Civil-Military Relations and Global Security Governance - Transcript

Intro [00:00:02]

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

Duncan McCargo [00:00:08]

Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. I'm Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. It's great to be joined today by my colleague Cornelia Baciu, a researcher in the Center for Military Studies, which is also located here at the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. And Cornelia works on international security organizations and conflict. Today we're going to be discussing her book, Civil Military Relations and Global Security Governance Strategy, Hybrid Orders in the case of Pakistan, which was out from Routledge in 2021. Cornelia, welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast.

Cornelia Baciu [00:00:47]

Good afternoon. Duncan Thank you so much for this kind of attention and also hello to our audience.

Duncan McCargo [00:00:53]

Great. So your book covers quite a wide range of issues as you set out to offer a more nuanced theoretical explanation for civil military relations in what you term hybrid orders such as Pakistan's. And many of us will know Pakistan as a country where the military has gained considerable political power and has indeed staged a number of coup d'état, most recently the Musharraf coup of 1999. And of course, Pakistan's far from being the only Asian country where the military plays an outsized role in governance. Other examples include Thailand, which is always close to my heart, and not least Myanmar, which is still reeling from the extremely repressive coup of February 2021. I'm sure many of our listeners would love to understand more about why such interventions take place and perhaps especially what could be done to prevent them. Perhaps we can start off with one key phrase from your title, that of hybrid order. How do you define a hybrid order for the purposes of your book?

Cornelia Baciu [00:01:47]

Well, I would define a hybrid order as order where different type of actors are coexisting. And when I say different type of actors, I mean like actors such as political actors, civilian actors, military actors, non-state actors, democratic or less Democratic actors. So the state of hybridity is a state that I formally define as a nation or as a country that is simultaneously insecure and fragile. So insecurity and fragility are two features of my definition of hybridity. Now we will see that there is a de facto overlap between my definition of hybridity and post-colonial contexts. So when I started my PhD, I set my research question and the title was Civil Military Relations in post-Colonial Context and the Case of Pakistan. It is a case of a post-colonial context. The state of hybridity is around the three main features fragility, post-colonial condition and insecurity.

Duncan McCargo [00:02:50]

Great. That's very clear. Now, one key element in your argument involves taking a critical view of some of the literature. For these purposes, we should focus on classic work of the American scholar Samuel Huntington, including his 1957 book, Soldier and the State. And then there's My Own, which doesn't get so much of a mention, but I think many people are very familiar with political order in changing societies. 1968. And that kind of approach has been widely understood as arguing that a powerful military could actually be a positive thing for some of these newly independent countries as a bulwark against communism and other forms of agitation. So in a nutshell, what's the problem with Huntington's very widely cited and referenced view of the military in countries like this?

Cornelia Baciu [00:03:32]

There are several problems with Huntington's approach and theory of civil military relations. One of it is that just to briefly summarize Huntington's notion of civilian control, Huntington's argues that in order to reach civilian control of the military, which we all know is a prerequisite for a democratic condition for a country, we need a professional soldier. So what Huntington describes as proportionality is a state where we have a separation between the civilian institutions and the military institutions. So we have this two autonomous spheres, and this would preclude the military from intervening in politics because it is a state of theater between the two institutions. He also calls this objective control. This is one aspect. The second aspect is that Huntington draws his theory from the experience of Western countries and mainly of the United States. And it would be a caveat to claim validity for this theory to be at a global order, because we need to differentiate between democracies which have established democratic institutions and non democracies, whether they are hybrid orders or they are totally autocratic orders, political institutions are not yet established, and many of the post-colonial states are in this condition because colonialism, for example, has inhibited the development of political institutions. So we are in a situation in which Huntington's theory of civil military relations and military professionalism and separation and objective control of the military cannot claim validity for the political realities in. Colonial contexts in other countries, right?

Duncan McCargo [00:05:10]

Yeah. So it doesn't convincingly offer explanations for the kinds of cases that you're looking at, which are the very same countries where there are a lot of military coups and a lot of examples of intervention in the political order by the armed forces. Use this term civil military relations. That's also in the title of your book. And let me just raise that question with you. I've got to confess, I've always avoided that phrase maybe on the grounds that it sounds like a Cold War euphemism for something that might be potentially a little bit more problematic or a bit more sinister. And I've always preferred to talk about the political role of the military, but I know it's a lot of people working in security. Studies are very attached to this phrase civil military relations. Do you have an uncritical relationship with that phrase or do you use it with any quotation marks? Or what are your feelings about civil military relations as a term?

Cornelia Baciu [00:05:54]

Civil military relations is an established subfield in political science, and I are and it might be that it is so mostly in the United States. And we see that most theories of civil military relations are coming from the United States, where this relations between the military and the civilians is central to the academic work. So in Europe, we have to admit that the field or the subfield of civil military relations has received less attention. It has been neglected. And there are few scholars in Europe working on civil military relations. Is this thing theoretical field? And I think that is my attachment to this term. This is where I would locate and where I would situate my theory of civil military adaptations. I would situated in the subfield of civil military relations.

Duncan McCargo [00:06:45]

That makes total sense. I must confess, I'm imagining one day someone might start a journal called Critical Civil Military Relations or something like that. That takes a slightly skeptical perspective on some of these things, but obviously that's where you're located now. As you rightly note in the book, it's not that common in literature that appears in the field of security studies to do empirical fieldwork on the ground. We see an awful lot of stuff written about issues relating to the military and security that draws primarily upon secondary sources. And what's really great about your book is that you did a couple of things. One of you did a survey of about 40 informants, but you also went to Pakistan and spent some time there conducting interviews with people. And it's rare that anybody goes to interview key informants about these kinds of questions. So can you tell us a bit about how you conducted the research and who you talk to? And what kind of conversations did you have with those people?

Cornelia Baciu [00:07:36]

Yes, of course. I conducted 95 or nearly 100 interviews with experts on this topic, and I can say a bit more on the respondents profiles. I conducted these interviews and surveys in four sample regions in Pakistan, in Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, in Peshawar. I choose this four regions because I wanted to have a representative sample and to be able to capture perceptions on the changing nature of civil military relations from different corners of the country. Because Pakistan is a highly diverse country, and this is reflected also in my selection of the locations in which I have been. In order to capture that variation, I choose to go to these four different regions in this four different regions. I talked to representatives of the military, mainly retired military personnel, but very high ranking, but also with representatives of the civilian government, high level people and the civil society. That would be the people that I have been talking to.

Duncan McCargo [00:08:40]

Did you find substantial differences between the kinds of responses that you got and informants in these four different areas?

Cornelia Baciu [00:08:47]

What is surprising is that I was able to identify patterns that have emerged from my empirical material in relation to the line of inquiry of this book. That is, how have civil military relations changed since the end of the Pervez Musharraf government? And there have been some patterns emerging and some recurrent answers to this question, which I thought it is surprising. It is also adding to the validity of my middle range theory of civil military adaptation. And I also use different research softwares in order to analyze the interviews that I have mostly transcribed. Then I did data analysis using different softwares in vivo and Stata.

Duncan McCargo [00:09:27]

When you are undertaking the research, obviously you went to interview a very large number of people, including, as you say, some high ranking figures, retired military figures and so on. Did you face any particular challenges in accessing those informants and perhaps you could just reflect on what it was like for you? I don't know how much time you'd spent in Pakistan before this project. Was this your first trip and how did they react to you coming and asking them questions? Because quite a few of the topics that you're touching on could be construed as a little bit sensitive, a little bit politically delicate to say the least. What did they make of you, a European researcher turning up and asking about this kind of thing?

Cornelia Baciu [00:10:03]

Yeah, this is a very good question. It wasn't my first time in. Pakistan. I have been to Pakistan, fulfilled research before in the context of my master's thesis that was on the Kashmir conflict. So at that time, I went to do food research on both sides of Kashmir, on the Indian side and on Pakistani side. So at that time, I also went to different regions to to do elite interviews. And also I've been lucky, perhaps one of the few people that has traveled, that has been in a very short period of time on both sides of Kashmir.

Duncan McCargo [00:10:38]

This has to be another podcast. Yes, this is fascinating. It has to.

Cornelia Baciu [00:10:41]

Yes, another podcast. Exactly. So this was helpful for me because I was familiar with the context. I was familiar with the situation on the ground, so I knew what to expect. I also had a pre doctoral fellowship from Zeitstiftung in Hamburg. So on the context of that fellowship, I was also able to conduct a pilot field research before the main field research. So that was also helpful for me to inform or to formulate my actual research questions and the questions and the discussions that I plan to conduct with those experts. And I think every field research is challenging. I also did field research in Europe at in different countries at the NATO headquarters, or you and I think every field research can be challenging in terms of management. I remember it was quite intense because it involved a lot of traveling and a lot of planning of the interviews. So sometimes I had like 2 or 3 interviews per day, which meant traveling a lot and having car life or yeah, life in the car or something like this. It was permanently on the road. But in the end I was very happy with my achievement because I also got to have really good discussions with people on the ground.

Duncan McCargo [00:11:57]

No, you've certainly done some research of a kind that very few people have been able to carry out in recent years, and that's that's really commendable. And it gives the book a depth and a quality that's quite serious there. You're critical in the book about a tendency to use what you call a narrowly institutionalist perspective when engaging with the military in countries such as Pakistan. What do you mean by that? What's what's the problem with what you're calling narrowly institutionalist views of what the military does and is?

Cornelia Baciu [00:12:27]

Yeah, so what I mean by this is actually the kind of sense, the essence of the critique against or towards Huntington in take an approach on civil military relations. So the novelty or the contribution of my theory is that acknowledging that an institutional approach and the separation of spheres approach does not work in post-colonial or fragile context, I establish a middle range theory of civil military adaptation. Also starting from the interesting puzzle that you have mentioned at the beginning of our podcast that we have recently experienced the different coups that are in Mali. Now, recently I think it was in Burkina Faso, many countries that have a post-colonial path. Intriguing puzzle for me. It's like, why haven't we experienced this in Pakistan since the military has been so influential since the partition and the emergence of the country? How can this be explained that despite the influential role in politics and that there have been three successful military coups and that military has been in power for a long time, Pakistan's history. What explains the absence of the coup? Even though we do not have established political institutions or established democratic institutions? And what explains the absence of the coup? So this is what I try to explain in this new theory of civil military adaptation. What is the explanation for the absence of coup? This is important to know because if we know what explains the absence of the coup, this means that we can replicate this model on other countries in order to achieve a sort of form at least of civilian control. And the second contribution of my theory and the novelty of my theory is that it tackles and sheds light on global local dynamics of order. So what is the role of international actors in this processes of change, and how are they underpinning this processes of civil military adaptation?

Duncan McCargo [00:14:33]

Yeah, I was going to come to that because your book does in the end contain quite an optimistic message that we got a bit of a flavor of in, in what you were saying just now, which is that NGOs, civil society actors or whatever you want to call them, an international organizations could influence the militaries in countries like Pakistan to move in an implicitly more democratic direction. What's the evidence that you have for that rather bold, forward looking claim?

Cornelia Baciu [00:14:57]

Yes, the evidence that I have for that is that local organizations that are mostly funded by international actors, global governance, actors, international. Nations such as the EU, United Nations, but also by US programs by Japan and other countries, or they can also be locally funded. But most of them are funded programmes of international organisations or international actors. And we also have international NGOs, also of different countries, the United States or Germany that are working on the ground and they are conducting projects. And the evidence that I was able to find for the role of local actors, most of them internationally funded, most of the respondents have been of opinion that impact of NGOs on peace and security processes is a mixed impact in the sense that NGOs can have a positive impact on changing things and but on in the same time, there are also limitations on the impact that they have or that they can have on peace and security processes. And to be more specific about this, the role of non-state actors, of local actors, of NGOs, whether local NGOs or international NGOs, can be categorized in four types. So that is, NGOs can play a role in providing input legitimacy. Input legitimacy refers to the procedural aspects of political participation of different groups that can underrepresented, whether it is like women groups or other groups. The second role of local actors is in providing or enhancing output legitimacy. That is the improvement of the quality of political process and trying to achieve good governance, for example, and to improve political processes. The third row of local actors is in establishing a so-called diagonal accountability. Diagonal accountability is defined as the capacity of both political institutions and citizens to sanction the people in power. So the capacity of sanctioning of the political institutions and of the people has increased, and that is also towards the military. And the fourth role that local actors mainly internationally funded, as I said, the role that they can play is in elite bridging, in bridging elite from different corners of the society and also from different institutions. So they can bring, for example, military and civilians together and civil society actors and to have a debate or discussion and so on. Of course, when we say about this ideal roles, this is something that have that has emerged based on my empirical material that is nonetheless not without caveats, but this would be the four main roles that local actors can play.

Duncan McCargo [00:17:55]

Great. Yeah. Although you're not explicitly so much using the terminology of coup proofing, some people would see this in those kind of terms, right? You can try to head off potentially troublesome interventions by the military through this kind of active engagement on a variety of fronts through international and civil society organizations. I believe you're planning another article and that you're going to set out your theoretical approach. Building on what you've explained in the book, can you tell us something about that project and how you're developing your argument going forward?

Cornelia Baciu [00:18:26]

Yes. So in the article that I'm planning is actually an advancement of the findings of the book. So I have this draft article on global local dynamics of Order and the theory of civil military adaptation in post-colonial context. So what I want to focus on in this article is the elements of this theory of civil military adaptation and the factors. How can the military predisposition to intervene in politics can change under the auspices of international reform? And related to that, the article tries to illuminate the global local dynamics of order. So what is the interplay between international level normative approaches in values and local understandings of order? How do they interact? Are there any processes of transposition from from global to local level and how they unfold? This is what the focus of my article is.

Duncan McCargo [00:19:22]

Great, so we have that to look forward to and we're going to find out more coming soon with the elaboration of the argument that you lay out in the book. Thank you, Cornelia, for taking the time to discuss your ideas about the military and hybrid political orders with us here on the Nordic Asian podcast.

Cornelia Baciu [00:19:37]

Thank you so much, Duncan, for the invitation, and thank you also to our audience for listening to us.

Duncan McCargo [00:19:43]

I'm Duncan McCargo, director of NIAS at the Department of Political Science in the University of Copenhagen. I've been in conversation with Cornelia Baciu about her very engaging recent book, Civil Military Relations and Global Security Governance Strategy, Hybrid Orders in the Case of Pakistan. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.

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