Please join us for a book talk by Olaf Bachmann on ‘quasi-armies’ in Africa. An important study in African Security and a factor in atrocities, Quasi-Armies and State-Building in Africa offers rich, new case studies of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Cameroon, and Rwanda.

In a significant contribution to de-Westernising civil-military studies, Bachmann provides a powerful and globally relevant re-examination of state-formation processes as they relate to the control of violence. The study focuses on the army as a key pillar of the state, starting from the historically established axiom that there cannot be a state without an army and there cannot be an army without a state. From here, Bachmann demonstrates how and why many African militaries never developed into professional armies, but, instead, remained quasi-armies in the context of the quasi-states that established themselves after independence. The findings of this work raise many pressing questions. What are the implications of this for international programmes that repeatedly fail in attempts to generate stability, development and peace in post-conflict and post-crisis societies? What does it mean for state-building and political culture? How does this affect our understanding of war crimes and military misconduct? What is the broader significance of this understanding in the Global South, generally, and particularly in Africa?

About the author

Dr Olaf Bachmann is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow and a Visiting Practitioner within the Practice of Leadership programme at the African Leadership Centre at King's College London. He is co-founder of a consultancy group with expertise in the fields of security governance and institution building, which produces studies on African security. He is a proud alumnus of the Department of War Studies at King’s, where he completed BA, MA and PhD degrees, and was part of the War Crimes Research Group while preparing the last of these.

Event co-sponsored by the African Leadership Centre, the Department of War Studies and the War Crimes Research Group, King's College London.