Insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, and civil-military relations: When, how, and why do civilians prevail?

摘要

Most scholars of civil-military relations argue that the presence of domestic security threats increases the role of the military in politics. However, domestic security threats do not always increase the political involvement of the armed forces. And when they do, the effects vary across time and space. Why do comparable experiences with internal security threats have divergent effects on the nature of civil-military relations?;This is an important theoretical question with great policy relevance. For centuries, civilian leaders have struggled with the problem of subordinating militaries to their authority. The lack of civilian control over the armed forces has become a major factor that blocked the consolidation of democracies in numerous countries of Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In those countries where the military is a key actor in policy making, the presence of domestic security threats and internal enemies has been a common justification for this political involvement. Therefore, it is important to understand the actual connection between national security threats and civil-military relations and to discover the conditions under which the former is likely to lead to an increase in the political involvement of the armed forces.;In order to provide an answer to this research question, this dissertation presents a comparative case study of counterinsurgency policy making in Turkey and Peru, which have fought against Kurdistan Workers' Party and Shining Path terrorists, respectively, from the 1980s onwards. This study shows that structural variables, such as the presence or degree of threat, are not sufficient to explain the military's role in politics. Instead, it develops a theory of dynamic civil-military interaction, which shows that it is the interaction of strategic choices made by civilian leaders and military organizations in domestic threat environments that lead to different outcomes in civil-military relations. Sometimes this interaction is limited to the government's preference of a particular policy option and the military's expression of criticism or agreement with it. Sometimes it involves intense discussion and even bargaining among civilian and military actors. Both political leaders and military organizations are goal-oriented actors. That is why, they develop their policy preferences based on their assessment of costs and benefits of a particular move. Because civilian and military assessments about the costs and benefits of different policy options vary according to specific conditions, the resulting policy could reflect a different balance of power between the government and the armed forces each time. This dissertation's main argument is that these specific conditions, whose presence makes civilian control over the armed forces more likely in internal threat settings are first, the strength of the head of government, second, the civilian leadership's legitimacy in the eyes of the military, and third, the extensive and systematic international pressure for democratization.