First published in 1982, this book aims to examine the role that ruling military governments have played in African development. Dr Odetola discusses military organisational values and skills in modernisation and argues that the evocation and application of these values and skills depends on the character of the leadership of individual ruling juntas, their degree of professional training, proximity to civilian society and so on. He also investigates the relationship between the ruling military and existing social classes.

Despite the decline in the number of military coups since the 1960s and 1970s, Militaries continue to be crucial political actors in many world regions. Their impact on the democratic development of nations, however, has been mixed. On the one hand, coups against democratically elected leaders in Mali (2012), Egypt (2013), and Thailand (2014) have spelled doom for these countries’ nascent democratic regimes and have ushered in new periods of military dominance in politics. The cases of Portugal (1974), the Philippines (1986), and Tunisia (2011), on the other hand, show that the military’s decision not to defend authoritarian leaders against mass protests contributed crucially to the fall of dictatorships and facilitated transitions to democracy. This volume addresses the military’s ambivalent role as "midwife" or "gravedigger" of democracy and highlights the often multi-layered and complex relationship between militaries’ political behaviour and democratization. The chapters were originally published in a special issue of Democratization.

In December 1931, El Salvador’s civilian president, Arturo Araujo, was overthrown in a military coup. Such an event was hardly unique in Salvadoran history, but the 1931 coup proved to be a watershed. Araujo had been the nation’s first democratically elected president, and although no one could have foreseen the result, the coup led to five decades of uninterrupted military rule, the longest run in modern Latin American history. Furthermore, six weeks after coming to power, the new military regime oversaw the crackdown on a peasant rebellion in western El Salvador that is one of the worst episodes of state-sponsored repression in modern Latin American history. Democracy would not return to El Salvador until the 1990s, and only then after a brutal twelve-year civil war. In Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940, Erik Ching seeks to explain the origins of the military regime that came to power in 1931. Based on his comprehensive survey of the extant documentary record in El Salvador’s national archive, Ching argues that El Salvador was typified by a longstanding tradition of authoritarianism dating back to the early- to mid-nineteenth century. The basic structures of that system were based on patron-client relationships that wove local, regional, and national political actors into complex webs of rival patronage networks. Decidedly nondemocratic in practice, the system nevertheless exhibited highly paradoxical traits: it remained steadfastly loyal to elections as the mechanism by which political aspirants acquired office, and it employed a political discourse laden with appeals to liberty and free suffrage. That blending of nondemocratic authoritarianism with populist reformism and rhetoric set the precedent for military rule for the next fifty years.

Ruling, but not governing : a logic of regime stability -- The Egyptian, Algerian, and Turkish military "enclaves" : the contours of the officers' autonomy -- The pouvoir militaire and the failure to achieve a "just mean" -- Institutionalizing a military-founded system -- Turkish paradox : Islamist political power and the Kemalist political order -- Toward a democratic transition? : weakening the patterns of political inclusion and exclusion.

Many generous people deserve special thanks for their assistance in the preparation and completion of this project. I wish to express my gratitude to each of the contributors for agreeing to tackle a difficult and inherently controversial subject. I am only sorry that C.I. Eugene Kim did not live long enough to see the fruits of his labor; he will be sorely missed by all of us who knew him. The Third World and the military do not respond easily to scrutiny by social scientists. Many colleagues and referees read all or part of the manuscript; I am grateful to Professors Richard Lane, Roy Christman, and Bob Kumamoto of San Jose State University and Timothy Lukes of Santa Clara University, who offered numerous helpful• comments. My parents, Panos and Athanasia Danopoulos, my brother George and his wife, Niki, my aunt Areti Paraskevopoulou, and my koumbaro George Nikoletopoulos have provided boundless moral support. Polly Taylor's expert typing and coding made the preparation of the typescript possible. Finally, my wife, Vickie, and our two sons, Panos and Andreas, deserve special thanks for their willingness to endure the long hours that writing and manuscript preparation entail. Though helpful, none of these people bear any responsibility for any problems associated with this volume. Responsibility for the accuracy and scholastic quality of what follows belongs to the contributors and myself.

Political executives have been at the centre of public and scholarly attention long before the inception of modern political science. In the contemporary world, political executives have come to dominate the political stage in many democratic and autocratic regimes. The Oxford Handbook of Political Executives marks the definitive reference work in this field. Edited and written by a team of word-class scholars, it combines substantive stocktaking with setting new agendas for the next generation of political executive research.

This book includes Janowitz's seminal work, The Military in the Political Development of New Nations, with additional new analysis of Latin American nations and of the increasing significance of paramilitary and police forces in authoritarian regimes in developing nations.

In Turkey: The Pendulum between Military Rule and Civilian Authoritarianism, Fatih Çağatay Cengiz explains Turkey’s trajectory of military and civilian authoritarianism while offering an alternative framework for understanding the Kemalist state and state-society relations.