Culture, identity, and ethnicity are central to understanding political behavior and the complex questions of military behavior in developing countries. Drawing on distinctive military periods in Fiji, Pakistan, and Uganda, each of which exemplifies, respectively, the main elements of the three schools of thought regarding ethnicity—primordialist, instrumentalist, and constructivist—this study argues that the fundamental behavior patterns associated with ethnicity relate directly to the problems and promises of military establishments in developing countries. By recognizing and understanding the dynamics of the culture of identity, military establishments in new political systems may better understand their own ethnic or “quasi-ethnic” politics. As developing military establishments build a quasi-ethnic identity, this will reinforce the growth of nationalism, which, in an age of ethnicity, would seem to posit a direct threat to democracy.

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Constantine P. Danopoulos is professor of political science at San Jose State University. Boris Znidaric is lecturer on security and insurance at the University of Maribov, Slovenia.

Andrew C. Danopoulos is an honors graduate in economics and sociology from the University of California–Davis. Constantine P. Danopoulos teaches political science at San Jose State University.

Poverty in third world (TW) countries is a serious problem, and microcredit has become the most popular approach to address this undesirable phenomenon. This model, perceived more than a quarter century ago in Bangladesh, is now being pursued around the globe. In spite of this enormous popularity, there is scepticism about the model's ability to make a “major dent in the TW poverty situation”. These criticisms, however, seem just as weak as the arguments supporting the model. One apparent reason is that both the claims and criticisms are founded on the same theoretical perspective of neoclassical economics. To inject some fresh ideas in the debate, this paper examined microcredit's poverty‐alleviating ability from the perspectives of moral and political philosophy and concludes that the theory has insurmountable limitations as a model of sustainable poverty alleviation in the TW.