Civil Military Relations In Lebanon

This volume examines Lebanon’s post-2011 security dilemmas and the tenuous civil-military relations. The Syrian civil war has strained the Lebanese Armed Forces’ (LAF) cohesion and threatens its neutrality – its most valued assets in a divided society. The spill-over from the Syrian civil war and Hezbollah’s military engagement has magnified the security challenges facing the Army, making it a target. Massive foreign grants have sought to strengthen its military capability, stabilize the country and contain the Syria crisis. However, as this volume demonstrates, the real weakness of the LAF is not its lack of sophisticated armoury, but the fragile civil–military relations that compromise its fighting power, cripple its neutrality and expose it to accusations of partisanship and political bias. This testifies to both the importance of and the challenges facing multi-confessional armies in deeply divided countries.

Eduardo Wassim Aboultaif critically analyzes civil–military relations and the way armies are constructed in divided societies. To achieve that, the book looks at four case studies with deep divisions and whose armed forces have been reconstructed after civil wars. Lebanon and Bosnia-Herzegovina represent two examples of consociational power-sharing arrangements with functioning armed forces that enjoy wide popular support and neutral in internal affairs. Iraq and Burundi, however, have semi-consociational provisions that have politicized the army and made it a partisan military that has either led to disintegration (as in the case of Iraq) or politicization and loss of legitimacy (as in Burundi).

In Civil-Military Relations in Israel, Yehuda Ben Meir examines the reasons preventing Israel from becoming a "garrison state". A former deputy minister for foreign affairs and longtime member and analyst of the Israeli political scene, Ben Meir is uniquely qualified to give a behind-the-scenes picture of the intimate relationship between Israel's civilian and military leaders. Civil-Military Relations in Israel examines the changing face of the military over the years from an idealistic defense force to a professional army. Ben Meir also views the great divisiveness in Israeli politics as a threat to the unified strength of purpose that in the past characterized the nation's civil authority, and he examines present and future threats to continued civilian control of the military. The book also delves into the legal and constitutional foundations of Israel's civil-military relations, providing a valuable perspective on the organization and role of the current defense establishment, as well as the informal relationship between the key players in the system. In addition, Ben Meir pinpoints the areas in which the military is involved in key political decision making. Despite continuing efforts to resolve the pattern of violence and conflict in the Middle East, the long-standing hostility between Arab and Jew in the region is unlikely to disappear in the near future. And as long as such animosity lingers, Israel's military will remain a strong force in Israeli politics.

This book investigates an important phenomenon in the Middle East and the Mediterranean region, namely the role that the military plays in the governments of several states of the region. Can military forces be defined as guardians of a regime in a democratic state? How is it possible to limit the power of armies to solely military prerogatives and competences? How can the intervention of military forces in the political arena in democratising countries be prevented? It is easy to ask these questions, but finding answers is more difficult. Using historical events and theories as examples to follow is an even more complicated task. What happened after the Arab Spring has demonstrated again how civil-military relations constitute an important pillar of the democratisation process. The contributors to this book develop and analyse the reasons why militaries in the Middle East and the Mediterranean wished to obtain a guardianship role and the methods they used to achieve and maintain it. The book also investigates how these militaries reacted to democratisation in their respective countries, and begins with a conceptual framework followed by examples from Spain, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon and Iran. This work provides a multi-faceted understanding of the historical, political, social and economic layers of complicated civil-military relations in one of the world’s most unstable regions.

The Routledge Handbook of Civil-Military Relations not only fills this important lacuna, but offers an up-to-date comparative analysis which identifies three essential components in civil-military relations: (1) democratic civilian control; (2) operational effectiveness; and (3) the efficiency of the security institutions. This Handbook will be essential reading for students and practitioners in the fields of civil-military relations.

This book addresses the challenge of reforming defense and military policy-making in newly democratized nations. By tracing the development of civil-military relations in various new democracies from a comparative perspective, it links two bodies of scholarship that thus far have remained largely separate: the study of emerging (or failed) civilian control over armed forces on the one hand; and work on the roots and causes of military effectiveness to guarantee the protection and security of citizens on the other. The empirical and theoretical findings presented here will appeal to scholars of civil-military relations, democratization and security issues, as well as to defense policy-makers.

2009 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Oren Barak sheds new light on the major political and social developments in Lebanon since its independence by focusing on the emergence of the Lebanese Army, its paralysis during the civil war from 1975 to 1990, and its reconstruction after the war. He discusses the remarkable transformation of a military dominated by one sector of society—the Christian communities, and particularly the Maronites—into one that is characterized by power sharing among Lebanon's various communities, large families, and regions. The book develops a new approach to the study of the role of the military in divided societies by examining military institutions from three intertwined angles: first, as major arenas for social coexistence and conflict; second, as actors that are involved in politics but are also affected by political processes; and third, as actors that promote the process of state formation. This comprehensive look at Lebanon will inform the discussion of other divided societies, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, that face the dual challenge of restoring the political system and the security sector after state failure and intrastate conflict.

politics, and national security policy.--John R. Ballard "On Point"