in the recent past, the armed forces either watched on as protestors brought down a ruler or intervened to take over in the face of unyielding street action. This is a major departure from past civil-military relations.  In other African states that have established decent and durable democratic institutions, like Ghana, Kenya, and Senegal, the growth of middle classes  and  expansion  of  national  economies  have  contributed  to  transforming the remit of the military from overt domestic political intrusions to preoccupation with strategic national security engagements. Here, the consolidation of democratic governance and the attainment of modest economic growth and political stability make for healthier civil-military relations and the armed forces attuned to the model civil-military regime of subordination  of  the  military  to  civilian  authority.  In  these  countries, incumbents still weaponize the military for political goals through appointments and budgetary allocations (e.g., during general elections in Ghana), but on the whole it has become far more difficult for the armed forces to engage  in  excesses  that  undermine  civilian  authority  or  grossly  offend norms of professionalism. Historically, African  militaries  tended  to  exercise  oversized  roles  in political  affairs  and  social  processes,  which  inevitably  entailed  military seizures of power, gross human rights abuses, and political instability that took a toll on African states and societies. Today, military actors have to contend with, and play their roles in, changed domestic social settings that have  undergone  fundamental  demographic  shifts  as  well  as  new  geographies of economic activities, civil societies, and political institutions. From organized business interest groups to political advocacy actors and subnational Indigenous institutions, the sociopolitical and economic landscape on the continent today is far more complex and plural than it was, for example, at  the  height  of  rampant  coups  and  civil  wars  in  the  1980s  and  1990s. Therefore, the corporate interests and demands of the military have to be negotiated in an environment of contending civilian actors and countervailing forces where the uniformed cannot simply have their way. 

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The shifts in the social structures and demographics have also meant the growth of socially diverse and organizationally changed militaries away from the educationally and ethnically skewed compositions that characterized most African militaries at independence in the early 1960s and in the few decades that followed. The new militaries that emerged out of reform rebels  of  the  1980s  and  1990s,  for  example,  had  internal  organizational cohesion and espoused considerable degrees of formal education and officer training among their command structures (Day, Khisa, and Reno 2020; Fisher 2020; Reno 2011). The changes noted here also have implications for patterns of recruitment not addressed in any of the chapters of this book, but  an  important  theme  that  requires  further  careful  analysis  in  future research and which we briefly address next. The political uses and misuses of the military, particularly for purposes of capturing and retaining power, tended to be built around processes of recruitment, training, and promotion. This had origins in colonial rule when colonial administrators  sought  to  staff  the  rank  and  file  with  “warrior  tribes”  that embodied a combination of slavish implementation of orders and a romanticized  physical  demeanor  deemed  suitable  for  exercising  coercive  force— height, size, and evident displays of toughness and traits ostensibly necessary for combat hardiness. The net outcome of this colonial set of recruitment criteria was military compositions at independence that had the dominance of certain regions and ethnicities, especially among the foot soldiers but also in command and leadership positions. In countries such as Nigeria and Uganda, this produced an endemic national problem of “northerners” versus “southerners” in the military and civilian government positions. These colonially created distortions in military recruitment were handy tools for independent African rulers who perpetuated and deepened them, thereby compounding military and political fissures with disastrous consequences.  If  colonial  authorities  were  eager  to  cobble  militaries  comprised  of warrior tribes to rule over hostile natives and maintain alien colonial rule through sheer coercion, the new African rulers in the first decades of independence  (1960s–1980s)  needed  something  else  from  the  armed  forces: direct loyalty. Colonialists sought to maintain unfamiliarity and assure obedience from warrior-like troops, many recruited from far-flung regions or even brought in from outside; by contrast, African rulers needed loyalty from close quarters to secure their hold on power and guard against potential military overthrow. As we have shown in Chapter 1 of this book and elsewhere (Khisa and Day 2020), this was especially a pronounced rationale after militaries overthrew many immediate postindependence leaders through coups in Benin, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Egypt, and Uganda, among others. The default criteria for ensuring loyalty, then, Changing Patterns of Military Recruitment

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was to pursue a policy of stacking the military with coethnics of the incumbent ruler. This was a crucial coop-proofing strategy but a double-edged sword, as it had the unintended consequence of setting off civil wars spearheaded by excluded ethnic groups (Roessler 2016; Allen 2020).  The ethnic and regional stacking strategy remained a useful tool in many states  long  after  independence.  As  recent  as  in  Omar  al-Bashir’s  Sudan, stacking  military  command  positions  with  loyalists  and  coethnics  while recruiting and deploying counterinsurgency fighters in regions not of their origin was a strategy that al-Bashir relied on in dealing with challenges to his power (Allen 2020). However, in some states during the 1970s and 1980s, there was a notable attempt to break with the colonial legacy of the warrior tribe stereotype and the ethnically stacked composition of the military.  Among the earliest success stories of the push to reset the button for recruitment was that of Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, under the aegis of a socialist experiment that sought to transcend ethnic lines in engineering a nationalist  project  (Parsons  2004;  Khisa  2020).  Later  iterations  of  this attempt to turn around the colonial template, and the immediate postindependence  modus  operandi,  included  radical  Marxist-inspired  military takeovers  in  Burkina  Faso,  Ethiopia,  and  Ghana  by  junior  officers  who wanted to toss out the corrupt and ethnically skewed military status quos of the time. Similarly, the reformers who took over in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda in the 1980s and 1990s sought to pursue a redefined nationalist and nonsectarian state rebuilding project even though they had their initial organizational nucleus in localized ethnic bases (Khisa 2020; Fisher 2020). The militaries of these countries still reflect notable ethnic and regional imbalances, especially in top leadership positions, but there has been a fundamental shift away from the brazen and overt ethnic and regional skews of the earlier decades. Ethiopia’s experiment with ethnic federalism departed quite importantly from the overall direction of these reform regimes.  Across the board and in just about every African state, there is now a considerable shift toward staffing the military with more educated, better trained, and vastly exposed personnel. There was a time when a career in the armed forces was considered the last resort as a professional option. Societal perceptions tended to construe enrollment into the armed forces as a sign of failure to secure higher-status careers. Not anymore; increasingly, joining the military is a badge of honor, attracting the interest of university graduates. In countries where military reform has taken on rapid and modernizing initiatives, lower-level recruitment requires a high school diploma while  cadet  recruits  are  university  graduates. These  militaries  now  draw from far more educated populations than those of the past.  At another level discussed in different chapters of this book, unlike in the past the growth of African peacekeeping operations also has provided

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an added incentive to young and well-educated recruits who are attracted to the prospects of participation in foreign missions as well as training programs at home and abroad to deal with new security challenges, including counterterrorism operations and managing cross-border security problems. The recruitment of an officer corps with higher education qualifications, their participation in regional peacekeeping operations, and acquisition of training experiences in foreign military colleges have all combined to contribute to enhancing military professionalism in various ways. A consistent finding from our ongoing joint fieldwork seems to confirm these patterns. Armies rebuilt in recent decades tend to have better human rights records. We expect that this is by virtue of having more educated recruits, who also benefit from peacekeeping and foreign training programs that include inculcation of norms of human rights and grasping the logics of the militarycivilian authority nexus.  As none of the chapters in this book have addressed this subject of the changing nature and patterns of military recruitment, it remains an area of considerable significance one of the aspects of civil-military transformation in Africa that still needs to be explored. Even for regimes that rely on ethnic stacking for coup-proofing and regime preservation purposes, it now has to be done in a less crude fashion and with some level of embellishment quite apart from the brazen ways that previous governments managed militaries with a decidedly ethnic bent. To achieve a national outlook among the rank and file, some states implement regional- and district-level quotas in recruitment. While the use of quotas might yield a socially diverse armed forces at the level of foot soldiers, promotions and positions at the top level are more likely to be based on other political calculations and considerations than merit and equity.  Recruitment policies and practices have a bearing on how the public perceives the military and how the military fits in to the broader political settlement undergirding the extant ruling regime. In the final years of alBashir’s rule in the Sudan, for example, the national military was characterized by fragmentation and internal cleavages, as al-Bashir had built his rule around the instrumental use of the armed forces to repress and control.  As  noted  above,  often,  as  part  of  al-Bashir’s  broader  strategy  of manipulative use of the military for political purposes, soldiers recruited for counterinsurgency operations were non-coethnics of the president and also  were  not  from  the  same  region.  Darfur  serves  as  a  prime  example here, where the military and its proxy militias engaged in well-documented acts of brutality. While narrowly defined regime survival and ruling-class security interests drive incumbents to hang on to old ways of recruitment and control of the armed forces, as al-Bashir did in Sudan, the evolving security landscape presents entirely new threats and fronts of security management that require

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changing course. From jihadist movements to transnational terror networks and new forms of rebel organization as well as nonmilitary security threats, African states and elites have found that they have to reorient their military and police organizations to match the currents and waves sweeping around. For a long time, subjective political imperatives such as the perceived risks of being overthrown through coup d’état conditioned the modes of recruitment and policies relating to promotion and appointment to command positions in African militaries. But in recent years, as noted above, African militaries have had to contend with new objective security challenges that call for a different organizational ethos, modus operandi, and operational doctrines. New security threats that range from urban terrorism to organized crime,  small  weapons  proliferation,  and  cross-border  disputes  over,  for example, access to water sources and contested commercial activities have redefined the remit of African militaries away from an exclusive focus on traditional national defense and regime security. Different shades of streetbased  protests  and  other  forms  of  unarmed  challenges  to  sitting  governments  have,  to  some  extent,  replaced  traditional  armed  rebel  activities. Rebel  groups  that  have  a  presence  and  are  active  no  longer  display  past templates of guerrilla insurgency and systematic strategies for capturing power by controlling territory. The implication, here, is that the actions of armed forces in tackling these new and unorthodox security challenges give rise to novel menus of engagement with civilian publics and redefinitions of  security  priorities,  norms  of  human  rights,  and  relations  between  the armed forces and civilian authorities. Arguably, the biggest frontier of security focus, not just for Africa but the world at large in recent years, has been counterterrorism operations as cross-border terrorist groups and jihadist movements have taken shape. The Lake Chad basin, for example, is one of the most pronounced hotspots and  subregional  hubs  of  transnational  jihadist  security  threats  that  have stretched the security forces of Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger. In the Sahel, events in Mali and Libya continue to present a dire security situation, while in the Horn of Africa there has been a near permanent Islamist insurgency with enormous cross-border spillovers and security complications. The conflict in South Sudan and the recent deadly fallout in Ethiopia, particularly the escalation of war in Tigray with the involvement of Eritrea, have only worsened matters in the Horn. In all these contiguous areas of security threats and arenas of new military engagements, the overarching problematic remains one of using effective governmental and broadcasting powers  in  ways  that  serve  the  needs  of  the  civilian  public  in  cultivating legitimacy  and  ameliorating  the  conditions  that  engender  insurgency  or facilitate the proliferation of armed violence.  Shifting Security Threats and Security Sector Reform

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The human security problems in these subregions that include issues of arid conditions and appalling socioeconomic conditions give succor to violent entrepreneurs and jihadist groups, which turn civilian livelihood problems  into  security  conundrums.  In  response,  African  governments  have ramped up the securitization of otherwise civil problems that, in the broader scheme  of  the  global  fight  against  terrorism,  attract  external  support  for security sector reforms and a slew of militarization activities now embodied in military bases. Particularly in the Sahel, France and the United States have  aided  militarization  in  ways  that  have  been  counterproductive  and exacerbated terrains of armed conflict.  In countries such as Mali, Niger, and Nigeria, securitization and the extraction of external military support through security sector reform programs  have  tended  to  fuel,  rather  than  curtail,  insurgency  and  jihadism. SSR programs treat the symptoms, but they hardly tackle the root causes of insecurity, which are to be located in state weaknesses and the nature of elite bargains. As Louis-Alexandre Berg argues in Chapter 7 of this book, SSR programs, however well intentioned, run into an endemic disconnect between external stylized thinking on the one hand, and the hard realities of concrete  domestic  political  economies  and  power  distributions  in  target countries on the other.  From a research design and methodological point of view, getting a handle on the new forms of security challenges and the problems that attend SSR interventions requires paying attention to the incentive structures that underpin elite bargains and compromises between incumbents and challengers, and between civilian and military actors. The shifting African security landscape, despite new threats and unorthodox cross-border complexities, nevertheless remains considerably situated in the larger and long-standing elusive quest for functional and effective state systems and robust governance regimes. Unless states address the fundamental question of effective and legitimate government, SSR interventions will inevitably get drowned out and leave only a limited impact. The Distinct African Context Recall for a moment from Chapter 1 that the impetus for this book came from having our initial deductive orientation toward Africa’s civil-military relations crash and burn once we got to the field and spoke to a range of military officers. We discovered that in the African context, working backward from our assumptions—both normative and analytical—about what constitutes  the  “proper”  mode  of  civil-military  relations  was  problematic  for  a variety of reasons. Chief among them was the discovery that the “civil” part of the equation referred directly to civilian populations, not the civilian institutions of government, particularly in states that have had a pronounced role

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of the military. Above all, in an era with coups on the decline, the political roles of African armies have not necessarily declined in tandem.  This book therefore represents a modest attempt to identify and understand  more  fully  an  African  variant  of  Peter  D.  Feaver’s  (1996,  2003) “civil-military relations problématique.” As such, it explicitly frames the African social and political context as markedly distinct, defying normative assumptions derived from the West. We sought to move past efforts that look to Africa to find the “right balance” between protection by the military and protection from the military. This book acknowledges that Africa is an environment where political authority is much more informal and fluid, and where the development of formal institutions varies across cases. In this context, attaining a workable equilibrium of civil-military relations does not necessarily require meeting an externally determined, minimum threshold  of  military  professionalism  as  defined  by  the  more  conventional approaches rooted in the Janowitz-Huntington foundation.  Moreover,  there  are  recent  empirical  examples  of African  militaries being deployed not simply as blunt instruments of power and authority, but in  the  service  of  providing  public  goods.  For  instance,  the  Botswana Defense Force squares off directly against highly organized poachers in the country’s national parks and game reserves (Henk 2005, 2006). This case stands in stark contrast to other countries that maintain militarized ranger forces, whose relationships to state security and coercive roles vary (Day 2020). The Republic of Sierra Leone’s armed forces stretched the boundaries of civil-military relations during the 2013–2016 Ebola epidemic. Partially at the behest of humanitarian organizations and alongside the British army,  the  national  army  took  a  direct  role  in  helping  staff  the  National Ebola Response Center, helping run treatment units, and taking point on dead body collection and burial (Ross, Welch, and Angelides 2017). Taken together, these cases serve to further contextualize the African experience with civil-military relations and raise important factors that are consistent with this book’s call.  In some ways, our insistence on framing the African context as distinct elides with the recent turn to decolonize African Studies (Kessi, Marks, and Ramugondo 2020; Branch 2018). These efforts seek to situate knowledge production  of Africa  within  the  longue durée of  institutional  history  that directly considers colonial legacies, as well as the persistence of the Western-centric intellectual apparatus deployed to study contemporary African politics  and  society  (Branch  2018;  Bhambra,  Gebrial,  and  Nişancıoğlu 2018). We would add that political science is one of a range of disciplines within African  studies  that  has  unfinished  business  in  reorienting  how  it grapples  with  the  racial  landscape  of  knowledge  production  about Africa (Allman 2019). We also recognize that there are key features of African politics and society that shape contemporary phenomena that are independent

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of Africa’s colonial heritage (Clapham 2020). As such, we find ourselves walking a fine line. While we seek to bring civil-military relations into the unfinished  business  of  interrogating  how  we  understand  contemporary Africa, we do not wish to overcorrect and fall into an “African exceptionalism” argument that seeks to essentialize civil-military relations and attribute all modes of contemporary governance to things like, for instance, precolonial institutions or neopatrimonial authority structures. To square the circle, we have sought to reconceptualize civil-military relations in such a way as to consider the twin concepts of regime proximity and social embeddedness, which in our view represents an important step toward dislodging the study of Africa’s security actors from conventional approaches. That said, there are other potential paths forward. One possible approach involves reacquainting ourselves with the traditions of African political thought as a wellspring of civil-military relations on the continent.  From  the  “philosopher  kings”  such  as  Kwame  Nkrumah  and Julius  Nyerere  to  the  revolutionary  political  thinkers  such  as  Thomas Sankara  and Amilcar  Cabral,  as  well  as  pan-Africanists  such  as  Cheikh Anta Diop, the intellectual traditions of African statesmen, African political thinkers, and scholars can help us reflect how power is exerted, resisted, and reasserted on the continent over time. This also provides opportunities to reconsider how we study African politics more generally within the  discipline  of  political  science,  and  from  the  perspective  of  Western academic institutions. Either way, and circling back to the decolonization of African studies, participating in this project requires not just additively including more perspectives from African scholars and thinkers, but also being deliberately aware of who has the power to define what is studied and to what end. We have been clear that we view the dominant approach to civil-military relations as objects of study reflecting the problem-solving orientation so characteristic of Western scholarly and policymaking traditions, where Africa is valued only insofar as it can be acted on by outsiders. We now turn to a deeper discussion of these themes.  Concepts, Norms, and Prescriptions The lion’s share of the literature on civil-military relations assumes that militaries in modern states look and behave in specific ways. When militaries do not behave as expected, it is understood that they have fallen short of conceptual and empirical standards rather than because they have been created with an entirely different set of security goals and norms or conform to different social and political realities. Operating from this worldview elicits an epistemological program—or a conscious strategy for learning about a given phenomenon—that seeks to understand what is wrong

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with African militaries, and to offer a prescription for assisting these militaries to better conform to how a modern military should behave.  One of the aims of this book is to interrogate the idea of civil-military relations in Africa as a set of empirically driven phenomena, freeing it from the epistemological constraints of classic civil-military literature. But this is just a first step in a process that needs to examine not only the conceptualization of civil-military relations, but also the ontological and normative elements that form the basis for these concepts and the prescriptive decisions that are, in turn, shaped by the concepts and underlying normative assumptions. This section of our concluding chapter takes a brief look at the ways in which scholars can retune and enrich research on civil-military relations by focusing on the conceptual, normative, and prescriptive shortcomings of current approaches and existing debates.  The modern African military, in our estimation, has been designed to be something different, and there is no reason to believe that they are somehow transitory organizations in their current form. Much like the arguments over hybrid regimes (Way and Levitsky 2010), there is little empirical evidence to support claims that African militaries are necessarily dysfunctional and rickety, or at least that their institutional evolution is somehow predetermined. They may do a poor job of protecting citizens or the government, but these are not always design failures. In fact, the limited successes of security sector reform suggest that Africa’s security forces are highly functional  and  quite  durable. And  as  some  of  the  chapters  in  this  book  have pointed out, attempting to change them often brings about more instability without any payoff in terms of future political goals.  As Robin Luckham (1994) and Maria Erikson Baaz and Judith Verweijen (2018) among others, have pointed out, the modern state is a European construction forced on the world mostly through colonial expansions and subsequent decolonial processes, and the national military is an entity born from this process. While African states have been forced to adopt the physical veneer and vocabulary of the modern military, as we point out in Chapter 1 of this book, it is infrequent that their militaries are constructed or behave in accordance  with  this  model. The  myriad  tasks  that African  militaries  are asked to perform include the traditional roles of protecting the state from internal  and  external  adversaries,  but  they  also  engage  in  implementing development projects and assuming some degree of economic stewardship, as well as responsibilities in policing and even governing. These economic and political uses fly in the face of the traditional conceptualization of a military and the relationship it is supposed to have with civilian powers. To reiterate, this baseline model derived from Samuel Huntington’s work (1957) views the modern army as a professional force that is apolitical, cohesive, Conceptualization: Epistemological Shifts

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hierarchical, and distinguishable from society by being isolated and selfsufficient. By meeting these standards, a military is best able to fight and win wars without causing domestic political instability. There are two difficulties with accepting this model as universal. First, it conflates the goals of a military with the strategies for achieving these goals. The goals, if we are to understand the main thrust of the civil-military literature, is simply to be a tool of protection for the government and people of a country, capable of winning wars. It may be that under certain circumstances, professional behavior as described by Huntington, in conjunction with isolation from society, best accomplishes these goals. But it may also be that these goals are realized differently when the foundational conditions are altered. In this regard, it is important to note that the Huntington model presupposes conditions that are not uniformly present in Africa: a consolidated state and (at least nascent) democratic or civilian institutions. Rather, African militaries were created at a particular moment in history when sovereignty and state survival were all but guaranteed to independent African countries,  meaning  that  they  never  had  to  prove  themselves  in  battle (Herbst 1990). With few exceptions, they were created not for the necessity of warmaking against external rivals, but for establishing a state capable of gaining  recognition  from  the  international  community.  Most  were  then repurposed and reconfigured over time to handle many different tasks for African governments, including regime protection, domestic policing, economic growth, and development.  It is easy to find studies that discuss the variations that African militaries have away from the classic Western military, including the presence of ethnic stacking (Morency-Laflamme and McLauchlin 2020; Allen 2019; Harkness  2016),  parallel  military  structures  and  reporting  lines  (Howe 2001), and dual hatting in government (Rwengabo 2013). Similarly, there are many studies that describe the alternate purposes to which African militaries have been put such as running state-owned enterprises, particularly in  construction  and  manufacturing  (Booth  and  Golooba-Mutebi  2012; Gebregziabher  2019),  or  domestic  development  projects,  particularly  in infrastructure and health sectors (Diop 2011). Importantly, the point of most of  these  studies  (except  Booth  and  Golooba-Mutebi  2012)  is  not  that African militaries are empirically different, but that they are aberrant, and their aberration breeds negative outcomes. The literatures on ethnic stacking and parallel military structures are looked at almost exclusively through the lens of coup-proofing strategies that forestall democratization; the use of African militaries in economic and development projects are described as corrupt and granting the military undue power vis-à-vis the private or civil society sectors in Africa. As such, these arguments rest on the assumption that civil-military relations and African militaries themselves are dysfunctional and far removed from what a military is supposed to look like or do.

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Conceptually, this is problematic because we have been using a label for an organization that does not share the constitutive attributes that are expected  of  it. Anyone  familiar  with  the  work  on  conceptual  stretching would be hard pressed to continue applying the concept of “modern” or “national” militaries to the security forces of many African states because they do not live up to the basic constitutive properties of Western militaries, generating a need to create diminished subtypes or new terms altogether (Collier and Mahoney 1993; Sartori 1970). In a recent attempt to grapple with this conceptual difficulty, Moses Khisa and Christopher Day (2020) created a typology of differing modes of civil-military relations that breaks down to four types: integrated, insulated, exploitative, and predatory. In this book, we have taken this effort a step further to simply place the African  military  along  two  continuums  of  social  embeddedness  and regime  proximity.  These  theoretical  models  more  accurately  reflect  the empirical reality that we find on the African continent and allows a more refined  picture  of  the  security  sector  in Africa.  Contained  within  these types are militaries that function well and those that do not according to the broader goals of security provision. We believe that this approach is a huge step forward in reconceptualizing African civil-military relations in ways that are not weighed down by the Huntingtonian assumptions and Western-derived models.  Reconceptualization alone, however, is not enough, because underlying this conceptual framework is a normative presumption that militaries would still be better off if, somehow, they could be made to organize and behave in accordance with the Western model. That is, there remain assumptions, at a minimum implicit, within existing studies that African realities would be  improved  were  civil-military  relations  or  militaries  themselves  more closely aligned with Western standards. These normative assumptions also deserve some interrogation.  As Khisa and Day (2020: 175) wrote, “There is a need for rethinking the language that addresses the gulf between normative expectations of African militaries and their actual practices” because, as they argue, African civilmilitary relations are contained within a “socio-political context that defies Western assumptions” about what a modern military’s role in society looks like. Shifting the language, however, does little to challenge those normative expectations. Challenging what a military is does not necessarily challenge what a military should be. One is an epistemological question, the other is an ontological one that deals with how we come to know the world. Empirical explorations can easily be done without letting go of the normative assumptions that may drive such studies. Much of this book has been an attempt to interrogate and explicate these empirical realities regarding Norms: Ontological Questioning

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many  facets  of  civil-military  relations  in Africa.  But  heavy  questions  of interpretation hang in the background of these chapters. For example, how are we to understand the Nigerien coup of 2009? Was it a display of a military force protecting the country’s citizens against a corrupt leader? Or was it a sign that African militaries still lack professionalism because they did not protect the regime? And what about Mali in 2012 and 2020? The reason for this confusion is that many scholars (and policymakers) take the narrow version of a professional soldier at such face value that two things can happen. First, failures to meet Huntington’s criteria become, in and of themselves, negative outcomes to be explained. Different conceptual frameworks, rather than solving for this, simply provide a cleaner explanation for what went wrong. Second, when a negative outcome (e.g., predation) and a different strategy for creating a military are present in a case, there is an initial assumption that the latter inevitably caused the outcome. The counterfactual of what would have happened if the military more closely resembled a Western professional force is rarely deeply  interrogated,  and  therefore  other  explanations  for  the  troubling outcome are easily overlooked. When brought together, these two problems elicit studies that again conflate the goals of effectiveness and protectiveness, with a constrained set of strategies for building effective and protective militaries.  The question needs to be asked: in the sociopolitical contexts present in many African states, is an isolated and apolitical army the best strategy for building effective security forces and assuring stability? Is an apolitical military always preferred to one that has an interested stake in politics? In what ways might a military that is more tightly embedded into society be better at protecting civilians than one that is always kept separate  and  insulated?  What  if  Ugandan  president  Museveni’s  choice  to invite generals to have a vote in the national parliament actually forestalls coups effectively (Rwengabo 2013)? Is this perhaps a more honest way of revealing the military’s interests than the lobbying for ever larger pieces of legislative budgets? Can we imagine a setting in which such a political voice  creates  a  military  that  is  more  beholden  to  protecting  society because it is a caretaker not only of the peace but also of the rules? While the chapters in this book go a great distance in exploring some of the negative consequences of focusing on the European model, such as Jahara Matisek’s Chapter 6 on military effectiveness, there is still a lot of work to be done that begins by challenging the assumed rightness of a certain model of professionalism.  Evidence  of  these  normative  assumptions  is  easy  to  find.  With  the recent spate of potentially protective coups across the continent from Niger to Sudan and Zimbabwe, many scholars immediately pointed to the dangerous precedent they presumably set (Roessler and Abi-Falah 2017). These

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rested on the problems of politicization and the breakdown of the democratization process, and the problems associated with soldiers acting outside the bounds of political neutrality. Thus, some analysts concluded that these acts, in and of themselves, were wrong, rather than showing that they led to worse outcomes for the citizens of these countries. It is not just coup behavior that elicits these sorts of interpretations. In looking  at  the  colonial  origins  of  modern African  states,  Naison  Ngoma (2010) documents how this has often made them feared or disliked entities in independent Africa. But he ultimately concludes that through policies such as civic education programs, it is possible to move the needle on professionalization of African militaries and this will solve the issue. Yet, the problem Ngoma identifies is one of origins rather than current practice, and his analysis still rests on a normative presupposition that molding African militaries to be Western-like would make them more useful and less predatory. Similarly, Birame Diop’s (2011) study on using the military for development goals spends a great deal of time discussing the dangers of “overreach.”  Despite  having  just  cataloged  how  the  military  was  the  only organization with the resources or the wherewithal to handle such largescale development projects, he argued that continuing to use the military this  way  ran  the  risk  of  undermining  civil  society  and  misusing  a  set  of actors designed for an alternate purpose (Diop 2011). Such criticisms only make  sense  if  we  accept  a  worldview  in  which  militaries  must  be  constructed a certain way.  The problem with broadening the conceptualizations of African militaries without challenging the normative preeminence of Western models is twofold. To begin, it continues to allow for scholarship that seeks to identify the “wrongness” of civil-military behaviors or explain this aberration in Africa simply with a richer understanding of the mechanics behind it. This is because our interpretations of events are filtered through these normative lenses, so that when we witness a military attempting to be effective or protective, but we are using strategies that are misaligned with the Huntington model, we ascribe any failures of the attempt to the strategic difference. Perhaps  more  problematic,  however,  is  that  our  prescriptive  offerings revolve around bringing African militaries into closer alignment with Western models, an issue to which we now turn. Chapter  7  by  Louis-Alexandre  Berg  and  Chapter  6  by  Jahara  Matisek make clear that most foreign military assistance programs are designed to transform  African  militaries  into  Western  models.  This  has  happened through a series of different engagements, from conditional funding, to direct military training, to informal military-to-military exchanges. These programs  are  a  direct  result  of  the  prescriptive  advice  generated  by Prescriptions: Getting the Advice Wrong

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research into civil-military relations in Africa since the 1960s—the same studies that rested on the flawed conceptual and normative assumptions discussed above. Indeed, it is a logical outcome that if researchers have identified the causes for predatory behavior or political instability in African states as related to the constitutive elements of the African militaries— particularly those that diverge from the Huntington model—policymakers from the West would attempt to make African militaries behave more like their own militaries do.  This process becomes reinforced by those creating the military assistance programs and those carrying out the training exercises. These actors’ worldviews  generate  prescriptions,  so  they  are  unlikely  to  challenge  the ontological assumptions or interpretations offered by the researchers. Anecdotally, there is evidence that may even suggest that some Western soldiers that engage with African militaries are morally offended by their counterparts since living by the ethos of Western professionalism is central to their sense  of  integrity  and  duty.  They  thus  have  an  emotional  filter  through which the behavior of African militaries also passes. The inequities of the international military assistance regime further compound this process. US- and European-run security sector reform programs hold a great deal of sway in Africa because they come with funding and partnership opportunities that are predicated on transforming the militaries in Africa into more European versions of themselves. African military leaders agree to these SSR packages not because they believe in the transformations, but because they come with so many material and diplomatic benefits. However,  because  African  militaries  are  designed  differently  to respond to a different set of security needs and social circumstances, the Western advice and assistance has often failed to bring about the expected results and, indeed, sometimes has created worse outcomes (see Berg this volume). The usual response on the part of those who study these events is to double down on past errors because the failure is not that the African military was asked to change in ways that were untenable, but that the reforms  were  not  far-reaching  enough. This  leads  to  a  vicious  cycle  in which inappropriate or ill-fitting advice and assistance are offered to a military and, when this assistance fails to bring about the reforms expected, the fault is placed on the militaries or the individual soldiers for being unwilling to follow the advice, and more training is recommended for the African militaries.  Signs  of  failures  abound,  but  the  behavior  of  the  Ethiopian  military documented  by  Matisek,  and  the  multiple  examples  used  by  Berg  are appropriate here. One of the more pernicious outcomes of these training programs is when they manage to enculturate African soldiers into believing in a set of standards regarding professionalism that includes political

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neutrality and protection of a constitution. When taken back home, these principles often may come into odds with one another. The coups in Niger in 2009, in Mali in 2012, 2020, and 2021, in Sudan and Zimbabwe in 2019, and in Guinea in 2021, as well as the failed attempt in Burundi in 2015, are examples of this. Should professional soldiers stay silent as corrupt leaders disregard  or  violate  the  constitution  (or  changes  it)  to  stay  in  power,  or should  they  defend  the  rule  of  law  even  when  it  requires  that  they  must defy their civilian commanders? In neither scenario is the officer capable of behaving correctly according to the Huntington model. Creating military assistance programs based on SSR that do not match the  sociopolitical  contexts  in  which  they  must  operate  is  thus  a  doomed project on many fronts. First, it asks a military to recreate itself to handle problems that it may not be facing or to concentrate on one task (e.g., counterterrorism)  at  the  exclusion  of  all  others.  In  so  doing,  it  weakens  the organization  from  handling  myriad  tasks  that  it  has  been  designed  to address,  whether  they  are  internal  instability,  development,  or  economic growth. Second, it further damages the structures of these militaries that can make them most effective at protection or stability by demanding that they find ways to be more self-sufficient or isolated from society (it is a true irony that one mechanism to find funding is to accept further reform programs from the West). Third, it produces military officers and soldiers who  cannot  live  up  to  all  of  the  ideals  of  the  training  at  once,  and  this means they must make impossible choices in trying to follow the advice offered  by  these  programs.  Finally,  it  forestalls  other  creative  uses  that African militaries might be capable of fulfilling by labeling them a priori corrupt or unprofessional. These conceptual, normative, and prescriptive dimensions of the classic  model  of  civil-military  relations  complement  one  another  and,  taken together, build a worldview that manages to explain away their inapplicability to the African setting. This singular observation—that African soldiers and militaries fail to conform to the classic concept of professionalism—is translated through the normative frameworks into causal evidence that all political instability and predation seen on the continent are the fault of these differences. Understood in this way, the only logical solution is to assist  these  militaries  into  becoming  more Western  entities.  Because  the prescriptions derive from the same normative assumptions that drove the initial  interpretations,  any  shortcomings  that African  militaries  reveal  in attempting to follow the advice is interpreted as a failure of the military rather than the program. Without challenging the normative assumptions about what a military should look like, we are destined to continually repeat the process of creating a conceptual framework that does not fit the African context and offering advice that is unlikely to improve the stability of the African state or protection of the African people. 

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Some Final Thoughts Aside from the above categories, there remains much ground to uncover, recover, and analyze in Africa’s civil-military relations. Africa has undergone  fundamental  transformations  in  politics,  society,  and  security,  but change has happened alongside continuity. There is much that we know, but equally a great deal that we do not. For one, the institutional features and organizational underpinnings of African militaries remain an important area  for  further  investigation:  understanding  the  different  institutional types and stripes of African militaries deserves close and careful analysis. This ties into the subject of forms and patterns of recruitment discussed above that require detailed treatment and empirical assessment. Given the emerging socioeconomic and political dynamics that present new forms of security threats and challenges to incumbents, the ways in which militarization and the manipulative use of the armed forces come to bear on public spaces and civic engagement also deserve systematic analysis. What happens  when  political  and  military  elites  are  driven  into  manipulating military resources and organizations in the context of new social structures and demographic shifts? Under  the  aegis  of  the  African  Union,  African  states  evolved  new norms and practices that depart fundamentally from the era of the Organization of African Unity. The development of the African Peace and Security Architecture came on the heels of the African Union’s policies and practices  that  included  a  shift  from  noninterference  to  nonindifference— increased cross-border collaboration in tackling shared challenges through collective  security  in  situations  likely  to  threaten  domestic  and  regional peace. The wide-ranging implications of continental actions and processes for domestic behavior and institutional change remain underexplored and an  area  worth  pursuing  within  the  broader  research  agenda  on  Africa’s civil-military  relations.  We  hope  that  this  book  will  encourage  further investigation into such topics.

Acronyms

ACDEG ACIRC ACLED ACOTA AFRC AFRICOM AMIS AMISOM APSA AQIM ASF ATT AU BIR CAR CIA CJTF CNDD

COIN COMESA CSDP CSSDCA CJTF

African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (Ghana, Sierra Leone) Africa Command, US African Union Mission in Sudan African Union Mission in Somalia African Peace and Security Architecture Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) African Standby Force Amadou Toumani Touré (former Malian president) African Union Rapid Intervention Battalion (Battalion d’Intervention Rapide) Central African Republic Central Intelligence Agency, US Civilian Joint Task Force National Council for Democracy and Development (Guinea Conakry) counterinsurgency Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa Common Security and Defense Policy (European Union) Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa Civilian Joint Task Force

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Acronyms

DG DEVCO Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development (European Commission) DRC Democratic Republic of Congo EASF East African Standby Force ECCAS Economic Community of Central African States ECOMOG Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group ECOWAS Economic Community of West African States ENDF Ethiopian National Defense Forces EU European Union FACA Central African Armed Forces FH Freedom House FOMAC Force Multinationale de l’Afrique Centrale FROLINAT National Liberation Front (Chad) G5 Group of Five GDP gross domestic product IAF Inter-African Forces ICU Islamic Courts Union IGAD Intergovernmental Authority on Development INSCR Integrated Network for Societal Conflict Research LRA Lord’s Resistance Army MCJD Military Council for Justice and Democracy (Mauritania) MNJTF Multinational Joint Task Force MNLA National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (Mali) MUJAO Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa NARC North African Regional Capacity NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NPFL National Patriotic Front of Liberia NRA National Resistance Army (Uganda) OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD-DAC Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee OAS Organization of American States OAU Organization of African Unity PAIGC African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde PNDD Pacte National pour la Démocracie et le Développement (Mauritania) PSC Peace and Security Council (African Union) RPF Rwandan Patriotic Front RTF Regional Task Force RUF Revolutionary United Front (Sierra Leone) SADF South African Defence Force SADC Southern African Development Community

Acronyms

SFA SPLA SSR TSCTP UCGs UNAMID UNIFIL UPDF USAID ZANU-PF

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security force assistance Sudan People’s Liberation Army security sector reform Trans-Sahel Counter Terrorism Partnership unconstitutional changes of government United Nations–African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon Uganda People’s Defence Force US Agency for International Development Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front

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The Contributors

Michael Ohene Aboagye is a PhD candidate in international relations at

Florida International University.

Louis-Alexandre Berg is assistant professor of political science at Georgia

State University.

John F. Clark is professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University. Erin Damman is clinical assistant professor for the International Studies

Program at the University of Idaho.

Christopher Day is associate professor of political science and director of

African Studies at the College of Charleston.

Moses Khisa is assistant professor of political science and Africana Studies at North Carolina State University.

Jahara “Franky” Matisek is an active duty officer in the US Air Force. He is also associate professor in the Department of Military and Strategic Studies and director of research at the Strategy and Warfare Center at the US Air Force Academy. William Reno is professor and chair of Political Science at Northwestern

University.

237

Index

Abdel Aziz, Mohamed Ould, 55, 136 Abi-Falah, Layla, 78 Abusive security forces, 163–164 ACDEG. See African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance ACIRC. See African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crisis ACLED. See Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project ACOTA. See African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance AFRC. See Armed Forces Revolutionary Council Africa and the International System (Clapham), 34–35 Africa Command (AFRICOM), 104, 156 African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crisis (ACIRC), 130 African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights (Banjul Charter), 70 African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ACDEG), 10, 73–77, 78–80, 100 African context, of civilian-military relations, 196–197 African continent, as less democratic, 83 African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA), 104 African militaries, as empirically different, 200–201, 204 African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), 60–61

African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), 10, 84, 129 African political processes, as marketplace, 22 African societies, as complex, 190 African Standby Force (ASF), 11, 84, 129 African states, domestic political dynamics of, 4 African Union (AU), 2, 7, 10, 37, 65–68, 99–101; actions against unconstitutional changes in government, 74tab; Burundi and, 76; CAR and, 86; coup taboo and, 105– 106; Egypt and, 80–82, 112; impact of member states on, 83–84, 87–88, 90n8; Niger and, 77–81; nonindifference policy of, 11, 72–73, 89; Peace Enforcement Mandates of, 88; peacekeeping by, 84–86, 87, 90, 104, 129–131, 135–137; response to constitutional coups of, 74–75; soldier disobedience and, 86; subregional forces, training for, 84; suspensions of, 73, 95; Zimbabwe and, 82–83 African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), 85, 88, 130–131 African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS), 85, 129–130 African Union task forces, 10, 87 AFRICOM. See Africa Command Afrobarometer, 43, 46 Aftermath, of successful coups, 66

239

240

Index

Alignment, of donor interests, 171–173, 180 Allen, Nathaniel, 32 Ambiguous Order (Howe), 147 Ambitions, of officers, 41 Amin, Idi, 17, 70, 119, 134 AMIS. See African Union Mission in Sudan AMISOM. See African Union Mission in Somalia Amnesty International, 119 Analytical framework, 26–27 Angola, 158 Anjouan, 10 Ankrah, Joseph Arthur, 65 Ansar Dine jihadist group, 58 Anticoup norm, 97–101 Apartheid, 126, 170 Apolitical armies, 160, 202 APSA. See African Peace and Security Architecture AQIM. See al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb Arab Spring protests, 53 Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), 9 Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), 9 ASF. See African Standby Force ATT. See Touré, Amadou Toumani Attacks, on citizens, 125–126 Attempted coups, 7, 66 AU. See African Union Authoritarian regimes, 4, 16, 48, 86–87, 106–107; African military states as, 154; protection by military, 47; replacement of militarism with, 113–114 Autocrats, 27, 50–51, 102, 116

Baaz, Maria Erikson, 199 Backing, of major Western powers, 106 Balance, of ethnic Inclusion, within state militaries, 18 Banda, Hastings, 44 Bantariza, Shaban, 142–143 Barlow, Eeben, 153 al-Bashir, Omar, 1, 7, 27, 40, 53; overthrow of, 72; view of military under, 194 Battle of Adwa, 150 Beckley, Michael, 149–150 Behavior, of political and military actors, 18–19, 20–21 Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine, 53 Benin, 5–6 Biddle, Stephen, 142, 152 Biya, Paul, 125

Bloodless coups, new interpretation of, 108 Böhmelt, Tobias, 140 Bokassa, Jean-Bedel, 70 Boko Haram, 10, 87, 88, 120–121, 124– 125; Nigerian army and, 158 Bongo, Omar, 40 Botswana, 33, 117, 197 Boundaries between military and wider society, as permeable, 22 Bozizé, François, 32, 73 Broad tendencies, in civil-military relations, 50 Brooks, Risa, 12, 140–141 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 39 Burkina Faso, 6, 29, 52, 53, 90n5, 153; duration of coup of, 107; presidential guard of, 91 Burundi, 75–77, 85–86, 130

Caesarism, 19 Camara, Moussa Dadis, 60 Cameroon, 119–120, 125 Capital city rule, 71–72 Capture, of regimes, 23 CAR. See Central African Republic Caverley, Jonathan D., 14, 104 CDSP. See EU Common Security and Defense Policy Central African Armed Forces (FACA), 86 Central African Republic (CAR), 27, 32, 44, 52, 73; AU and, 86 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 103 Chad, 10, 27, 96, 123, 127 Challenges, to expectations of military, 201–202 Changes, in regional and global norms, 34– 35, 68 China, 136 Chiwenga, Constantino, 82 Churchill, Winston, 1 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency Civil liberties scores, of Freedom House, 49 Civil populations in military relations, role of, 24 Civil wars, 44, 71–72, 126–127, 174 Civil Wars (journal), 36 Civilian dress, of military rulers once in power, 108 Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), 125 Civilian oversight institutions, SSR programs as, 162 Civilian regimes, stable minority of, 17–18, 116 Civilian transitional government, in Niger, 80

Index Civilian uprisings, prolonged, 47, 57 Civilians, violence, against, 27 “The Civil-Military Problematique” (Feaver), 21, 167 CJTF. See Civilian Joint Task Force Clapham, Christopher, 34–35 Clark, John F., 41, 42, 43, 49, 62 CNDD. See National Council for Democracy and Development Code of conduct, of military, 3 Coevolution, of regimes and regional institutions, 84 COIN. See Counterinsurgency Cold War, 103; end of, 69–70, 73, 113 Cold War era politics, 4 Colonial militaries, 30, 119, 192 Colonially created distortion, 14 Common defense framework, 9–10 Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), 177 Comoros, 10 Compaoré, Blaise, 53, 91 Complications, of African military operations, 155–156 Composite Warfare, 153 Concentration of power, through personal rule networks, 71 Conceptual clarity, of SSR, 183 Condé, Alpha, 83 Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa (CSSDCA), 70 Conflict, interstate, 13, 133–134, 148 Conflict, within armed forces, 16–17 Congo-Brazzaville, 42, 48 Constitutional coups, 7, 74–75, 100–101, 110–112 Constitutional Court, of Burundi, 76–77 Constitutive Act, of AU, 10, 129 Conté, Lansana, 59–60 Control: of African militaries through institutional arrangements, 40; excessive, of certain countries over AU, 88–89; mean proportion of African countries per year that shifted toward civilian control, 176fig; objective civilian control, 22, 34, 176; of state, 3; strengthening of civilian control of SSR programs, 168; over territory, 72 Convivial relationship, with civilians, 123– 124 Cooperation, among African states, 131–133 Corporate grievances, 16–17 Corporate interests, of military, 41

241

Côte d’Ivoire, 91 Council of Ministers, of OAU, 99 Countercoups, 97 Counterinsurgency (COIN), 122–123, 146 Counterterrorism, 195–196 Coup attempts against legitimate regimes, as rare, 50, 53–54 “Coup but Not a Coup,” 7–8 Coup d’état, 1–3; aftermath of, 66; attempted, 7, 66; as catalyst for democratization, 16; as cyclical, 97; decline in, 3–4, 5–7, 48–49, 66, 92–94, 101–102, 107, 114, 187–188; against duly elected governments, 99; of 80s and 90s, 99; encouragement of by West, 98; from 2008-2018, 49–51; in Mali, 58–59, 62–63, 75, 117, 153; in Mauritania, 54–55; as outliers, 66, 68; overt, 93–94; political instability and, 21; professionalism and, 21, 202–203; since Independence of Africa, 5–6, 15, 48–49; SSR and, 171; studies of African politics beyond, 4–5, 12–13, 19–20, 185–186; through 2007, 46–49 Coup routines, of 1970s and 80s, 5 Coup taboo, 37, 92–93, 101–113, 188 Coup-proofing guarantees, 14 Coup-proofing strategies, 18, 37, 89, 107, 146; African military studies and, 200; civilian elites and, 169 Coups, in Africa over time, 6fig Coups, mutinies contrasted with, 13, 25 Coups, or attempted coups in Africa 20082018, 51tab, 51–52 Coups from below, 16, 17 “Coups No Longer Acceptable: OAU” (Meldrum), 70 Courting, of civilian public, 31 CSDP. See Common Security and Defense Policy CSSDCA. See Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa Culture, of military interventions, 42 Cycle, of military intrusions, 8, 52, 204

Damann, Erin, 38, 186 Darfur, 27, 120, 129 Daxecker, Ursula, 86 Day, Christopher, 201 De Bruin, Erica, 18, 19 Decalo, Samuel, 19, 44, 96, 107 Decline: in coups, 3–4, 5–7, 48–49, 66, 92–94, 101–102, 107, 114, 187–188; in

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Index

duration of governments as result of coups, 107–108, 114; economic, 48, 116; in state violence, 9 Decolonization, of African Studies, 197–198 Dee, Samuel, 32 Defense operations, 9–11 Democracies, as vulnerable to coups, 16 Democratic legitimacy, 40, 43, 45, 49 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), 35, 129, 152, 179–180 Democratic transition, 48 Democratization: acceleration of, 93; coup d’état as catalyst for, 16; third wave of, 109–110 Denial, of international legitimacy of coup makers, by OAU, 99 Diendéré, Gilbert, 91–92 Difficulty, of enforcement of legal norms, 101 Diop, Birame, 203 Disconnect, between objectives of donors political struggles and, 166, 180 Dismissal of military authorities, of Ould Abdallahi, 55–56 Disorder, maintenance of authority networks and, 22 Disorganized armies, 123 Djibo, Salou, 53, 80 Domestic political dynamics, of African states, 4 Domestic power distribution, SSR and, 12 Donor-dependent states, 16 Dwyer, Maggie, 13, 84, 86 Dysfunctional politics, 17

East African Standby Force (EASF), 130– 131 ECOMOG. See Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group Economic change, 33 Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), 127–128 Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS), 10, 70, 77, 105, 120–121; security problems and, 126 Economic conditions, as determinant of military intervention, 40 Economic decline, 48, 116 “Economic Development and Military Effectiveness” (Beckley), 149–150 Economic sustenance, 44–45 ECOWAS. See Economic Community of Western African States Effective state control, 3

Egypt, 2, 8, 52, 54, 56–57, 63n5, 108–109; AU and, 80–82, 112; fragility of democracy and, 62; panel of AU on, 81–82, 90n7 Egypt uprising, as “led by the people,” 81 Elevation, of role of African armies, 11 Empirical puzzles, 4–5 Encouragement, of coups by West, 98, 103 Epistemological shifts, 199–200 Ethiopia, 134, 148–149, 204 Ethnic exclusions, 15 Ethnic stacking, 194, 200 Ethnicity, as factor in coups, 15, 193 European governments, Africa and, 156 European Union (EU), 177, 178–180 Evaluation, of African militaries, 148 “Every Car or Moving Object Gone” (Tuck), 127–128 Excessive control, of certain countries over AU, 88–89 External involvement, institutional change and, 172, 177 External threats, 13, 167 Eyadéma, Gnassingbé , 40

FACA. See Central African Armed Forces Failure: to protect citizens, 44, 45, 59; of SSR efforts, 169–170 Fearon, James D., 149 Feaver, Peter D., 21, 145, 167, 197 50th Anniversary Solemn Declaration (AU), 81 Finer, Samuel Edward, 8, 19, 116, 142 Focus, on foot soldiers, 154–155 Food insecurity, 46 Foreign aid, autocrats and, 14, 116 Foreign military assistance, 116, 203–204 Foreign military training, 11–12, 84–85, 103–104, 204–205 Free elections, presence of, 45 Freedom and Justice Party, 56 Freedom House, 33, 49, 50–52, 63n3, 110; Civil Liberties rating of Mauritania, 55; ratings of Egypt, 56; ratings of Mali, 58 Freetown, Sierra Leone, 72 French Fourth Republic, 45, 62 Frequency, of coups, 92 FROLINAT. See National Liberation Front Fused, political and military powers as, 27

G5. See Group of Five Sahel Alliance Gabon, 40 Gambia, 10, 33, 49, 105 Geography, issues of, 155 Geopolitical proxy wars, 14

Index Ghana, 6, 16, 18, 29, 34; coup record of, 120; SSR and, 172 Gnassingbé, Faure, 78 Goals: of Military, 200; short-term operational, 171, 174; of SSR, 164 Godfatherism, 158 Goldsworthy, David, 17–18 Gomes, Carlos, Júnior, 61 “Good Coup,” 7, 8, 50, 52–53, 67; AU and, 78–79, 89; Mali and, 117; Niger and, 80–81 Goya, Michael, 147–148 Gramsci, Antonio, 19 The Green Book (Qaddafi, M.), 149 Group of Five Sahel Alliance (G5), 132 Gruzd, Steven, 82 Guardianship dilemma, 13–14 Guerilla movements, 24–25, 29 Guinea, 52, 54, 60, 62 Guinea Conakry, 59 Guinea-Bissau, 52, 54, 60–61, 179

Habré, Hissan, 127 Hanson, Victor Davis, 152 Harare, Zimbabwe, 82 Hard cases, 53–55 Hardline Islamists, in government of Ould Abdallahi, 56 Harkness, Kristen, 18 Hegemony, 23 Higher status, of military careers, 193–194 Hobbes, Thomas, 44 “How the African Union Got It Wrong on Zimbabwe” (Roessler), 112 Howe, Herbert H., 147 Human rights records, of recently rebuilt armies, 194 Human rights violations, 70, 93, 122 Human Rights Watch, 60, 88 Human security concerns, of SSR programs, 169, 196 Huntington, Samuel, 3, 15, 20, 22, 23–24; critiques of, 141–142, 199–200; model of, 28; third wave of, 98–99 Hutchful, Eboe, 16

IAF. See Inter-African Forces ICU. See Islamic Courts Union, of Somalia Ideological orientation, of senior officers, 30 Ideological provenance, 29–30 IGAD. See Intergovernmental Authority of Development Illegitimacy theory, of coups, 54 Illegitimate regimes, 51

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Illiberal regimes, 16, 24, 57 Image, of predatory African soldier, 9 Imperatives of sovereignty, 71 Incorporation, of Western practices in to African militaries, 118 Increase: in Democracy in 1990s, 109–110; in institutional capabilities, 118, 122; in peaceful transfers of power, 111 Independence, of Africa, 5, 14, 115 Individual ambition, of officers, 41 Influence on cabinet appointments, of Abdel Aziz, 55 Informal power bases, 25 INSCR. See Integrated Network for Societal Conflict Research Institutional change, 33, 166–167, 182 Institutional conditions, 28 Institutional crisis, of Ould Abdallahi Regime, 55, 62 Institutional paralysis, 45, 62 Institutional reform, 38, 70 Institutionalization, of authority, 4, 36, 117 Institutionlessness, 22, 39 Insurgency, not from military, 46 Integrated Network for Societal Conflict Research (INSCR), 66 Integration, of military into society, 202 Intelligence networks, 25 Interaction, between African militaries external actors and, 118 Inter-African Forces (IAF), 127 Inter-class conflicts, 15–16 Intergovernmental Authority of Development (IGAD), 126 Internal political dynamics, 167 International security environments, influence on civil-military relations of, 13 Interstate conflict, 13, 133–134 Interstate wars, 31, 133–134, 148 Intervention: by invitation only, 71; in Mali, 57–58; to support democratic process, 125. See also Military intervention Interview: with Australian military officer, 139; with Ethiopian military officer, 139, 142 Intraelite conflict, SSR and, 12 Intrusion, of military in political realm, 3 Islamic Courts Union, of Somalia (ICU), 130 Issoufou, Mahamadou, 53

Jammeh, Yahaya, 10 Janowitz, Morris, 20, 21, 22, 28, 142 Junior soldiers, 86

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Kabbah, Ahmed Tejan, 99, 170 Kagame, Paul, 40, 85 Kainerugaba, Muhoozi, 154 Kaldor, Mary, 153 Kampala Document, 10, 70 Kandeh, Jimmy, 17 Keïta, Ibrahim Boubacar, 1, 63 Kennedy, Paul, 149 Kenya, 40, 181–182 Khisa, Moses, 201 Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre, 120, 128 Kolingba, André, 32 Konaré, Amadou, 59 Krahn ethnic group, 32 Kuruma, Mamadu Ture, 61 Kuti, Fela, 9

Laitin, David D., 149 Large-Scale wars, between African states, 134tab Latin America, 92 Launching, of insurgencies, 47 Legal-bureaucratic institutions, 23 Legitimacy, 41–42; democratic, 40, 43, 45, 49; loss of, 45, 46, 60; as matter of degree, 43; military restraint and, 49– 50; political, 39, 43, 44, 46, 48; slim margin of, 57 LeoGrande, William, 23 Lesotho, 50, 62 Letterbox sovereignty, 34–35 Liberation Committee, of OAU, 126 Liberia, 32, 127 Libya, 40, 53, 58, 148 Lindberg, Staffan I., 41, 43, 49, 62 Linz, Juan L., 19 Lissouba, Pascal, 42, 48 Lomé Declaration, 71, 100 Longue durée, 36, 197 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), 10, 87, 124, 181 Luckham, Robin, 199 Lynn, John, 155

Macro-level factors, 14–16 Madagascar, 52, 73 al-Mahdi, Sadiq, 72 Malawi, 44 Mali, 1, 8, 48, 54; coup d’état of, 58–59, 62–63, 75, 117, 153; intervention in, 57–58 Malware, military, 8 The Man on Horseback (Finer), 8, 19, 116

Maoist approach, 27 Marketplace, African political processes as, 22 Marshall, Donna, 48, 51–52 Marshall, Monty, 48, 51–52 Marx, Karl, 19 Maslow, Abraham, 44 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, 44 Mauritania, 54–56, 65, 78–80, 135–136 McGowan, Patrick J., 5–6, 42, 48, 66, 71; on economic decline coups and, 116 MCJD. See Military Council for Justice and Democracy Mean proportion of African countries per year that shifted toward civilian control, 176fig Meldrum, Andrew, 70 Mesocosms of national-level sectarian imbalances, African armies as, 17 Meso-level factors, 16–18 Micro-level factors, 18–20 Migdal, Joel, 157 Militarism, 14, 89, 113 Military: African standards of, 199, 201; attitude toward, 2; backing of civilian protests, 53; corporate interests of, 41; dictatorships, 93; effectiveness, 116– 118, 140–159, 188; goals of, 200; intrusions, cycle of, 8; involvement in regime politics, 3–4; loyal to state building of, 3; malware, 8; proximity to regime of, 23; rulers civilian dress of, 108; rulers of 1960s and 1990s, 102– 103; social embeddedness of, 23; strength, 150, 160n5; training foreign, 11–12, 84–85, 103–104, 204–205; warlords, 121. See also Professionalized militaries “Military, Politics are Bedfellows” (Bantariza), 142–143 Military Council for Justice and Democracy (MCJD), 79 Military effectiveness: as distinctive, 140– 141, 144; local context of, 153; regime proximity and, 141, 188; variations in, 38; vertical and horizontal aspects in Africa, 145fig “Military Effectiveness” (Rosen), 152 Military enclaves, 157–158, 160 Military force, against civilians, 27, 85 Military interference in civilian politics, AU and, 89 Military intervention: culture of, 42; economic conditions as determinant of,

Index 40; from liberal perspective, 50–51; as modernizing force, 41; as proof of illegitimacy, 46; record of, in Africa 2008-2019, 41; use of term rather than coup d’état, 46–47 Military involvement, in politics, 28 Military recruitment, changing patterns in, 31–33, 192–196, 206 Military rule, political instability and, 21 Miller, Andrew C., 78 Mnangagwa, Emmerson, 82 MNJTF. See Multinational Joint Task Force MNLA. See National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad Modern state, as European conception, 199 Moi, Arap, 40 Morocco, 134 Morsi, Muhammad, 2, 56–57, 62, 81, 108– 109 Moyo, Sibusiso, 7–8 Mubarak, Hosni, 2, 8, 53, 56 Mueller, Lisa, 80 Mugabe, Grace, 82 Mugabe, Robert, 2, 46, 53, 70, 82; generals on overthrow of, 111–112, 114 Multiethnic armies, 125 Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF), 10, 87, 88, 132 Multiparty democratic political systems: in Mauritania, 54–55; as rare, 44, 49–50 Museveni, Yoweri, 40, 87–88, 132 Muslim Brotherhood, 56 Mutinies, 25; coups contrasted with, 13

!Nanseb Gaib Gabemab (the snake in the grass), 151 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 56 National armies, 14 National Assembly, of Mauritania, 56 National Committee for the Salvation of the People, 1 National Council for Democracy and Development (CNDD), 59–60 National Liberation Front (FROLINAT), 96 National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), 58 National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), 127 National Resistance Army (NRA), 32, 123–124 NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization N’Diaye, Boubacar, 18, 79 Neopatrimonialism, 19

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Ngoma, Naison, 203 Nguema, Francisco Macias, 70 Niger, 52–53, 77, 80–81, 90n6; soldiers of, 86, 146, 158 Nigeria, 60, 87, 88, 120–121, 124–125 The 1993 Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution, 70 Niyombare, Godefroid, 86, 131 Nkrumah, Kwame, 65, 95, 198 Nkurunziza, Pierre, 76–77, 131 Nonindifference policy, of AU, 11, 72–73, 89 Non-Western templates, in Africa, 142 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 53, 164 Not Free ranking, by Freedom House, 52 NPFL. See National Patriotic Front of Liberia NRA. See National Resistance Army Nugent, Paul, 71 Nyerere, Julius, 193, 198 Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges, 35

OAS. See Organization of American States OAU. See Organization of African Unity Obama, Barack, 108–109 Objective civilian control, 22, 34, 176 OECD-DAC. See Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee Officers: ambitions of, 41; from Burkina Faso, 153; ideological orientation of, 30; junior officers’ role in mutinies, 25, 104–105; participation in government by, 5, 191; removal from government, 175 Openness, to external assistance, 133 Operation Democracy, 10 Operation Restore Legacy, 2 Operation Turquoise, 155–156 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC), 164 Organization of African Unity (OAU), 66– 68, 99–100; demonstration of effective territorial control by, 71; principle of noninterference of, 10–11, 69–70, 89, 126, 206; weaknesses of, 72–73 Organization of American States (OAS), 98 Organizational underpinnings, of African militaries, 206

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Index

Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, Sidi, 55; dismissal of military authorities of, 56 Ould Daddah, Mokhtar, 54 Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, Maaouiya, 54–55, 78–79 Outliers, 7–8 Overt coups, 93–94

Pacte National pour la Démocracie et le Développement (PNDD), 55–56 PAICG. See African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde Paralysis, of government institutions, 45, 62 Participation: of military officers in government, 5, 191; of US in regime changes, 109 Partly Free regimes, 45, 52 Patassé, Felix, 32, 65 Patronage Networks, 23 Patterns, of state violence, 8–9, 119–120 PDD-23. See Policy Decision Directive on US Security Assistance Peace and Security Architecture, 67–68, 75, 90, 100, 187 Peace and Security Council (PSC), 10, 68, 74, 77, 81 Peace enforcement mandates, of AU, 88 Peacekeeping: by AU, 84–86, 87, 90, 104, 129–131, 135–137; by UN, 120, 128, 164, 172, 177 Pereira, Raimundo, 61 Performance, of military against threats, 31 Perlmutter, Amos, 23 Permeable, boundaries between military and wider society as, 22 Personal Idiosyncrasies, Coups and, 19 Personal networks, 123 Personalist regimes, 43, 123 Physical security, political freedom and, 44 PNDD. See Pacte National pour la Démocracie et le Développement Policy Decision Directive on US Security Assistance (PDD-23), 178 Political authority sources, 24 Political instability, 36, 116, 119, 131–132 Political institutions, weak, 15, 17, 67, 116 Political legitimacy, 39, 46, 48; as contextual, 44; as subjective, 43 Political transitions, as openings for institutional change, 168–171 Politicized militaries, 16 Politics, dysfunctional, 17 Politics of the ordinary, 66 Popular protest, 19, 91

Populist turns, in political systems, 25 post-Cold War era, 114 Post-Cold War international order, 96, 106 Postcolonial armies, 17, 30 Postcolonial institutions, 43 Postconflict peacebuilding, 26 Postcoup Africa, 8 Powell, Jonathan, 86 Power bases, informal, 25 Power resources, 23 Power transfer, back to civilians, 80–81, 89, 107–108 Practices, of contemporary politics, 36 Praetorian behaviors, 114 Predatory behavior, of army and militia, 9, 35 Presence, of free elections, 45 Prey, on civilians during peacetime, 26 Principle of noninterference, of OAU, 10– 11, 69–70, 89, 126, 206 Private security, of rulers, 27 The Professional Soldier (Janowitz), 21 Professionalism, prevalence of coups and, 21, 202–203 Professionalized militaries, 7, 9, 17, 21, 83–85; civil-military problématique and, 115–117, 188; inter-Africa cooperation and, 135–136 Prolonged civilian uprisings, 47, 57 Promotion: of democratic Ideals by armed forces, 21; of professional norms, 37; of training member state armies, by AU, 67 Proximate military institutions, 23 Proximity to regime authority, of military, 23 PSC. See Peace and Security Council Psychological conditioning, to refrain from intervention in West, 42 Putschists, 73, 78, 80

Qaddafi, Muammar, 40, 53, 127, 148 al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), 58 Quashigah, Courage, 104

Rarity, of overt military takeovers, 92 Rawlings, Jerry, 29 Rebel groups, 31, 122–123, 148, 195 Rebellion, against ATT, 58–59 “Reconceptualising Civil-Military Relations in Africa” (Khisa & Day), 201 Refusal, of militaries to join police to end civilian protest, 54 Regime politics, 28, 71

Index Regime proximity, 20, 22–24, 26fig, 28– 29, 38; AU and, 68; military effectiveness and, 141, 188; political legitimacy and, 39, 46; SSR and, 163 Regimes: illegitimate, 51; illiberal, 16, 24, 57; partly free, 45; personalist, 43, 123; stable minority, of civilian regimes, 17– 18, 116. See also Authoritarian regimes Regional institutions, role of, 84–85, 132– 133 Regional norms, 34–35, 68 Regional security, 9–11, 87 Regional Task Force (RTF), 10, 87 Reid, Richard J., 5–6 Relationship, between military wider society and, 25, 185 Removal, of military officers from government, 175 Reno, William, 147 Repression, use of, 45 Resignation, of Ould Abdallahi, 56 Resources, 154, 160; power, 23 Revolutionary United Front (RUF), 72 Rise, of middle classes, 34, 192 “Robert Mugabe’s Journey from Freedom Fighter to Oppressor” (Gruzd), 82 Roessler, Philip, 18, 32, 78, 112 Rorke’s Drift, 151 Rosen, Stephen Peter, 151–152 RPF. See Rwandan Patriotic Front RTF. See Regional Task Force RUF. See Revolutionary United Front Rule of law, 205 Russia, 136 Rwanda, 27, 40, 85, 151 Rwandan Defence Force, training of, 85 Rwandan genocide, 85 Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), 85

Sadat, Anwar, 56 Sanhá, Malam Bacai, 60–61 Sankara, Thomas, 29, 115, 119 Savage, Jesse Dillan, 14, 104 Schiel, Rebecca, 86 Scholarship, on Africa, 67–68 Sectarian markers, 15 Sectarianism, 32 Securitization agenda, 16 Security Force Assistance (SFA), 118, 135, 143, 160n3 Security role, of AU, 88 Security Sector Reform (SSR), 11–12, 35, 161–184, 185n1, 189; problems with, 204–205; shifting security threats and, 195

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Security system, of Mali, 58–59 Seizing Power (Singh), 15 Seizure, of radio station, 71 Senegal, 10, 105, 122, 124, 150 Sese Seko, Mobutu, 35, 40, 106 SFA. See Security Force Assistance al Shaab, 130 Shen-Bayh, Fiona, 47 Shift: away from coups, 38; of behavior of African militaries, 115–116; to civilian control, 176; to nonindifference of AU, 11, 72–73, 89 Short-term operational goals, 171, 174 Sierra Leone, 9, 72, 99, 106, 121; ECOMOG and, 128; security sector reform and, 165, 170 Singh, Naunihal, 15, 18–19 al-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 57, 66, 82 Social dynamics, 24 Social embeddedness, 20, 22–23, 24–26, 26fig, 28–29; Damann on, 38, 186; political legitimacy and, 39, 46; SSR and, 162 Social networks, 27 Social relations, 25 Social values, in professional life, 25 Socioeconomic transformations, 190 The Soldier and the State (Huntington), 3, 15, 20 Somalia, 85–86, 134, 181–182 Somparé, Aboubacar, 59 South Africa, 151, 165, 170 South Sudan, 5 Sovereignty, 131 SPLA. See Sudan People’s Liberation Army SSR. See Security Sector Reform Stable minority, of civilian regimes, 17–18, 116 Standard assumptions, about civil-military relations, 24 State fragility, 2–3 State violence, patterns of, 8–9, 119–120 State-society interface, 190–192 Stepan, Alfred, 19 Strasser, Valentine, 72, 99 Structural emancipation, of armies, 24 Structural features, of institutional milieu of Africa, 15 Studies of African politics, Beyond Coup, 4–5, 12–13, 19–20, 185–186 Subalterns, 42 Subregional forces, 84 Sudan, 1, 5, 7–8, 27, 40; AU and, 66 Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), 72

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Index

Sultanism, 19 Supply side, of civil-military relations, 16– 17 Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy, 80–81 Suspensions, of AU, 73, 95

Taming, of military organizations, 23 Tanja, Mamadou, 52–53, 77, 80, 81 Tannenwald, Nina, 93 Tanzania, 27, 96, 193 Taya Regime, 56 Taylor, Charles, 127 Tendi, Blessing-Miles, 82 Tests, on new democratic institutions, 56 Third wave, of democratization, 109–110 Threats, external, 13, 167 “To ‘Midwife’—and Abort—a Democracy” (N’Diaye), 79 Togo, 5, 40, 73, 78, 119 Touré, Ahmed Sekou, 60 Touré, Amadou Toumani (ATT), 58–59 Traditional authority, 44 Training, of Rwandan Defence Force, 85 Transitions, institutional change and, 173, 177 Trans-Sahel Counter-Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP), 180 Trends, in civil-military relations in SubSaharan Africa, 175fig Trends, in SSR, 173–175, 183–184 Tuareg fighters, 58, 117 Tuck, Christopher, 127–128 Tunisia, 50, 53

Uganda, 5, 17, 27, 32, 40; AU and, 87–88; OAU and, 70; rebel groups and, 123– 124 Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF), 87, 124, 151 UN. See United Nations UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), 120 Uneven civil-military relations, 15 UNIFIL. See UN Interim Force in Lebanon United Kingdom (UK), 165, 172–173 United Nations (UN), 70, 86, 98, 105–106; peacekeeping missions, 120, 128, 164, 172, 177

United States (US), 103, 107–109, 178– 181; military model, 143–144; new governments acknowledged by, 109; other militaries compared with, 140, 160n1; security aid to Africa, 181fig UPDF. See Uganda People’s Defense Force Upper Volta, Burkina Faso, 29 US. See United States Vaz, José Mário, 61 Venezuela crisis, 132–133 Verweijen, Judith, 199 Violence, against civilians, 27

de Waal, Alex, 22, 123 van de Walle, Nicholas, 33–34 War on Terror, 103 Warfare in African History (Reid), 5–6 Warrior tribes, 192 Weak political institutions, 15, 17, 67, 116 West Africa, 95 Western aid packages, 73 Western assumptions, of effectiveness, 141 Western donors, SSR and, 163, 180, 182– 183 Western militaries, 143, 152–153 Western-centric views, 187, 198–199, 201– 203 Williams, Rocky, 144 Witbooi, Hendrik, 151 Witt, Antonia, 83 Yakoma ethnic group, 32 Yalá, Kumba, 61 Young, Crawford, 95 Youth Bulge, 191

Zaire, 40 ZANU—PF. See Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front Zimbabwe, 2, 7–8, 46, 66, 82–83; AU on, 111–112 Zimbabwe African National Union— Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), 82 Zolberg, Aristide R., 15 “Zombie,” 9 Zuma, Nkosazana Dlamini, 76–77

About the Book

Though Africa historically has been the site of countless military coups d’état, civil-military relations across the continent have changed dramatically in recent years. What do these changes say about the military’s ongoing role in Africa’s political and social institutions? How useful are conventional models for understanding civil-military relations in the African context? The authors of Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in Africa address these questions, exploring the nature and significance of evolving relationships between political authority, military power, and society.

Moses Khisa is assistant professor of political science in the School of Public and International Affairs at North Carolina State University. Christopher Day is associate professor of political science at the College of Charleston.

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