Broadening the Perspective on Military Cohesion

Abstract

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.

New Body of Cohesion Research at a Macrolevel

“…The two groups tend to cite and be much more familiar with the research literature in their own geographical area and much less so with the literature on the other side of the ocean. For example, in Käihkö’s (2018b) article on broadening cohesion research, his citations are disproportionately Eurocentric despite a large body of available government and academic research from North America, Australia, and Asia. Even so, he also misses relevant cohesion references from Sweden’s geographical neighbors in Norway and Finland (e.g., Salo & Siebold, 2008).…”

“…Finally, Käihkö’s (2018b) review of the cohesion literature is a bit off key. For instance, he asserts that the concept of cohesion comes from the 16th and 17th century rather than two millennia ago from the Romans.…”

“…For a previous edition of this journal, Käihkö (2018a, 2018b) put together a special issue with others to propose a broadening of perspective on military cohesion. Certainly, cohesion is a critical topic and deserves to be well researched and expanded; these authors should be applauded for their effort.…”

Toward Strategic Cohesion: A Reply to King’s Criticism of the Call for a Broader View of Cohesion

“…In a recent intervention, Anthony King accuses me of speaking past him in a 2018 special issue published in this journal that called for an empirical, methodological, and theoretical broadening of the study of cohesion: empirical broadening through including premodern, nonstate, and non-Western armed groups, methodological broadening through methods like ethnography that allow studying cohesion in these kinds of groups, and theoretical broadening through paying more attention to mesoand macrolevel factors (Käihkö, 2018a(Käihkö, , 2018c; these points were further elaborated in Käihkö & Haldén, 2020). While King welcomes the call to broaden the study of cohesion to encompass archival and ethnographic research and non-Western armed groups, he feels that none of my theoretical claims are sustainable.…”

Full-Spectrum Social Science for a Broader View on Cohesion

“…A recent Armed Forces & Society special issue on broadening the perspective on military cohesion argued that previous studies of cohesion have struggled to explain and/or understand cohesion and its preconditions in non-Western, nonstate, and nonmodern cases (Käihkö, 2018a(Käihkö, , 2018b. The special issue and the workshop organized at the Swedish Defence University in December 2015 that led to it stemmed from the previous debate between King (2006King ( , 2007 and Siebold (2007) in the pages of this journal.…”