Civil–Military Relations and Democratic Stability

Rank One ◽

Conventional Weapons ◽

Democratic Stability ◽

The Stability ◽

The Moment ◽

The One ◽

Military Relations

Steven Wilkinson builds on the Rudolphs’ (1964) seminal analysis of India’s civilian–military relations to explain why India, in contrast to many other countries, has succeeded in preventing military intervention in domestic politics. He reviews recent concerns arising from the efforts by retired military leaders to become involved in politics, the widespread mobilization among India’s three million veterans by leaders of the ‘One Rank One Pension’ campaign, and disagreements between military leaders and political leaders in the Ministry of Defense. Wilkinson finds that the biggest threat to the stability of civilian–military relations results from the diminishing insulation of soldiers from conflicts and tensions in their villages, states, and the wider society due to developments in telecommunication and social media. He sees no threatening conflict on the horizon at the moment. Wilkinson views the failure to modernize conventional weapons systems as the most serious problem now confronting the military.

Military Leaders and Foreign Policy-Making

American Political Science Review ◽

10.2307/1952830 ◽

1963 ◽

Vol 57 (2) ◽

pp. 392-405 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Lewis J. Edinger

Keyword(s):

Comparative Politics ◽

Theoretical Models ◽

The United States ◽

Social Scientists ◽

Military Leaders ◽

Interdisciplinary Field ◽

The One ◽

Military Relations ◽

A survey of the literature of the last decade in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field which has come to be known—rather imprecisely—as civil-military relations, reveals a large number of descriptive and prescriptive, operational and theoretical studies, but little unity of focus or method. The interested shopper finds himself in a veritable department store filled with a wide assortment—including those in the bargain basement. Spurred on by wartime experiences and Cold War exigencies, historians and social scientists, physical scientists and journalists—above all in the United States—have covered reams of paper with discussions of the relationship between arms and men, war and peace, strategy and policy, defense and diplomacy. Displaying a great variety of analytical depth, breadth and sophistication, some of these studies have advanced our knowledge of civil-military relations—particularly in contemporary America—while others have failed to survive changes in international politics and weapons technology. Some writers, both of conservative and liberal orientation, have focused on the “appropriate” role for the military in state and society; others have sought to remain detached from such normative questions in order to concentrate on micro-descriptive phenomenal studies or more or less abstract macro-analytical theoretical models. Between the earth-bound descriptive and prescriptive studies on the one hand, and the soaring theoretical efforts on the other has loomed a wide gap, all too familiar to students of international relations, comparative politics, and public administration, waiting to be bridged—if bridged it can be—by empirical theories of civil-military relationships.

Rwanda: Civil–Military Relations

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1900 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Marco Jowell

Keyword(s):

Central Africa ◽

Armed Forces ◽

National Defense ◽

Mass Violence ◽

Early 21St Century ◽

Practical Experiences ◽

The One ◽

Military Relations ◽

The army has been a central part of Rwanda’s political system from the precolonial period until the early 21st century and is intrinsically part of the construction and politics of the state. Civil–military relations in Rwanda demonstrate not only the central features of transitioning a rebel group to a national defense sector but also how some states construct their armed forces after a period of mass violence. Since the civil war and genocide in the early 1990s, the Rwandan military has been the primary actor in politics, the economy, and state building as well as in regional wars in central Africa and the Great Lakes region. Practical experiences of guerrilla insurgency and conflict in Uganda and Rwanda, postconflict military integration, and the intertwining of political and economic agendas with the ruling party have shaped civil–military relations in Rwanda and have been central to how the Rwandan defense sector functions. Contemporary Rwandan civil–military relations center around the two elements of service delivery and control, which has resulted in the development of an effective and technocratic military in terms of remit and responsibilities on the one hand, and the creation of a politicized force of coercion on the other hand. The military in Rwanda therefore reflects the pressures and dynamics of the wider state and cannot be separated from it. The Rwandan army is thus a “political army” and is part and parcel of the political structures that oversee and govern the Rwandan state.

The “New Turkey” At Home and Abroad

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle-Eastern and North African History ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199672530.013.29 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 625-648

Author(s):

Asli Ü. Bâli

Keyword(s):

Domestic Politics ◽

Arabian Gulf ◽

Arab Uprisings ◽

Syrian Civil War ◽

Turkish Politics ◽

The Government ◽

Religion And State ◽

Military Relations ◽

The Relationship

This chapter examines the reversal of Turkey’s trajectory over the last fifteen years. It addresses the domestic transformation of Turkey through constitutional reforms, shifting civil–military relations, economic growth, corruption, ethnic conflict, and the relationship between religion and state. Examining these issues helps to explain why Turkish politics has become more polarized, and how this has been manipulated by the governing party to consolidate a majoritarian system and to crack down on dissent. The chapter then traces changes in Turkey’s foreign policy as it moves away from prioritizing relations with Washington and Brussels and seeks to forge a more multifaceted set of regional policies. This has failed for a number of reasons, including the Arab uprisings and the Syrian civil war. Instead, the government has embraced a “Eurasianist” turn aligning Turkey with authoritarian regimes in the Caucasus and the Arabian Gulf, in keeping with the country’s increasingly repressive domestic politics.

Cyber Operations, Legal Secrecy, and Civil-Military Relations

Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197535493.003.0014 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 245-262

Author(s):

Dakota S. Rudesill

Keyword(s):

Decision Process ◽

Low Cost ◽

Decision Processes ◽

Cyber Warfare ◽

Military Commanders ◽

Conventional Weapons ◽

Planning Decision ◽

Military Relations ◽

And Control

What civil-military challenges will arise from the virtual world of cyber warfare? Congress and the president have grown increasingly comfortable with permissive grants of authorities and decentralized delegations—including via classified documents with legal force (secret law)—, allowing military commanders to operationalize cyber tools in both defensive and offensive modes with greater ease and frequency. These cyber tools are unusually complex in their variety, design, and potential uses, at least relative to more traditional and conventional weapons. Their technical attributes render them difficult to monitor and regulate because those responsible for decisions to use such weapons—civilian officials—are often least likely to have experience or familiarity with them. The relatively low-cost, rapid-effect nature of cyberwar also encourages not just use in armed conflict, but also below the standard threshold of war. Cyber operations initiated without careful inter-agency planning, decision process, and presidential review drive up operational risk and undermine civil-military norms. To foster more effective civilian oversight and control of the nation’s military’s cyber sword, and to encourage more deliberative application of ever-evolving technologies, Congress should use its constitutional authorities over “the [cyber] land and naval Forces” to craft better decision processes and better civil-military and legal transparency balances.

Horror Vacui

10.1093/oso/9780190626013.003.0023 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Ozan O. Varol

Keyword(s):

Political Parties ◽

Domestic Politics ◽

Physical World ◽

Dense Material ◽

The Political ◽

Civilian Leaders ◽

Military Relations ◽

The Military ◽

Coup Attempt

Nature, Aristotle said, abhors a vacuum. He argued that a vacuum, once formed, would be immediately filled by the dense material surrounding it. Aristotle’s insights into vacuums in the physical world also apply to civil-military relations. Where a vacuum exists in domestic politics because the political parties are weak, unstable, or underdeveloped, the dense material that is the military may fill the void by staging an intervention into domestic politics. But when, as in the July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, the civilian leaders themselves hold densely concentrated authority—in other words, are powerful, popular, and credible—their attempts to keep the military at bay are far more likely to succeed. Without a vacuum there is no void for the military to fill.

Military Defection and the Arab Spring

10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.26 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Risa A. Brooks

Keyword(s):

First Generation ◽

Arab World ◽

Military Leaders ◽

Explanatory Factors ◽

Revolutionary Movements ◽

Military Relations ◽

The Arab Spring ◽

The Impact ◽

And Diffusion

The protests that began in Tunisia in December 2010, and quickly spread across the Arab world, have drawn significant attention to the impact of militaries and coercive institutions on protests and revolutionary movements. The actions of the militaries were a central determinant of the outcomes of the uprisings of 2010–2011. In Tunisia and Egypt the decision by military leaders to abstain from using force on mass protests to suppress them led to the downfall of the countries’ autocrats. In Syria and Bahrain, militaries defended political leaders with brutal force. In Yemen and Libya, militaries fractured, with some units remaining allied to the leader and using force on his behalf and others defecting. In still other states, leaders and militaries were able to forestall the emergence of large, regime-threatening protests.To explain these divergent outcomes, scholars and analysts have looked to a variety of explanatory factors. These focus on the attributes of the militaries involved, their civil-military relations, the size and social composition of the protests, the nature of the regime’s institutions, and the impact of monarchical traditions. These explanations offer many useful insights, but several issues remain under-studied. These include the impact of authoritarian learning and diffusion on protest trajectory. They also include the endogeneity of the protests to the nature of a country’s civil-military relations (i.e., how preexisting patterns of civil-military relations affected the possibility that incipient demonstrations would escalate to mass protests). Scholars also have been understandably captivated by the aforementioned pattern of military defection-loyalty, focusing on explaining that observed difference at the expense of studying other dependent variables. The next generation of scholarship on the uprisings therefore would benefit from efforts to conceptualize and investigate different aspects of variation in military behavior.Overall, the first-generation literature has proved enormously useful and laid the foundation for a much richer understanding of military behavior and reactions to popular uprisings in the Arab world and beyond.

The New Civil-Military Relations

American Political Science Review ◽

10.1017/s0003055400124177 ◽

1961 ◽

Vol 55 (1) ◽

pp. 53-63 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Gene M. Lyons

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Minimum Cost ◽

The United States ◽

Fundamental Principle ◽

Civilian Control ◽

Military Establishment ◽

Military Leaders ◽

Military Relations ◽

Historically the character of civil-military relations in the United States has been dominated by the concept of civilian control of the military. This has largely been a response to the fear of praetorianism. As recently as 1949, for example, the first Hoover Commission asserted that one of the major reasons for strengthening the “means of exercising civilian control” over the defense establishment was to “safeguard our democratic traditions against militarism.” This same warning was raised in the report of the Rockefeller Committee on defense organization in 1953. While the overriding purpose of the committee's recommendations was to provide “the Nation with maximum security at minimum cost,” the report made it clear that this had to be achieved “without danger to our free institutions, based on the fundamental principle of civilian control of the Military Establishment.” Finally, during the debate on the reorganization proposals of 1958, senators and congressmen used the theme of a “Prussianized” military staff to attempt to slow down the trend towards centralization in the military establishment.Despite this imposing support, the concept of civilian control of the military has little significance for contemporary problems of national security in the United States. In the first place, military leaders are divided among themselves, although their differences cannot be reduced to a crass contrast between dichomatic doctrines. Air Force leaders who are gravely concerned over the need to maintain a decisive nuclear retaliatory force are by now acknowledging the need to develop a limited war capability.

Between Mars and Mammon; the East India Company and Efforts to Reform its Army, 1796–1832

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x00013388 ◽

1990 ◽

Vol 33 (2) ◽

pp. 385-401 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Douglas M. Peers

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

East India Company ◽

British India ◽

Early Nineteenth Century ◽

Military Conflict ◽

History Of ◽

The One ◽

Military Relations ◽

Anglo Indian

The history of the East India Company's rule of India is marked by sporadic outbursts of civil-military conflict. It was not unknown in India for European officers to down tools and commit acts that bordered on outright mutiny. Perhaps this could be expected when, on the one hand, the Company, as a commercial body, sought to maximize its profits, while on the other, the army was essentially a mercenary force, ever grasping for a larger slice of the fiscal pie. If, however, we penetrate deeper into the labyrinth of their relations, we find that the issues at stake lose their simplicity. In the early nineteenth century, a third group came into play, further confusing the state of civil-military relations in India. The Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, which had incorporated military attitudes into the operating system of British India, had begun to assert itself. Through such spokesmen as Thomas Munro, John Malcolm, Charles Metcalfe and Mountstuart Elphinstone, an increasingly militarized rule of British India was put forward, angering the court of directors and allowing the officers to mask their private interest under the guise of the national interest. This ideology of militarism, however, must be firmly placed within the context of nineteenth-century British India for it bore little resemblance to those strains of militarism witnessed elsewhere.

Caretaking Democratization

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190620967.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Renaud Egreteau

Keyword(s):

Domestic Politics ◽

Armed Forces ◽

Political Actors ◽

Economic Transformations ◽

Army Officers ◽

Aung San Suu Kyi ◽

Military Relations ◽

Hybrid Regime ◽

This book examines the political landscape that followed the 2010 elections in Myanmar and the subsequent transition from direct military rule to a semi-civilian, ‘hybrid’ regime. Striking political, social, and economic transformations have indeed taken place in the long-isolated country since the military junta disbanded in March 2011. To better construe – and question – what has routinely been labelled a ‘Burmese Spring’, the book examines the reasons behind the ongoing political transition, as well as the role of the Burmese armed forces in the process. The book draws on in-depth interviews with Burmese political actors, party leaders, parliamentarians, active and retired army officers. It also takes its cue from comparative scholarship on civil-military relations and post-authoritarian politics, looking at the ‘praetorian’ logic to explain the transitional moment. Myanmar’s road to democratic change is, however, paved with obstacles. As the book suggests, the continuing military intervention in domestic politics, the resilience of bureaucratic, economic and political clientelism at all levels of society, the towering presence of Aung San Suu Kyi, the shadowy influence of regional and global powers, and the enduring concerns about interethnic and interreligious relations, all are strong reminders of the series of elemental conundrums which Myanmar will have to deal with in order to achieve democratization, sustainable development and peace.

Iran: Imperial and Republican Civil–Military Relations

10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1828 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Ahmed S. Hashim

Keyword(s):

Domestic Politics ◽

Armed Forces ◽

Officer Corps ◽

Military Forces ◽

Senior Officer ◽

The Face ◽

Power Centers ◽

Military Relations ◽

Iran has traditionally been troubled by unstable civil–military relations throughout its history. In the past, even before the emergence of the academic study of civil–military relations, Iranian imperial monarchs attempted, but often failed to ensure complete oversight of their military forces, due to the nature of imperial rule with its multiple power centers, and to the existence of myriad military forces that were often not under the monarch’s control. The rise of a centralized state in the early 20th century under Reza Shah ensured the emergence of stability in civil–military relations by means of carrots and sticks. Under Mohammad Reza Shah (r.1941–1979), early civil–military relations were quite unstable due to political turmoil and the young ruler’s lack of confidence; in subsequent years, he managed to cement his control over the military by means of patronage, insulation from domestic politics, and stringent oversight of the senior officer corps. The Iranian revolution (1978–1979) succeeded, to a large extent, due to the Shah’s own failures and those of the senior officer corps, both of which were paralyzed in the face of massive political and social turmoil. The successor state, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) achieved control over the armed forces through ideological control and oversight and the creation of institutionalized parallel military structures. Nonetheless, the IRI has faced and continues to face instability in civil–military relations due to war, domestic political and socioeconomic crises, and foreign pressures.