The Interdisciplinarity of Military Studies: A Sociological Perspective and South African Application (original) (raw)
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Interdisciplinary and Cross-National Character of Social Studies on the Military
Modern social-scientific study of the military is usually traced back to the work of Samuel Stouffer's team in the United States in 1942-45, the results of which were published following the Second World War . As is widely known, this was a study conducted jointly by a team of sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, statisticians and others: an approach, that is, that was certainly interdisciplinary and perhaps (but I leave this assessment to historians of the social sciences) also transdisciplinary ante litteram. In the subsequent development of studies and researches on the military, this interdisciplinarity, understood, as I shall describe more fully below, as the cooperation and interaction of various scientific disciplines, instead of growing and expanding to extend the array of disciplines involved, has been partially lost. The more properly sociological studies, although often carried out by scholars from neighbouring disciplines, such as political scientists , have continued in accordance with a line of investigation of their own, while other disciplines -history, psychology, political science (2), law, etc. -have taken other roads, without much interaction between them. Today, the increased complexity, diversification and importance of the military function imperiously calls us back to interdisciplinary, cross-national study of the military. I introduce also this dimension, aimed at overcoming national bounds, because both the problems and the dimensions of deployment of national armed forces now amply exceed the confines of individual countries and can no longer be studied and solved in a narrow national perspective. But why does one feel today, much more than in the past, a need for the cooperation of several disciplines in study of the military? A theoretical, scholarly need has probably always existed in this direction but, as often occurs for the social sciences, this need finds currency and instruments when problems of a practical, concrete nature become urgent, as already occurred for our subject of study at the time of The American Soldier (3). Referring readers to later in this paper for a more specific analysis of the conditions in which the military operates today, for now it is sufficient to point out that the parallel and often contemporaneous existence of new and old forms of warfare, the increase in conflict following the end of the bloc politics, the growing constabulary aspect (see Janowitz, 1960) of many missions, pose the military and its leaders (at all levels) a set of new problems with respect to the recent past. As recently summarised by Harry Bondy , many new terms have appeared in the literature to indicate this change, like fourth-generation warfare, revolution in military affairs, postmodernism, and postglobalism, so that "military culture can only be understood and shaped by an inter-disciplinary approach that addresses individual and group behaviour." (4) If the scholar, the researcher, must provide elements of knowledge and interpretation of the phenomena that can invest the military today, it no longer seems possible (or sufficient) for this to occur in a satisfactory way with a monodisciplinary approach, because there are too many factors of various origins that impact and determine these phenomena. I am not the first in expressing this needing, of course: I can cite here, as an example among several others, what recently Joseph Soeters wrote: "Problem based research -and this is what decision-makers ask for -does not account for disciplinary boundaries. It is for this reason that sociologists should integrate their efforts with social and organizational psychologists, political scientists, scholars in public
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