Search

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...

This article focuses on the post-2016 military reforms and examines the meaning of civilian oversight and control that these reforms have brought. For almost two decades, the establishment of civil...

Populist politicians surrounded by military allies are a frequent sight in countries that have experienced democratic backsliding. Populists sometimes seek protection in the military, who in turn l...

This article compares two military formats employed in late Medieval Europe. Italian cities contracted out entire military campaigns whereas European monarchies recruited mercenaries in their armie...

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...

Turkey has experienced a heterogeneous collection of social movements and protests. While scholars have given substantial attention to coups in this context, it remains unclear if the Turkish Armed...

The civil–military relations of the Trump Presidency became increasingly troubled. The President attempted not only to involve the military in partisan politics, but also in counter-protest operati...

The emergence of increasingly autonomous uninhabited systems has sparked understandable concern among policymakers, defence personnel, and academics, as well as civil-society. Quite reasonably, the...

Colonially inherited institutions are a key determinant of the regime type and economic outcomes of postcolonial countries. This study extends this claim to civil-military relations, arguing that f...

Civil–military tensions played a central role shaping the evolution of the British campaign during the Malayan Emergency. While the Briggs Plan has often been described as focusing exclusively on p...

During the war against Islamic State from 2014 to 2017 the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga became important local allies of the United States and its international partners, playing a significant role in the eventual defeat of Islamic State. In 2017, backed by the US and its Western allies, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) agreed plans to reform and modernize the Peshmerga. This article provides an analysis of this reform process. Reform is severely constrained by two problems. First, the continuing soft civil war between Iraqi Kurdistanâ s two main political parties, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), within which both parties view their maintenance of independent Peshmerga forces as central to their power and political survival. Second, the heroic-mythic status of the Peshmerga within Iraqi Kurdish society, which makes it difficult to convert the Peshmerga into a â normalâ military force. Reform efforts to date have not addressed these issues. Until such time as the deep political divide between the KDP and the PUK is addressed, Peshmerga reform is unlikely to make significant progressâ the military cart cannot be put before the political horse.

This article highlights the domestic effects of the ongoing changes in United Nations peacekeeping practice on troop contributing states from the Global South. It juxtaposes scholarship on stabiliz...

There is a burgeoning literature on how to deal with populism in advanced liberal democracies, which puts a strong emphasis on legalist and pluralist methods. There is also a new and expanding literature that looks at the consequences of coups d'etat for democracies by employing large-N data sets. These two recent literatures, however, do not speak to one another, based on the underlying assumption that coups against populists were a distinctly twentieth-century Latin American phenomenon. Yet the cases of Venezuela in 2002, Thailand in 2006 and Turkey in 2016 show that anti-populist coups have also occurred in the twenty-first century. Focussing on these cases, the article enquires about the extent to which military coups succeed against populists. The main finding is that although anti-populist coups may initially take over the government, populism survives in the long run. Thus, anti-populist coups fail in their own terms and they do not succeed in eradicating populism. In fact, in the aftermath of a coup, populism gains further legitimacy against what it calls repressive elites, while possibilities for democratisation are further eroded. This is because populists tap into existing socio-cultural divides and politically mobilise the hitherto underrepresented sectors in their societies that endure military interventions. Bilim Akademisi BAGEP Award Yaprak Gursoy's initial research on populism was supported by the Bilim Akademisi BAGEP Award given to promising Turkish scientists.

This article reconsiders the simple minority-majority dichotomy that surrounded the death of Colonel ʿAdnān al-Mālkī who was a Sunni killed by an ʿAlawi in 1955. Nevertheless, it was not the ʿAlawi...

This paper analyses the relationship between national security policymaking and the defence sector. The goal is to understand how a lack of attention to national security policymaking affects the d...

How do we explain variation in judicial assertiveness towards politically powerful militaries? This article argues that the judiciary’s willingness to assert itself against the military is contingent upon the type of military prerogative being challenged. Focusing on Pakistan, I find that courts are more willing to contest military prerogatives connected to the military’s political authority, than prerogatives connected to its institutional autonomy. This selective assertiveness is strategic, as concerns about military retaliation against the judiciary are more likely to outweigh judicial preferences, on questions of the military’s institutional autonomy than on questions of the military’s political authority. I test this hypothesis using an original dataset of 720 high court and supreme court judgments pertaining to military prerogatives from Pakistan. I then discuss a sample of judgments selected from the dataset to demonstrate how variation in judicial assertiveness is guided primarily by strategic concerns about the likelihood of military retaliation against the judiciary. In studying the interactions between the judiciary and the military in Pakistan, the article provides a new perspective on the sources of judicial assertiveness and restraint, and the role the judiciary can play in bringing militaries under civilian control in authoritarian and post-authoritarian states.

Women have historically been excluded from combat roles in state militaries. However, in recent years, women’s growing involvement in combat roles has sparked public debate. Currently, only a small...

Boubacar N’Diaye surveys the four-decade rule by military officers in Mauritania to understand civil-military relations and the failure of democratisation. Exploring the country under military lead...

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...

The growing strength, responsibilities, and involvement in internal security operations of the Nigerian armed forces have brought rapid increase in the number of military bases required to accommod...

There have been over 90,000 UN peacekeepers deployed around the world to 78 peacekeeping operations (PKOs) in over 125 countries since 1948. Some scholars have made the case that these missions hav...

The effectiveness of a military and its ability to successfully meet the needs of the state remains an integral part of political systems. Thomas C. Bruneau and Aurel Croissant embark on a thorough...

After WWII, Japan established a unique system of civil–military relations and civilian control of its Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), characterised by bureaucratic rather than political control. For mo...

In India, issues related to environmental governance have not been aligned to the military’s objectives except in a few cases. Since environmental change has not been recognised as a critical 'secu...

What is the impact of international peacekeeping missions for civil-military relations at home? This article unpacks the conditions that produce positive effects of peacekeeping participation on th...

Relations between African militaries, civilian authority and the public have undergone significant transformation over the past decades. Much of previous scholarship on civil-military relations ten...

Can the military bridge social schisms? Conventional wisdom supports this assumption. However, it seems that, at best, the effect of military service on bridging social schisms and promoting social...

Since the 1990s, the face of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping has changed drastically, with personnel contributions now coming predominantly from developing countries. Some of the most fragile stat...

The literature examining national militaries in the Arab world paints a near-universally bleak picture of their capabilities. Some argue that issues rooted in ‘Arab culture’ – so-called essentialist rationales – fatally undermine military effectiveness. Others assert that regime security concerns encourage leaders to actively politicize, coup-proof, and consequently weaken their military. This article challenges these literatures by demonstrating that UAE forces have repeatedly exemplified unusual levels of military effectiveness and sophistication in hostile campaigns. Using approaches from public policy studies (the Advocacy Coalition Framework), this paper investigates how the UAE military bucked the trend. The 1990 invasion of Kuwait was a ‘focusing event’ that prompted a rethink of existing approaches. Catalyzed, a key ‘policy entrepreneur’, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, changed approaches to training, unified federal militaries, and tested forces in challenging operations. Such findings undercut lingering essentialist critiques of Arab militaries, provide a potential pathway for other states to emulate, demonstrate that secure and motivated leaders can overcome coup-proofing concerns, and showcase the fruitful pollination of methodologies from public policy to security studies.

The National Resistance Movement government in Uganda after three decades in power still appeals to the legacy of the liberation struggle to reaffirm and legitimize its control over the state. The ...

This article explores how elite bargains affect external influence over civil-military relations. It argues that opportunities for security assistance arise from fragmented post-war coalitions and ...

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...

Data on Central and Eastern European anti-Communist revolutions are plagued by missing values, and a disproportional amount of scholarly attention has been given to nonviolent strategies adopted by...

Yemen’s defence structure presents a dynamic of “double hybridization”: hybridization due to the overlapping of tribal and military roles and loyalties, and hybridization because of the vague bound...

After gaining independence in 2006, Montenegro succeeded in establishing democratic civilian control over its armed forces in a short period of time, earning membership in NATO’s Partnership for Pe...

As the First World War came to an end, the U.S. Navy's leadership engaged in a bitter fight over the “lessons” of the war. Admiral William S. Sims and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels...

Parliamentary control of the armed forces is a core norm of the liberal security sector reform paradigm. Western governments and transnational actors have spread this norm to democratizing states t...

Emerging powers from the global south have generally opposed the use of force in international politics. However, taking a closer look at the area of peacekeeping, the international community’s mos...

This article analyses the struggle of civilians at the home front during the Pacific War (1941–45). The home front under analysis is the Huon Peninsula, a strategically important stretch of coastli...

Drawing on international political sociology, this article shows how the merger of development and security has become part of the ideational architecture that facilitates a new ‘feel-good’...

Two examples from recent British campaigns, the first from the Falklands War of 1982 and the second from the Iraq War of 2003, are used to consider attempts by civilian policy-makers to influence t...

For decades, Turkish policymakers have perceived the possible emergence of a Kurdish autonomous region or an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq as an existential threat to Turkey. However, from 2008 onwards, under the Justice and Development Party government, Turkish foreign policy towards the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) was gradually desecuritized. In light of Turkey?s experience, this paper explores the role of context in desecuritizing foreign policy issues in general and Turkish foreign policy towards the KRG in particular. It argues that the changing civil?military relations in Turkey as well as the country?s broader political and economic conjuncture allowed for the desecuritization of Turkey-KRG relations from 2008 onwards. The context also determined what kind of a desecuritization Turkey experienced towards the KRG. This work was supported by TUBITAK [grant number 114K354]. Publisher's Version

Why do some transitions of power from military rule occur violently while others do not? What effect, if any, does the international security environment have on how violent breakdowns of authorita...

Prior research has not established a clear relationship between democracy and insulation from coups d’etat, with very few studies illustrating robust findings on the subject. I contend that...

This article examines 20 civil-military variables across 21 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries to better understand military responses during the “Arab uprisings.” This proje...

This article seeks to explain the increasingly regressive (or illiberal) behaviour on the part of the Indonesian military. It focuses on the expansion of the Army’s Territorial Command stru...

The possibility for Croatia to obtain new fighter aircraft is not new, as this option has been publicly debated for at least a decade. A sudden decision to advance the acquisition of a limi...

Military officers often oppose political interference in the conduct of war. Political leaders respond by citing Clausewitz’s contention that “war is the continuation of politics with the addition ...

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...

Boubacar N’Diaye’s study of Mauritania under four decades of military rule is insightful and filled with masses of information. It covers several domains: geopolitical analysis, history, military s...