The changing norms of civil and military and civil-military relations theory

Abstract

The dichotomy between civil and military is well-established in international political practice. International law, international order, and war are but some of the institutions that rely upon making a distinction between civil and military. The distinction, arguably, is also central for analyses of conflicts worldwide. Almost daily, we are fed stories of atrocities against civilians in conflict-ridden parts of the world. In academic discourse, similarly, several fields of study including most of the debate centering on interpreting modern war relies upon a distinction between civil and military. Both research and practice, however, tend to treat these categories as fixed and global. In this article, I argue – to the contrary – that what constitutes civil and military are malleable norms. This forms a particular challenge to analyses of civil–military relations and it calls for a different categorization of civil–military relations in Weberian ideal types.