Description
There have recently been coups in Sudan, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad and Gabon. The increasing prevalence of coups threatens to reverse the democratic progress made across the continent in the past decades. The paper explores how to improve civil-military relations in African postcolonial states employing a conceptual framework utilising Rebecca Schiff’s Concordance theory of civil-military relations and Moses Khisa and Christopher Day’s concepts of regime proximity and social embeddedness. According to Rebecca Schiff, the nature of agreement among three partners; the military, the political elites and citizenry on four indicators: the social composition of the officer corps, the political decision-making process, the recruitment method and military style determines the character of civil-military relations in a country.
The paper undertakes a contextual exploration of some African coup affected countries utilizing Rebecca Schiff’s theory of civil-military relations suggesting that civil-military relations in African countries could be improved by building consensus in accordance with the theory. Furthermore, drawing examples from the work of Moses Khisa and Christopher Day, the paper proposes that the concepts of regime proximity and social embeddedness could be useful approaches for achieving this needed consensus. The paper illustrates how employing conceptual and analytical tools of research provided in the sub-field of civil-miliary relations and international studies could help in the resolution of societal challenges such as problematic civil-military relations in Africa.
KEYWORDS: Africa, civil-military relations, concordance theory, regime proximity, social embeddedness, postcolonial, liberal democratic, democracy.
