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Introduction
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January 2011 - December 2013
September 2010 - December 2011
Publications
Publications (46)
Most countries deployed their military in some capacity to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. We present original data on early pandemic-related deployments, identifying seven types of deployment: logistic operations, enforcement, international involvement, border protection, information provision, intelligence operations, and domestic protection. We fi...
This article explores an enormous elephant in the Mediterranean space: European security assistance’s impact on the continuation of a global postcolonial order. We identify three core practices of security assistance that provides for postcolonial readings: externally producing ‘the problem’ and designing ‘the solutions’ to be tackled; linking the...
Peacekeeping helps to prevent conflict and to protect civilians. But how does it work to achieve those aims? Notwithstanding a growing recognition that peacekeeping mandates alone do not directly determine what actually happens in the field, we still know little about how—once deployed—military units translate an ambiguous mandate into action. In t...
Previous research has shown that military training at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst was used by the UK in the post-World War II period as a soft foreign policy tool in anticipation of decolonisation. This article builds on this work by first detailing how early attempts to introduce military training for foreign cadets replicated racial hie...
Academic research on civil-military relations often assumes that dangers for democracy and civilian control mainly emanate from the military's predisposition of ‘pushing’ its way into politics. Yet, civilian control frequently is a precondition for governments’ moves of ‘pulling’ the military into roles that may potentially be problematic. These ca...
A considerable amount of research within security studies has explored the military's increasingly diverse and multifaceted tasks. However, this debate has been disconnected from the literature on civil-military relations to the effect that we still lack knowledge about how and why these operational tasks have consequences for the relations between...
We explore the role of mission composition as a potential factor influencing the outcomes of UN peacekeeping operations. We focus on three important dimensions of composition: who the peacekeepers are, how they are combined together, and whom they interact with. First, using data visualizations, we show how who is keeping the peace and the composit...
Qualitative scholars exhibit a wide range of views on and approaches to causality. While some approaches reject causality from the outset, a large strand of qualitative research in political science and international relations does, however, pursue causal explanation. Qualitative scholars nevertheless disagree about what causality means. Our paper...
Notwithstanding the prominence of the so-called Standard Model of Military Group Cohesion (SMMGC), important parts of the model are understudied: both conceptually and empirically. In this article we, first, synthesize previous research to conceptualize and measure the overlooked institutional cohesion dimension. Second, we test the validity of the...
In recent decades, military organizations have deployed much more extensively in nonconventional operations. Army units are deployed as peacekeepers, navy vessels engage with migration control and search and rescue (SAR) operations and the air force delivers humanitarian aid. Do recent trends imply that the military is switching to new kinds of cor...
Military organizations often apply old solutions to new problems. Since the early 1990s, Western militaries have deployed several nonconventional operations, such as the United Nations missions in the Balkans or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) operations in Afghanistan. How have the deployed militaries adapted to these new missions an...
This chapter explores the relationship between Force Commanders and their peacekeeping troops. The qualitative material suggests that strategic divergences or cross-cultural misunderstandings between peacekeepers and their Force Commander may jeopardize a mission’s effectiveness. Yet, a mission composed of troops with high distance from the Force C...
This chapter explores the issue of diversity within mission’s leadership: between the Special Representatives of the Secretary-General (SRSG) and the Force Commanders (FC). It asks how this affects operational performances. In three case studies, UNIFIL II, MINUSMA and MINUSCA, the chapter finds the presence of communication and coordination proble...
This chapter addresses the question of whether it is better or worse to have many troops from multiple national armies within a United Nations peacekeeping mission. On the one hand, high levels of diversity create obvious organizational challenges and coordination problems. On the other, high levels of diversity produce a mix of complementary persp...
This chapter introduces the analytical and theoretical framework for the entirety of the book. First, it establishes three key concepts for this research: mission composition, diversity, and distance. These concepts are used to explore whether and how differences within peacekeepers, between the peacekeepers and the local populations, and as well a...
This chapter turns to the external dimension of mission composition and explores to what extent similarity between the peacekeepers and the local population matters for mission’s effectiveness. In the qualitative part, it finds that smaller cultural distances might imply the existence of shared norms, practices, and languages, and these qualities m...
The book explores how diversity in United Nations’ peace mission composition affects peacekeeping effectiveness. It identifies four key dimensions of composition: Blue Helmets’ field diversity, top mission leadership diversity (between Force Commander and Special Representative of the Secretary General), vertical leadership distance (Leadership-Blu...
A wealth of research in comparative politics and international relations examines how the military intervenes in politics via coups. We shift attention to broader forms of military involvement in politics (MIP) beyond coups, and claim that terrorist violence and the threat of terror attacks provide a window of opportunity for military intervention,...
This chapter critically examines how the UN builds resilience in the Sahel region. After providing an overview of the UN approach to the region, the analysis focuses on the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali (MINUSMA), showing that the mission focuses primarily on providing security rather than enhancing state institutions and societies’ ability to wi...
The Soul of Armies: Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Military Culture in the US and UK. By Austin Long. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 288p. $89.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. - Volume 17 Issue 3 - Chiara Ruffa
Coherence is a core objective in most multinational interventions and seems of particular relevance to UN peacekeeping missions with their increasing complexity and multidimensionality. Yet, coherence has rarely been studied empirically. We borrow the concept of ‘fit’ from organizational theory and use it to develop a conceptual framework to study...
As of September 2017, the United Nations alone deployed 110,000 uniformed personnel from 122 countries in fifteen peacekeeping operations worldwide. Soldiers in these missions are important actors who not only have considerable responsibility for implementing peace and stability operations but also have a concomitant influence on their goals and im...
Frames guide the way in which organizations and individuals interpret their surrounding contexts and shape avenues for thought, action, and behavior. This paper tests the individual-level effects of experiencing ‘frame disputes’: the state of holding individual-level frames that are at odds with dominant organizational frames. We hypothesize that o...
Although hundreds of thousands of soldiers from different national contingents are deployed every year in multinational peace operations, no previous study has examined differences in peacekeeping practices along national lines. This paper first documents systematically differences in the way national contingents behave during peace operations in t...
The fifth chapter studies Italian strategic culture and decisions to participate in all four of the operations examined in the book. The analysis shows that for Italy it has been important that international military operations are multilateral, preferably with a UN mandate, and that they promote a peacekeeping narrative. In all operations studied,...
In complex humanitarian emergencies, why are NGO-military relations cooperative in some cases, yet deeply conflictual in others? Drawing on historical-institutionalist theoretical insights, we argue that NGOs and military organizations are embedded in, and responding to, domestic institutional configurations that define a set of political incentive...
In the Spring 2014, while in Paris, I happened to enter an exhibition about summary executions of French soldiers during World War I. The soldiers had mainly been executed for mutiny, although in fact they had rarely contravened orders or rebelled. Rather, these soldiers were deeply traumatised young conscripts, operating in unbearable conditions,...
In January 2012, a video depicting U.S. soldiers urinating on Afghan dead bodies was released. Mr George Little, a Pentagon spokesman, declared that the footage was “utterly deplorable”, and this was followed by similar statements by other high-ranking U.S. government officials (Bowley/Rosenberg 2012). The behavior of these soldiers had dramatic po...
Why does peacekeeping sometimes fail? How can effective peacekeepers increase the likelihood of success of a mission? The two main flaws in the current evaluations of peace operations are that they mainly rely on already concluded missions and that they make use of indicators that do not reveal micro-level dynamics. This article introduces an analy...
The tactical level has become increasingly important in the conduct of contemporary complex military operations. Yet, the potential impact that this tactical level may have on domestic civil–military relations has been neglected. In this article, we focus on mechanisms by which low-level soldiers have acquired an increasing importance in tactical o...
International responses to conflicts and humanitarian emergencies have become more crowded. Not only do traditional actors intervene on a greater scale, such as non-governmental organizations and the military, but new actors such as Private Military Security Companies also play an increasingly important role. These actors often differ in their prec...
Sweden defines itself as a neutral country. But neutrality has taken different forms and meanings throughout history. In the XIX century, Sweden used neutrality as a tool to balance the great powers in the Baltic region, namely Russia and Denmark (Petersson 2009: 21–23). During World War I and II, Swedish neutrality stretched: it was pro-Germany at...
This exploratory article points out how armies differ in the performance of their daily military activities during a peacekeeping mission and analyses the role of contrasting perceptions of the mission operational environment in explaining this variation. As a first step, this article documents systematic variations in the way French, Ghanaian, Ita...
This article seeks to explain the relationship between the European Union (EU) and one of its Middle Eastern neighbors: Lebanon. By conducting an in-depth empirical single case study and engaging in competitive theory testing, this article shows that the EU in Lebanon behaves at the same time as a normative and a realist power. This article challen...
During complex humanitarian emergencies, the relations between humanitarian NGOs and military organization vary widely, ranging from hostility to cooperation. In some cases, NGOs and military organizations define forms of coordination to avoid duplication, they cooperate and even launch joint projects. In others, however, even basic coordination ha...
Projects
Projects (2)
The ambition for the Handbook of Military Sciences project is to present an open access major reference work in the field of Military Sciences. Its main purpose is to inform and enlighten those dealing with the military on the role and contributions of science in describing, understanding and explaining military life, knowledge and activity. As such, we aim to assemble a handbook that offers a comprehensive thematic introduction to various sub-fields of Military Sciences.
You will find all chapter OpenAccess at SpringerLink: https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-030-02866-4
A wealth of studies in comparative politics and international relations examine the causes of violent military intervention in politics, most notably coups d’e ́tat. In this article we shift attention from violent to nonviolent military involvement in politics, building upon case study research on civil-military relations. We develop a theory that proposes politically motivated violence by terrorist groups and the threat of terror attacks motivate and facilitate nonviolent military intervention. This theory is tested using subjective and objective data for nonviolent military intervention in politics, and measures for domestic and transnational terror attacks and perceived threats for all countries of the world between 1984 and 2004.
