Explaining Civil-Military Relations in New Democracies: Structure, Agency and Theory Development

This article discusses the structure-agency problem in explaining civilian control of the military in new democracies. The authors first provide a systematic analysis of the core contents of the structure-agency problem and its implications for theory-building in civil-military research: the agential entities whose interactions are constitutive of civil-military relations, the relevant environmental factors, and the theoretical argument which links agents’ behaviour with the environment. Based on these meta-theoretical deliberations, the authors analyze four recent attempts to explicitly connect structure and agency in explaining civil-military relations in new democracies. The analysis shows that while being important contributions to theory development in the field, none of these theories have consistently dealt with the agency-structure problem in explaining civil-military relations in new democracies.