Military, Arms Monopoly and Proliferation of Small Arms and Light Weapons in Africa

Abstract

The military is the custodian of national security. It is the instrument of last resort in the times of dire national security debacles. For its strategic role in the state, the military wields exclusive authoritative powers over the sphere of arms: the production, circulation, possession, acquisition and use of legal instruments of coercion. It controls the arms sector in order to guarantee the state’s coercive authority and territoriality. The emergence and proliferation of non-state military actors in the global security terrain has queried the traditional notion of military monopoly of legitimate force. Non-state actors nowadays have been found to wield competitive control of arms, sometimes in asymmetric contention with the state’s military. While the problem of arms proliferation is a global phenomenon, its incidence has been very alarming in Africa. This chapter explores the issue of military monopoly of violence against the backdrop of the emergence and prevalence of non-state armed and violent groups in Africa. It posits that the dysfunctionality of the African states, coupled with its gross governance deficits, has created ample ungoverned and undergoverned spaces where criminalities such as Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALWs) proliferation fester. The chapter makes a case for a pragmatic state-building approach that prioritizes aspects of transformative security governance as the way forward.