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Este artigo analisa a agenda da Reforma do Setor de Segurança (RSS) em sua adaptação às condições brasileiras, mormente tendentes ao autoritarismo. Persegue-se a hipótese de que, no Brasil, há uma incorporação da agenda da RSS com o fim de legitimar o incremento de intervenções militares no domínio social, em uma atualização dos procedimentos da Doutrina de Segurança Nacional (DSN). Por meio de pesquisa em fonte primária e estudo de caso, analisa-se a intervenção federal no Rio de Janeiro em 2018, planejada e desempenhada pelas Forças Armadas após uma série histórica de engajamento militar em operações de pacificação e Garantia da Lei e da Ordem (GLO). Security Sector Reform in Brazil and the Updating of the National Security Doctrine: The Case of the Federal Intervention in Rio de Janeiro (2018) analyzes the Security Sector Reform (SSR) agenda in its adaptation to Brazilian conditions that pend towards authoritarianism. We defend the hypothesis that, in Brazil, the RSS agenda is processed to legitimize the increase of military interventions in the social domain, updating procedures from the National Security Doctrine. Through primary source research and a case study, we analyze the federal intervention in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, planned and carried out by the Armed Forces after a historical series of military engagement in pacification and Law and Order Guarantee operations.

Resumen. Las relaciones civiles-militares deben ir más allá del control civil, basado fundamentalmente en el riesgo de un golpe de Estado. Para ello, un concepto importante es el de identidad militar. Sin embargo, no hay mucha literatura que discuta explícitamente cómo las identidades de los militares y de los civiles moldean los comportamientos en las relaciones civiles-militares. Este artículo explora cuál es el papel de las identidades militares en los desafíos estructurales que implican dichas relaciones en Colombia, a partir del estudio del caso de la campaña presidencial de 2014 y sus principales aspeaos políticos, de seguridad, escándalos y debates públicos. Se discute cómo estas identidades son tanto un activo como un pasivo para fortalecer las relaciones civiles-militares, y se plantea una vía de mejora a través del concepto de identidad ciudadana. Abstract. Civil-military relations must go beyond civilian control based primarily on the risk of a coup d etat. An important concept in this regard is military identity. However, literature explicitly discussing how military and civilian identities shape behaviors in civil-military relations is scarce. This article addresses the role of military identities in the structural challenges involved in these relations in Colombia, based on the case study of the 2014 presidential campaign, its main political, security, scandals, and public debates. It discusses how these identities are both an asset and a liability to strengthening civil-military relations and proposes a means of improvement through citizen identity.

A considerable amount of research within security studies has explored the military's increasingly diverse and multifaceted tasks. However, this debate has been disconnected from the literature on civil-military relations to the effect that we still lack knowledge about how and why these operational tasks have consequences for the relations between the armed forces, civilian authorities, and society at large. In order to provide for a better understanding of these effects, this introduction to the Special Issue debates the concept of operational experiences to capture how the military's routine activities affect the equilibria, logics, and mechanisms of civil-military relations. The article then provides an overview of the Special Issue's six contributions, whose diverse and global perspectives shed light on different aspects of the relationship between military missions and the military's roles in society and politics. Among other factors, they highlight role conceptions – the military's shared views on the purpose of the institution – as crucial in shaping the dynamic relation between what the military does and what place it occupies within the state and society. The article concludes by describing potentially fruitful areas of future research.

The proposed article provides a critical analysis of approaches to understanding civil-military relations not only as a control factor, but also a broader social phenomenon. It was found that the latter serves as a kind of social integrative factor in the field of security and defense of Ukraine. The problem is covered through the prism of dialectical categories of content and form, essence and manifestations, general and separate, unity and difference of civil and military relations, etc. The author does not limit himself to stating the existing achievements in the formation of these relations, but raises the question of their further fruitful development in the legal system of Ukraine.

In the pages of this journal, Damon Coletta and Tom Crosbie published a response to our article entitled, “The Continuing Relevance of Morris Janowitz’s The Professional Soldier for the Education of Officers.” In that article, we argued that Janowitz’s emphasis on the need for political awareness in the U.S. military should receive greater attention in the education of today’s officer corps. Coletta and Crosbie suggest that we are too ready to abandon Samuel Huntington’s classic work, The Soldier and the State. In this continuation of that dialogue, we respond with three clarifications and three substantive disagreements. Huntington and Janowitz offer divergent perspectives on the issues of officer education and “political virtue,” we suggest, and Janowitz’s perspective deserves greater weight that it has traditionally received. Coletta and Crosbie also place greater emphasis on the separability of political and military affairs than is warranted, and Janowitz is more helpful here as well.

This article explores how military ‘frontline workers’ use their discretion to interpret and then comply, breach or bypass policies that reach into the tactical level, and why. Based on extensive p...

The ever-increasing demands of war during the Renaissance caused rulers to continuously impose new taxes and exactions. One of the most unpopular exactions was billeting – the obligation to provide...

Scholars have contended that norms of professionalism are critical to understanding how militaries interact with civilian leaders and when they intervene in politics. Yet, few studies have directly examined the normative structures of military officers. Through a survey of 1468 US Military Academy cadets, this study evaluates cadets’ views toward professionalism, and in particular what is often presumed to be the dominant framework of those norms based on Samuel Huntington’s The Soldier and the State. We identify five patterns of normative beliefs based on cadets’ views of civil–military interaction and the nonpartisan ethic: orthodox, unorthodox, inconsistent, non-committal, and motivated norms. Cadets fall into each of these categories, but approximately one-quarter demonstrate motivated norms, adhering when convenient, and otherwise dispensing with them when the rules they prescribe clash with their partisan identities. These findings, especially our novel conceptualization on norm adherence, contribute to a greater understanding of military culture and professionalism.

The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) played a critical role in the lives of many Union veterans after the Civil War. Its efforts were supported by its women’s auxiliary, the Woman’s Relief Corps (WRC). Yet scholars do not know much about the evolution of the relationship between the rising WRC and the slowly declining GAR, whose members were dying away in the early 20th century. Here, we evaluate state-level membership and local group data for both associations to determine the nature of their connection from 1884 to 1924. The evidence reveals that the WRC’s auxiliary role helped sustain the GAR while providing an organizational structure that allowed women to chart an independent course.

An influential model of democratic civil-military relations insists that civilian politicians and officials, accountable to the public, have “the right to be wrong” about the use of force: they, not senior military officers, decide when force will be used and set military strategy. While polls have routinely asked about Americans’ trust in the military, they have rarely probed deeply into Americans’ views of civil-military relations. We report and analyze the results of a June 2019 survey that yields two important, and troubling, findings. First, Americans do not accept the basic premises of democratic civil-military relations. They are extraordinarily deferential to the military’s judgment regarding when to use military force, and they are comfortable with high-ranking officers intervening in public debates over policy. Second, in this polarized age, Americans’ views of civil-military relations are not immune to partisanship. Consequently, with their man in the Oval Office in June 2019, Republicans—who, as political conservatives, might be expected to be more deferential to the military—were actually less so. And Democrats, similarly putting ideology aside, wanted the military to act as a check on a president they abhorred. The stakes are high: democracy is weakened when civilians relinquish their “right to be wrong.”

The events of January 6, 2021, when violent rioters attacked the Capitol building in Washington in order to disrupt validation of the 2020 presidential election, forced an unprecedented reckoning with the state of American politics. Members of Congress struggled to account for the rhetoric that gave rise to the event; law enforcement grappled with the challenge of holding accountable those who perpetrated the violence; and journalistic outlets wrestled with reporting a complex web of conspiracy theories and disinformation that gave rise to the insurrection. But for senior military leaders, the question was how to explain the troubling presence of active duty servicemembers and veterans in the first attack on the American seat of government in two centuries. The result is a profound and urgent discussion in U.S. civil-military relations.

Before the end of the British Mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel, the Yishuv’s intelligence services assessed that King Abdullah would be willing to accept the existence of a Jewi...

For more than a decade, the United States military has conceptualized and discussed the Internet and related systems as “cyberspace,” understood as a “domain” of conflict like land, sea, air, and outer space. How and why did this concept become entrenched in US doctrine? What are its effects? Focusing on the emergence and consolidation of this terminology, I make three arguments about the role of language in cybersecurity policy. First, I propose a new, politically consequential category of metaphor:foundational metaphors,implied by using particular labels rather than stated outright. These metaphors support specific ways to understand complex issues, provide discursive resources to some arguments over others, and shape policy contestation and outcomes. Second, I present a detailed empirical study of US military strategy and doctrine that traces the emergence and consolidation of terminology built on the “cyberspace domain.” This concept supported implicit metaphorical correspondences between the Internet and physical space, yielding specific analogies and arguments for understanding the Internet and its effects. Third, I focus on the rhetorical effects of this terminology to reveal two important institutional consequences: this language has been essential to expanding the military's role in cybersecurity, and specific interests within the Department of Defense have used this framework to support the creation of US Cyber Command. These linguistic effects in the United States also have implications for how other states approach cybersecurity, for how international law is applied to cyber operations, and for how International Relations understands language and technological change.

This article reexamines and develops the analytical metaphor of “Reserve Soldiers as Transmigrants” in three directions. First, we advance the notion of transmigration by linking it to the explicit and implicit “contracts” or agreements struck between the military and individuals and groups within and outside of it. Second, we show that the “management” model of reserve forces is not just an administrative matter but that “negotiating” with reservists involves wider issues that include managing identity, commitment, and the meaning attached to military service. Third, we examine the institutional and political meaning of the reserves at the macro sociological level. The juxtaposition and interplay of two models—transmigration and multiple contracts—allows us to introduce structural elements into the movement of soldiers between the military and civilian society, and add a dynamic dimension to the contents of the implicit contracts that organize reservists’ relations with the state and military.

This article argues that Theo Farrell’s book Unwinnable is a semi-official British Army history of the Afghan war and reflects the ‘dominant military narrative’. The book’s argument is contradictory, it suggests that NATO was ‘learning, adapting and winning’ the war but the politicians stabbed the military in the back by withdrawing just as a turning point had been reached in 2009-11. This was Farrell’s optimistic analysis when the war was ongoing. But Unwinnable also argues that the war was unwinnable from 2001. This implies that it was the military elite that blundered because of their enthusiasm for the escalation of Britain’s involvement in an unwinnable and, therefore, futile war. Unwinnable tries to rescue ‘counterinsurgency’ by trying to claim, implausibly, that it was only properly implement during 2009-11. Farrell champions the empowerment of the military elite and is unconcerned that the politicians struggled to exert democratic control over the military.

Although voluntary recruitment to the military is today the Western norm, we know little about citizens’ beliefs regarding service members’ reasons for joining. This article, reporting and analyzing the results of a nationally representative U.S. survey, rectifies this gap. We find that, despite the reality of market-based recruitment, many Americans continue to subscribe to an idealized image of service members as moved by self-sacrificing patriotism. This belief is most heavily concentrated among conservative Americans. Liberal Americans are more likely to believe that service members join primarily for economic reasons. Those furthest to the left are more inclined to aver that service members join chiefly to escape desperate circumstances. Perhaps most surprising, we discover a disconnect between respondents with military experience and their families: The former are more likely to acknowledge that pay and benefits are a primary motivation for service, whereas their families are more likely to embrace a patriotic service narrative.

The U.S. military's prevailing norms of professionalism exhibit three paradoxes that render the organization poorly suited to meet contemporary challenges to its nonpartisan ethic, and that undermine its relations with civilian leaders. These norms, based on Samuel Huntington's objective civilian control model, argue that the military should operate in a sphere separate from the civilian domain of policymaking and decisions about the use of force. The first paradox is that Huntingtonian norms, though intended to prevent partisan and political behavior by military personnel, can also enable these activities. Second, the norms promote civilian leaders’ authority in decisionmaking related to the use of force, yet undermine their practical control and oversight of military activity. Third, they contribute to the military's operational and tactical effectiveness, while corroding the United States’ strategic effectiveness in armed conflict. These tensions in Huntington's norms matter today because of intensifying partisanship in society and in the military, the embrace by civilian leaders of objective control and their concomitant delegation of authority in armed conflict to the military, and growing questions about the causes of the inconclusive outcomes of the United States’ recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is time to develop a new framework for military professionalism.

Over the years, attempts to define the notion of national security in terms of what it means and what it represents have ranged from a classical, purely military definition, to a broader multidimensional concept encompassing a range of different features. Studies on Israel’s national security concept have tended to emphasize the formative role played by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister. These works have focused on the military aspects of the national security concept, based on arguments concerning the perceived threat of wartime engagements with Arab armies. This article argues that Ben-Gurion’s national security concept was essentially a civilian perspective with military features that responded to the four types of threats, local, regional, international, and Jewish, facing the State of Israel at the time, most of which were not military.

This article modifies the framework for the analysis of civil–military “gaps” proposed in Armed Forces & Society (Vol. 38, 2012) by Rahbek-Clemmensen, Archer, Barr, Belkin, Guerro, Hall, and Swain, who depicted a continuum of four binary fissures (“gap dimensions”) dividing two hypothetically homogeneous communities: civilians versus military personnel. Extrapolating from Israel’s experience, this article instead visualizes a more dynamic and fissured landscape, inhabited by several heterogeneous clusters of population groups, each comprising impromptu coalitions drawn from both the armed forces and civilian society. That environment, we argue, although certainly influenced by the traditional penetrability of Israel’s civil–military boundaries, more directly reflects current technological and cultural processes, which are transforming encounters between civilians and military personnel in other countries too. We therefore suggest replacing the predominantly dichotomous taxonomies that generally characterize studies of civil–military relations in contemporary democratic societies with the fractured format observed in the Israeli case.

A sovereign nation –state requires a strong military institution and the Nepali Army demands its personnel’s obedience, loyalty, sacrifice and discipline to maintain command and control. However, as an established principle, civilian control of the military is desirable to the military control of the state. The concept of Civil Military Relations (CMR) is dynamic, evolutionary and country specific. Such a bond between an official security organization and the public in general change with regime shifts, external imperatives and technological innovations. The impact of regime changes and political movements has been observed in various aspects of politics, society in Nepal is not an exception. In this line, this article deals on the theoretical discourse of CMR, reviews the constitutional and legal provisions and examines the factors influencing CMR in Nepal from the period of modern nationstate formation to present days. Along with existing debates around the role of the Nepali Army in various non-military jobs, this paper proposes multiple perspectives on how different entities, including bureaucrats, politicians and military leaders perceive CMR. Likewise, the writers argue that sharing the responsibilities among the civil society, citizenry and military organizations is one of the most suitable approaches in response to balancing CMR in Nepal.

Unsurprisingly, most of the literature on the origins of the ANZUS alliance examines why the treaty came into existence in 1951, emphasising the role of John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s Speci...

Civil-military relations in Pakistan are always in search of common ground. Historically, military forces and civilian leadership in Pakistan struggle to find the right balance and the civilian leadership has hardly commanded the gun. This study is intended to analyze that how the two selected daily English newspapers of Pakistan, i.e. Dawn and The News covered the major developments in civil-military relations, particularly during the regime of Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Raheel Sharif, followed by the most sensitive event i.e., Zarb-e-Azb. The study employed the method of discourse analysis and has used the theoretical notion of agenda-setting and framing. The results of the study revealed that the slant, style, themes, and discourses used in the news stories of both the newspapers almost remained the same, appreciating the military institutions positively. Whereas condemning the civilian leadership for their lack of concern towards implementing the already approved Nation Action Plan.

Endorsements by retired flag and general officers are now a fixture of the presidential election cycle. However, their motivations are unclear. Retired flag officers might endorse with material, purposive, or solidarity motives. We evaluate these motivations with a new data set of 1,340 endorsements by 1,041 endorsers between 2004 and 2016 matched with campaign contributions. We find that campaign contributions, service in the Navy, and retiring as a higher ranked officer are all associated with an increased likelihood of endorsing. We conclude that about 10 retired flag officers participate to improve their material situation, 193 seek to advance their ideological preferences, and the remainder participate to demonstrate solidarity with their peers or acquaintances. These findings provide new insight into endorser motivations and civil–military relations.

Available scholarship on civil–military relations, and coup politics in particular, tends to treat military coups d’état as originating purely within the minds of military officers; that is, the overwhelming bulk of scholarship assumes that the idea to seize power stems from officer cliques. To the extent that societal factors (e.g., polarization, economic decline, party factionalism) explain coups, they merely account for why officers decide to seize power. Most research that discusses civilian support for coups does so within single case studies—almost entirely drawn from the Middle East and North Africa. Building on a vibrant wave of studies that disaggregates civil–military institutions, a small body of recent research has begun to systematically and comprehensively consider the theoretical and empirical importance of civilian involvement in military coups. This perspective deemphasizes the military’s possession of weapons and instead focuses on ideational sources of power. Civilians have more power and resources to offer military plotters than existing scholarship has given them credit for. Civilian elites and publics can legitimate coups, organize them, manipulate information on behalf of the plotters, and finance coups for their own economic interests. In short, to fully understand coups, one must seek as much knowledge as possible about their formation, including where the idea for each plot originated. Such detailed analysis of coup plots will give researchers a clearer picture about the motivating factors behind coups.

Myanmar has had one of the longest ruling military regimes in the world. Ruling directly or indirectly for more than five decades, Myanmar’s armed forces have been able to permeate the country’s main political institutions, its economy, and its society. Myanmar is a highly revealing case study for examining the trajectory of civil–military relations over the past seven decades. Myanmar ended direct military rule only in 2011 after the military had become the most powerful institution in society, weakened the political party opposition severely, coopted several ethnic armed groups, and built up a business empire that allowed it to remain financially independent. The new tutelary regime—established in 2011 after proclaiming a roadmap to “discipline flourishing democracy” in 2003, promulgating a new constitution in 2008, and holding (heavily scripted) elections in 2010—allowed a degree of power-sharing between elected civilian politicians and the military for a decade. Although policymaking in economic, financial, and social arenas was transferred to the elected government, the military remained in firm control of external and internal security and continued to be completely autonomous in the management of its own affairs. As a veto power, the military was also able to protect its prerogatives from a position of strength. Despite this dominant position in the government, civil–military relations were hostile and led to a coup in February 2021. The military felt increasingly threatened and humiliated as civilians destroyed the guardrails it had put in place to protect its core interests within the tutelary regime. The military also felt increasingly alienated as the party the military had established repeatedly failed to perform in the elections.

Iraq is a young state, having been founded in 1921 by a colonial power, Britain. Its army was created several months beforehand, with its nucleus being Iraqi Sunni Arab officers of the former Ottoman army. As the mandate power in Iraq, Britain wanted a small internal security establishment while the officer corps and the monarchy wanted a large army that would act as a nation-building institution to make Iraqis out of the disparate ethnic groups who found themselves reluctant subjects of this new entity. As the strongest institution in the fragile state, the army played an important role in the political process and ultimately launched the first coup in the Arab world in 1936. As the older and more pliant senior officer corps retired, younger, more nationalist officers came to the fore; they were discontented with the overbearing presence of the British, the rampant cronyism and corruption in the royal court and among the ruling elite, and by the backwardness of their country. A small group of militant nationalist officers seized power and fought a brief and unsuccessful war against Britain. The power of the ruling elite was seemingly consolidated in the period after World War II. Both Iraq and the rest of the Middle East were in turmoil as colonial powers found themselves facing a rising tide of movements striving for independence. Leading the way were junior and middle-ranking officers, and in Iraq they launched a bloody coup-revolution in 1958 that destroyed the monarchy and established a republic. The Iraqi republic was unstable, due mostly to the inability of elites to establish solid institutions for governing the country and channeling mass politics effectively. The fragility and lack of legitimacy of governments provided ample opportunity for the military—which was riven by factionalism and ideological differences—to intervene regularly in the political process. The seizure of power by the nationalist and socialist Baath Party under Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein effectively put an end to the military’s political role; the Baath Party implemented a series of stringent “coup-proofing” measures between 1968 and 2003 when it was displaced from power by the U.S. invasion. The Baath Party’s measures did not mean that members of the officer corps did not try their hand at overthrowing the Baath regime; many did, but all failed, often at tremendous costs to themselves and their families. The measures of control had a deleterious effect on the professionalism and combat performance in the conventional wars that it fought between 1980 and 2003. The Americans tried to build a new Iraqi army and sought to professionalize it, but their efforts had little success. The removal of the brutal authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein did not change Iraqi politics for the better. Sunni Arab dominance was replaced by Shia Arab dominance. Post-Baath governments were kleptocratic, corrupt, and characterized by ethno-sectarian favoritism and cronyism. These characteristics pervaded the new military itself but the military’s ability to interfere in the political process has been stymied by its focus on fighting the dangerous jihadist fighters of the Islamic State (Daesh), the proliferation of government security services, and by the emergence of heavily armed and motivated pro-government militias. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

This article examines the dynamics of an emerging multi-use paradigm for satellite remote sensing (RS). From the beginning of the space age, RS satellites have served as dual-use technologies. The advancements to RS technology since that time have largely been driven by the security and economic interests of States. While these interests are to some extent mutually supporting, they have also created a complex environment where non-governmental actors such as commercial satellite operators are increasingly involved in matters of national security and defence. Furthermore, the growing number of RS data providers globally, and more open and easily accessible data and analysis tools online, are creating a new use paradigm for RS in civil-military relations. These developments are extending the dual-use technology dilemma to one of multi-use, where non-governmental actors, including ordinary individuals, are becoming entangled in government affairs. This article traces the trajectory of these processes, and discusses potential implications for RS capable States.

While academic debate on the political control of military forces tends to oppose the poles of ‘integration’ or ‘separation’, the French military tradition is most often described as a case...

When and why do states launch campaigns of genocide against minorities? In 2017, in a violent campaign increasingly described as genocide, the Myanmar military drove almost 700,000 Rohingya from Ra...

Few would disagree that European militaries have experienced dramatic changes since the end of the Cold War. Much of the discussion on these changes to date has referred to the concept of professio...

The profession of arms shares with other professions a certain universality, in terms of both time and place. This transnational “corporateness” helps to foster strong military-to-military ties on a bilateral and multilateral basis between and among the armed forces of states. Through senior international professional education and the operations of its global network of unified Combatant Commands (COCOMs), the United States seeks to develop and reinforce a web of relationships with military leaders as an element of its national security strategy. These professional and operational linkages create an international fraternity of the uniform. The fraternity of the uniform, by providing an additional military avenue of communication between the United States and foreign states, one that at times seems to skirt and compete with normal diplomatic and political relations, can be viewed as a challenge to liberal-democratic norms in civil–military relations both at the national and international level. That is to say it can be used by foreign military leaders as a “shirking” tactic employed to reduce the inequality inherent in the civil–military dialogue. The challenge for governments, then, is to leverage the advantages afforded by having their militaries join in the fraternity, while not allowing such membership to undermine proper civil–military relations. In doing so, the international fraternity of the uniform contributes to the operational effectiveness of American-led military multilateralism and the mutual security of its participants.