Civil-Military Relations

A June 2019 national survey asks how Americans view the relationship between civilian leaders and the military. The authors find two main takeaways: respondents are unusually deferential to the military on when force should be used and comfortable with high-ranking officers intervening in public policy debates; and opinions about civil–military relations are shaped by partisan alignment, with Republicans less deferential and Democrats more willing to see the military as a check when their party opposes the president.

Public trust in the armed forces often rests on the military’s legitimation as, and aspiration to be, a non‑partisan institution. This non‑partisan identity shapes how citizens evaluate the military relative to other state institutions and to political actors.

This research explores the relationship between military ties and civilian political survival in China. We propose that autocrats strategically differentiate rivals based on their social connections to the military, manipulating career progression as a means of security.

The paper asks how government oversight of the military affects the occurrence of wartime sexual violence and contributes a theoretical and empirical account linking oversight, state capacity, and military behavior. Building on principal–agent arguments, the authors develop a game-theoretic model where government monitoring serves as an informative signal about the state’s willingness and capacity to punish misconduct; governments may monitor strategically or remain “strategically ignorant.” The paper then tests implications of this model with cross-national data on sexual violence, military oversight, and state capacity.

This study asks why some rebel winners succeed in creating obedient, state-like militaries after civil war while others experience postwar military defections. Using a new list of winning rebel groups since 1946 and two case studies (Zimbabwe and Côte d’Ivoire), the author argues that intense security threats during the civil war make field commanders more likely to remain obedient by promoting inclusive leadership and by constraining commanders’ capacity to build local power bases during the war-to-peace transition.