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The Zia ul‐Haq regime adopted state‐led Islamization to shore up waning state power. It adopted aspects of Islamist ideology to reshape the country's judicial and political structures. This strategy expanded state power after years of domestic strife and at a time when Pakistan was involved in the Afghan War. The policy was also used to legitimate military rule, providing a justification for its continuation as demands for democratization grew. The Islamization strategy firmly entrenched the postcolonial state in Islamic ideology and allowed the military to ally itself with Islamist forces to achieve its goals.

This chapter describes the politics following Argentina's and Chile's last bout with authoritarianism. In spite of some important similarities between Argentina and Chile, military rule and the subsequent democratization process have been dissimilar. The chapter argues that the disparate performance of the Argentine and Chilean praetorian elites yielded for them different bargains with the opposition. These different deals led to vastly different outcomes, that is, profound disparities between military politics in contemporary Chile and Argentina. In Chile, democratizers have succeeded in gradually reducing the military's political autonomy to a level acceptable by democratic standards. On the other hand, their Argentine colleagues have gone too far in what has amounted to a virtual vendetta against the military as an institution and, in the process, seriously impaired its ability to protect and project Argentine national interests. The chapter's secondary case is Guatemala, a Central American state ruled for most of the Cold War by unusually brutal military dictators.

This chapter focuses on the military bureaucracy and its personnel. It uncovers the social background, education, and training of the officers seconded to administrative posts, and assesses their competence vis-à-vis their Anglo-Indian counterparts.

This chapter focuses on Ghana, Tanzania, and Botswana. During the periods under study here, Ghana experienced intermittent military rule while Tanzania was a socialist state; their armed forces were not committed to democracy and, in Ghana's case, not even to civilian rule. Unlike Ghana, Tanzania was successful in establishing civilian control over the armed forces. Civilian control must not be confused with democratic control, however. In Tanzania, civilian control was unitary, the party-state's domination of the armed forces hardly surprising considering there was no independent legislature, judiciary, or any other political organization free of TANU/CCM control. Tanzania's example demonstrates that civilian control can be successful while incorporating the armed forces into the general political arena. Botswana's situation is similar to Tanzania's insofar as one party has ruled the country since independence, but with the major difference that in Botswana, during the same time period, free elections have been held at regular intervals.

This concluding chapter assesses the arguments of this study. The fundamental contention of this book is that consolidated democracies cannot exist without military elites committed to democratic governance, that their support is a necessary if insufficient condition of democratization. It also argues that the six settings—major war, civil war, military rule, communism, colonialism, and (re)unification and apartheid—present different challenges to would-be democratizers intent on crafting democratic armies and civil–military relations. Finally, it contends that it is virtually impossible to come up with a general theory that provides substantive and useful explanations for civil–military relations in such diverse political and socioeconomic environments. The chapter then outlines the policies and conditions that advance or inhibit the development of armies supportive of democratic rule.

The conclusion summarises the main lines of the collage and raises the question as to whether the work has succeeded in drawing the connection between the large-scale political and social changes in Egypt brought on by the 2011 revolution and the smaller story narrating the everyday interactions of a middle-class building. The collages of four tales provided a myriad of divided snapshots: scenes of Tahrir Square and its protesters; of violence and the reinvention of public spaces in a moment of insurrection; of phantasmagorias in mimicking mini-Dubai(s) and Singapore; of mushrooming mega shopping malls; of the transforming neighbourhood of Doqi pushing away its middle classes, transmuting the ‘popular’ street into a site of lucrative commercial activities; of moving to New Cairo and compound life at the far end of an exhausting commute; of evictions in popular neighbourhoods; and finally of the militarisation of urban life. In view of this overt military rule, one main recurring question raised is how to trace the elements of continuity on a micro level, when the urban transmutations in post-January Cairo are so pervasive. Here, referring time and again to the groundbreaking work of Stephen Graham (2010), to what extent is the ‘new military urbanism’ actually new, when all but one of Egypt’s presidents since 1952 have been military men?

This chapter traces how the Burmese generals who took power after the early 1960s deliberately set about to change the system of a plural society in the name of Burman nationalism. It was an agenda of “race and religion,” directed against not only the colonial-era immigrants but also those ethnic groups on the fringes of the old Burman kingdom. The near destruction of Burma's plural society was achieved in two phases, by the Japanese invasion in early 1942 and then by the imposition of military rule in 1962. After the nation's period of independence and a benign leadership under its first prime minister, in 1962 the country was overtaken by a military coup, which attempted to create a disastrous communist-style nationalised economy—i.e. the “Burmese Way to Socialism.”

This chapter explores the transformation of lower-class political life during the period of military rule in the seventies. The regime of Juan Velasco Alvarado has been interpreted as corporatist, or at least as aspiring to install an “inclusionary” corporatist-style system of interest representation. The Velasco experience illustrates the difficulty that inclusionary corporatists face in creating ties with the lower classes which move beyond clientelism, on the one hand, and in remaining in control of the mobilization they are likely to produce, on the other. It also illustrates the difficulty of constructing a corporatist system organized not around the labor movement but around residential communities of the poor.

David Styan interprets the evolution of political violence in Chad between independence in 1960 and its fifty-year anniversary of 2010. Styan first looks at the successive phases of military rule and their effect on violent practices. The author argues that, given the repeated attempts to violently seize state power in N’Djamena, Chad is probably the least cohesive state produced by the decolonization of French Equatorial Africa in 1960. Styan links these observations to Idriss Déby’s efforts to extend his two decades as president through an electoral victory in 2011, in which the author sees a clear relationship between violence, power, and electoral legitimization. In this context, the chapter comes to the role of France’s ongoing political and military links with Chad, contributing to the maintenance and regulation of internal political violence. Styan notably questions the effects of the defence accords between N’Djamena and Paris, and of the presence of the French units of Opération Epervier, thereby linking post-colonial violence to supposedly neocolonial politics.

This chapter illustrates how Israel consolidated its military rule in the Occupied Territories (OT) by increasing the inhabitants' economic productivity while diminishing their political capabilities. It begins by briefly describing the coercive measures Israel employed to crush all oppositional forces, and then discusses some of the changes introduced in the education system in order to suppress both national identification and political aspirations. The chapter then describes how, alongside its efforts to quell the population's desire for emancipation, Israel encouraged economic practises that promoted Palestinian prosperity and, in this manner, hoped to normalize the occupation.

Middle-class, urban Argentines bought into a dictatorship-era fantasy of normalcy, modernization, and an Argentina on track to “overcome” its chaotic past. That fantasy—as read in part by Argentines through the rise of two sports figures, Carlos Reutemann and Guillermo Vilas—exposes the falsity of a binary that posits only two dictatorship-era identities, either pro- or anti-dictatorship. There were grey zones where Argentines, appalled at state-sponsored terror, might at the same time dream about the sort of modernized Argentina promised by military rule. While many Argentines wish for and remember a dictatorship era in which every Argentine struggled against human rights violations, and in which the military government found itself isolated in an international community of outraged nation states, the reality is foggy and complicated. Many fought abuses. But many more reacted to news of disappearances with the well-known dictum “por algo sera” (“there must have been a good reason”).

With the fall of the dictatorship at the end of 1983, Argentines embarked on a three-decade search for answers and justice. All the same, the aftermath of military rule in Argentina did not wipe the slate clean on human rights for the new government of President Raúl Alfonsín. Elected on his reputation as a human rights lawyer, Alfonsín faced immediate intransigence from military officers determined to maintain their failed illusion of a dictatorship in defence of human rights. There was a rapid and extensive creation of human rights agencies. The new bureaucracy was designed to erase the legacies of military rule while creating a culture of human rights that celebrated the victory over dictatorship-era abuses. Argentines were hopeful of swift justice and punishment for newly ousted military leaders. It came, but only in part. In conjunction with shifts in domestic policy, the Alfonsín administration quickly set about making Argentina an international leader on human rights, establishing mandates and deadlines for results that were impossibly optimistic. Faced with a barrage of foreign pressures to make the disappeared appear, the new government’s record was mixed.

The military conquest of 1704 was followed by failure and frustration. The occupation of Gibraltar in the name of ‘King Charles III’ was not the prelude, as expected, to his triumphant enthronement in Madrid. As a result, and consequent upon partition and the containment of allied troops behind the walls of a fortified town at the south end of an isthmus on the tip of southern Europe, the problem arose as to who would thereafter govern Gibraltar, and how. There was the question of whether the separation between Gibraltar and mainland Spain would be reversed and, if so, how and on what terms. This chapter examines Gibraltar's government and politics during 1704–1819. It looks at the territory as a British fortress, military rule, civilian politics, cooperation and protest, and civic self-government. The chapter also explores efforts to bring Gibraltar constitutionally into line with towns in Britain and indeed in other parts of the eighteenth-century colonial empire.

This chapter analyzes how these movements of the urban poor persisted under renewed civilian rule in the 1980s and early 1990s, without fully displacing a “clientelist” pattern of accommodation. In March 1980, presidential and parliamentary elections were held for the first time in twelve years, bringing an end to Peru's longest period of military rule in this century. But the heritage of military rule under Velasco shaped lower-class politics after the state returned to civilian control. This heritage was nowhere clearer than in the persistence of a rights-oriented and confrontational politics among segments of the urban poor.

Pakistan has experienced three major military coups d’éétat (1958, 1977, 1999), and has been ruled by the military on three different occasions (1958–1971, 1977–1988, 1999–). Even when it has been under civilian rule, the military has remained in control of government. Moreover, the civilian bureaucracy and the key institutions of society have been purposely penetrated by the military and its intelligence services. Whereas a major divide exists in India in the post-Independence years, Pakistan has alternated/oscillated between a low and a high growth rate, at least over the first five of the six different periods. Geopolitics and national security have strongly influenced the outcome. This chapter discusses military rule, alliances, and economic development in Pakistan as well as the role of Islam in the country. The author goes on to discuss Pakistan’s relations with the United States and how geopolitics has played a pre-eminent role in its economic development. It also examines the nature and consequences of foreign aid to Pakistan.