Although all authoritarian regimes in Africa are not military in character, the question of the military has been central to the current issue of democratisation on the continent. The contributions in this volume deal neither with the definitive erosion of the military and civil authoritarianism, nor with the inexorable march toward democracy but with what appears in retrospect to be a less clear-cut and more open-ended state of transition, located ambiguously between the crisis of authoritarianism and the prospect for democracy on the continent. The contributors emphasize the uneven patterns and forms of militarisation in Africa but within and between regimes.