Armed Forces and Society

Civil Military Relations is a challenging, and increasingly, topical subject of study. Exactly how civil and military actors relate affects how states apply the use of force in domestic and international affairs. As a subject of inquiry, Civil Military Relations concerns itself with ideas, structures, processes, groups of people, and individuals. It examines the interplay between all of these, as a means of explaining and evaluating how militaries, governments, and societies interact. As such, Civil Military Relations can be seen to underpin a host of other subjects: military effectiveness, the creation and implementation of strategy, and political development. By understanding how these fundamental relations work we may come to a better understanding of how these other fields function, too. The aim of this course is to enable students to engage with the prevailing concepts of civil-military relations, across a range of geographical settings throughout the contemporary period. At the end of the course, students will have developed an in-depth knowledge of the key theories and concepts of Civil-Military Relations and be able to apply them to a variety of analytical settings and contexts. In so doing, students will also have gained a general overview of how those theories have been put in practice in a number of locations around the world.