Europe is training military forces in weak states – and that’s seriously risky

This may be another example of the law of unintended consequences. By training the military from countries with weaker African states, the EU aims to support them in joining Peace-Keeping Operations in theatres where we do not wish to send our own troops. But better trained officers are more effectively able to seize power with a coup d’état…

I do wonder if what is presented in the article as being “causality” is actually not “correlation”. A state whose military has received Western training is 2x more likely to have suffered a coup, could easily just reflect the fact that we have chosen to train those forces in countries that we consider more “coup prone”. However, independently of this quibble, the key message is: Security Sector Reform, and civilian oversight really is a vital component in any such work – bravo to the likes of David Law in this field.