No abstract

This Armed Forces & Society forum concentrates on broadening the perspective on military cohesion. This introduction, and the five articles that it acts as a preamble to, argues for the need to widen the scope of the recent debate on military cohesion, which in part took place in this very journal. This debate narrowly focused on Western state militaries during the 20th and 21st centuries and even then on the microlevel. The articles in this issue contribute to this broadening by exploring military cohesion in non-Western or nonmodern contexts, as well as through new methods, thus individually and collectively suggesting new ways forward to further our understanding of military cohesion.

Social media and instant messaging are fast becoming an integral part of contemporary life, and subsequently of ethnographic research. As ethnography is essentially a process defined by relations between people, this article investigates how online interaction influenced my relationships with the people I studied: Ukrainian volunteer battalions. Framed in a broader context of conflict ethnography, the resulting chatnography made access to informants tremendously easier, and allowed for remote data collection. Chatnography nevertheless exacerbated ethical challenges posed by study of armed conflict. The blending of offline and online also led to despatialization, and the blurring of personal and professional. This questions the traditional notion of the ‘field’, while more immediately threatening to limit my private life. While not a magic bullet, the convenience of chatnography means that it will be here for years to come. This article offers an attempt to investigate what this entails in practice.

It is difficult to underestimate the importance of cohesion for armed groups or organizations specialized and engaged in organized violence. This article argues that the recent debate on military cohesion has been far too narrow as it focused on Western state militaries during the 20th and 21st centuries, and even then only on the microlevel. It is necessary to broaden the perspective in order to construct theories that encompass even the vast majority of armed groups—the non-Western, nonstate, and nonmodern. This article advocates two ways of doing so: the investigation of cases that belong to these three types and broadening analysis to two new levels of analysis—the meso-level of armed groups and the macro-level, which contains state and society. Cohesion is established through harmonizing these three levels, which necessitates including them in the analysis in the first place.