African Armed Forces and Social Transformation
The military is one of the most firmly established institutions within the post-colonial African state. Moreover, as an icon of independence and sovereignty, it serves as the chassis of the state in the African context. In the post-colonial period, African states have embraced a more critical, rather than a state-centric, approach to security. Although this approach still emphasises the centrality of the state in international relations, it highlights the need to link state security to other elements of security, such as human, systemic, environmental, group and non-governmental security. This linkage makes the contemporary definition of security to be more global in approach and hence more inclusive and accommodative in as far as problems of African political economy are concerned.
However, the difficulty is that there are different schools of thought on security, which hinder the processes towards the reorientation of the militaries in general to assimilate this new type of security thinking. The most effective typology of military politics in the African context is the one provided by Peter J. Schraeder, who places the degree of involvement of the armed forces in domestic politics into five categories (see the Ibrahim Traoré graphic above).
At one extreme is the civilian supremacy model, in which the armed forces are firmly under the control of civilian politicians who control decision making with respect to the issu
