Un aspect de l'insertion des militaries dans le processus de développement national en Afrique
Étude de quelques contradictions
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2139295 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michel L Martins, Michel Louis Martin (Sciences Po Bordeaux, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1973 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 267-285 |
| Publication date | 1973-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0008-3968 • E-ISSN: 1923-3051 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00083968.1973.10803698 |
| OpenAlex | W1703739922 |
| Language | FR |
| References cited | 5 |
Students of the role of military-politicians in the process of development and modernization have sought, with specific examples, to evaluate either the military's virtuosity or weakness. If the treatment of quantitative or qualitative information has been crucial in this research, it has to be said that ideological preferences have also been the main guide.The purpose of this essay is, from the viewpoint of the military organization, to bring out a certain number of objective and recurrent contradictions between the requirements of development and African military organizations. Furthermore, these contradictions affect the logic of the two parameters.Three of these contradictions deserve to be carefully studied. The desire of military- politicians to pursue more intensively the engagement of the societies they govern toward development, is impeded by 1) the latent fissiparity of military organizations; 2) the perennial tendency toward corporate behaviour among members; 3) the bureaucratic nature of these organizations and their attachment to order and stability.The careful observation of African armies shows, firstly, that they are affected by a high degree of organizational volatility. This instability is due to several endogeneous and exogeneous causes. The access to power does not weaken these tensions, as the constitution of a political chain of command parallel to the traditional military chain of command, will have strong dysfunctional consequences.Secondly, the perennial tendency toward corporate expectations which is considered as one of the main reasons for military usurpation, is in complete opposition with the principles of development especially in an economic arena characterized by scarcity of resources.Finally, the army, despite its originality, remains a bureaucratic social actor. The internal mechanisms of regulation function on the basis of discipline and conformity. Thus, settled at the head of power, the military is not skilled in the innovation and creative imagination necessary to the spirit of modernization. Military-politicians have a tendency to favour an order and a stability conceived as the absence of conflicts. Such a centralizing view hardly favours the undertaking of reforms by a non-homogeneous society.Army and development are, therefore, two elements which do not belong to the same phenomenological. universe. For many reasons, the military has become the keystone of national politics, without having a clear vision of its new role
Bureaucracy · Constitution · Economics · Ideology · Modernization theory · Opposition (politics) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scarcity · Sociology · African Studies and Ethnography · African Studies and Geopolitics · Agriculture and Rural Development Research · Law
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |