Conveners
Military Interventions: Military Interventions
- Kersti Larsdotter (Swedish Defense University)
Description
With the winding down of large-scale boots-on-the-ground multinational missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has become apparent in both policy and academic circles that large-scale military interventions are but one option among others. Many other kinds of military interventions have been and are being launched and implemented, ranging from military assistance, to more ‘agile’ counterinsurgency, drone fighting, peacekeeping, and aerial interventions, among others. Recent work has investigated the politics of forming multinational coalitions for launching military interventions. Other contributions have explored the politics of implementation, looking at caveats and actual behaviour of troops on the ground. A third strand has explored the implication of military interventions for the civil-military relations of the home country when those soldiers return home. Notwithstanding recent advances, within the field of security studies, there is little clarity about the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical underpinnings of different kinds of military interventions with important implications for both scholarship and policy. This panel welcomes contributions on different types of military interventions and potential comparisons. Contributions are welcome from a variety of disciplines (history, political science, sociology, etc.) and may shed light on conceptual, theoretical, and empirical aspects of the ongoing debate on military interventions within the security studies debate in dialogue with other neighbouring fields such as peace and conflict research, war studies and military sociology.
The rise of political polarization and partisan contestation over foreign and security policy has challenged traditional notions of bipartisanship and cross-party consensus in democratic countries. While partisan contestation seems to be prevalent, there are instances where cross-party consensus emerges. This paper theorizes a novel causal mechanism of partisan entrapment through which...
After the Vietnam War, the United States attempted to reduce its troop levels, which led to a deterioration of the South Korea-US alliance. However, little attention has been paid to the Carter administration's ultimately unsuccessful attempt at withdrawal. This paper examines why civil-military preferences clashed and how this led to the failure of President Carter's complete withdrawal of US...
In today’s multipolar and interconnected world, states often use surrogates in order to pursue their interests and expand their influence, while staying underneath the threshold of direct conventional war with a great power competitor. This paper proposes a conceptualization of surrogates that includes all human actors that patrons, who can be both state or non-state actors, delegate some or...
This paper explores what drove Vladimir Putin’s decisions to send troops on combat missions to foreign countries since his ascent to the Russian presidency on the last day of 1999. The author will first infer hypothetical drivers of Putin’s decisions to send troops to fight abroad from the academic literature on the subject. He will then explore whether any of the inferred drivers have been...
