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Civil Militia: Africa's Intractable Security Menace?

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As a PhD student studying the emergence of civil defense forces in Africa and other places, I was particularly interested in getting my hands on this book. Here is a summation of the pros and cons. Pros: It covers a large field of a lightly covered subject in security studies and brings together a number of African scholars to address the topic. Overall, an interesting read that gives a nice overview of a rarely addressed, but emerging security concern.

Cons: their is very little objectivity in the writings; each author seems to address the problems with civil militias and rarely address or glance over the benefits. David Francis provides a very nice introduction to the work, but most of the authors seem to veer off onto their own track. For example some use civil militia, paramilitary, civil defense force and death squads interchangeably. But they all have different qualities. This may be more of an organizational problem with the book, which became quite apparent when I found numerous grammatical errors in most chapters. The grammar issue my be due to English as second language writers, but that is what copy-editors are for. What happened to the copy-editor at Ashgate? While most of the chapters are organized well enough to follow, some, like Chapter 9 are rather painful. There are too many scattered ideas forced together that in the end, say very little and leave the reader disappointed. Finally, some chapters are backed up with weak or limited citations, which may be a reflection of limited data or poor scholarship. At this point in my research, I'll assume its the former.