Nature Of Civil-military Relations Research Articles

Tunisian Military and Regime Change

This paper has several research objectives. They are related to the description of the position of the military in the non-democratic regime in Tunisia, as well as to the clarification of its role in the overthrow of the regime, that is, to the identification of the causal factors that determine the military role during uprisings. The purpose of this paper is to show that the support of the military or its neutral position during such uprisings represents necessary condition for success of transition from a non-democratic regime. Applying two-level model of analyses based on the strategic approach to transition, we concluded that the nature of civil-military relations in the previous regime and the nature of protest determine the role of the military in the uprisings. In other words, the character of the previous non-democratic regime and the initiators of transition settle the model and the results of transition, and its consolidation.

Evolution of Civil-Military Relations in Bangladesh: A Comparative Study in the Context of Developing Countries

Although Civil-military relations have historically been recognized as a subject of study in the developed world, it has become a subject of study in the region since World War II due to military intervention in newly independent Third World countries. Although the country became independent on the basis of Civil-Military relations in the war of liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, the relations did not last long. Civil-Military relations have been the subject of renewed research in Bangladesh since the establishment of the military-backed government on 1/11, 2007. The study discusses the historical context of Civil-Military relations, the nature of Civil-Military relations in Bangladesh, various activities under military rule, and political leadership. The roles of the military in the formation of the country have been analyzed. The limitations of Bangladesh's Civil-Military relations have been discussed on the basis of the experiences gained through personal interviews of high-ranking Civil-Military members and general public. In this study has been described on the civil-military relations in the light of developing countries which have been under military rule for several decades during the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Therefore in carrying out this study, the civil-military relations in other developing countries and Bangladesh have been analyzed to understand the comparative aspects of civil-military relations at both local and global level. In addition, guidelines have been given on what should be the military-civil relations in the Political System of Bangladesh.

War and democracy: the legacy of conflict in East Africa

AbstractThe historical literature on statebuilding in Europe has often portrayed a positive relationship between war, state making and long-term democratisation. Similarly, a number of large-n quantitative studies have concluded that war promotes democracy – even in cases of civil war. Against this, a growing area studies literature has argued that violent conflict in developing countries is unlikely to drive either statebuilding or democratisation. However, this literature has rarely sought to systematically set out the mechanisms through which war undermines democracy. Contrasting three ‘high conflict’ cases (Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda) with two ‘low conflict’ cases (Kenya and Tanzania) in East Africa, we trace the way in which domestic conflict has undermined three key elements of the democratisation process: the quality of political institutions, the degree of elite cohesion, and the nature of civil-military relations. Taken together, we suggest that the combined effect of these three mechanisms helps to explain why Kenya and Tanzania have made significantly greater progress towards democratic consolidation than their counterparts and call for more in-depth research on the long-term legacy of conflict on democratisation in the African context.

The Normative Underpinnings of Pakistan’s Military

The number of books devoted to the study of Pakistan's military continues to grow, and with good reason. Any understanding of Pakistan's foreign and security policy begins with an appreciation of the role played by the country's premier political institution, the army. The volumes by C. Christine Fair, T.V. Paul, and Aqil Shah add richly to the literature on the army and militarism in Pakistan. As in other studies, the preoccupation of Pakistan's military with the perceived threat of India looms large in the authors' analyses. The adversarial nature of civil-military relations and the military's mercurial relations with the United States are also familiar themes. These three books stand apart, however, in the weight given to strategic culture in forming attitudes and behavior within Pakistan's military. Fair finds the army's ideology and mentality necessary for explaining the biases in Pakistan's foreign policy. Shah focuses on those beliefs and mindsets in the army that lead to its repeated interventions against civilian authority. Paul shows how the military's thinking, particularly about India, has prevented the country from emerging as a development-oriented state and has instead turned it into a garrison state.While employing a similar normative approach, the books frame their analyses around different leading questions. Fair asks why after almost seven decades Pakistan has been unable to accommodate itself to India's regional preeminence and has stayed committed to a revisionist foreign policy regarding Kashmir, despite the detrimental consequences. She finds the answer in Pakistan's apprehensions about its larger neighbor that are driven more by ideology than security. It is a military fixed on an image of India as an aggressive power whose aim is to dominate Pakistan and the South Asian region. Fair describes a military that uses Pakistan's founding national ideology, Islam, to unify the country against India's supposed existential threat.Paul is most concerned about why Pakistan has remained a security state and has failed to move toward becoming a sustainable democracy. After explaining the historical and sociological reasons behind this failure, he argues that in large part what perpetuates military dominance is war preparation that has siphoned off the country's scarce resources and distracted its citizens from demanding economic and social reforms. Paul points to the state's execution of U.S regional strategic objectives in return for aid as having disincentivized the political elite from taking the route to sustainable economic growth and political reform.Shah explores why the military has repeatedly intervened in the country's political affairs. Drawing on historical evidence, he traces the expansion of authoritarianism to nation-building problems and the conception of members of the army's higher officer corps about the appropriate institutional role of the military in national security, governance, and democracy. Shah finds that the perceived security threat from India, coupled with ethnic and linguistic cleavages during Pakistan's formative years, led to the military's rapid modernization and development at the cost of economic growth and civil-institution building. Periods of instability under civilian rule strengthened the army's belief in itself as the protector of the state against external threats, ethnic fragmentation, and incompetent and corrupt politicians.In the best sense, these are academic books. They ground their analyses solidly within the political science literature and international relations theory. All three books provide deep historical context and single out the importance of political events in the shaping of the military's frame of mind. Largely free of jargon, they are written for both a well-informed and general readership. Methodologically, there are commonalities. Fair and Shah are particularly interested in what the military says about itself as recorded in its own publications and through interviews. …

Comparative Study of Politics in Pakistan and Bangladesh: An Insightful Analysis

More often than not, the study of South Asia has been compartmentalized into the study of individual countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka. A comparative study of these countries is rare. Also rare is analysis of the future of Muslim-majority countries, such as Bangladesh and Pakistan, that are facing the critical problems of poverty, deteriorating law and order, and security. The latter omission is especially striking in contemporary times given the importance of the spread of Islam in South Asia and its effect throughout the world. This book fills the gap. Issues such as nationalism, military domination, the politics of language, the nature of civil-military relations, and religious extremism are addressed with considerable care and sophistication, particularly with reference to Pakistan and Bangladesh. The book is the outcome of a laborious comparative study of the history and evolution of both countries. One of the book’s major strengths is that it offers an enormous amount of secondary data that should prove fruitful for researchers conducting further analysis. Being a seasoned diplomat, William Milam’s analysis is based on his personal experience as well as on his observations and deep understanding of historical developments in South Asia. The book is accessible and presents a lively portrait of the structure and agency of politics in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Various interesting observations are scattered through the book. For example, both countries had initially attempted to establish a government based on democratic principles that upheld the secular approach of their founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and yet later they seemed to adopt the politics of religion based on undemocratic norms. Religion could not hold the two countries together and proved to be the biggest evidence of the weakness of the “two nation” theory, according to which Muslims in the Indian subcontinent demanded a separate homeland on the basis of their

The socio-economic relations of warfare and the military mortality crises of the Thirty Years' War

Michael Flinn wrote that the Thirty Years' War, fought in central Europe between 1618 and 1648, remains the classic study of the military causation of mortality crises.' Despite these words, the Thirty Years' War has rarely been studied from this perspective. In what follows, I seek to explain the enormous demographic loss experienced during the War. In doing so, I find that the socio-economic relations of warfare and, in particular, the nature of civil-military relations during the War form a key element of the explanation. The wider import of this paper is therefore that the new approach to the history of mortality, in which the contributions of social action and personal behaviour to mortality changes have been investigated and highlighted, is one which promises a significantly deeper and more successful account of the military mortality crises which punctuated the past and continue to afflict the present.

Samuel Huntington and Communist Civil-Military Relations

Contrary to Huntington's hypothesis, analysis suggests that the relationship between the party-political apparatus and line elements of the armed forces of the former Soviet Union and the former German Democratic Republic was less confrontational and more symbiotic. In the USSR, Huntington's subjective control measures accurately described the situation that existed during the early 1920s. However, as Soviet officers internalized the regime's value structure, the relationship became more symbiotic and was increasingly characterized by what he called objective control measures. In the case of East Germany's National People's Army, the relationship between political and line officers was never as confrontational as Huntington expected. To encompass the communist experiment, Huntington's model would have to be modified to take into account the fact that subjective control measures can change into objective ones over time. The nature of civil-military relations in communist countries was more dynamic than Huntington assumed.

McNamara and Military Behavior

Many studies of civil-military relations employ a case study approach. The present study, however, attempts to generate some empirically based propositions regarding the nature of civil-military relations in America as a preliminary step toward theory building. Content analysis of three sources over the period 1953-1964 provides the data with which to investigate the relationship between levels of civilian control and military behavior. Subsequent controls for budgetary allocations are also found to be particularly important for explaining the character of civil-military relations in contemporary America.