Suchergebnisse

The transition from military rule to democracy in Venezuela has been sustained over four decades, during which time civilian control over the armed forces has become markedly institutionalised. This book explores the political forces at work in the country

The transition from military rule to democracy in Venezuela has been sustained over four decades, during which time civilian control over the armed forces has become markedly institutionalised. This book explores the political forces at work in the country.

Book review by Harold Trinkunas of: The Soldier and the Changing State: Building Democratic Armies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. By Zoltan Barany. Princeton University Press, 2012. 472 pp. ; By titling his new book as he has, Zoltan Barany consciously evokes Samuel P. Huntington's seminal 1957 study on civil-military relations, The Soldier and the State. Whereas Huntington focused on great powers and had in view militarism and the role that it played in the twentieth century's two world wars, Barany aims to explain civil-military relations following democratization. His goal as an investigator—to examine the conditions that are most likely to produce democratic civil-military relations across a wide range of transitional settings—is ambitious. As a theorist of civil-military relations and democratization, however, Barany's aims are more modest. Eschewing a general theory of how new democracies achieve control over their militaries, he instead offers to scholars and practitioners of democracy the wisdom that can be gained from his case studies.