Description
What roles are military institutions expected to play in today’s rapidly changing security environment? How are they supposed to interact with the society they are expected to protect? These questions have since long been posed by classical military sociologists as well as more recently by a newer generation of scholars. Yet so far, a comprehensive mapping of the military’s potential roles in contemporary society seems to be missing. In this article we contribute to an update of this debate by providing a categorization of the different and sometimes overlapping roles and tasks that the military institution plays in current industrialized democratic states. We identify three core roles, each divided into sub-roles, by drawing on an extensive reading of 70 National White Papers and Security Strategies from the 37 OECD member states: (collective) defense, collective security and aid to the nation. We then analyze how these roles and tasks influence recent configurations in civil-military relations. This study thereby contributes with 1) a useful illustration of the military’s shifting roles and tasks in contemporary society; 2) increased understandings of how the different roles impact civil-military relations and related to this; 3) a practical starting point for further analyses of the military organization’s internal challenges related to its, at times, contradictory roles.
