The immediate postcolonial moment brought both promise and peril for the states of Africa and their security. The process of decolonization generated instability, and the emergent Cold War caught up the still-fragile independent states in a global ideological struggle between superpowers. While the political story of these states has been written in detail, the story of their militaries has been largely inaccessible, leaving only sketches of the coups, mutinies, and overall failures of security that outside observers could chronicle. Ujamaa’s Army traces the evolution of the Tanzania People’s Defence Force from its inception in 1964 following the broader East African uprisings to its fully realized form on the eve of Tanzania’s 1978 conflict with Uganda. The book gathers primary interviews with key military actors within Tanzania and interweaves their narratives with archival sources to produce a detailed history of the culmination of President Julius Nyerere’s ideological project and the military leadership’s vision of a professional and effective force for guarding the nation and supporting liberation struggles across Southern Africa.

In recent years, the capacity of civil society to respond to crises has been increasingly constrained by rising authoritarianism. Yet in West Africa, where civil society has historically played a pivotal role in democratization, this trend reveals deeper structural challenges. Unraveling of Civil Society examines how international aid strategies emphasizing technical capacity and professionalization have inadvertently contributed to the politicization and fragmentation of civil society in Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork—including interviews with representatives of more than a hundred locally led organizations, analysis of 260 strategic plans, and collection of cross-national survey data—this book offers a rare longitudinal and comparative study of civil society in the region. It traces how donor-driven models have led organizations to become sector specific, mimic donor institutions, or align with political interests—ultimately reducing organizational diversity and weakening the social infrastructure necessary for collective action and crisis resilience.

The book situates these findings within broader debates on democratic backsliding, noting that three of the nine countries that transitioned to autocracy between 2021 and 2023—Guinea, Chad, and Mali—are in West Africa. Despite significant international investment, “coup culture” and unconstitutional power shifts have resurged, raising urgent questions about the effectiveness of aid and the role of civil society in sustaining democratic norms.

Combining comparative historical analysis with a mixed-methods approach, Unraveling of Civil Society challenges prevailing assumptions about capacity building and offers practical recommendations for democratizing local organizations from within. It advocates for participatory governance and funding mechanisms and engages with ongoing conversations around the localization and decolonization of aid in a shifting geopolitical landscape.

This book is essential reading for scholars of African studies, political science, development studies, and global civil society as well as for practitioners in crisis management and political reform.