The Missing Piece of the Puzzle: The EMASYA Protocol and Civil-Military Relations in Turkey

The civil-military relations literature on Turkey focuses predominantly on the guardianship role of the Turkish military, its interventions, and the role of the National Security Council as the main institutional mechanism of military tutelage. Yet, the existing studies lack a much-needed focus on the law enforcement or policing missions of the Turkish military. To fill this gap, this study discusses the EMASYA Protocol ( Emniyet Asayiş Yardımlaşma or Security and Public Order Assistance), a secret protocol signed in 1997. Emerging in the context of political instability and military tutelage of the 1990s, the Protocol enabled the military to conduct internal security operations without permission from the civilian authorities. This paper argues that the EMASYA Protocol provided a sphere of “reformulated new professionalism” for the Turkish military, enabled it to specialize in the war against rising internal threats such as reactionary Islam and Kurdish separatism, and created anomalies in civil-military relations in Turkey.

Civil–Military Relations and Russia’s Post-Soviet Military Culture: A Belief System Analysis

This article studies the role of military culture in defense policymaking. It focuses on Russia’s post-Soviet civil–military relations and military reform attempts. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s armed forces were in a state of despair. Despite having relative institutional autonomy, the military neither made itself more effective before minister Serdyukov nor tried to overthrow the government. The paper uses the advocacy coalition framework’s belief system approach to analyze data from military memoirs, parliamentary speeches, and 15 interviews. The research shows that the military’s support for institutional autonomy, combined with its elites’ self-serving bias, critically contributed to what I term an “imperfect equilibrium” in Russian civil–military relations: the military could not reform itself and fought back against radical, though necessary, changes imposed by civilian leadership.

Germany: An Army in a Democracy in an Epoch of Extremes

The German soldier and German politics in the second decade of the 21st century face the challenges of a deteriorating international system as well as the reappearance of integral nationalism at home and abroad. The security-building roles and missions of the German armed forces in the three decades since unity are being reoriented to alliance collective defense as well as security building amid great friction with sources near and far. These phenomena in their variety threaten the civic and multilateral tenets of German statecraft as well as fundamental military standards and defense organization since 1949, and in particular, since unification in 1990. Specifically, the constants of postwar German democratic civil–military relations—the citizen in uniform, both bound and empowered by Innere Führung, serving in arms in a force firmly located in European and alliance structures but with a low profile at home, undergirded by both legal and social preferences—have had to withstand multiple blows of late. Some of these blows have been a result of unintended consequences of various policies or nonpolicies articulated without sufficient regard for current context; some as a result of unforced errors by leaders relying on outdated assumptions; and some as intentional provocations amid a fraying political consensus. While the German defense establishment—civilian and uniformed—has thus far mostly mastered these circumstances, the strain on German democratic civil–military relations is unmistakable. Thus, Germany’s civil–military relations face the test that they have well surmounted in the past, that is, to have a good democracy and a good army at the same time. The Bundeswehr’s 2020 deployment amid the coronavirus crisis, alongside discussions about a corona dividend in times of exploding state deficits, seems to have boosted soldiers’ popularity, and thus has opened a new facet of civil–military relations. However, the Bundeswehr must be careful not to foster a self-image of camouflaged civilian service or to create an identity crisis of its Afghanistan veterans serving for months as attendants in retirement homes. The public debate and official reflection manifest at best a mediocre comprehension of the needs of the soldier and the imperative to find a usable past for soldiers asked to defend democracy against its many enemies, without falling prey to militarism and integral nationalism. Innere Führung remains the valid heritage of the German soldier, even—or perhaps especially—for those who are asked by duty and fate to risk their lives in combat.

Tunisian Military and Regime Change

This paper has several research objectives. They are related to the description of the position of the military in the non-democratic regime in Tunisia, as well as to the clarification of its role in the overthrow of the regime, that is, to the identification of the causal factors that determine the military role during uprisings. The purpose of this paper is to show that the support of the military or its neutral position during such uprisings represents necessary condition for success of transition from a non-democratic regime. Applying two-level model of analyses based on the strategic approach to transition, we concluded that the nature of civil-military relations in the previous regime and the nature of protest determine the role of the military in the uprisings. In other words, the character of the previous non-democratic regime and the initiators of transition settle the model and the results of transition, and its consolidation.

Shifting the US-Myanmar Relations under Trump Administration and its Geopolitical Implication

This paper aims to analyze the shifts in the US-Myanmar relations during Trump administration compared to that of Obama administration, what factors affect such shifts, and how they posit important geopolitical implication. Under Trump administration, the US-Myanmar relations largely revolved around the Rohingya crisis, which shaped the relations between the two nations ‘substantially uncomfortable’. The factors affecting the changing relationship are the temporal dimension of Rohingya crisis, civil-military relations under NLD government, as well as Trump’s ‘American First’ foreign policy, which contributed to the declining of strategic engagement towards Indo-Pacific region where Myanmar is located. This caused an important geopolitical implication: the growing Chinese influence in Myanmar.

‘Stranger to Relate yet Wonderfully True’

Building on the preceding chapter’s effort to study war and territorial conquest from the vantage point of peninsular India, this chapter focuses on the Madras presidency at war against the sultans of Mysore (1780–4). In stark contrast to the muted resistance offered by the civilian government of Bombay, when confronted with a vastly expanded military challenge, the Madras civilian power completely imploded. The belligerent Governor George Macartney struggled to wrest control against encroachments over his civilian authority from military commanders, an overweening Bengal administration and the inveterate hostility of the rulers of Mysore. These fissiparous struggles were not merely confined to the high politics of colonial administration. Ideologues like Henry Malcolm argued for the complete inversion of the ideology of civilian control of the military, especially for the local administration in Madras presidency. Taken together—the complete breakdown of civil–military relations at the highest levels of the Madras presidency and the view from the margins of local administration—the experiment of placing the military well above and beyond the civilian components of early colonial rule had taken deep roots in peninsular India.

A kingdom with many internal facets: power, politics and instability in a post-colonial state. Ramifications for public stability

Lesotho offers an exciting case study for the analysis of the interface between power, politics and instability. Since gaining its independence from Britain in 1966, Lesotho has over the last five decades been plagued by persistent political instability that has paved way for the breakdown of the rule of law, gross human rights violations, underdevelopment and insecurity where at times the security sector like the Lesotho Defence Force has taken over several key institutions in the country. Political instability in the tiny kingdom has been a daunting agenda for all concerned actors, including political parties, civil society, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and other continental stakeholders. While the security sector of any state is of importance, it becomes problematic if it becomes involved in a state’s political affairs. The repercussions of such trajectories of governance have been quite profound for democratic stability and security. Using a qualitative methodology, supplemented by secondary data, this article seeks to unearth Lesotho’s political instability, the role of its security forces and continental actors in its continuous internal governance crisis post the colonial era. The article rightfully shows that The power, possessed by both the military and police, has made them have a robust role in state affairs rather than institutions, mandated to safeguard Lesotho’s citizens. The legitimacy of the security sector underpins restructuring, transparent and accessible security sectors enhance healthy civil-military relations. Restructuring a state’s security and political dynamic reforms is not an easy task, it requires a state managerial and dedication prowess and assistance from different role players and therefore an ample amount of time and effort is invested in the coordination of this process.

A versatile organisation: Mapping the military's core roles in a changing security environment

What roles are military institutions expected to play in today's rapidly changing security environment? How are they supposed to interact with the society they are tasked to protect? These questions have been posed by classical military sociologists as well as by a newer generation of scholars. Yet so far, a comprehensive mapping of the military's potential roles in contemporary society is missing. In this article we contribute to an update of this debate by providing a categorisation of the different roles and tasks that the military institution plays in current industrialised democratic states. We identify three core roles, each divided into subroles, by drawing on an extensive reading of 70 National White Papers and Security Strategies from 37 OECD member states: (collective) defence, collective security, and aid to the nation. We analyse how these roles and tasks influence recent configurations in civil-military relations. This study thereby contributes with: (1) a useful illustration of the military's shifting roles and tasks in contemporary society; (2) increased understandings of how the different roles impact civil-military relations and related to this; and (3) a practical starting point for further analyses of the military organisation's internal challenges related to its, at times, contradictory roles.