This article explores how Ukraine’s civil society has taken on direct security functions during Russia’s full-scale invasion, with a particular focus on the production of weaponized drone technologies. Drawing on and grounded in the “everyday International Relations (IR)” framework, the article assembles a novel database of both for-profit and nonprofit drone manufacturers operating in Ukraine, while applying social-network analysis to trace their patterns of collaboration. The article asks why civilian actors assumed a role usually monopolized by the defense industry and how their micropolitical practices reshape Ukraine’s macro-level war efforts. The results reveal a hybridized field in which civic activists, start-ups, and established firms converge, consequently blurring the conventional boundary between market activity and grassroots activist mobilization in the pursuit of national defense imperatives. By illuminating how market logics and activist practices intertwine under conditions of existential threat, the study challenges the standard definition of civil society as a realm separate from the state, family, and market, thereby advancing scholarship on whole-of-society resilience during wartime exemplified by the production of weaponized drones.
This article analyses media representations of Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, in light of the ICC arrest warrant issued for her and Vladimir Putin over the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. Using discourse analysis across Ukrainian, Russian, and selected Western (UK/US) media, it examines how gendered narratives shape understandings of female agency, political violence, and motherhood. Drawing on feminist and poststructuralist theories, the article explores how Lvova-Belova is framed differently across contexts: Ukrainian media depict her as a key perpetrator of a genocidal campaign, emphasizing her autonomy and casting her as a monstrous mother. Western outlets often downplay her role, portraying her as subordinate to Putin. Russian state media, meanwhile, presents her as a humanitarian saving orphaned children. These gendered framings reflect broader ideological divides and serve political ends. The article highlights how femininity and motherhood are strategically deployed to construct narratives of blame, innocence, or legitimacy during war.
This article explores how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has influenced public attitudes toward gender roles, particularly in the context of (gendered) military duty. On the basis of analysis of representative national surveys of leading sociological centers in Ukraine and other data from open sources, the author explores whether there are signs of the militarization of Ukrainian society at the level of (gendered) sociocultural expectations, with an emphasis on public attitudes toward three issues: the military and its role in society including in postwar reconstruction; the roles of men during war; and the roles of women during war. The findings reveal a complex and often contradictory set of gendered attitudes. While legislative norms reinforce a binary of gender roles of men who are “defenders” and women “are defended”, societal attitudes are more fluid: many men resist the prescribed “defender” role, and women’s participation in the military is increasingly accepted. The article contributes to debates on militarization and gender equality by showing that, in the Ukrainian context, war has led to erosion of patriarchal gender norms at sociocultural level rather than to their reinforcement.
This special issue presents an empirically driven analysis of Russia’s war against Ukraine from the perspective of Ukrainian scholars. Curated in response to the limited presence of Ukrainian voices in international academic discourse on the conflict, this collection focuses on the social, gendered, and lived realities of war. The issue also addresses the underrepresentation of women’s voices in war and conflict studies. Ukrainian women scholars are the authors or lead authors on all contributions to the issue, which explore critical themes including the impact of the war on gender roles, the rapid integration of women into the Ukrainian armed forces, gendered discourse surrounding war crimes, and the innovative role of civil society in defense. The issue also includes a review of recent books that offer insights on the war’s impact on Ukrainian society from sociocultural, anthropological, historical, and journalistic perspectives. Ultimately, this special issue offers readers a nuanced understanding of how Ukrainian society is navigating and being profoundly transformed by the war, affirming the vital importance of insider perspectives in comprehending modern war.
Establishing the policy of equal rights and opportunities in the military sector requires women to have better access to professional military education (PME); it also means developing PME to incorporate awareness of gender issues in the armed forces. Ukraine’s implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, “Women, Peace, and Security,” provides women and men equal access to educational institutions at all levels in the security and defense sector and the inclusion of a gender component in education. Solving the issue of protecting military personnel from sexual harassment is another step on the path to creating a professional army. Education is an important factor as well, as it can raise the awareness in both men and women soldiers of the importance of gender equality and improve their ability to recognize sexual harassment, counteract it, and deal with its consequences. This study addresses the intersection of two sectors: education and the military. It is based on the results of a representative public opinion survey on women’s access to military education, an anonymous online survey, and secondary data analysis. It underlines the importance of a gender-sensitive approach to women’s access to PME, which itself plays an important role in the implementation of gender equality in the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), helping to break down stereotypes and biases that have historically limited women’s roles in the military.
Review of: Dispossession: Anthropological Perspectives on Russia’s War AgainstUkraine edited by Catherine Wanner. Routledge. 2024 Feminist Perspective on Russia’s War in Ukraine: Hear Our Voicesedited by Maryna Shevtsova. Lexington Books. 2024 Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia’s Warby Jen Stout. Polygon. 2024 Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States by MariaPopova and Oxana Shevel. Polity. 2024
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is not debt trap diplomacy; rather, it is an effort by China to coalesce and capitalize on the sentiments of its participants who have expressed concurrence with China’s view of international relations. At a time when the dominant international relations narrative is being challenged, specifically by China, the BRI has provided China with an opportunity to obtain affirmation for its foreign interests and principles. This claim is made evident by evaluating, as metrics of geopolitical influence, United Nations resolutions representing China’s interests and how BRI participant nations voted on them, as well as official BRI statements that these nations have made regarding China’s foreign policy stances.
In 2013, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta removed the ban on women serving in combat roles in the US military. This policy decision effectively opened all positions in the military to women. Decades of scholarship inform us that military service leads to long-term socioeconomic benefits, but this research has focused on male veterans. This earning advantage holds true for all male veterans but is more significant for racial minority groups. As the original equal-pay institution, the military has long been an attractive option for women on their career path, and today female enlistment rates are rising faster than any other group. This study analyzes how military service affects women who elect to serve, across several economic and social variables, and how that has evolved for different cohorts of female service members. Conducting regression analysis on multiple census data sets, we find that women who join the military gain significant long-term socioeconomic benefits in comparison to their civilian counterparts, that military service affects social variables including marriage, and that these effects are stable over time.
In the wake of the War in Ukraine, the need for Armed Forces organizations to focus on recruitment and retainment and to attract, educate and maintain their future leaders has reentered the agenda. As organizational identification is known to strengthen retainment, this study examines antecedents of military identification, focusing on the role of intrinsic motivation and military socialization. Thus, through cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of a unique dataset with Danish cadets, we show, first, a close link between intrinsic motivation and military identification. Second, while military socialization seems to play a role, we also find that the difference that can be ascribed to intrinsic motivation remains: Regardless of the method of analysis pursued, strongly motivated cadets just identify stronger with the military. These findings have obvious recruitment implementations and should also give rise to considerations regarding the Armed Forces’ prioritization of retainment initiatives.
At the end of the Cold War, a lively public and academic debate arose on the nature of contemporary armed conflicts, their transformations, and their supposed novelty compared to previous wars. Numerous definitions were coined to mark these changes: ethnic, predatory, criminal, postmodern, hybrid, asymmetric, etc. By analysing a long-term model based on the historical dynamics of organised violence developed by the sociologist Malešević, we seek to show that the exponential growth of bureaucratic and ideological apparatuses within modern societies are at the root of the steady increase in organised violence, and consequently that the phenomenon of war, as the case of the Russian-Ukrainian war demonstrates, has not undergone such radical transformations as to justify any paradigm shift.
The personnel selection based on ethnoreligious factors, with the readoption of Fulani herders, bandits, and unknown shooters into the defense organization, has challenged Nigerian troops’ perceived individual employability, perceived work ability, and fit between person and vocation. Also, these have made personnel career adaptability a severe challenge for Nigerian soldiers. We examined person-job fit as a moderator in the associations of perceived individual employability, perceived work ability, and career adaptability. Two hundred and fifty-two Nigerian military personnel between eighteen and sixty years of age (M = 39; SD = .964) participated in the study. Through purposeful and convenient sampling techniques, we collected data using the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale, the Self-Perceived Individual Employability Scale, the Perceived Work Ability Scale, and the Person-Job-Fit Scale. Our findings showed that individual employability, perceived work ability, and person-job fit significantly predict military personnel’s career adaptation. Person-job fit moderated the association of perceived individual employability and military career adaptation. However, it did not influence the association between perceived work ability and military career adaptation. Our study showed that person-job fit, individual employability with work ability, and career adaptation are prerequisites for enlistment, deployment for combat, and well-being after combat experiences. Practical implications are that the insecurity challenges in Nigeria would have been mitigated if defense organizations had selected enlisted personnel for military work and deployment based on work ability, employability, and person-job fit so that they could quickly adapt to their careers and fight these insecurity challenges. Also, our study suggests that educational qualifications are not essential for military enlistment and deployment. We highlighted our study’s limitations and suggested further work on the topic.
In response to a number of military failures in a rapidly changing war environment, the Department of Defense put forth major efforts to incorporate social science research into the US national defense strategy. Three such efforts—Project Camelot, Human Terrain Systems, and the Minerva Research Initiative—represent iterative Department of Defense efforts to better understand and change their organizational environment through legitimate academic knowledge production. Our investigation of these efforts demonstrates that when the Department of Defense wants specific information and has a difficult time obtaining it, it eventually finds a way to produce it, in this case by employing tactics similar to those employed by economic elites when they want to develop knowledge that will help them achieve their goals.
In a democratic state, it is expected that a balance exists between civil and military power. While the military’s role has been traditionally defined as safeguarding a country’s national sovereignty and security, the modern concept of civil-military relations encapsulates a broader engagement of the military in advancing a country’s diplomacy as well. This article, taking the broader understanding into consideration, probes into the Bangladesh military’s expanding role. While civil-military relations went through much turbulence during the first few decades in Bangladesh’s history, with the restoration of democracy in 1991 the military has been one of the key participants in advancing defense diplomacy. Using several case studies, the article addresses vital questions such as the role of colonial legacies in Bangladesh’s military, how the military has gradually embedded itself in Bangladesh’s social, political, and economic milieu, and how unique civil-military relations have emboldened Bangladesh’s defense diplomacy.
The Republic of Korea (ROK) is making efforts to switch to a technology-intensive military that introduces advanced technology to prevent a security vacuum caused by a shortage of troops due to population decline. This study analyzed the replacement rate of military job performance ability by branch according to the development of science and technology (S&T). In addition, the following conclusions could be derived. First, S&T will significantly replace the human personnel’s job performance by 2040. Second, the degree of replacement by S&T will be high for the troop-intensive branches. Third, low-skilled and standardized jobs are easy to replace by S&T, and high-skilled atypical jobs are difficult to replace. Therefore, the ROK military’s aim of a military with advanced technology needs a customized policy that identifies low-skilled, standardized jobs, replaces them with S&T first, and gradually introduces super-technical skills that fit the attributes of the branches to which those jobs belong.
For Bangladesh, defence diplomacy has evolved as a cornerstone of its military since the restoration of democracy in 1991. This chapter highlights the evolving roles and activities of the Bangladesh Armed Forces in this context as well as an extension of traditional diplomacy of the country. The military’s training and education facilities foster international cooperation and regularly host members of foreign armed forces. Bangladesh’s involvement in United Nations peacekeeping in particular has been instrumental in strengthening the defence diplomacy sector and has become an inseparable part of the military’s identity. It is argued that Bangladesh succeeded in promoting itself as a keeper of international peace and security through its participation in peacekeeping. Consequently, the chapter concludes that despite its peripheral position Bangladesh has been able to carve out its own space in international politics by virtue of promoting soft power through defence diplomacy, notwithstanding the fact that these activities are often circumscribed by manifold challenges.
This review article elucidates concepts related to sea power, the social construction of the ocean, and maritime transformation. It begins with Mahan’s and Mackinder’s classic understanding of sea power, arguably the source of all traditional perspectives on the subject. Although this article accepts Till’s definition of sea power, it maintains that conventional wisdom does not offer a clear distinction between sea power as “a means of social power” and sea power as “states with powerful navies.” Furthermore, this article discusses Lambert’s conception of seapower identity, contending that his perspectives on seapower-state establishment are not based on relationships between the state, military, and the oceans. Lambert’s analysis of seapower states focuses on the activities that people engage in on land for seapower identity. His account suggests that maritime transformation could only occur in cases in which sea states transform into seapower states. However, this article claims that Steinberg’s concepts and theory of the social construction of the ocean provide a useful approach to examining the maritime transformation required for a transition from tellurocracy to thalassocracy.
This article views military service through the lenses of legal and gender approaches. With the reinstatement of compulsory military service being debated in many Western countries, the factors contributing to draft evasion are relevant. This article explores policy aiming to address draft evasion through a case study of post-EU-accession Cyprus. It shows that in Cyprus, policy attempts to reinvigorate military values are flawed. Draft evasion points to social, political, and economic developments that call for the military ideology of the armed forces to be redesigned to render a fairer institution toward conscript soldiers. When the draft evasion phenomenon becomes intensified, armies should consider a fairer form of military service, such as “giving back” to soldiers for the time spent in the army through the development of skills and educational and professional qualifications.
Several studies focusing on public attitudes toward transgender people have been conducted, but there has been minimal research on how heteronormativity might influence military-affiliated respondents’ attitudes toward transgender service members. In this qualitative study, seven United States veterans participated in phone interviews from July 2020 to January 2021, in which they shared their thoughts about working with transgender service members. Findings also included their opinions regarding transgender service as it relates to unit cohesion, military effectiveness, and national security. Overall, this study uniquely contributes to the scholarly literature by providing a firsthand account of transgender military service from the service members themselves. The findings also lay the groundwork for future and more extensive studies related to the current integration of transgender service members as they workalongside their cisgender colleagues.
This article explores “revolutionary etatization,” defined as the process of revolutionary organizations evolving into embryonic proto-states even before they have seized power. The article focuses on the period between the end of World War I and the present day. While the situation of inescapable violent competition (Tilly) represents the Darwinian driver of the process, we need the ideologicaland strategic dimensions to account for the variety of revolutionary proto-states. Embryonic revolutionary states come in two main types: the multi-department civil-administration apparatus, and the agglomerate of organs of popular representation, corresponding, respectively, to “constructive” and “co-optive” modes of state formation. Revolutionary etatization is a universal experience holding true not only for rural guerrillas controlling “liberated territories” but also for urban guerrillas and urban insurrectionists.
This article analyzes “National Defense Courses” textbooks that were used to disseminate defense information to the political, social, and administrative elite in Finland. Textbooks from 1967 to 2018 provide qualitative historicaland sociological data, showing how Finland has prepared for war and other security contingencies for the past five decades. The main shift in fostering the population’s allegiance to the state has gone from addressing the management of political heterodoxy as a patriotic endeavor to one of cultivating apolitical resilience in the face of adversity. Both patriotism and resilience appear in the texts as forms of civic piety, in which people’s individual preferences give way to collective interests.
