Gender and civil-military relations

Abstract

This article addresses the relevance of gender to understand the transformations of civil-military relations in advanced democracies. After clarifying the analytical perspective in an opening section, it examines in a second section the debate over women's roles in the military - the so-called ‘rights vs. readiness' debate - to show how gender issues have been both an arena for the expression of civil-military tensions and a constitutive element of civil-military relations. Resorting to available empirical information on Western advanced democracies, it focuses in a third section on the topic of women's military integration, highlighting how it has exerted pressures to bring about greater convergence between armed forces and societies. Since these pressures have not been uniform, the article highlights patterns of similarity and difference among countries, showing how varying constellations of circumstances in both armed forces and societies at large have produced different outcomes. The article makes two claims: that gender issues have become an increasingly important indicator of trends in civil-military relations and that both military effectiveness, and congruence between the armed forces and democratic social values can better be achieved if gender issues are addressed and gender integration is promoted in the military.