Afghanistan is one of the most drone-affected states, however, very few scholarly studies of drone use there exist. This article uses original fieldwork data in a strategically important area of Afghanistan, eastern Nangarhar province, to analyse drone effects in context. It raises important concerns about the ability of the US to attain stated counterterrorism and counterinsurgency goals. Our results show contextualised analysis of drone use necessitates appropriate enquiry into policy, doctrine, and local circumstances. It also reveals serious incoherence, inaccurate assumptions, and insufficient appreciation of local circumstances and dynamics not only in US policy and doctrine, but also numerous scholarly studies of drone use effectiveness. This has far-reaching policy, operational, and research implications, including regarding local communities’ governance, relations, and resilience to insurgent and terrorist encroachment. Therefore, we contribute to debates about how to analyse and assess drone use and its effects, why drone analysis needs to change, and what more effective forms of research and analysis can reveal.

With the advent of smartphones and social media, non-elites possess more resources to engage in politicisation and securitisation of issues. The increasing popularity and acceptance of eyewitness videos captured by non-elites presents new political-security implications, especially for the issue of migration and refugees, as witnessed during the European refugee crisis. The eyewitness videos the host population of Europe captured served as key heuristic artefacts for non-elites to engage in the securitisation and counter desecuritisation of asylum seekers. The production, visual, circulation, and audiencing aspects of eyewitness videos are significantly different from those of professional videos from news media and therefore can potentially articulate (in)security in distinct ways. I argue that the epistemic-political constitution of eyewitness videos and their online remediation through the complex networked act between the calculated security publics and video recommendation algorithms of social media play a key role in facilitating security articulations of asylum seekers. This is illustrated in the analysis of two popular eyewitness videos from Calais. The article examines how non-elites used eyewitness videos to politicise and securitise Calais asylum seekers.

A considerable amount of research within security studies has explored the military's increasingly diverse and multifaceted tasks. However, this debate has been disconnected from the literature on civil-military relations to the effect that we still lack knowledge about how and why these operational tasks have consequences for the relations between the armed forces, civilian authorities, and society at large. In order to provide for a better understanding of these effects, this introduction to the Special Issue debates the concept of operational experiences to capture how the military's routine activities affect the equilibria, logics, and mechanisms of civil-military relations. The article then provides an overview of the Special Issue's six contributions, whose diverse and global perspectives shed light on different aspects of the relationship between military missions and the military's roles in society and politics. Among other factors, they highlight role conceptions – the military's shared views on the purpose of the institution – as crucial in shaping the dynamic relation between what the military does and what place it occupies within the state and society. The article concludes by describing potentially fruitful areas of future research.

Why do some regional powers collectively threatened by a potential hegemon eagerly cooperate to ensure their security, while others appear reluctant to do so? I argue that robust security cooperation at the regional level is less likely when an unbalanced distribution of power exists between the prospective security partners. In such situations, regional security cooperation tends to be stunted by foot-dragging and obstructionism on the part of materially inferior states wary of facilitating the strategic expansion of neighbours with larger endowments of power resources, anticipating that much of the coalition's gains in military capabilities are likely to be achieved through an expansion of the materially superior neighbour's force levels and strategic flexibility. Evidence drawn from primary material and the latest historiography of France's postwar foreign policy towards West Germany provides considerable support for this argument. My findings offer important correctives to standard accounts of the origins of Western European security cooperation and suggest the need to rethink the difficulties the United States has encountered in promoting cooperation among local allies in key global regions.

What roles are military institutions expected to play in today's rapidly changing security environment? How are they supposed to interact with the society they are tasked to protect? These questions have been posed by classical military sociologists as well as by a newer generation of scholars. Yet so far, a comprehensive mapping of the military's potential roles in contemporary society is missing. In this article we contribute to an update of this debate by providing a categorisation of the different roles and tasks that the military institution plays in current industrialised democratic states. We identify three core roles, each divided into subroles, by drawing on an extensive reading of 70 National White Papers and Security Strategies from 37 OECD member states: (collective) defence, collective security, and aid to the nation. We analyse how these roles and tasks influence recent configurations in civil-military relations. This study thereby contributes with: (1) a useful illustration of the military's shifting roles and tasks in contemporary society; (2) increased understandings of how the different roles impact civil-military relations and related to this; and (3) a practical starting point for further analyses of the military organisation's internal challenges related to its, at times, contradictory roles.

Democratisation is hailed as a pathway to peace by some, yet, blamed for provoking renewed violence by others. Can democracy aid explain the effect of democratisation after civil war? Building upon findings that transitions to democracy are prone to violence, this article shows that external democracy aid can mitigate such negative effects. It is the first to disaggregate democracy aid and analyse its effect on peace after civil war. To this end, it uses a configurational approach and focuses on support for competition (for example, promoting free and fair elections), institutional constraints (for example, strengthening the judiciary), and cooperation (for example, facilitating reconciliation). Combining Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) with an illustrative case study on Liberia, it demonstrates that democracy aid can help to prevent recurrence during postconflict democratisation. Two pathways can explain peaceful democratisation: first, fostering ‘cooperative democratisation’ characterised by substantial support for cooperation in lower-risk contexts; and second, fostering ‘controlled competition’ by combining substantial support for institutional constraints and competition. Importantly, democracy support does not trigger renewed violence. These findings speak to the academic debate on the destabilising potential of democratisation processes after civil wars and inform policymakers designing postconflict support strategies.

The idea of integrative pluralism offers a promising path for the development of theory in international security and international relations. Instead of either trying to shoehorn all theorising into a single, limited paradigm or giving up entirely on theoretical progress, the integrative pluralist approach calls for bringing diverse approaches together. More precisely, integrative pluralism involves explaining specific phenomena by linking causal processes across multiple layers of reality, and then using the findings to inform broader theoretical constructs such as IR theory paradigms. Elements of the integrative pluralism approach are already visible in the work of mainstream scholars such as Snyder and Katzenstein, as well as of critical scholars such as Sjoberg and Hansen, but the field has tended to overlook these scholars’ efforts at theoretical integration. To more explicitly develop integrative pluralism for our field, this article first draws on critical realist philosophy and social theory. It then illustrates how further steps in this direction might be taken, in particular by highlighting the integrative pluralist aspects of Kaufman's applications of symbolic politics theory to explaining ethnic conflict and war more generally.

This article addresses the problem of drone violence that is ‘grey’ in the sense of being hard to categorise. It focuses on circumstances, such as arose in Pakistan, in which a foreign government's armed drones are a constant presence. A lesson from US experience there is that the persistent threat of drone strikes is intended to suppress activities that endanger the drone-using state's security. However, this threat inevitably affects innocent people living within potential strike zones. To judge such drone use by reference to military ethics principles is to assume that ‘war’ is going on, but indefinite drone deployments are difficult to conceptualise as war, so traditional Just War thinking does not suffice as a basis for moral judgement. In assessing the US government's commitment to drone-based containment of risks emerging along its ‘terror frontier’, the article considers three alternative conceptualisations of drone violence arising in non-war contexts: vim (‘force short of war’), terrorism, and imperialism. It then rejects all three and proposes that such violence is better conceptualised as being merely ‘quasi-imperialistic’. On this basis, however, the sustaining of a drone strike campaign against a series of suspected terrorists can still be condemned as violating the right to life.

How do militaries push back when they oppose civilian initiatives? This article analyses the sources and character of military dissent, focusing on the United States. It details the sources of military preferences over policy and strategy outcomes, emphasising the interplay of role conceptions with other material and ideational factors. It then presents a repertoire of means – tactics of dissent – through which military leaders can exert pressure, constraining and shaping civilians’ decision-making calculus and the implementation of policy and strategy choices. Empirically, it traces military dissent in the 1990s-era humanitarian interventions; the US's ‘War on Drugs’ beginning in the 1980s; and the Afghanistan surge debate in 2009. In so doing, the article contributes to a broader research programme on military dissent across regime types. It also expands scholars’ understandings of preference formation within militaries and illuminates the various pathways through which military dissent operates and potentially undermines civilian control.

In recent years, the concept of ‘prototype warfare’ has been adopted by Western militaries to accelerate the experimental development, acquisition, and deployment of emerging technologies in warfare. Building on scholarship at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and International Relations investigating the broader discursive and material infrastructures that underpin contemporary logics of war, and taking a specific interest in the relationship between science, technology, and war, this article points out how prototype warfare captures the emergence of a new regime of warfare, which I term the experimental way of warfare. While warfare has always been defined by experimental activity, what is particular in the current context is how experimentation spans across an increasingly wide range of military practices, operating on the basis of a highly speculative understanding of experimentation that embraces failure as a productive force. Tracing the concept of prototype warfare across Western military discourse and practice, and zooming in on how prototype warfare takes experimentation directly into the battlefield, the article concludes by outlining how prototype warfare reconfigures and normalises military intervention as an opportunity for experimentation, while outsourcing the failures that are a structural condition of the experimental way of warfare to others, ‘over there’.

This article assesses the processes and trends of desecuritisation through the deradicalisation of identity politics within the higher education sector in Afghanistan. It examines the desecuritisation of radicalisation through efforts directed at deradicalisation in the context of a securitised conflict environment. The article draws on the data generated through interviews and discussions with actors engaged with higher education. Higher education, while manipulated by numerous actors for ideo-political purposes, can function as a ‘desecuritisation’ and ‘deradicalisation’ mechanism by supplementing the statebuilding efforts, and more subtly, by providing a venue for critical teaching and learning processes. This article highlights that while the sector is typically a very low reconstruction priority, if addressed strategically, it has the potential to contribute to the desecuritisation of ethnic politics through the deradicalisation of ethnic grievances and hence function as a catalyst for effective and sustainable postwar recovery.

In a post-9/11 environment, the Department for International Development (DFID) shifted its strategic focus towards an integrationist approach that aligned mainstream development programming with the national security agenda. A key part of those reforms was integrating counterterrorism – directly and indirectly – into DFID's portfolio. Using a feminist institutionalist approach, I examine how discourses about women, development, security, and counterterrorism are reproduced through a ‘development-security-counterterrorism nexus’. Within the nexus, DFID represents a key site for the production, reproduction, and evolution of gendered discursive practices1 about women. I argue that institutional evolution is possible through a process of discursive evolution where certain discourses become more or less engrained or ‘sedimented’2 depending on the presence of alternative ideas and knowledges. The central research question asks how did gender-sensitive development work evolve after 9/11 and what factors influenced and shaped this evolution? The main findings were that as counterterrorism aims, objectives, and methods became more emphasised in UK development programming, a sense of institutional incoherence and poor strategic direction adversely affected how gender-sensitive programming was designed and implemented. Furthermore, I conclude that gendered development policy was largely based on assumptions rather than evidence, which negatively impacted how programmes were implemented.

Latin American militaries are today in many regards inoperative and obsolete as an instrument of defence. Yet, they seek to maintain their organisational power and privileges. Governments, on the other hand, lack the adequate means to fight criminality, persisting poverty and social inequality. In an apparent win-win situation, Latin American governments have used the military as a wildcard to step in where civilian state capacity falls short, including for urban and border patrols, literacy campaigns and to collect garbage, among many other tasks. The military's manifold internal use has been defended mainly based on pragmatic reasons. We argue instead that the ostensive pareto optimality between militaries and governments has had negative effects for civil-military relations from a democratic governance point of view that takes into consideration the efficiency and effectiveness of how the state delivers basic services across different policy areas.

Securitisation theory has too often been associated with the liberal state of exception and its problematic baggage. The Copenhagen School's early claims to deconstruct (not reproduce) the national security logic seem overlooked. Using the fantasy video game World of Warcraft as a large-scale thought experiment, this article asks how a distinct security mode is still possible when the normalisation of armed violence exceeds even what Carl Schmitt's political theory can provide for. Following a careful reading of Ole Wæver's formulation of the ‘existential threat’, securitisation asserts that without a certain referent object, the world becomes meaningless. As a tool for reshaping the limits of imagination, securitisation enacts political communities in World of Warcraft by turning upside down common wisdom about normalcy and security. While normal politics are violently conflictual, securitisation fills in the role of international norms and organisation, fostering supranational cooperation and erasing sovereign disputes. Securitisation thus far exceeds its contingent incarnation in the modern concept of security – a conclusion that has consequences for the normative debate on securitisation and for non-Western interpretations of the theory.

This article examines how coalition forces sought to weaponise the counting of civilian casualties in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2014. Drawing on interviews with senior coalition officials, recently declassified documents, and coalition data on civilian harm, it will explain how these figures were used to calibrate the violence inflicted on the Afghan people, ensuring that commanders applied sufficient force to achieve their objectives without causing unnecessary harm to civilians and jeopardising the success of military operations. The article examines the formation of the Civilian Casualty Tracking Cell (CCTC), which was created by General David McKiernan in 2008. It also traces the formation of the Civilian Casualty Mitigation Team (CCMT), which was established by General John Allen in 2011. Furthermore, it explores how this data was deployed by coalition officials to minimise civilian harm where possible and to rationalise this harm where necessary. Rather than simply documenting the death and destruction, these counts were complicit in the violence experienced by Afghan civilians, helping to enable and enhance the effectiveness of military operations. As such, I argue that these counts failed to contest the violence of war or the continued dehumanisation of Afghan civilians.

Will AI-enabled capabilities increase inadvertent escalation risk? This article revisits Cold War-era thinking about inadvertent escalation to consider how Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology (especially AI augmentation of advanced conventional weapons) through various mechanisms and pathways could affect inadvertent escalation risk between nuclear-armed adversaries during a conventional crisis or conflict. How might AI be incorporated into nuclear and conventional operations in ways that affect escalation risk? It unpacks the psychological and cognitive features of escalation theorising (the security dilemma, the ‘fog of war’, and military doctrine and strategy) to examine whether and how the characteristics of AI technology, against the backdrop of a broader political-societal dynamic of the digital information ecosystem, might increase inadvertent escalation risk. Are existing notions of inadvertent escalation still relevant in the digital age? The article speaks to the broader scholarship in International Relations – notably ‘bargaining theories of war’ – that argues that the impact of technology on the cause of war occurs through its political effects, rather than tactical or operational battlefield alterations. In this way, it addresses a gap in the literature about the strategic and theoretical implications of the AI-nuclear dilemma.

Peacebuilding policies and practices represent strong attempts by external actors to exercise power in postconflict settings. Yet the extensive theoretical treatments of power in International Relations remain somewhat disconnected from empirical analyses of peacebuilding, and how external actors exercise power is under-conceptualised in the literature. Likewise, the literature on forms of resistance by local actors is seldom examined as an exercise of power in itself, and as part of a multidimensional relationship of power/resistance between external and local actors. This article thus theorises the different dimensions of power/resistance, with a detailed focus on an exemplary case – international efforts at peacebuilding in Burundi – that spans more than twenty years. It deploys a tripartite conception of both to analyse the ways in which different forms of power and resistance can be uncovered in peacebuilding practices, We demonstrate this via an analysis of postconflict peacebuilding in Burundi, and in particular the longer-term efforts of local actors to overtly and covertly bend and fuse peacebuilding practices to their own ends.

Academic research on civil-military relations often assumes that dangers for democracy and civilian control mainly emanate from the military's predisposition of ‘pushing’ its way into politics. Yet, civilian control frequently is a precondition for governments’ moves of ‘pulling’ the military into roles that may potentially be problematic. These can include the military's involvement in political disputes or internal public security missions. Notwithstanding its empirical relevance, little academic work has been devoted to understanding how ‘pulling’ works. In this article, we aim to provide a first, exploratory framework of ‘pulling’ that captures the dynamics of the military's reactions and indirect consequences for civil-military relations. We identify three analytically distinct phases in which pulling occurs. First, politicians initiate either operational or political pulling moves. Second, we situate the military's reaction on a spectrum that ranges from refusal to non-conditional compliance. This reaction is driven by the military's role conceptions about appropriate missions and their relation to politics. In a third phase, the military may slowly start shifting its role conceptions to adapt to its new roles. We illustrate our argument with case studies of two different instances of pulling: operational pulling in the case of France (2015–19) and operational – then-turned-political – pulling in the case of Brazil (2010–20).

The Covid-19 pandemic that emerged in the spring of 2020 caused severe political, social, and economic turmoil throughout the world. In spite of early warning signals from the World Health Organization, countries struggled to shape their policy responses and countermeasures for curtailing the spread of the virus while also minimising the damage that any restrictions would inflict on the health and well-being of society at large. While some countries have adopted strict regulations and extraordinary measures after declaring ‘states of exception’ and ‘national emergencies’, others have relied upon expert recommendations and individual responsibility. Sweden is viewed as having adopted one of the latter type of approaches in that it places the responsibility for social distancing upon the individual. Is this an instance of a failed ‘securitisation’ process, or rather a sensible constitutional and political response to a severe security event? This article presents an in-depth analysis of the Swedish strategy for coping with Covid-19, arguing that this case illustrates that security management in a democratic state should direct greater attention to rule following in accordance with a logic of appropriateness rather than the rule breaking envisaged by securitisation theory.

Only two European countries – France and the UK, both NATO members – have nuclear weapons, and leading politicians have called for the UK and EU to maintain close military and security links post-Brexit. In the context of the Trident renewal debate and the UK government's recently published integrated defence and security review, this article uses data from the new UK Security Survey to analyse attitudes towards the possession of nuclear weapons among the British public. It assesses three key theorical strands in the wider scholarly literature on public opinion and states’ use of military force: domestic political attitudes, foreign policy predispositions, and the ‘gender gap’. We find that all three theoretical perspectives contribute to the underpinnings of contemporary public opinion towards nuclear weapons. Support for the retention of Britain's nuclear deterrent is associated with being a Conservative Party supporter, favouring Brexit, endorsing superior military power worldwide as an important foreign policy goal, wanting to protect the transatlantic relationship, and with being male. The article makes a distinctive contribution to the growing subfield of research on public opinion and foreign policy, while the findings advance wider empirical understanding of contemporary citizen engagement in a key dimension of security policy.