| المستخلص: |
The researcher on African affairs, or who cares about it, is still immersed in the predicament of the “militarization of politics” in Africa. The army's involvement in politics in Africa is sometimes a jigsaw puzzle. The African Development Bank has monitored more than 200 military coups in Africa since independence in the 1960s till 2012, at least 45% of these coups succeeded in overthrowing the regime and reaching power. Despite the civility of a significant number of African political systems on the eve of independence, they soon became less than a decade of independence into military political systems, culminating in the 1970s. The next important stage in the study of civil-military relations in Africa was the hypothesis of some researchers, since the late 1980s, that the era of military intervention in politics ended, and this hypothesis proved to be true, or almost true, after the wave of formal transformation towards democracy in many African countries in the early 1990s. But the reality soon revealed the fragility and mistake of this assumption over the past two decades of the new millennium, as armies returned to African political scene through the most crude and tradition military coups. Large groups of researchers in African affairs re-read, consider, research, and analyze the theories, quotations and assumptions of civil-military relations and recall their classical writings, especially the book (The Soldier and the State) by Samuel Huntington published in 1957, in an attempt to bridge the gap between civil-military relations in theory; Its current reality in the wave of the militarization of politics in Africa in the new century, and the re-reading of the African political scene after the army’s repositioning, a rebound that often causes great confusion. To start an analysis of Civil-military relations in Africa on the assumptions and arguments accumulated in the theoretical field and civil-military relations in the democratic experience, which is confirmed by Huntington himself, as will be discussed later, this study is an attempt to re-read those relationships in the reality of Africa. In this paper, the researcher first reviews the main theoretical trends on civil-military relations, then goes back to the paths of those relations in the reality of the African situation, the motives behind the interventions, the features of the current relations, and finally its future.
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