Band of Brothers or Band of Others?: Rhetoric, Veterans, and Civil Rights Fights in Germany and the United States

Research suggests that marginalized groups can use military service to win greater governmental and social acceptance by using civic republican rhetoric, however, conditions in which claims-making rhetoric is coercive are underspecified. Because rhetorical effectiveness requires sympathetic ears, we examine the influence of (1) expectations and political efforts of marginalized group members seeking greater acceptance, (2) whether majority group economic status is outpacing marginalized groups seeking improved treatment, and (3) whether marginalized groups have influential military veterans from majority groups as allies. We apply these factors to explain the claims-making failure of German Jews following the First World War and the success of African Americans after the Second World War. From the African American case, we also conclude that military service led to greater socio-political inclusion and rights based on development of future political actors through leadership development processes and inter-group contact, especially regarding Presidents Truman and Eisenhower.

The “Supermen” Club: Organizational Secrecy and Masculine Identity in an Israeli National Security Organization

How does secrecy shape narratives of militarized hegemonic masculinity? This article assesses a gap at the intersection between theories of masculinities and organizational secrecy. Supported by 15 interviews with current and former male workers of a covert section of an Israeli national security organization, it argues that secrecy is experienced as both an external hurdle and a central component to the way that men internalize masculinity. Unable to access social capital outside the security organization, the respondents of the study construct a social field inside it through which they can assert their masculinity. They do so by conceptualizing their jobs, themselves, and the organization through a prism of sacrificial warriorhood, and actively incorporate secrecy’s constraints into a narrative of “super-men”. This study thus examines secrecy in the context of a militarized environment, showing the experience of masculinity and a perceived lack of power-access among members of a dominant group.

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.

“You haven’t gone out and done anything”: Exploring Disabled Veterans Experiences in Higher Education

Through the analysis of 24 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, this study explored the process through which disability affects veterans’ experiences in the university classroom and their social relations with traditional students. Using inductive-exploratory qualitative methods, this study builds upon the sociological understanding of veterans’ experiences in higher education. Findings from this study tentatively suggest that while disability related fear/hypervigilance, stigma, and anxiety significantly impact veterans’ comfort levels when engaging with traditional students, veterans also externalize the impact of their disability as a social artifact of their military service. More research is needed to determine if the interaction of disability and artifacts of service decreases veterans’ ability to integrate well with traditional students in classroom settings.

Managing Threats on the High Seas: The Role of Naval Bases on Reducing Maritime Piracy

Weak coastal states often lack an adequate, sustained naval presence to monitor and police their territorial waters. Unpatrolled waters, both territorial and otherwise, may provide pirates with substantial financial opportunities that go far beyond any single country. Maritime piracy costs the global economy on average USD 24 billion per year. This research explores the impact of naval bases on acts of piracy to determine if naval presence can decrease the likelihood of piracy. To examine this important economic and national security issue, our research employs a zero-inflated negative binomial regression model. We also rely upon a newly constructed time-series dataset for the years 1992–2018. Our study shows that the presence of naval bases is essential in helping maritime forces combat piracy. Policymakers searching for options to combat piracy should find the results of this study especially useful in creating prescriptive approaches that aid in solving offshore problems.

Neither a Conscript Army nor an All-Volunteer Force: Emerging Recruiting Models

This article develops an analytical model of force composition that combines the advantages of conscription with those of an all-volunteer force. Using Israel as a hypothesis-generating case study, it argues that mandatory military service has undergone changes centered on five key organizing principles: selective conscription, early discharges, elongated lengths of service, forms of voluntary service and differing pay-scales, and other material and non-material incentives for conscripts. These principles are “grafted” onto conscription creating a hybrid, “volunteer-ized” model. The utility of the theoretical model lies in explaining how these principles facilitate mobilizing a needed number or recruits, providing an adequate level of military expertise, as well as maintaining the legitimacy of the armed forces by meeting domestic social, economic, and political expectations about its composition and the use of personnel at its disposal. The system is adaptive and flexible, as shown through the comparisons throughout the paper.

Finnish Military Officer Identities and Micro-Political Resistance

Drawing on the concept of micro-political resistance, this article presents an empirical analysis of how officers of the Finnish Defence Forces challenge, resist, and reinforce the collective military identities constructed within the prevailing organizational discourses. There is a need for identity work to meet the norms and ideals of the military, but individuals can also work as change agents. Micro-political resistance derives from feelings of otherness as well as conflict between the dominant organizational identities and individuals’ personal interests. This study presents a thematic discourse analysis based on texts written by 108 officers and 12 interviews on the theme of “the ideal soldier.” Three main discourses of micro-political resistance were identified: perceiving the profession of a military officer as a job like any other rather than a sacred calling, putting family first, and being oneself instead of embodying the traditional masculine ideal soldier.

Risk Factors Explaining Military Deaths From Suicide, 2008–2017: A Latent Class Analysis

Military suicide prevention efforts would benefit from population-based research documenting patterns in risk factors among service members who die from suicide. We use latent class analysis to analyze patterns in identified risk factors among the population of 2660 active-duty military service members that the Department of Defense Suicide Event Report (DoDSER) system indicates died by suicide between 2008 and 2017. The largest of five empirically derived latent classes was primarily characterized by the dissolution of an intimate relationship in the past year. Relationship dissolution was common in the other four latent classes, but those classes were also characterized by job, administrative, or legal problems, or mental health factors. Distinct demographic and military-status differences were apparent across the latent classes. Results point to the need to increase awareness among mental health service providers and others that suicide among military service members often involves a constellation of potentially interrelated risk factors.

Sexual Arenas, Alcohol (Ab)use, and Predatory Leadership: Facilitators of US Military Sexual Violence

Scholars argue that, historically, military women have not been considered equals to men in kinship and, therefore, have and will likely continue to experience more violence and greater fear of violence. The All-Volunteer Force (AVF) may even foster military sexual violence through sexual arenas in work-home spaces, alcohol (ab)use fueling sexual encounters between colleagues, and predatory leadership. This exploratory, grounded theory study captures insights of women veterans ( n = 20) entering service between 1964 and 2016. Full inclusion is alleged, yet military women are objectified and “othered,” targets of sex-based attention, predation, and violence. From these data, military sexual violence (MSV) characterizes the AVF. To mitigate this, a renewed commitment to the US military’s historical ideal of altruistic care is necessary to realize the full inclusion of women and reduce if not eliminate military sexual violence.