Introduction

Abstract

What is freedom, and who decides? In Africa’s long era of military rule, a peculiar idea of freedom emerged from the barracks. Soldiers took a maxim from their training—that discipline is a path to freedom—and made it into a political philosophy. What happened to this belief when it was scaled up into a national ideology? Was militarism fundamentally an ideology for men? If so, how do we explain the fact that some of its most enthusiastic supporters were women? Could judges check the powers that soldiers wielded? How colonial were Africa’s legal systems, and how did those origins shape how law worked after independence?