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"Bringing together leading international scholars, this comprehensive Research Handbook analyses key problems, subjects, regions and countries in civil-military relations. Showcasing cutting-edge research developments, it illustrates the deeply complex nature of the field and examines important topics in need of renewed consideration. Arranged in five thematic sections, chapters explore the role of armed forces in politics and society, the missions and roles of militaries, and crucial issues of control, compliance and effectiveness. Contributors present theoretically informed and empirically applied research asking novel questions and examining cutting-edge solutions to ongoing problems in the field. They showcase the wide range of research methodologies and meta-theoretical traditions in civil-military relations, spanning structuralism, behaviouralism, institutionalism, and constructivism. Ultimately, the Research Handbook is a timely insight into the contemporary role of militaries, for example in democratisation and autocratisation processes and deployment during natural disasters and pandemics. The Research Handbook on Civil-Military Relations will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of military, security, and strategic studies, as well as comparative politics and military sociology. It will also be an important read for policy-makers seeking to better understand the role of the military in society"--

"This book examines the ways in which long-term processes of state-formation limit the possibilities for short-term political projects of statebuilding. Using process-oriented approaches, the authors explore what happens when conscious efforts at statebuilding 'meet' social contexts, and are transformed into daily routines. In order to explain their findings, they also analyse the temporally and spatially broader structures of world society which shape the possibilities of statebuilding. Statebuilding and State Formation includes a variety of case studies from post-conflict societies in Africa, Asia and Europe, as well as the headquarters and branch offices of international agencies. Drawing on various theoretical approaches from sociology and anthropology, the contributors discuss external interventions as well as self-led statebuilding projects. This edited volume is divided into three parts: - Part I: State Formation, Violence and Political Economy - Part II: Governance, Legitimacy and Practice in Statebuilding and State-Formation - Part III: The International Self - Statebuilders' Institutional Logics, Social Backgrounds and Subjectivities The book will be of great interest to students of statebuilding and intervention, war and conflict studies, international security and IR"--

Leaders around the globe have long turned to the armed forces as a "school for the nation." Debates over who serves continue to arouse passion today because the military's participation policies are seen as shaping politics beyond the military, specifically the politics of identity and citizenship. Yet how and when do these policies transform patterns of citizenship? Military service, Ronald R. Krebs argues, can play a critical role in bolstering minorities' efforts to grasp full and unfettered rights. Minority groups have at times effectively contrasted their people's battlefield sacrifices to the reality of inequity, compelling state leaders to concede to their claims. At the same time, military service can shape when, for what, and how minorities have engaged in political activism in the quest for meaningful citizenship. Employing a range of rich primary materials, Krebs shows how the military's participation policies shaped Arab citizens' struggles for first-class citizenship in Israel from independence to the mid-1980s and African Americans' quest for civil rights, from World War I to the Korean War. Fighting for Rights helps us make sense of contemporary debates over gays in the military and over the virtues and dangers of liberal and communitarian visions for society. It suggests that rhetoric is more than just a weapon of the weak, that it is essential to political exchange, and that politics rests on a dual foundation of rationality and culture

Drawing on classical sociological writing on secrecy by Simmel, Merton and Shils this groundbreaking book by Brian Balmer also draws in more contemporary perspectives in science and technology studies that understand knowledge and social order as co-produced within heterogeneous networks of 'things and people' in order to develop a theoretical set of arguments about how the relationship between secrecy and science might be understood.

Abstract
The article explores different and contested narrations surrounding alleged war crimes by former Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, with a particular focus on one veteran with considerable public standing, Ben Roberts-Smith. It shows how certain stories told to identify and condemn acts of extra-legal violence, work to separate these acts out as exceptional and different from wider violence in war, and thus support the normalization and justification of war violence more broadly. However, it also demonstrates how attention to the role of race and gender in shaping meaning-making around violence in war disrupts the idea that extra-legal violence is exceptional. It finally articulates a thematic reading of how allegations of war crimes are interpreted and rejected in discourses of support for Roberts-Smith expressed on Facebook. It shows how different constructions of extra-legal violence at different sites each contribute to the ways that meaning might be drawn from acts of violence into narrative formulations about liberal war and offer important insights into the political configurations surrounding war crimes and their relationship to national identity and liberal militarism. The article thus contributes conceptually and empirically to debates surrounding the politics of war crimes.

The first in-depth look at two incidents of alleged troop refusals to obey an order at an artillery base near the Cambodian border in 1971. Uses these incidents as a lens for bringing into sharper and more precise focus the nature of our war in Vietnam during the waning years of our involvement there.