ABSTRACT
The contest for supremacy between the institutions of the Salazarist state and the security forces called upon to do its bidding proved instrumental to the final outcome of Portugal's decolonisation from Africa. While the remit of Portuguese military action might be imperial and global, this second factor is, once again, primarily metropolitan in focus. Professional commanders and long-service professional units became alienated from a Lisbon regime whose backing for the three discrete campaigns being fought in Portuguese Africa they found both perilously inadequate and politically self-serving. Portuguese society was changing fast. Urbanisation and attendant housing pressures rendered Lisbon's fast-expanding population in particular harder to govern and to control. Changing patterns of migration brought more Portuguese into contact with more prosperous Western European societies. The warring parties in all three Portuguese colonial conflicts in Africa relied on cross-border sanctuary and external aid.
