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This article addresses the relevance of gender to understand the transformations of civil-military relations in advanced democracies. After clarifying the analytical perspective in an opening section, it examines in a second section the debate over women's roles in the military - the so-called 'rights vs. readiness' debate - to show how gender issues have been both an arena for the expression of civil-military tensions and a constitutive element of civil-military relations. Resorting to available empirical information on Western advanced democracies, it focuses in a third section on the topic of women's military integration, highlighting how it has exerted pressures to bring about greater convergence between armed forces and societies. Since these pressures have not been uniform, the article highlights patterns of similarity and difference among countries, showing how varying constellations of circumstances in both armed forces and societies at large have produced different outcomes. The article makes two claims: that gender issues have become an increasingly important indicator of trends in civil-military relations and that both military effectiveness, and congruence between the armed forces and democratic social values can better be achieved if gender issues are addressed and gender integration is promoted in the military. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Counterinsurgency strategies employed by the US military in Afghanistan have led to the US military embarking on civil governance reform. This has created new forms of civil-military relations with Afghan and international counterparts. These relations appear less dramatic than 'conventional' civil-military relations, in that they do not create the same visible alignment on the ground between military and non-military identities. In addition, the increased merging of civil and military work areas creates a new complexity that stems from semantic confusion. This complexity is mostly about norms and principles, in that the core puzzle is the more general question of what kinds of tasks the military should and should not do, rather than about violent consequences to civilians and questions of neutrality. This article proposes the term 'third-generation civil-military relations' to capture and examine the conceptual challenges that stem from the merging of military and civil work areas in Afghanistan's reconstruction. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright PRIO, www.prio.no]