Politics Of Cohesion Research Articles

You're in the Army Now: The Politics of Cohesion During Military Integration in Sierra Leone

Military integration is intended to facilitate postconflict stabilization by creating unified armed forces from formerly antagonistic armed groups. However, integrated armies often struggle to overcome the factional identities of their soldiers, raising questions about interventionists’ ability to produce military cohesion during such processes. Yet, in the established scholarship on military cohesion, largely derived from the study of Western armed forces, internal small-group social dynamics are privileged over and above broader societal and political identities. This article examines the postconflict military integration program conducted in Sierra Leone to test extant theories of military “social cohesion.” Contrary to theoretical expectations, military cohesion in Sierra Leone proved highly reliant on wider (and highly politicized) societal identities, undermining integration efforts. This finding not only challenges existing understandings of social cohesion and its determinants but also the utility of military integration as a vehicle for postconflict stabilization and civil-military change.

‘Things fall apart’: social imaginaries and the politics of cohesion

‘Social cohesion’ has been adopted on policy agendas across Europe. In the way the notion has been applied on recent public policy agendas, social problems are generally brought into connection with deficiencies in the social fabric and with scenarios of social disintegration. Policies towards cohesion, in turn, rely on ideas of civic activation and the inculcation of a sense of individual responsibility. Cohesion thus appears intimately linked to a revision of the role of government. To understand what it is that connects the turn to cohesion with new understandings of social governance, the article proposes the lens of ‘social imaginaries’. Drawing on contributions by Charles Taylor, Cornelius Castoriadis and Ernesto Laclau on ‘social imaginaries’, it suggests that this conceptual tool proves useful to understand how, with cohesion, a re-description of society links up to a re-orientation of social governance.