Does discrimination in the military erode institutional trust and reduce public support for defense spending and recruitment? We test this through a survey experiment (n = 2,442) examining Canadian public reactions to scenarios highlighting the Canadian Armed Forces' inclusion challenges for First Nations, M & eacute;tis and Inuit, Francophones, people of colour, LGBTQ2S+, and women. Findings reveal that discrimination scandals significantly erode public trust, reduce support for defense spending, and undermine willingness to recommend military recruitment. Using causal mediation analysis, we demonstrate that discrimination primarily operates through its effect on institutional trust rather than through direct pathways. Crucially, trust functions as a more complete mediator in recruitment decisions than in defense spending, indicating that personnel recruitment depends almost entirely on institutional confidence, while spending support reflects a more complex calculus. Maintaining public trust-particularly trust that the military reflects societal values of inclusion-is essential for sustaining public support necessary for military recruitment and resource mobilization.

ABSTRACTAlthough much research confirms a gender gap in political science and its subfields internationally, only recently have scholars analyzed country-specific conditions for women within the field. Our study contributes to this national-level examination of gender diversity and inclusion by examining the extent to which a gender gap within the subfield of security studies, identified in the international literature, also is present in Canada. Research on gender representation and gendered experiences mostly centers on the academic workforce in the United States. However, in this article, we share the results of a multi-method investigation into the state of gender diversity in Canadian security studies—a national context in which the university sector has signaled a strong commitment to diversity and the government has actively promoted gender equality in official policy. By analyzing data collected from an online survey of security studies scholars in Canada and a document analysis of Canadian security-related journals and selected security studies syllabi, this contribution provides evidence that women are underrepresented in Canadian security studies and experience the subfield in less positive ways. We discuss the implications of these findings for the security studies subfield and suggest paths for future research and key recommendations.

This chapter focuses on how civilian control of NATO forces is exercised during expeditionary operations. We find that national command authorities exercise more control over their deployed contingents than NATO does. We demonstrate this by applying principal-agent theory to four means that countries use to control their troops: leadership selection, discretion, oversight, and incentives. We discuss the various factors that shape and complicate decisions about each of these control mechanisms, primarily showcasing behaviour in Afghanistan to illustrate these dynamics. We conclude with implications for both policy and future research.

Legislatures vary widely in how they affect democratic civil–military relations. In some countries, legislative oversight plays a critical role in guiding their defense establishment. In others, legislators are largely ignorant and happily so. In this article, we explain the sources of these variations in fifteen democratic states. After discussing the importance of the legislature's role in democratic civil–military relations, we clarify what we mean by oversight. We argue that variations in oversight are explained by the number and scope of legislative committees charged with military oversight and party politics within those committees. After reviewing alternative explanations, we present oversight patterns in fifteen democratic countries across the world. We then briefly examine Germany's Bundestag and Japan's Diet, as the comparison of these cases challenges most existing explanations of legislative oversight and serve as hard cases for our argument. We conclude with implications of legislative oversight for broader debates about civilian control of the military.

An enormous number of people are leaving their homelands around the world today. This has happened several times in the past, but migration has spiked in recent years. These population movements can have significant effects on both the host country (where emigrants or refugees settle), as well as politics back in the homeland. After they leave their homelands, why do some groups mobilize, and in what ways? In this article, we examine a number of factors that may impact when emigrated groups mobilize after they move. We develop a new dataset on potential diasporas in the United States to evaluate a series of hypotheses, including those about motivations for mobilization such as identity maintenance, the objective plight of co-ethnics in the homeland, and group capacity to mobilize. We find some merit in the identity preservation argument and a strong effect of geographic concentration of the diaspora segment. Surprisingly, diaspora mobilization does not appear to be strongly related to conflict in the homeland among these groups.

Abstract Is secession contagious? If so, can it beco ntained orqu arantinedto limit its spread? These two questions must be,addressed,to understand the challenges posed by ethnic,divisions within and between states today. The end ,of ideological competition between ,the United States ,and the Soviet Union has not ushered in an era of global peace, but instead a period characterized by ethnic conflictswithin many states. The coincidenceof the disintegrations of the Soviet, Yugoslav, and,Czechoslovak federations suggests that secession does spread with potentially ,nasty consequences. Further, there seems to be more secessionism today than ever before.,By,restricting thestudy tosecessionism, rather than the full spectrum of ethnic conflict, this paper will evaluate some conventional beliefs concerning secessionism, develop initial arguments about the important dynamics and processes at work, and posit alternative approaches to the international politics of

In most advanced democracies, civilian control of the military is taken for granted even though it is fundamental to democracy itself. In many democracies, relatively few elected officials have significant power and responsibility over this very important domain. Canadian institutions, like those in many democracies, provide few incentives for politicians to become seriously engaged in defence issues. This chapter puts Canada into comparative perspective, indicating both that oversight over the Canadian Armed Forces is rather weak and that Canada is not alone. Using principal-agent theory, this chapter considers who are the relevant actors for the supervision of the armed forces, what their powers and interests are, and what this means for the Canadian Armed Forces. The focus here is on the prime minister, the defence minister, the chief of defence staff, the deputy minister and parliament, with a quick look at the limited private sector. The end of the chapter then considers what the Canadian Armed Forces does with its substantial autonomy.

This study introduces a new type of oversight in civil-military and executive-legislative relations: community policing. Building on principal-agent theory, this type of oversight emphasises trust rather than confrontation. To illustrate how community policing functions, the study examines how legislative oversight of military affairs operates in Belgium and New Zealand. Legislative defence committees in both countries rely on trust when overseeing the executive's handling of defence affairs. This allows these committees to perform their oversight function at low cost in terms of time and effort, but with a high degree of access to information. Community policing therefore combines the strengths of recognised 'police patrol' and 'fire alarm' oversight, while avoiding their respective weaknesses. However, since it relies on a higher degree of trust and cooperation between the principal and agent, community policing is inherently fragile.

Have the major international relations paradigms declined as much as has been asserted? Some scholars view paradigmatic theory and theory in general as on the decline as hypothesis-testing now apparently dominates published research. Such scholars argue that professionalization provides disincentives to theorize. This article demonstrates that these arguments are based on perceptions rather than on the data, on speculation about what professionalization incentivizes and how that influences research production. This article examines several datasets to consider these assertions. The article addresses what is being published, how scholars see themselves and the field, and what is being cited. Because scholars are publishing more articles compared to in the 1980s, the changes that some scholars have observed about the decline of certain approaches and the rise of others are relative and not absolute. A closer examination of the data reveals that what is perceived to be the normal pattern of theoretical output was an outlier in the mid-1990s and that pure theory development has always been a niche enterprise. To explain the trends, rather than stressing the impact of professionalization of the discipline, the article proposes an alternative process that focuses less on structure and more on agency. Social movements aimed to increase the publication of diverse theories and methodologies may have simply been effective: new journals are publishing more and more diverse articles, fostering a wider range of work. The article concludes by exploring the implications of the patterns of theory development in published IR research.

Today, few countries fight alone; most fight as allies or partners in multilateral campaigns. The end of the Cold War opened a window of opportunity for multinational military operations (MMOs). These have seen varying degrees of participation, enthusiasm, and success. This special forum is devoted to the politics of multilateral warfare including their formation, maintenance, and durability. The introduction sketches past research and derives some key questions of continuing relevance. The contributions shed light on the domestic and international politics of MMOs, focusing on the implementation of national restrictions and their repercussions for MMOs, party politics of military intervention, the conditions under which states decide to defect from military operations, and the role of junior partners in MMOs. In sum, this forum offers a fresh look at the politics of MMOs, including conceptual contributions to the study of national restrictions, domestic constraints, and coalition warfare.

Abstract Foreign intervention in ethnic conflicts has received significant attention in the last 20 years. Scholars have initially considered the sources for these interventions through instrumental and affective factors, though a better classification involves grouping these motives between domestic and international factors. The former category assumes that a third state’s internal politics best explain motives of intervention, and that domestic groups within the state have the greatest impact on foreign policy decision making. Theories based on domestic explanations assume that domestic politics greatly matter in the formulation of states’ decisions to intervene or not in ethnic conflicts elsewhere. As for the external explanations, scholars share a common assertion that the international environment is the central determinant explaining third state intervention. These explanations focus on the impact of institutions and international norms on the international relations of ethnic conflicts. In addition to these approaches, this area of research still contains many issues left unaddressed, such as how interference from outside might affect an ethnic conflict, and what forms of analysis might be used to study foreign interventions. Scholars have applied both quantitative and qualitative techniques, and the diaspora literature stands out for relying almost exclusively on case studies and on very notable cases. Otherwise, the rest of the work in this field follows the current standards by using a mixture of case studies and quantitative analyses depending on the questions in play.

The author's take on ethnic conflict builds on the institutionalist debates between Horowitz and Lijphart and is pluralist when it comes to methods. As a result, the consistent findings he stresses relate to the relevance of institutions (electoral laws, federalism) and demography (group concentration, not fractionalization). As a scholar of International Relations, he tends to focus on the transnational dynamics of ethnic conflict. The research question that he would pursue if he had more time and resources would be: why do people follow some politicians who play various ethnic cards and not others? That is, some politicians try to manipulate ethnic identities by highlighting one at the expense of others and by promoting specific aspects of that identity. Not all such politicians are successful in such efforts.

This paper considers some of the lessons that can be drawn from Canada’s experience in Afghanistan. It focuses not just on the military but also on the rest of the government, two prime ministers, the opposition, the media, and the public. While the primary lesson might be “do not do this kind of thing again,” there are other lessons to draw that apply to Canada’s foreign and defence policies every day.

This paper analyses how democratic legislatures oversee the military, using Canada as a case. The paper argues that the tendency to engage in intrusive oversight versus reactive oversight is shaped by institutional structures and party preferences. Canadian institutional structures discourage parliamentary defence committees from engaging in intrusive oversight of the armed forces to achieve policy influence, and encourage opposition parties to focus on reactive oversight efforts that complement their vote-seeking preferences. Vote-seeking, the paper argues, incentivises opposition parties to be public critics of the government's handling of military affairs, rather than informed but secretive monitors of the armed forces. The paper then addresses a key case where the opposition was able to use an exceptional constitutional power of the House of Commons to force the executive to disclose classified information regarding the military: detainee transfers by the Canadian Armed Forces in Afghanistan. This case highlights the trade-offs that parliamentarians face when they demand information to perform more intrusive oversight of the armed forces. This suggests that party preferences are a significant, yet understudied, aspect of how legislatures vary in their oversight of the military.

This article examines the Canadian data collected by the Teaching, Research and International Policy project to assess the state of Canadian international relations scholarship. The focus is on the divide, mentioned but not studied in previous work, between the higher profile PhD programs (UBC, McGill, Toronto) and other Canadian universities. The results indicate that the approaches, methods, and theoretical inclinations differ less than often averred, but that the two groups do value different scholars, journals, and presses. And there is more diversity within each side than often argued, which makes the divide itself less deep. The article concludes with some implications about the possibility of a distinctively Canadian international relations.