Rethinking Civil-Military Relations by Birgitte Refslund Sørensen Eyal Ben-Ari

Author:Birgitte Refslund Sørensen, Eyal Ben-Ari [Birgitte Refslund Sørensen, Eyal Ben-Ari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, International, International Security
ISBN: 9780739194171
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2014-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Civil–Military Relations from International Conflict Zones to the United States

Notes on Mutual Discontents and Disruptive Logics

Robert A. Rubinstein and Corri Zoli

Introduction

Civil–military relations in the United States are much more militarized today than they were thirty years ago. In this chapter we take stock of one way this came about. We describe how efforts to improve humanitarian action and warfighting by taking a “cultural turn” created a web of relationships that at first entangled and later entrapped institutions and actors. The processes involved began in the 1990s and accelerated as the “cultural turn” became more central to post-9/11 security developments in the United States. Thus we consider the mutual dependences and dependencies attendant to these processes and consider the emergence of the militarization of local policing an exemplar of the broader societal arrangements they entailed.

Since 9/11, the patterns of civil–military interactions that have characterized institutional relations between the military and civil society in the United States have changed, prompting concerns that once separate, bounded spheres of social and political life have become increasingly convergent and fraught (Adams and Murray 2014; Hart 2013; Feaver 2009). To understand how security developments over the last three decades have contributed to these shifting boundaries in traditionally separated realms of military and civilian spheres in the United States, we examine linked international and domestic developments: the militarization of humanitarian action in the post-9/11 wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the militarization of policing efforts at home, including disruptive responses to them. We also situate each of these developments in the context of the “cultural turn”—the institutional moments in which culture and cross-cultural understanding is made the focus of security policy responses and interventions.

In focusing on these security shifts, we are interested in the ways in which the thickening entanglements that flow from military and civilian organizational efforts to collaborate spread from military strategic initiatives abroad to local law enforcement trends at home—with unexpected effects. To flesh out these developments, we focus on several examples. In the international context, we examine, first, coordinated cross-cultural military and civilian humanitarian efforts to improve crisis response to complex emergencies in conflict and postconflict settings, and, second, the role of cross-cultural understanding as a military strategic framework adapted by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) to address setbacks in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These instances reveal well-intentioned efforts by both military and civilian organizations in conflict settings to use culture as a strategic tool to advance respective mission priorities. We then turn to homeland security developments in the United States in which the military “cultural turn” abroad come to shape domestic policing policy at home in ways that often reveal the extension of military logics to emergency responses. As may be expected, none of these developments are without their discontents and disruptions.

In conducting our investigation, we have narrowed our engagement with the current voluminous social science literature on U.S. civil–military relations to the process of interactions occurring between federal institutions and matériel. We adapt Hodder’s (2016) conceptualization

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