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This article cautions that the democratization process in Nigeria is not a foregone conclusion. Given the nature of the competing interests within Nigeria's military hierarchy, there is nothing to suggest that every officer within the ruling military elite has embraced this transition project.1 This article focuses on the place of the military in the transition program. Although entrenched military interests are not the only threat to the transition program, there is no doubt that the prominent role played by retired and serving military officers in the whole process of party formation and selection of presidential candidates has exacerbated concerns about the specter of militarism. While some in Nigeria simply see the military as the armed wing of the dominant oligarchy, others conclude that the military actually is the oligarchy. Without an in-depth look at how military control has developed, we run the risk of either underestimating the network of military influence or inflating the importance of an institutional mind-set when concentration should really be on personal designs or isolated group agendas. This distinction becomes necessary for two reasons. First, isolated personal designs, no matter how powerful, may be easier to counteract by the incoming civilian government if its assessment of the potential threat is accurate and the political will to tackle the problem exists. Second, it undermines the potential for healthy civilmilitary relations to assume that the project of a powerful military elite is necessarily the military class project, agreed to in advance by the entire officer corps. This may distort the personal or group origins of an agenda in a country where the military elite has a history of interposing itself in politics as an extension of an oligarchic agenda not necessarily shared by all officers. Any attempt to build healthy civil-military relations, therefore, would benefit from a more thoughtful assessment of the military that does not treat the institution as a monolith or define the military simply by the excesses of its aberrant officer corps. It is therefore useful to trace the sociological and institutional underpinnings of the military's role in the current transition to enable us to assess whether it

No abstract available Democracy & Development Vol.3(2) 2003: 51-84

This chapter begins from the premise that people and states must be secure from the fear of violence at the local, national, regional, and international levels if an enabling environment for sustainable political and economic development is to be created. This means both that states must be adequately protected against external aggression and internal subversion, and that the lives of ordinary citizens must not be crippled by state repression, violent conflict, or rampant criminality.

This powerful book critiques mercenary involvement in post-Cold War African conflicts. The contributors investigate the links between the rise in internal conflicts and the proliferation of mercenary activities in the 1990s; the distinction in the methods adopted by Cold War mercenaries and their contemporary counterparts; the convoluted network between private armies; business interests and sustained poverty in Africa's poorest countries; and the connection between mercenary activities and arms proliferation. Countries discussed include Sierra Leone, Zaire, Angola, Uganda and Congo.