Military Society Research Articles

“War Is like a Blanket”

Abstract Despite the recent outbreak of violence and conflict, peace continues to be high on the agenda of the Kurdish political movement and many progressive Turkish intellectuals and activists. Based on qualitative research we conducted in Diyarbakır, Istanbul, London, and Berlin in 2015–16, we show that Kurdish activists have struggled to make the eradication of gender-based inequalities and violence central to the wider Kurdish peace movement, while Turkish women’s rights activists have increasingly recognized that the war against the Kurds, “like a blanket,” often papers over gender injustices. Both Kurdish and Turkish activists stress the necessity of understanding that a just and sustainable peace must include gender equality and that gender justice cannot be achieved in times of war. Thus feminist convergences in Kurdish and Turkish activism present peace and women’s rights as inseparable and generate the potential to challenge nationalist state power and the militarization of society.

Roman History

Let's begin at the beginning, with a book by Jeremy Armstrong that takes us back to the Early Republic, from the sixth to fourth centuries bce, examining the social and political transformations of that period and looking at the very foundation of the Roman state. The challenges of working on this early period are well known. Indeed, Armstrong early on says that he will eschew an overly optimistic, positivistic approach to the later literary account and make use of the substantial archaeological evidence. This archaeological evidence is crucial in drawing up a picture of the social and economic context of early Latium. However, the problematic literary accounts still often appear as rather too unproblematic framing narratives for what follows. Armstrong's account is chronological, taking us, as the title suggests, from the early ‘warlords’ to the military society of the Republic in the wake of the Latin Settlement in 338 bce. What we have here is a properly ambitious attempt to explain this crucial transition – but many problems and questions undoubtedly remain in the study of the early days of the Republic.

Addressing Corruption in Military Institutions

Military training places great emphasis on values such as integrity, and the armed forces usually hold a position of trust at the heart of the nation. However, abuses such as corruption in procurement, nepotism in officer promotion, abuse of position by general officers, infiltration by sectarian groups and use of military intelligence to smear adversaries show that the reality can be very different. In the last decade the issue has become more visible to militaries and policymakers; from scandals, social media exposure, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Corruption has also emerged as an international security issue. Military forces and Defense Ministries in many developing countries seek to limit corruption in their institutions. Incomprehension about corruption by international security assistance forces also inadvertently makes the situation worse. Based on extensive research, this paper reviews the nature of corruption in defense, describes corruption reform experiences in a range of different countries and describes how to set about such reforms. It describes several innovative approaches currently being explored by the military, international policy-makers and civil society, including approaches that quantitatively compare the corruption vulnerabilities of national militaries, and new ways to train military leadership in combatting corruption.

Military Professionalism and PTSD: On the Need for “Soldier-Artists”

In part one of this paper I discuss how issues of combatant misconduct and illegality have led military academies to become more focused on professionalism rather than on the tensions between military ethics and military training. In order to interrogate the relationships between training and ethics, between becoming a military professional and being a military professional, between military professionals and society, I turn to the work of Martin Cook, Anthony Hartle, and J. Glenn Gray. In part two I focus on Cook’s analysis of the conflict between the self-understanding and the expected behavior of military professionals. In part three I focus on Hartle’s analysis of how the experience of alienation by military professionals can help to create the culture of military professionals. In part four I introduce a new theory of professionalism based on the existential and phenomenological philosophy of J. Glenn Gray, which can help us to better understand the philosophical and psychological stakes of what it means to become a military professional. I conclude in part five by suggesting that the most pressing issue in the military is not a lack of professionalism, but a lack of trust.

МИРОВОСПРИЯТИЕ ПРЕДСТАВИТЕЛЯ АНГЛО-АМЕРИКАНСКОГО АРМЕЙСКОГО СОЦИУМА В ЗЕРКАЛЕ ФРАЗЕОЛОГИЗМОВ ВОЕННОЙ ТЕМАТИКИ

The article is devoted to research of worldview features of the British-American army society representative in the mirror of military phraseology. The relevance of the work stems from modern linguistics’ need for a comprehensive analysis of mentality problems of the military subculture members as an integral part of the national culture of the US and the UK. After studying the content of lexicographic sources, the author finds the presence of special images in the idioms, which are being used by representa-tives of the British-American military society, reflecting the specific worldview of the military personnel, formed under the influence of peculiarities of the army society and performed military tasks. On the basis of fundamental works by of V.A. Maslova “Lingvoculture” (2001), V.N. Telia “Russian phraseology. Se-mantic, pragmatic and linguocultural aspects” (1996), Yu.N. Karaulov “Russian language and linguistic personality” (2010) and other works, the author explores the issue of ethnic mentality reflection in native speakers phraseology and the social conditions of functioning of military phraseological units in British-American military subculture. The author not only emphasizes the common military phraseology and general phraseology of nation, but also the conditions of implementation of speech material in the language of professional soldiers, which allow us to consider the peculiarities of the soldiers’ language world picture, to reveal moral attitudes and values, to study ethnic mentality in the phraseological semantics. The article concludes that the studied phraseological units are mostly sarcastic, humorous, represent jocular attitude towards various aspects of soldier’s life, which confirms the fact of liberating power of laughter in deal-ing with stress and psychological tension.

Preface

Preface

Simon Creak. Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos

Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos Simon Creak Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015, xvi+337p.This book is a welcome addition to the literature on under-studied country, Laos, on also under-studied topic, sport in relation to nationalism and masculinity.Before looking at the evolution of sport and masculinity from a chronological perspective, Simon Creak reviews in the Introduction numerous theories and concepts related to physicality and masculinity-from Ana Maria Alonso's idea that physical practice strengthens national consciousness to Clifford Geertz's view of power in a theatre state exercised through spectacle, for instance-as a to present his overall argument that sport is the most significant means of substantializing notions of the body, masculinity, and the in modern societies (p. 12), since at the center of the book is empire building, making, and socialist construction.The first chapter discusses the case study of the indigenous game tikki, which resembles field hockey, and how French travelers' accounts transformed the game into a crucial element of what it meant to be truly Lao. Such accounts served the French colonial state's aim to differentiate the Lao territories and people from Siam and the Siamese. Indeed, the traveler-writers, young Lao researchers, and Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient scholars Paul Levy and Charles Archiambault, by writing about tikki a tradition and ritual, helped in creating an idea of Laos, justifying its constitution a French colony and later a distinct and independent nation (p. 50).Advancing through the French colonial period, chapter 2 presents the Vichy-era Lao Nhay cultural renovation movement (1941-45). While reading this chapter discovered that it was built a critique of my own work on the Lao Nhay movement and sports in Laos during the Vichy era (Raffin, 2005). The author contests my argument that sport development was secondary to the promotion of the Lao Nhay movement, whose function was to nurture a cultural and linguistic nationalism in response to the threat of Thai irredentism in Laos. Creak contends that both were important and complemented one another (p. 53). Although rightfully underlining that did not look at Lao-language sources, his own argument is based mostly on French sources. Adding a few examples from Lao-language sources on sport, a Lao-language novel by P. S. Nginn (who was a Lao Nhay member), a short excerpt of the memoir of Governor Jean Decoux stating that I decided to rely on Sports-Youth activities in this country to launch 'le movement lao' (p. 66), and mentioning the creation of sport clubs without talking about their activities, membership, etc. does not provide enough evidence to convince me that the colonial state's politics at the time promoted both sport and the Lao Nhay movement on equal footing and that subsequently the Lao Nhay movement was as much a physical awakening it was a mental or cultural one in Laos, too (p. 64).Overall, through this chapter the author stresses how the male body was the primary agent of Philippe Petain's National Revolution in the metropole and in Indochina, and how racial and right-wing ideologies well militarism shaped sport policies in Indochina. Such a militarization of society was carried out in the 1950s, with the National Youth and Physical Education Cadre School, or ENCJEP, being molded after the Vichy-era schools in Phan Thiet and Vientiane (p. 95).This leads to chapter 3, which discusses the militarization of masculinity in independent Laos during the 1950s. Projects are usually not carried out in a vacuum; hence, the sport policies of the 1950s show quite a few continuities with the World War II period, from the military-style choreography of human bodies to adapted Vichy-era uniforms for ENCJEP instructors and trainees and the use of the natural method for trainee parachutists. …

Japan's postwar military and civil society: contesting a better life

Japan's postwar military and civil society: contesting a better life

Organizing War and the Military in Society: A Systemic Perspective

Sociology can analyze war and warfare under different aspects, for example, as a problem of collective violence. It has rather neglected another important aspect of war, as in the fact that war is also always an organizational phenomenon. In the last few years, several studies on war have been focusing on this aspect by using or referring to Niklas Luhmann’s system theory. This paper looks at some of these aspects by critically asking how these sociological studies use Luhmann’s theory in their analysis of war or war-related social structures. Luhmann’s theory, particularly the theory of society based on the principle of functional differentiation, has a powerful explicative potential, particularly for the analysis of war and warfare. However, only a few studies are actually using Luhmann’s theory in an adequate way by situating the concepts at the correct analytical level. War and “military systems” should be analyzed as organizational structures in society which are managed, first of all, by the political system, a function system of society, and which by no means excludes a multiplicity of interdependen-cies with other systems. A systemic perspective should also take regional “expressions” of society such as “military systems” in specific states or groups of states into account.

Pierwsza wyprawa krzyżowa i jej następstwa

The Crusades were the first circumstance to demonstrate the cultural religious differences that divided the Germanized West from the Byzantine East. The barbarization of the West had ushered in a feudal military society which sought to justify its habitual pasttime. The Germanic code of civalry gave preeminence to the military hero; in this regard, the papacy itself was barbarized; there was nothing more disconcerning to the Christian of the Byzantine empire than the papal warfere and the idea of Crusade. The Byzantines, in contrast, did not consider death in battle glorious; nor did they they believe that being killed in the field by the infidel wasmartyrdom. The canons of the Orthodox Church stated that any one guilty of kiling in war must refrain for three years from taking Holy Communion as a necessary sign of true repentance.

Echoes of the Eurasian Steppe in the Daily Culture of Mamluk Military Society

AbstractThe Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria (1250–1517ce) was based on a military-political elite of Eurasian Steppe provenance, brought to the Eastern Mediterranean as youths. In the early decades of the Sultanate, most of these were Qipchaq Turks, but additional groups of Turks, Mongols and others were also well represented. The impact of the Eurasian military tradition has been long noted by scholars. However, some other aspects of the Inner Asian legacy have not been fully explored. In this paper I will look at a few characteristics of this cultural heritage: names, daily language, drinking habits, sports, hunting, religious rituals, and cultural awareness. The question of identity of the ruling strata of the Dawlat al-Turk/al-Atrak (“The Dynasty/State of the Turks), as the Mamluk Sultanate was then known in Arabic, will be broached at the end of the paper.

The Businessmen of Sveaborg: Civil–Military Interaction in an Atypical Eighteenth Century Nordic Military Town

Late eighteenth-century Helsinki was, due to the sea fortress Sveaborg, one of the most prominent Nordic military towns. At the same time, Helsinki differed from other Nordic military towns of the era because of its geography. The fortress Sveaborg, with its large military and civilian population, was built on islands unconnected to the mainland and thus was isolated from the outside world every spring and autumn due to the Nordic climate. The burghers of Helsinki, who had shops and taverns on the islands, were vital to the maintenance of the fortress. At the same time, their presence caused tension between the civil society and the military society, as the Army tried to control the burghers’ business and the burghers saw this as a violation of their economic rights. During the sixty-year period of the fortress’s construction (1748–1808), the situation evolved from an open conflict to a mutual agreement and, finally, led to the birth of a new kind of business circle that shook the borders between civil society and the military.

Between military–society and religion–military relations: different aspects of the growing religiosity in the Israeli defense forces

The growing religiosity in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in recent years is discussed by employing the broader lens of changes to the organization's overall manpower. First, the authors will indicate the dynamic and changing make-up of those serving in the IDF, in terms of both the socio-demographic characteristics of conscripted soldiers, and the motivation of individuals enlisting in the IDF. Second, it is demonstrated how a window has opened in the IDF, especially in combat units and command roles, for a growth in religiosity as a result of the gradual increase in the number of conscripts affiliated with the Zionist national-religious population.

South London's ‘Age-Fudgers’: Kitchener's Under-Age Volunteers

This article examines the numerous adolescents, many from the South London boroughs of Lewisham and Deptford, who lied about their age when joining the 11th (Lewisham) Battalion Royal West Kent Regiment in 1915. It focuses on their motivations for enlisting underage, highlighting the ‘push’ effects of particular features of working-class family life and the local labour market and the ‘pull’ effects of army recruitment policies and the increasing militarization of society as the war proceeded. Despite a minority causing the army major problems during the period of training, most of them conformed to military discipline and became useful recruits. Parents’ objections to the enlistment of their sons were muted, at least until the battalion was sent overseas in May 1916, after which the army authorities tried, not always successfully, to keep the under-aged out of the firing line.

Collective Agreement for Members of Slovenian Armed Forces: Reflections on Features of Collective Negotiations in the Public Sector for the Military Profession

In the Republic of Slovenia, the military is an organization that, like elsewhere in the European Union (EU), belongs to the public sector. The military service is a part of the public service sector and treated with a single collective agreement for the public sector. Despite certain theses (Janowitz 1977, Moskos 1986, Callaghan and Kernic 2003, Garb 2008) about the growing similarity of the military profession with professions in the public sector or other civilian occupations, work in the military is unique because of the specific role of the military in society. However, the military profession has sufficient similarities with other public sector professions in peacetime circumstances, so that soldiers should be granted the right to bargain the economic conditions of their employment. Through the process of collective bargaining, either within the public sector or individually, they could ensure compensation for the restrictions and requirements contained in the work of soldiers. The most important European institutions, in terms of safety and protection of the rights in the European region, are following the trend of changes in the security environment, new tasks of the military organization, the changed nature of the military profession in the postmodern era, and defend the concept of the “citizen in uniform”. Through resolutions, recommendations and memorandums, they are following the trend of increasing demands for the equalization of the rights of soldiers with the rights of other citizens. In particular, the right of unions to organize and the right for the possibilities to negotiate conditions of employment are emphasized. In the EU, there are two approaches regarding the possibility of bargaining on the economic conditions of employment for soldiers. Both provide the possibility of obtaining a special allowance for soldiers serving the country.

Civil Society from the Underground

In the 1980s, the “red border town,” as Potsdam was called then, was a center of the East German left-wing punk and skinhead movement; as a countermovement it soon became a location for right-wing extremist violence and counter-violence. To confront right-wing organizing, Antifa groups were established in Potsdam and other towns nearby, bringing the taboo topic of neo-Nazism as a social problem to the public’s attention. Initially, the SED state tried to downplay the confrontations as typical conflicts between youth groups; however, the newly founded Antifa groups were openly criminalized from the start. This course of action led to protests by both the left-wing alternative scene and the political civil rights movement. In memorandums and practical political actions, the Antifa groups fundamentally criticized the state, its failure to mold a socialist people, its militarization of society, and the state-enforced consensus of silence. In 1989, this critical approach became a part of the revolutionary, pro-democratic protest and reform movement, and Potsdam’s anti-Nazi League itself became an active factor of local revolutionary upheaval, a factor that has been largely ignored by research as well as memorial culture. This article uses the city of Potsdam as an example of how communication—a democratic process in itself—between subcultures and information transfer occurred between the center and periphery, that is, socialist capital, district town and surroundings. In addition, the article will also analyze the Antifa movement as a political and urban phenomenon of town environments and follows the question as to which locations the confrontations arose and why.

<em>Imtheacht an Dá Nónmhar agus Tóraigheacht Taise Taoibhghile</em>: an Early Modern Irish exemplary tale

The Early Modern Irish (EModIr) fianaigheacht text known as Toraigheacht Taise Taoibhghile (henceforth TTT) has not hitherto been the subject of any lengthy critical comment. The present paper will argue that TTT is an exemplary tale concerned with the relationships of vassals to their overlords and to one another. In addition, attention will be drawn to the text’s treatment of poets and poetry, in particular with regard to the privileged position of men of art in aristocratic military society and the proper use of praise and satire.

Civil-Military Relations in Peacebuilding: Boko-Haram in Perspective

The paper attempts examining the relationship between civilians in society and the military as a peace building institution in a violence prone polity. Thus, because of the relevance of the subject, the study focuses on contextualizing the contending dynamics of civil-military relations from the colonial period to date. Aspects of this relationship and the sometimes extreme tension characterizing it, hence thwarting efforts at mobilizing against the threat to the state as an organic entity by the Boko Haram insurrection are coherently brought to the fore as core themes within the article. The methodology sourced to sustainably direct the thrust of our argument leans heavily on the qualitative analysis (non numerical approach) of existing data. Findings confirm that a major bane of the war on terror is the discord between the military and civil society. This is in the sense that members of the civil society perceive themselves as victims of the arbitrary conduct of the military against them hence their refusal to partner with the military in confronting the menace of Boko Haram plaguing the country. This condition has negatively imperiled the harnessing of a robust civil-military relations that should have contributed in fashioning out an avenue for intelligence sharing that will naturally fortify the chosen strategy against the Boko Haram terrorist organisation. Therefore, the work advocates that if set goals are to be achieved, then international human rights precepts must be observed which should include strict adherence to the principles defining the central themes in the rules of engagements (ROE) as troops are deployed amidst the civil populace.

Factors influencing military recruitment in South Africa: the voices of Cape Town high school learners

This research sets out to establish how the youth in South Africa view military service, and what factors affect the ability of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to attract suitable recruits to staff its modern, technologically advanced military. Due to high levels of youth unemployment, South Africa has sufficient persons volunteering for military service. The problem lies with recruiting sufficient quality personnel with the right profile and abilities. To establish what affects enlistment, focus group discussions were conducted with learners from eight schools to determine what influences their career choices, what deters them from or attracts them to military service, their perception of the military profession, their knowledge of the military, and the influence of factors such as race and gender. The conclusion is reached that the SANDF is not considered an employer of choice due to poor service conditions, a decline in the prestige of the military, unfavourable aspects associated with military culture, a growing ‘knowledge gap’ and disconnect between the military and South African society, the estrangement of certain race groups, and the masculine nature of the military. These aspects need to be addressed if the SANDF wishes to attract learners with good academic credentials.

America's education deficit and the war on youth

America s latest war, according to renowned social critic Henry Giroux, is a war on youth. While this may seem counterintuitive in our youth-obsessed culture, Giroux lays bare the grim reality of how our educational, social, and economic institutions continually fail young people. Their systemic failure is the result of what Giroux identifies as four fundamentalisms: market deregulation, patriotic and religious fervor, the instrumentalization of education, and the militarization of society. We see the consequences most plainly in the decaying education system: schools are increasingly designed to churn out drone-like future employees, imbued with authoritarian values, inured to violence, and destined to serve the market. And those are the lucky ones. Young people who don t conform to cultural and economic discipline are left to navigate the neoliberal landscape on their own; if they are black or brown, they are likely to become ensnared by a harsh penal system.Giroux sets his sights on the war on youth and takes it apart, examining how a lack of access to quality education, unemployment, the repression of dissent, a culture of violence, and the discipline of the market work together to shape the dismal experiences of so many young people. He urges critical educators to unite with students and workers in rebellion to form a new pedagogy, and to build a new, democratic society from the ground up. Here is a book you won t soon forget, and a call that grows more urgent by the day.