Civil-military relations in peace operations: Delivering coherent responses to complex emergencies

Research on civil-military relations in international peace operations has so far mostly been based ontheoretical concepts developed for studies within national contexts. This has brought inherent assumptions,scope, and descriptive arguments from state-centric research into policy developmentsand practice in international organisations without the necessary adaptation to their fundamentallydifferent governing frameworks.

This dissertation contributes to the literature correlating civil-military integration withoperational effectiveness. It does so explicitly in the context of international peace operations, and byrevisiting and refining previous state-centric theory and causal claims in three conceptual steps.

First, it introduces a new theoretical framework for understanding civil-military relationsin international peace operations as characterised by multiple principals and with a severedreciprocity between the sponsoring society and the operation’s beneficiaries. It pairs this frameworkwith a typology of civil-military interfaces to expand the earlier research scope to include the operationaland tactical levels where civilian and military professionals often work in tandem and whereexternal and local civil-military interfaces are essential to a contemporary peace operation’s success.Secondly, a quantitative plausibility probe into the civil-military gap in EU peace operations demonstratesthat civilian personnel in peace operations are much closer aligned with the transnationalprincipal than their uniformed colleagues indicating that coherence, as alignment with the transnationalprincipal’s preferences, can potentially be positively affected by increased civil-militaryintegration. Lastly, this claim is evaluated by applying a comparative case-study of the degrees ofcivil-military integration in EU and UN peace operations followed by a co-variational analysis oftheir correlation with operational effectiveness in intra-agency, inter-agency, and international-localcivil-military relationships.

The analysis finds that increased civil-military integration generally correlates positivelywith operational effectiveness, though mainly in external goal achievement and that it can attimes have an adverse effect on internal goal achievement - particularly when goals are componentspecific.This is in turn explained by the stronger alignment with an overall peace agenda held by thetransnational principal compared to the often technical and mandate-specific focus of uniformed entitiesin the missions.

The dissertation suggests that international peace operations stand to benefit from closercivil-military integration, especially to strengthen civilian control at the operational and tactical level