| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The dichotomy between civil and military is well-established in international political practice. International law, international order, and war are but some of the institutions that rely upon making a distinction between civil and military. The distinction, arguably, is also central for analyses of conflicts worldwide. Almost daily, we are fed stories of atrocities against civilians in conflict-ridden parts of the world. In academic discourse, similarly, several fields of study including most of the debate centering on interpreting modern war relies upon a distinction between civil and military. Both research and practice, however, tend to treat these categories as fixed and global. In this article, I argue - to the contrary - that what constitutes civil and military are malleable norms. This forms a particular challenge to analyses of civil-military relations and it calls for a different categorization of civil-military relations in Weberian ideal types.
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