Are the military coups that have shaken Africa recently simply a working-out of personal animosities, are they due to chance, or are they the result of something inherent in the very nature of present-day African political systems? It is to questions such as these that this article is addressed, and to which it seeks to provide tentative answers. Further, if, as will be argued here, the African coups result from something inherently systemic, what conclusions can be drawn at present about Africa's future political development?

The concept of state is not much in vogue in the social sciences right now. Yet it retains a skeletal, ghostly existence largely because, for all the changes in emphasis and interest of research, the thing exists and no amount of conceptual restructuring can dissolve it. The present article develops a conceptual approach in which no violence is done to historical or empirical fact, but which offers a means of integrating the concept of state into the current primacy of social science concerns and analytical methods. It is hoped that this approach not only will provide a convenient conceptualization, but will contribute to attacking a substantive problem of some consequence. Since the relevant area is potentially huge, no more than a brushstroke configuration can be attempted.

The international political system is currently undergoing changes that are both rapid and extensive. Especially since the early sixties, a number of trends have manifested themselves and become interrelated in such a way that, taken together, they are substantially altering the fundamental postwar patterns of international politics. These indications of change and flux have engendered a substantial debate concerning appropriate concepts for the analysis of the international system.

The problem of stability in politics can be viewed from various angles. One possible approach is to regard a number of power units at different points of time and note if any change in their relationship has occurred. This raises the question about measuring political power; and some scholars will doubt the advisability of asking such a question. Hedley Bull argues that political science is in danger of being “distorted and impoverished by a fetish for measurement.” He favors a return to the classical tradition, and some of his arguments are certainly persuasive.

The civilian strategic analysts who now constitute a distinct profession in the Western world have from the first been subject to criticism that has called in question the validity of their methods, their utility to society, and even their integrity of purpose. Some of it is directed at particular strategists or at particular techniques they employ, but much of it purports to expose deficiencies that are characteristic of the genre. Some of this is of so scurrilous a nature as not to deserve a reply, but some raises issues of real importance. What are in fact the distinguishing features of the new style of strategic analysis? What has given rise to the criticisms that have been made of it? And what substance do the criticisms have?

The concrete lessons of recent history have helped us to appreciate the paramount importance of the political preconditions of social and economic development in the new states. The basic problem of political stability must be solved before all others—or everything else may be in vain. For this reason, some of the scholarly attention that used to be focused on social and economic development has shifted to political organization and has given prominence to terms such as “nation-building,” “political culture,” and “democratization.”

Observers of Peru since Carleton Beals (1934) have been pre-dicting “fire on the Andes.” When Bolivia began its basic social transformation in 1952, a Peruvian conflagration seemed all the more inevitable. Then, in 1962, what appeared to be Peru's version of the Sierra Maestra phase of “the revolution” began in the densely populated mountainous areas of the south.

Can two or more self-differentiating culture-groups coexist within a single political structure? The question may well seem clearly settled by the overwhelming factual evidence of contemporary international politics, for it is indeed a truism that political and ethnic borders seldom coincide. Thus, the very existence of a host of multinational states, including such a time-tested example as the Soviet Union, would appear to document an affirmative answer. On the other hand, a recent spate of political unrest within such geographically diverse and historically unrelated states as, inter aliay Canada, Guyana, India, Uganda, Belgium, the Sudan, Burma, Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Rwanda, the United Kingdom, and Iraq, focuses attention on the common root cause of intrastate yet international conflict and again brings into question the assumptions of the multinational state.

Tocqueville referred to the behavior of the French peasantry during the Revolution as a wonder of history. The centers of revolution, he noted, were the very districts in which social reform and progress had been most visible, whereas resistance to revolution sprang up in areas where the old order had been most completely retained.

In a world in which popular democracy sometimes seems on the defensive, the rise of the Justice party has a significance that goes beyond the borders of Turkey. That nation's continuing social and political revolution, obscured as it has been in the eyes of most foreigners by the cruel impasse of Cyprus and the revival of Greek-Turkish antagonisms in the eastern end of the Mediterranean, is worth trying to understand. Not only does multiparty rivalry exist, but political power in this important American ally is held by the Near East's only genuine grass-roots political party. This party has its roots deep in the country's social structure and is currently headed by an energetic and intelligent young leader of relatively humble origins.

Hans Morgenthau's political realism has led him to the conclusion that there can be no permanent peace without a world state. But, he says, there can be no world government until there is world community, and a sense of world community cannot form unless national decision-makers resolve or ameliorate world tensions through a return to a wise diplomacy.

The 1967 lightning victory of Zahal, the Israel Defense Forces, was the result of a philosophy that had considered military effort as an instrument of nation-building from the very beginning of the Zionist movement in Palestine. In 1948, the Israeli War of Liberation thrust the army into prominence, and from then on army leaders have been influential in the governmental and economic elites committed to rapid modernization. The Sinai victory in 1956 and the third military success in Sinai, Jordan, and Syria in 1967 further enhanced Zahal's reputation. Although Israel's standing army is no larger than 80,000 men, one-seventh of the country's total Jewish population of 2.5 million is on active military reserve. Given these conditions, it is natural to wonder what impact the army has had on the political life of Israel.

The expectation that a customs union in Europe will ultimately lead to political unification is based on the so-called spillover effect. This effect operates whenever any step toward integration creates new needs and fresh demands to proceed further in the same direction. Thus a customs union may create pressures to integrate not only commodity markets but capital markets as well. An integration of capital markets in turn may necessitate currency unification for its effective functioning, and a unified currency finally may imply a pooling of sovereignties sufficiently complete to destroy the separate identities of the participating nation-states. The process could also work in the opposite direction: from an insistence on the integrity of the nation-state to an ultimate rejection of the customs union itself.

An important task of the social scientist is the continual reexamination of his vocabulary. His purpose in such a reexamination should be the achievement of greater precision in meaning—that is, a more explicit statement of the real-world phenomena to which his terms apply. This research note is an attempt to stimulate the critical examination of the term “oligarchy” and related phrases identifying a ruling elite which have been used widely and repeatedly in discussions of Latin American political systems.

The remarkable change in the United States attitude toward family planning was symbolized last October by President Johnson's acceptance of the Margaret Sanger Award for his “vigorous and farsighted leadership in bringing the United States Government to enunciate and implement an affirmative, effective population policy at home and abroad.” Less than a decade before, when the very mention of Margaret Sanger's name in official circles was considered risque, President Eisenhower had made it clear that family planning was not the business of the U.S. government. Few could have predicted that in 1966 the President of the United States would say, “It is essential that all families have access to information and services that will allow freedom to choose the number and spacing of their children within the dictates of individual conscience.”

Military intervention in politics is extremely common. Outside the North Atlantic area, the armed forces are more likely than not to be among the most important power contenders in any political system, and military regimes are at least as widespread as either totalitarian or democratic ones. It is surprising, therefore, that until recently this phenomenon has attracted little attention from students of politics. Though there has been some speculation about the causes of military intervention, our actual knowledge of the subject is meager indeed.

Until recently many political scientists tended to regard violent civil conflict as a disfigurement of the body politic, neither a significant nor a proper topic for their empirical inquiries. The attitude was in part our legacy from Thomas Hobbes's contention that violence is the negation of political order, a subject fit less for study than for admonition. Moreover, neither the legalistic nor the institutional approaches that dominated traditional political science could provide much insight into group action that was regarded by definition as illegal and the antithesis of institutionalized political life.

Several years ago we reviewed in this journal a collection of books dealing with various aspects of Britain's role in international politics. In the opening paragraph of that review article we observed that “these writings can be viewed simply as discrete accounts of a single nation's unique experience. But one can also view such literature from a broader perspective. Particular cases are always unique in their totality. But they may be exhibits of more widely encountered types of phenomena. It is always possible, and it may be interesting and fruitful, to formulate general comparative questions about particular cases, and to derive hypotheses which could be tried out for credibility in other cases.”

In determining how he will behave, an actor must try to predict how others will act and how their actions will affect his values. The actor must therefore develop an image of others and of their intentions. This image may, however, turn out to be an inaccurate one; the actor may, for a number of reasons, misperceive both others’ actions and their intentions. In this research note I wish to discuss the types of misperceptions of other states’ intentions which states tend to make. The concept of intention is complex, but here we can consider it to comprise the ways in which the state feels it will act in a wide range of future contingencies. These ways of acting usually are not specific and well-developed plans. For many reasons a national or individual actor may not know how he will act under given conditions, but this problem cannot be dealt with here.