International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   The term “civil–military relations” refers broadly to the interaction between the armed force of a state as an institution, and the other sectors of the society in which the armed force is embedded. It is an intensely interdisciplinary area of research, reflecting the work of political scientists, military sociologists, and historians. Arguably, the field of civil–military relations really took off – at least in the United States – as social scientists became part of the war effort in World War II. Much of this early civil–military relations research focused on the individual service member and small unit cohesion ( Stouffer et al. 1949–50 ; Gray 1959 ). Subsequently, there have been several “waves” of civil–military research ( Desch 1999 :2). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Samuel Huntington (1957) , Morris Janowitz (1960) , and Samuel Finer (1962) reoriented research away from individuals and toward the relationships among military institutions, societies, and governments in the post–World War II period. But given the belief that military intervention in the United States was highly unlikely, the focus of much postwar civil–military relations research was comparative, with special attention to emerging states in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East ( Shils 1962 ). A second wave emerged in the 1970s in response to the belief that US–Soviet ... log in or subscribe to read full text