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This article analyzes civil-military relations and the issue of civilian control through the lens of new managerialism. It illustrates that the means and mechanisms applied by governments to govern the military actually shape its organization and affect its functions in ways not always acknowledged in the civil-military debate. We start by illustrating the gradual introduction of management reforms to the Swedish Armed Forces and the growing focus on audit and evaluation. The article thereafter analyzes the consequences of these managerialist trends for the most central installation of the armed forces-its headquarters. It further exemplifies how such trends affect the work of professionals at the military units. In conclusion, managerialist reforms have not only changed the structure of the organization and the relationship between core and support functions but have also placed limits on the influence of professional judgment.

The existence of a clear-cut division between “civil and military” is in many ways a foundation for international law and diplomacy. It is also a given starting point in many studies on current issues relating to war and peace, as well as in historical interpretations of past conflicts. Yet the civil–military dichotomy is not always a useful way of approaching complex matters, and by adopting such a starting point, some issues risk being overlooked. There are numerous historical examples, from the American Civil War, to wars of national liberation ending colonialization, to insurrections shaking political status quo such as the Marxist–Leninist revolutions; all illustrate that neither the agents of war nor the victims fit neatly into one of two clear categories. In a contemporary setting, non-traditional forms of warfare that make use of cyber space or autonomous systems further serves not only to undermine ideas of internal–external security but also to blur the distinction between civil and military. In the everyday making and implementation of policy, these concepts are indeed fluid and the borders between them highly variable, continuously contested, and renegotiated. As concepts, they can be seen as co-constitutive in the everyday usage. Civil and military are therefore best understood as norms, whose contents and interrelationship are contextually determined. At the same time, civil and military are organizational principles of the state, and as such the distinction is, arguably, too important, too deep-seated within the modern state- system, and too engrained in how legal and political order are understood to disappear in the near future.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is a key political actor within the Chinese state. Together with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese state institutions, it makes up the political foundation of the People’s Republic of China. In the early years following the founding of the PRC in 1949, the military played an important role in state consolidation and the management of domestic state affairs, as is expected in a state founded on Leninist principles of organization. Since the reform process, which was initiated in the late 1970s, the political role of the PLA has changed considerably. It has become less involved in domestic politics and increased attention has been directed towards military modernization. Consequently, in the early 21st century, the Chinese military shares many characteristics of the armed forces in non-communist states. At the same time, the organizational structures, such as the party committee system, the system of political leaders and political organs, have remained in place. In other words, the politicized structures that were put in place to facilitate the role of the military as a domestic political tool of the CCP, across many sectors of society, are expected to also accommodate modernization, professionalization and cooperation with foreign militaries on the international arena in post-reform China. This points to an interesting discrepancy between form and purpose in regard to the People’s Liberation Army. 

The role of the military in Chinese politics has thus shifted over the years, and its relationship with the CCP has generally been interpreted as having developed from one marked by symbiosis to one of greater institutional autonomy and independence. Yet these developments should not necessarily be seen as linear or irreversible. Indeed, Chinese politics in the Xi Jinping era suggests an increased focus on ideology, centralization and personalized leadership, which already has had consequences for the political control of the armed forces in China. Chances are that these trends will impact the role of the PLA in politics even further in the early decades of the 21st century. 

Over the past decades, debates revolving around the role and challenges of military families have developed into an important subfield in military sociology. Throughout history, military families have played an important role for military forces, and in the post-World War II era, the role of the family has shifted as a consequence of military professionalization. Research on military families explores the different demands placed upon service members from both the military organization and the family. More recently, such research has studied how the inclusion of women and gender minorities, operational deployments, and broader societal changes transformed the composition, stakes, and challenges of military families and the traditional idea of the military spouse.

En fungerande demokrati förutsätter en god relation mellan militären, staten och samhället. Officerskåren, den militära professionen, förvaltar statens våldsmonopol och ansvarar ytterst för försvaret av viktiga samhällsfunktioner och demokratiska värden – en roll som kräver viss handlingsfrihet, om än begränsad.

I Officeren, staten och samhället undersöker Sofia K. Ledberg hur relationen mellan militären och omvärlden påverkas av en rad pågående samhällsförändringar. Hotbilden i Europa har ändrats och de militära organisationerna ställs nu inför nya typer av utmaningar och uppdrag. Samtidigt präglas dagens samhälle av ökande individualism och heterogenitet vilket hotar att vidga klyftan till den traditionellt sett konservativa och hierarkiska militära byråkratin.

Vilka nya krav ställer dessa förändringar på officerens expertis? Vilken betydelse har kårens representativitet värderingar för förankringen i och gemenskapen med det omkringliggande samhället? Med hjälp av ett professionsperspektiv belyser författaren både förändringar och utmaningar som utvecklingen medför

This article examines Chinese civil-military relations using a bottom-up analytical approach and hitherto untapped sources, including interviews with military personnel in active service. It argues that traditional approaches to political control, which generally interpret the changing political-military relationship through military professionalism and institutional autonomy, miss out on important aspects and may generate erroneous conclusions. Here, focus is instead on the professional autonomy of the Chinese officer corps. Through an empirical study of the organization of military work at two of China’s top military education institutes, the article illustrates how professional autonomy and direct political control varies, both between hierarchical levels and issue areas. This highlights the multidimensionality of both control and professional manoeuvrability and underlines the fruitfulness of including an intra-organizational perspective in order to reach better informed conclusions about political control and civil-military relations in today’s China. 

摘要:

本文利用自下而上的分析方法和至今尚未开发的来源，包括对现役军事人员的采访，探讨中国的军民关系。文章认为，传统的关于政治控制的研究方法，其一般通过军事职业化和院校自治来解释不断变化的政治与军事关系，忽视了许多重要方面，可能会产生错误的结论。因此，文章转而聚焦于中国军官阶层的专业自主权。通过对中国两个最高军事教育院校的军事工作的组织所进行的实证研究，本文阐述了专业自主权和直接政治控制之间，在等级和问题领域方面的差异。这突出了政治控制和专业灵活性的多维度，并强调了将组织内部透视包容进来的成果，以便获得关于今日中国的政治控制和军民关系的更为明智的结论。

The first part of this article discusses the most common theoretical and analytical approaches to the study of political control over the armed forces in China. It argues that the focus on professionalism and professionalization at the level of the military institution that is common in previous studies has certain limitations when analyzing Chinese civil–military relations. Against this background, the second part of the article suggests an alternative approach that places the Chinese officer corps and its professional autonomy at the center of analysis. Its benefit is demonstrated in a case study of quality control at China’s top three military education institutes. The study shows that autonomy and direct political control varies, which indicate a need for more nuanced discussions about military professionalization in China.

2014-2015 were years of turmoil for strategic relations, with Sino-Russian relations emerging as a particularly interesting set of ties to observe. This article asks whether recurrent Sino-Russian exhortations of friendship are mirrored by their strategic alignment in the defence and security realm, half a century after the end of the Sino-Soviet pact during the communist era. We examine the arms trade between the two countries and with regional partners, but also the recent pattern of bilateral and multilateral military exercises, as a combined test of the security and defence relationship.  We are able to show that the image of friendship that both Moscow and Beijing like to promote, while apparent at the UN Security Council and within the BRICS group, remains constrained by rivalry in high-tech segments of the arms industry and by lingering concerns about the prospects of peer interference in their shared regional vicinity.

The reform process that has been underway in China the past 30 years has affected most parts of Chinese society. In regard to core branches of the civilian state administration, public administration research provides evidence of far-reaching decentralization, marketization, and a relaxation of direct political control within many policy areas. Despite the fact that the military in any Marxist-Leninist state is an indispensable part of the state administration, it is rarely included in research on the Chinese state administrations. In this dissertation, it is argued that the military is intrinsically linked to the overall political stability of the Chinese state not only because it constitutes one of the most central branches of the Chinese cadre administration, but also given its close connection to the ruling communist party. Hence it deserves greater research focus.

The overarching focus of this study is political control and governance vis-à-vis the Chinese military. Contrary to previous studies that have approached the issue of control by investigating military infringement on civilian policy making, the analysis here illustrates that the structures and the underlying logic of control are better captured by a study of the professional autonomy of the Chinese military officer corps. Professional autonomy is investigated within the military education system, given that education is a central undertaking for any profession.

By suggesting a new approach to the study of the relationship between the political entities of the state and the military, an approach which makes use of insights from both the political science subfield of public administration and the sociology of professions, this dissertation makes important theoretical and analytical contributions to the field of civil-military relations. Yet the usefulness of the actor-centered approach put forward here, which focuses on the autonomy of the profession within the organization, reaches beyond the immediate study of the military and can be used in any analysis of power relations between the political entities of the state and its administrations. This dissertation also contributes to increase the understanding of Chinese military education, which is one of the military’s most important peace time undertakings.