ABSTRACT
Military intervention or praetorianism, i.e., “a situation in which military officers are major or predominant political actors by virtue of their actual or threatened use of force,” has preoccupied the attention of scholars and practitioners alike interested in the politics of changing or developing societies of the Third World. Though military regimes are unstable, the recognized capacity of the armed forces to replace one group of officers at the top with another, usually through a countercoup or a threatened one, give praetorianism an aura of permanence in the midst of the instability and economic underdevelopment permeating changing societies. A conscious effort was made to give a proportional balance by giving more emphasis to geographic regions with the greatest number of cases of military having left the levers of authority. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
