Military Patronage Research Articles

INTERNATIONAL PATRONAGE DURING CONFLICTS AND WAR

The article examines the latest challenges to the system of collective security associated with political instability and economic turbulence. Their key prerequisites, factors and features of a global nature are determined. The origins of international conflicts are shown, with an emphasis on armed conflicts that turn into wars according to the logic of their progression and the practice of response. Examples of the international reaction to the actions of the aggressor in the form of political and economic, sectoral and individual sanctions and multi-channel internationally consolidated and bilateral aid to the country suffering from the war are given. The role of international patronage in the system of measures and tools to help countries that have become objects of military aggression is shown. The essential features of international patronage are defined as the establishment of a voluntarily initiated regime of care for objects in force majeure circumstances to eliminate or neutralize internal and external threats to their existence and development. Its types (political, economic, financial, social), types (internal, external), objects (state, regions, cities, sectors, enterprises, infrastructure, projects), subjects (foreign countries, international organizations, corporations, public organizations, political parties, individuals) and forms (direct aid, grants, consulting, mass media support, lobbying, monitoring) are distinguished and identified. Using the example of Ukraine, projects of international political, economic and military patronage over cities and regions that have undergone significant destruction are illustrated.

Aesthetic (dis)pleasure in a war zone: complexities of US-military patronage of an ‘enemy’ Iraqi artist

ABSTRACT What happens when an Iraqi artist is commissioned by the US military in the middle of military conflict? This article examines the self-contradictory characteristics of the unexpected artist-patron relationship in 2003 between Iraqi sculptor Khalid Alussy and the 4th Infantry Division amid the Iraq War (2003–2011). This academically unexamined case presents an extraordinary relationship that merges destruction, creativity, mourning, cooperation, and subjugation. Alussy ultimately created a monument which elegises the deaths of US soldiers, for the division's base in Fort Hood, Texas using bronze harvested from statues of Saddam Hussein. These Hussein statues had also been made by Alussy. The article traces how this US Iraqi, artistic collaboration snowballed into a heart-warming myth online, before delving into the far more complex and unpleasant realities. The memorial may look straightforward and realistic, but it is a mirage of comfort, containing layers of conquest and suppression. Whilst there is ample scholarship on military aesthetics, propaganda, and art from conflict zones, this contribution presents an extraordinary case of military patronage of a local artist in the midst of warfare. This article uncovers the contradictory and exploitative processes that transform invaders into supposed benefactors and (potential) enemies into creators through art.

Ten years after the Ivorian Civil War (2002–2011): Reassessment of the conflict

ABSTRACT This article seeks to provide an update on the scholarship that has emerged concerning the civil war in Cote d’Ivoire (2002-2011) in the post-conflict decade, and to assess it vis-a-vis subsequent developments in national Ivorian politics. The literature is analysed and categorised, including both traditional and modern approaches, with the principal objective of determining key views on the conflict that have been re-examined in the last 10 years, revealing how our knowledge of that conflict has been clarified in light of post-conflict political developments. The author reviews and explores conflict emergence explanations centred on ethnicity, institutional viability, economic dependency and foreign interference – the latter challenged by the latest analysis of trans-border regional supply lines and domestic civil–military patronage networks. Overall the article attempts to enhance existing assessments of the Ivorian civil war in terms of causes, its course and its aftermath.

Patrons and Personnel: The Foreign Determinants of Military Recruitment Policies

Why do some states develop conscript armies, whereas others rely on volunteers? Most theories of military design describe domestic elites as making decisions based on rational security demands or cultural understandings of what a military should look like. Contrary to these explanations, many states faced with the challenge of building a military are dependent on powerful military patrons with strong beliefs about how to design their clients’ militaries. When states that are building new militaries have foreign military patrons, they are likely to emulate their patron’s recruitment practices. Patrons with sufficient interest and will to engage in security force assistance use their influence to shape recruitment practices in new or postconflict states. This article describes the dynamics of military patronage as they relate to recruitment decisions and finds support for the argument using both original quantitative data and a brief case comparison.

Diplomats in Science Diplomacy: Promoting Scientific and Technological Collaboration in International Relations**

Diplomats in Science Diplomacy: Promoting Scientific and Technological Collaboration in International Relations**

Sahelistan? Military Intervention and Patronage Politics in Afghanistan and Mali

ABSTRACT The ‘Sahelistan’ discourse that conflates conflict dynamics in Afghanistan and Mali is widespread in Western media and policy circles. We argue that such representations contribute to the adoption of one-size-fits-all conflict management policies. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in both places, we also argue that these standard templates of intervention shape responses from local non-state armed actors, who manipulate foreign interveners for their own (violent) purposes in similar ways. Yet, we show that this convergence in armed group behaviour still manifests itself in important variations in widely different contexts, furthering strongmen autonomy in Afghanistan, while fostering armed group fragmentation in Mali.

Poselstwo od wojska koronnego na sejm warszawski 1683 r. jako przykład funkcjonowania patronatu wojskowego Jana III

At the end of January 1683 a sejm assembled in Warsaw, attended by a delegation from the Crown Army, re-ceived in the Chamber of Deputies on 27 February and then by Queen Maria Kazimiera on 2 March. The dele-gation was composed of 9 people, including eight officers – six of national and three of foreign recruitment. The delegation was headed by the commander of the royal cavalry regiment, Dapifer Regni Aleksander Polanowski. It was also him who on behalf of his colleagues, whom he mentioned by name, on 6 February signed for the received 9,000 zlotys from the treasury allocated for parliamentary allowances. Owing to this receipt, we were able to determine the previously unknown composition of the deputation from the Crown Army. This made it possible to conduct an analysis which showed that the emissaries of the Crown Army in 1683 remained in the circle of the military patronage of King Jan III, therefore the ruler could entirely rely on them. The fact that Jan III acquired influence over the military deputation was a warning to the anti-royal opposition that the Crown Army fully supported the monarch’s policy.

Paul Erickson. The World the Game Theorists Made. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 384. $35.00 (paper).

Paul Erickson. <i>The World the Game Theorists Made</i>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 384. $35.00 (paper).

Fighting Falcons over northern Iraq: a Kurdish perspective on F-16 fighters and regional security

America plans to sell F-16 fighters to Iraq’s central government in Baghdad, a step that evokes existential fears amongst many of the country’s Kurds who live in the autonomous Kurdistan region given the integral part the jets of Saddam’s air force played in the genocide against the Kurdish minority during the 1980s. The F-16s would indeed shift the currently relatively stable balance of power in favour of the central government especially in the light of the ongoing quarrels between the Kurds and Baghdad over oil and territory. Inspired by conversations with Kurdish officials and military, this observation points out that there already are F-16s in the Iraqi skies, Turkish ones who operate against the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). However, it should be remembered that with their geopolitically important multimillion dollar investments in Kurdistan, Turkey is interested in a strong Kurdish region. Thus, the armament of Baghdad could possibly result in an ever deepening Kurdish–Turkish relationship beyond economy. Jets that were used against one Kurdish group, the PKK, could indeed become a symbol of military patronage for the autonomous Kurdistan region.

The Mamluk Sultanate as a Military Patronage State: Household Politics and the Case of the Qalāwūnid bayt (1279-1382)

Abstract This article focuses on the conceptualisation of Mamluk socio-political organisation in late thirteenth and early to mid-fourteenth-century Egypt and Syria. Breaking free of the heuristic constraints imposed on Mamluk studies by the paradigm of the political elite as defined by the normative exclusivism of elite military slavery—the so-called Mamluk system—it demonstrates that apparent dynastic attitudes were no mere façade for that system but rather powerful representations of the Mamluk version of a long-standing regional tradition of socio-political organisation: the military patronage state. It is argued here that this tradition, with its focus on military leadership, patronage ties, household bonds, and unstable devolved authorities, coalesced between 1279 and 1382 in Qalāwūnid leadership over and monopolisation of Syro-Egyptian societies.

The Money Trail: A New Historiography for Networks, Patronage, and Scientific Careers

Money is everywhere in science. Yet historians have only rarely placed the money trail at the center of their analyses. The essays in this Focus section demonstrate that following the money offers a historiographical path for investigating a number of key issues across disciplinary boundaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on cases and materials relating to a number of scientific fields, including electrical engineering, aeronautics, agriculture, and paleontology, the essays examine the continuous role of money in industrial and military patronage, personal connections and networks, and spatial and geographical dimensions of science, as well as in relation to state funding and ownership. Together, the contributions demonstrate how following the money offers a way of overcoming hyperprofessionalism in the history of science.

Athena's retinue: nineteenth-century scientists embedded in the army

AbstractBetween 1860 and 1880, scientists in the United States, Argentina and Russia accompanied military expeditions on the northern Great Plains, in Patagonia, and in northeastern Asia. The extent to which the scientists were able to remain at arm's length from the slaughter of war is seen in the publications resulting from their travels. In the context of consolidating or extending national territory during the modern age, military patronage did not invalidate the research findings of attentive naturalists, who adhered to transnational disciplinary norms. There is only weak evidence to suggest that local prejudice determined the form of natural knowledge stemming from the expeditions.

Mathematical Models, Rational Choice, and the Search for Cold War Culture

A key feature of the social, behavioral, and biological sciences after World War II has been the widespread adoption of new mathematical techniques drawn from cybernetics, information theory, and theories of rational choice. Historians of science have typically sought to explain this adoption either by reference to military patronage, or to a characteristic Cold War culture or discursive framework strongly shaped by the concerns of national security. This essay explores several episodes in the history of game theory--a mathematical theory of rational choice--that demonstrate the limits of such explanations. Military funding was indeed critical to game theory's early development in the 1940s. However, the theory's subsequent spread across disciplines ranging from political science to evolutionary biology was the result of a diverse collection of debates about the nature of "rationality" and "choice" that marked the Cold War era. These debates are not easily reduced to the national security imperatives that have been the focus of much historiography to date.

Défense de la nation contre prospérité de la discipline : engagement militaire et institutionnalisation de la psychologie au Canada

This article contributes to our knowledge about the rise of the social and human sciences through an examination of military uses of psychology in Canada and this field sensibility to external demand. The national crisis caused by World War II and the Cold War were perceived by psychologists as sizeable opportunities to promote psychological expertise outside academe and to strengthen the social authority of their discipline and profession. By the way of military patronage and psychological contribution to National defense, psychological expertise then gained new symbolic and material resources. Does it mean that this field exogeneity undermine its disciplinary practices or knowledge production? It is said that this is an empirical question that bears no univocal answers.

Gray Matters: Social Scientists, Military Patronage, and Democracy in the Cold War

A renowned physicist told U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara in 1961 that while World War I might have been considered the chemists' war, and World War II was con sidered the physicists' war, World War III . . . might well have to be considered the social scientists' war. As new states emerged from the wreckage of European empires, Penta gon officials enlisted social scientists in the battle to contain the spread of Communism in the so-called emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This fusion of social science and statecraft reached its acme at the Special Operations Research Office (soro), a multidisciplinary research institute created in 1956 by the U.S. Army and stationed on the campus of American University in Washington, DC At soro, political scientists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists joined forces with military experts to unearth the political and social causes of Communist revolution, identify the laws governing social change, and clarify the scientific principles of psychological warfare. soro researchers connected social knowledge and military affairs, creating a hybrid form of expertise intended to help the United States win the battle for hearts and minds.1 In the 1950s and early 1960s, when the defeat of Communism seemed a matter of national survival, most social scientists accepted military-funded research as legitimate social science. But as opposition to the Vietnam War and to American militarism intensi fied in the late 1960s, a growing number of academic social scientists, public intellectu als, and policy makers condemned Pentagon-funded social scientists as technocratic social engineers and partisan ideologues. They accused researchers of sacrificing their intellec tual integrity to a warmongering, imperialistic national security state. In 1969 American University's administration exiled soro from its campus and severed the university's ties to the military.2

The Riddle of the Valley

Since the Second World War, the San Francisco Peninsula has demonstrated a capacity to produce path-breaking new technologies. Recognized globally as Silicon Valley, the region's prowess appears to be growing. At the end of the 1990s, it was the heralded centre of the dot.com boom. And after that bubble burst, the auspicious debut of Google established it as the standard-setter for Internet search engines. This remarkable record, and the wealth that it has spawned, has attracted legions of interpreters. In a nation and a world obsessed with technology-based economic development, everyone wants to know Silicon Valley's secret of success. But understanding the Valley is less a secret than a riddle: the relevant factors contributing to its performance are evident to any keen observer, but how do they fit together? What makes them work? And, for would-be imitators, how might they be replicated? This volume by Christophe Lecuyer provides a new and authoritative account of how the pieces came together to create Silicon Valley in the first place. Lecuyer contrasts his approach with those taken by Stuart Leslie, who accorded a crucial role to Stanford University and particularly military patronage, and by Anna Lee Saxenian, who emphasized how a productive regional network emerged from the decentralized, competitive structure of industry.1 While supporting aspects of these analyses, Lecuyer endorses the perspective of Alfred Marshall, whose writings on the formation of industrial districts accorded 'a central place to technological skills and manufacturing practices' (p. 4).

Extending modern cartography to the ocean depths: military patronage, Cold War priorities, and the Heezen–Tharp mapping project, 1952–1959

The first comprehensive map of any ocean basin—covering the North Atlantic region—was created in the US in the 1950s. Compiled by Bruce C. Heezen and Marie Tharp, researchers at Columbia University's Lamont Geological Observatory, the Heezen–Tharp physiographic map of 1957 was significant in several respects. It defined the large-scale physiological provinces of the seafloor, and highlighted its major physical features (including the Rift Valley of mid-oceanic ridge, which Tharp discovered). Military funding for oceanographic research in the early Cold War made possible extensive sea voyages that provided these Columbia researchers sea-floor depth profiles and other critical information; military secrecy persuaded Heezen and Tharp to adopt the physiographic approach when national security restrictions made new bathymetric maps ‘born classified’. But overlooked until now is that the Heezen–Tharp map also deeply depended on extensive support from Bell Labs, then laboring to install the first transatlantic telephone lines. Heezen's hope that the map would support the theory of the expanding earth over the resurrected theory of continental drift did not succeed. But the 1957 North Atlantic Physiographic Chart did reaffirm that representations of the seafloor, mediated by new technologies, fundamentally reflected changing motivations for studying the oceans.

The Airplane in American Culture (review)

This collection of essays is a long-overdue study in the field of aviation history. As the editor, Dominick Pisano, notes in his introduction, "New Directions in the History of Aviation," most work in this field has been "narrowly focused" (p. 10). This is due to a variety of reasons. Aviation history owes much to military patronage, which has significantly limited its scope and objectivity. Also, aviation historians often have behaved as "enthusiasts" rather than scholars (p. 8). As a result, the field has "remained virtually static in its aims and methods over the course of its history," (p. 2) and has failed to keep up with historiographical developments. This work seeks to broaden the focus of aviation history by exploring various social and cultural facets of the field.

Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences

The earth sciences expanded dramatically during the first decades of the Cold War. Their growth largely resulted from military patronage, for the earth sciences appeared vital to emerging weapons systems, such as guided missiles, and to the pursuit of anti-submarine warfare. The earth sciences were also seen as important for achieving US foreign-policy objectives. By the mid-1960s military funds had helped create myriad new academic institutes in the earth sciences, and military leaders joined with national security advisors in expanding space and oceanography as strategic fields. In the present paper, I explore the history and significance of this transformation. The prominence of the earth sciences after 1945 was unmatched since the wave of geological exploration in the 1870s, and represents an important revival of federal support for the field sciences. But the particular form the rise of the earth sciences took had great implications for the institutional, intellectual, and professional character of the environmental sciences in the US. I argue that patronage for military-relevant fields in the earth sciences shaped the questions that researchers asked and valued, and limited their interactions with colleagues in the biological realms of environmental sciences research.

Project Camelot and the 1960s Epistemological Revolution

Project Camelot, a military-sponsored, social science study of revolution, was cancelled in 1965 amidst international and national discussion about the study's political implications. Subsequently, Camelot became the focus of a wide-ranging controversy about the connections between Cold War politics, military patronage, and American social science. This paper argues that following Camelot's demise, efforts to rethink the politics-patronage-social science nexus became an important part of what historian Peter Novick has called `the epistemological revolution that began in the 1960s'. Novick claims that `strictly academic' considerations provided the categories of analysis that challenged the scholarly mainstream's commitment to objectivity and related ideals, like value-neutrality and professional autonomy. In contrast, my analysis - which discusses post-WWII military patronage for the social sciences, Camelot's origins and cancellation, the ensuing controversy, and some long-term implications of this controversy - underscores the centrality of political developments and political concerns in that epistemological revolution.