An American private security contractor, employed to train troops in Africa and Latin America, had a theory. African armies, he told me, can never truly professionalize. Unlike the militaries of the United States or Europe, or even those of Latin America, African soldiers’ national ‘cultures’ did not lend themselves to military professionalism. Indiscipline and insubordination, he claimed, are an incurable ailment of African armies.

It was an extreme version of a truism that pervades the popular imaginary and the scholarly literature on African militaries. Maggie Dwyer's excellent Soldiers in Revolt challenges that conventional wisdom by deconstructing the most visible manifestation of unprofessional behavior in the armed forces: the mutiny.

African militaries and the coup d’état have, as Dwyer points out, been the subject of considerable study. But collective military insubordination that does not attempt, at least initially, to replace the head of state is much easier to miss and to dismiss. Governments generally do not publicize or even discuss their soldiers’ violations of military code. Observers too often assume that indiscipline is simply a fact of life in African soldiering. But ignoring the mutiny as a strategic form of military action, and indeed a relatively common one in West and Central Africa, has obscured important ways in which African armies function internally. It has also made it harder to understand the ways that African armed forces exist within society.

Mutinies, Dwyer argues, are in fact a rather sophisticated, or at least a reasonably calculated, mode of communication. They typically originate in pay and material support grievances and are often more broadly connected to a sense that rank-and-file soldiers are unjustly treated by their military hierarchy. A mutiny may point to structural issues within the armed forces, but they generally do not correspond to the stereotype of spontaneous outbursts by ‘dragooned’ and unwilling military recruits. Rather, most mutinies are planned and specific in their demands. That insight alone opens several novel and important corollaries. For example, mutinies have changed along with changes in media and communication technology. They tend to borrow the rhetoric and tactics of non-military social movements and are therefore more likely to occur in democracies than in authoritarian regimes. And they seem a surprisingly routine consequence of peacekeeping deployments, after which soldiers are more aware of the compensation and training given to other national armies and have more keenly felt the negative consequences of poor training, logistics, and internal corruption.

Dwyer fleshes out these arguments in a book divided into two parts that correspond, more or less, to the two research strategies on which the project draws. Chapters Two through Five are a multi-front diagnosis of archival material documenting mutinies around the region, of which, by Dwyer's calculation, there have been some 71 in West and Central Africa between 1960 and 2014. (Dwyer is refreshingly upfront in this chapter and throughout the book about the difficulties of defining her research subject, and about other qualitative and quantitative challenges to researching African armed forces). Chapters Six through Eight each concern a case study built around ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and the mutiny record holder, Burkina Faso. Pairing these two research strategies is the core strength of the book, and it is easy to see how the project benefits from a multi-pronged approach. The first section lays out the general theoretical and empirical insights, and the second gives them nuance and specificity. If nothing else, Soldiers in Revolt is exemplary in its handling of fundamentally different kinds of research in support of an overarching goal.

Given how well Dwyer does what she does here, it seems unfair to critique Soldiers in Revolt for what it does not do. But the one marked absence in the book is a serious engagement with the role of foreign military trainers and advisers across the continent today, and whether this has any bearing on the mutiny as ‘a way to open dialogue with senior leadership’ (8). Military advisers working with domestic military units are one of the major contact points between the United States, Britain, France, and West African states. If the mutiny is a form of action with many influences, surely this, too, must have some bearing on its future? In any case, it seems a worthy topic for Dwyer's considerable analytic skill.

Soldiers in Revolt should find its way to an unusually large number of reading lists for a book that is ostensibly about a narrow topic. Its prose makes it accessible to a non-specialist and student audience, and it has application in any course on violence or postcolonial governance in Africa. One hopes it will also find readers among the growing numbers of military experts charged with advising and in some cases rebuilding African armies, where the costs of misreading and dismissing the mutiny can be high.