Civil-Military Relations in Asia

Abstract

The social science literature on civil-military relations—a concept that encompasses the entire range of interactions between the military and civilian society at every level—falls into a sociological and a political science strand. The former is concerned primarily with the military as a social organization and the social functions of military systems, as well as the ways in which these factors have changed over time. The political science strand, in contrast, more narrowly focuses on political-military relations, that is, the structures, processes, and outcomes of the interactions between the institutions and organizations of the political system, on the one hand, and the armed forces and their members, on the other. As is the case with other continents, the study of civil-military relations in Asia is both normative and positive, often within the same work. While normative contributions ask what “good” civil-military relations should look like, positive analyses seek to describe and explain the actual relationship between the soldier and the state in Asia, examine the effects of military coups and military rule on other political or socioeconomic activities, and predict the consequences of political-military relations for the persistence and performance of political regimes. Perhaps as a consequence of the highly diverse cultures, colonial histories, political legacies, and modes of postcolonial governance, single-case studies and small-N comparative analyses dominate the field and systematic intra-regional comparisons and cross-national studies are rare. Since its inception in the 1960s, research on Asian civil-military relations in social science has moved in various directions: as elsewhere, its initial preoccupation was with the role of military institutions in processes of decolonization, modernization, and nation-building. In the 1970s, scholarship moved toward analyzing the origins of military coups d’état and policy consequences of military rule. A second line of research investigated party-military relations in Communist Party regimes, which operated under societal and institutional circumstances that were quite different from those in the non-socialist states. From the late 1980s onward, the so-called third wave of democratization inspired a new generation of civil-military studies, which illuminate the military’s role in the breakdown of authoritarianism and how young democracies struggle with the double challenge of creating and preserving a military that is strong enough to fulfill its functions, but that is subordinate to the authority of democratically elected institutions. In the 2000s, the study of security sector reform has become the most recent addition to the literature. This article is primarily concerned with the political science strand of civil-military research. It focuses on the positive literature and gives priority to research on Southeast Asia and East Asia, but also includes comparative works and collections that illuminate civil-military relations in South Pacific countries.