Armed Forces, Conflict, And Change In Africa

Questioning generalizations implicit and explicit in scholarship about African militaries and development, Bienen draws on his impressive fund of knowledge and insight about key African military regimes and sets forth an agenda for research to organize the extraordinary diversity he sees. The most interesting chapter is that on the relatively recent phenomenon of populist military regimes, where the author gets drawn far enough into a detailed examination of the data and research findings to hazard a number of provocative hypotheses.