Christoph Harig

Most civil-military relations scholarship implicitly or explicitly sees the military as a threat to democratic institutions and governments. In recent years, however, there have been several instances in which democratically elected governments tried to use the armed forces for undermining democratic institutions. Hence, military leaders may sometimes have to contest lawful political decisions if these potentially threaten democracy. This challenges fundamental normative assumptions in civil-military relations research. The present article therefore asks: Which analytical tools does civil-military relations scholarship provide for assessing the appropriate role of military leaders in the prevention of democratic backsliding? Should there be general, prescriptive normative theories for military leaders’ appropriate behaviour in contexts of democratic backsliding? The article begins by reviewing civil-military relations scholarship’s perspectives on the appropriate political role of armed forces and discusses how these are challenged by democratic backsliding. Building on previous attempts to conceptualise military dissent and the military’s role in autocratization processes, the article argues that military behaviour in backsliding processes cannot be assessed without taking military role conceptions as explanatory variable for military leaders’ ideas about appropriate behaviour into account. Illustrative examples from the Americas then assess military leaders’ reaction to backsliding attempts and their consequences for democracy and civil-military relations. The findings underline that prescriptive guidance for military disobedience should be treated with caution.

AS NATO and its member states are reviving their focus on territorial and collective defence, there is a growing awareness of the need for effective co-operation with non-military actors. Flagship documents such as the NATO

Warfighting Capstone Concept explicitly mention the need for “better day-zero integration” that requires partnerships with “non-governmental organisations, civilian actors and industry”.1 NATO’s current conceptual definition of multi-domain operations equally highlights the crucial requirement to integrate nonmilitary actors into military operations, particularly in the cyber and space domain, where private actors’ capabilities often surpass those of the military. Hence, the Alliance and its member states are facing the challenge of re-designing their engagement with non-military actors to make it suitable for the contemporary security environment. When looking at the current existing toolkit, the joint function of Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) appears as the obvious way of working together with non-military actors. However, CIMIC suffers from an image problem within military institutions across the Alliance. It remains associated with the expeditionary phase of operations after the end of the Cold War, and many still equate CIMIC with digging wells and its contributions to winning

over the ‘hearts and minds’ of local populations in foreign countries. However, tasks for CIMIC have always been much broader than this narrative would reflect and are likely to expand even further. While still widely misunderstood and under appreciated by large parts of NATO militaries, CIMIC as a joint function has the potential to help meet the demands of situations that require close cooperation with nonmilitary actors. This requires appropriate preparation of military personnel that should be able to flexibly use CIMIC in various aspects of planning and executing operations.

Participating in UN peacekeeping missions used to be seen as an appropriate way to improve civil-military relations in countries where armed forces held undue political power. Nevertheless, a growing body of scholarship cautions that sending troops to increasingly coercive peacekeeping missions can contribute to a deterioration of civil-military relations. How can this variance in outcomes of peacekeeping deployments be explained? Taking stock of the existing academic debate on socialisation processes in peacekeeping and comparing the cases of India and Brazil, this article argues that military role conceptions are a key factor for understanding the effects of peacekeeping on troop-contributing countries.

International organisations reflect global power configurations and as such, are deemed to reproduce global inequalities. Nevertheless, they also represent opportunities for the Global South to challenge the global stratification of power, for instance by providing personnel to international agencies and bureaucracies. This article examines the role of leadership personnel from the Global South in implementing robust peacekeeping mandates. Given that states from the Global South have often been hesitant to support the use of force internationally, can leadership positions in peace operations help these states to influence norms at the implementation level? We develop a conceptual understanding of individuals' role in implementing norms and apply the framework to military force commanders from Brazil, India, and Rwanda. The analysis demonstrates that appointments provide an opportunity for norm contestation, but do not necessarily guarantee such influence. Under certain circumstances, we find that military force commanders can actually undermine their governments' preferences. However, the relation between force commanders' practices and their country of origin's policy stance is complex and influenced by a variety of different factors that merit further investigation.

Why are Latin American politicians drawing the armed forces into politics and public security? What consequences does this democratically controlled re-militarisation have for civil-military relations? With a case study of Brazil, this article introduces the conceptual tool of 'negative convergence': a widespread acceptance of increasing the military's internal roles among political leaders, military elites and society. Drawing upon public opinion surveys, the article analyses the 'demand' for internal military roles. A qualitative analysis of secondary literature and news reports then analyses the 'supply-side' of negative convergence: political leaders' willingness to increase the armed forces' internal roles and the military's reactions.

Academic research on civil-military relations often assumes that dangers for democracy and civilian control mainly emanate from the military's predisposition of ‘pushing’ its way into politics. Yet, civilian control frequently is a precondition for governments’ moves of ‘pulling’ the military into roles that may potentially be problematic. These can include the military's involvement in political disputes or internal public security missions. Notwithstanding its empirical relevance, little academic work has been devoted to understanding how ‘pulling’ works. In this article, we aim to provide a first, exploratory framework of ‘pulling’ that captures the dynamics of the military's reactions and indirect consequences for civil-military relations. We identify three analytically distinct phases in which pulling occurs. First, politicians initiate either operational or political pulling moves. Second, we situate the military's reaction on a spectrum that ranges from refusal to non-conditional compliance. This reaction is driven by the military's role conceptions about appropriate missions and their relation to politics. In a third phase, the military may slowly start shifting its role conceptions to adapt to its new roles. We illustrate our argument with case studies of two different instances of pulling: operational pulling in the case of France (2015–19) and operational – then-turned-political – pulling in the case of Brazil (2010–20).

A considerable amount of research within security studies has explored the military's increasingly diverse and multifaceted tasks. However, this debate has been disconnected from the literature on civil-military relations to the effect that we still lack knowledge about how and why these operational tasks have consequences for the relations between the armed forces, civilian authorities, and society at large. In order to provide for a better understanding of these effects, this introduction to the Special Issue debates the concept of operational experiences to capture how the military's routine activities affect the equilibria, logics, and mechanisms of civil-military relations. The article then provides an overview of the Special Issue's six contributions, whose diverse and global perspectives shed light on different aspects of the relationship between military missions and the military's roles in society and politics. Among other factors, they highlight role conceptions - the military's shared views on the purpose of the institution - as crucial in shaping the dynamic relation between what the military does and what place it occupies within the state and society. The article concludes by describing potentially fruitful areas of future research.