Broadening the Perspective on Military Cohesion

摘要

It is difficult to underestimate the importance of cohesion for armed groups or organizations specialized and engaged in organized violence. This article argues that the recent debate on military cohesion has been far too narrow as it focused on Western state militaries during the 20th and 21st centuries, and even then only on the microlevel. It is necessary to broaden the perspective in order to construct theories that encompass even the vast majority of armed groupsthe non-Western, nonstate, and nonmodern. This article advocates two ways of doing so: the investigation of cases that belong to these three types and broadening analysis to two new levels of analysisthe meso-level of armed groups and the macro-level, which contains state and society. Cohesion is established through harmonizing these three levels, which necessitates including them in the analysis in the first place.