1 An Introduction to Military Research Methods
Matthew F. Rech, K. Neil Jenkings, Alison J. Williams and Rachel Woodward
DOI: 10.4324/9781315613253-1
What’s so special about military research methods? And why a whole book dedicated to them? This edited collection aims to comment on and give testament to the specificity of military research and the variety of methods deployed to address it. Military research poses a unique set of practical challenges for researchers working in civilian research contexts – challenges which are seldom found in other spheres of social-scientific research. These might relate to issues of access (to certain spaces, to research participants, to classified or redacted documents), to gatekeeper relations amid a convoluted and often gendered military hierarchical culture, or to the sensitivities of remembrance and the violation of bodies. Our original starting point with this book, informed by our own experiences and those of colleagues investigating a range of military-related topics in the social sciences and humanities, was to explore these sorts of issues in quite practical terms. We feel there is an urgent need for this since, although social science and humanities research into the military and the militarisation of Western democracies has developed and expanded in recent years, there is much more work to do. We argue that this lack of research is due, at least in part, to the unique challenges of developing military research methodologies, and hope that this collection may facilitate new and empirically rich scholarship from critical military perspectives.
This book is also warranted because, in our experience, military research almost inevitably requires some sort of personal engagement with questions about the politics of research, and with positionality. This might entail an explicit statement by the researcher on their attitude towards questions of military power and its consequences, or a more personal, internal negotiation of one’s relationship to the military establishment. Reflexive awareness of researcher position means different things to the contributors to this volume. For some, doing military research entails the development or utilisation of a critical distance from the object of critique (i.e. militaries), one which involves an exploration of the myriad social, political and cultural consequences of military forces, militarisation and war-making. For others, it entails a more proximate inspection of the internal dynamics of military institutions and life-worlds through research facilitated by, or perhaps produced for, military organisations themselves. For still others, military forces or institutions may constitute part of the context for research which, while not explicitly directed at the military, is irrevocably shaped by it. What we hope to show through this collection is that, above all else, there is a specificity to military research which suggests the need for attentiveness to the practicalities of research in military contexts, a reflexivity about that context, and a sensitivity to the ramifications of methods employed whatever the researcher’s position.
The outcomes of military research are in part orientated towards the concepts and disciplinary debates which prompt research activities in the first place. However, this book is important, we argue, because room must be made for considerations of military research methods in their own right. Thus, this volume intends to speak to practicalities, politics, positions and complexities in an ever-growing and multidisciplinary scholarly landscape characterised by little consensus but much possibility. Our aim has been to do this in a format which provides insights into the range of topics and approaches for those with little experience of military research. For those with greater experience, we hope to provoke fresh ideas, new responses, and alternative approaches to the diverse conceptual, political and personal issues which military research raises.
In the remainder of this introduction we consider these themes in more detail. First, we focus on a key contextual issue, and foreground a discussion of military research methods by considering debates around the terms ‘militarism’ and ‘militarisation’. We also raise questions about the continued relevance (or otherwise) of the identification of military specificity in methodological terms. We suggest that there is indeed a particularity to research in military contexts and on military topics, and explore the reasons why we believe this to be so. Second, we turn to the relationship between the methodological diversity of contemporary research on military-related topics, and more traditional methods and approaches originating in the social sciences in the post–Second World War period. Looking back, we try to explain the dominance of quantitative methodologies in military research, and point to the possibilities opened up, looking forward, by qualitative approaches, including those inspired by and developed in the arts and humanities. The third contextual issue we discuss concerns the position of the researcher and the scale and focus of inquiry. The ‘military researcher’, we suggest, often inhabits conflicted and contradictory positions vis-à-vis the politics of research. Drawing upon arguments articulated by critical approaches to military studies (e.g. Enloe, 2015; Rech et al., 2015), we build on this assertion and argue that a serious consideration of positionality here is of much broader methodological relevance than hitherto acknowledged. We conclude this introduction by explaining the purpose and structure of the book, and by introducing each section and its chapters.
Militaries, Militarism and Militarisation?
As noted earlier, what concerns the authors in this book are militaries, militarism and militarisation. In this respect, one of our central contentions is that a lack of methodological rigour, variety and reflexivity in military studies corresponds to the lack of clarity with which scholars in the social and political sciences have conceptualised these phenomena. We can begin to explore this contention by offering a more-or-less clear definition of the terms. First, militaries might be defined as the organisations authorised by sovereign powers to orchestrate state-sanctioned violence. However this traditional, state-centric definition hides complexities, slippages and overlaps (not least between the state and a variety of nonstate, quasi-military actors). It also obscures a fuller understanding of what militaries are, how they operate, and who and what they are composed of.
Militaries play a complex and adaptive role in the world, and increasingly so. However, in its very essence this expanded role challenges the meaning of ‘militaries’ implied in a state-centric definition. For example, while militaries are undoubtedly composed of men and women trained to use equipment and techniques which enable them to ensure the security of the state by force of arms, in recent years the rise of private military contractors (PMCs) has radically challenged this notion. Work by Higate (2012a, 2012b, 2013) illustrates that the word ‘military’ has been appropriated by PMCs to describe a group of trained individuals working to ensure the security of their employers through the threat and use of violence. However, PMCs have no recognised official state-sanctioned mandate, nor are they tethered to the defence of any one nation-state. Rather, the military in PMCs stands for a modus operandi: a set of learned behaviours and skills with weapons and allied equipment that cause civilians to take on the appearance and function of an armed state force, with whom they will often work alongside. PMCs are therefore just one illustration of the slippages that are occurring in the use of military terminologies, but one that also relates to personnel, technology and operations.
Another slippage can be found in much of the work done by traditional, state-run military forces themselves. Humanitarian and emergency relief operations, for instance, are an increasingly common mission for states’ military forces, and are carried out in addition to more established roles such as peacekeeping and peace support. British Royal Navy ships now regularly carry humanitarian aid and supplies as standard stores in case of emerging need. Recent deployments by units like these to sites of natural disasters and other emergencies offer a different perspective on what military forces can and might achieve. Yet this diversity of operations causes us to question what a military is and is for in the twenty-first century. What these examples suggest is that our definition of militaries needs to be much more nuanced than the one offered earlier. Take the example of the US military. In 2013, at the same time as one of its aircraft carriers and many of its personnel were deployed to provide emergency relief to the hurricane-ravaged Philippines, other members of its forces were perpetrating drone strikes in the tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border – the latter leading Amnesty International and others to accuse the US of international war crimes. Furthermore, sections of the military, at least in the UK, are increasingly involved in skills development and human resource training as part of outreach operations to businesses and universities (Woodward et al., 2015).
Militarism, on the other hand, can be defined in straightforward terms as an ideology which promotes the unproblematic acceptance of militaries and their (often preferential) use in international relations. Related to this, militarisation describes the processes and practices which support and enable the (re)production of militarism. Again, these terms are problematic and open to challenge, and a range of scholars have sought to consider and contest their implications (most recently Farish, 2013; Stavrianakis and Selby, 2013). Much of this work has emerged from a burgeoning field of scholarship in critical international relations (IR) and geography around the concept of security and the extent to which this concept (and set of practices) overlaps with and can be used as a alternative to militarism and militarisation. Indeed, Bernazolli and Flint (2009) have suggested that the terms militarism and militarisation should be replaced by the terms ‘security’ and ‘securitisation’, which they argue reflect more accurately the increased arming and militarised activities of police forces, as well as the noncombat operations of military organisations, such as the emergency response deployments noted earlier (see also Barkawi, 2011).
The replacement of ‘military’ with ‘security’ also illustrates, we suggest, the unease with which some scholars view military terminology. Given the association of military studies with military institutions (which we discuss in more detail later), there is often an eagerness to use the terminologies associated with security and securitisation in order to disassociate contemporary research from traditional military scholarship. While we recognise that issues around, and practices of, security and securitisation are very much in need of critical analysis (see Neocleous, 2008, 2011; Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2015), we reject the call to replace the terminology of military with that of security (see Woodward, 2014). Indeed, we contend that the emergence of a security studies and critical security literature requires us to be even more vocal and explicit about research on military forces, their practices and impacts, and to argue that militarism and militarisation remain vitally important terms if our task is to understand and challenge broader questions of power and politics in contemporary society.
The breadth and depth of (principally contemporary) military activities and deployments also means our spectrum of interest here stretches far beyond just war. However, while there are myriad subdisciplines that take the social, gendered and cultural constitution of militaries, militarism and militarisation very seriously, there is still little consensus on what, exactly, critical military scholarship should look like. Although recent developments, including the emergence of critical war studies as a conceptual concern within IR (see Barkawi and Brighton, 2011, and Hurst’s Critical War Studies book series) and the publication of a new Critical Military Studies journal (see Basham et al., 2015), point to exciting new directions, they also imply a further compounding of the ‘disciplinarity’ of critical military/war studies. Despite this, in the present volume we have sought to provide a range of interventions that are suggestive of a critical military studies and some of its methodological entry points. But this also goes alongside a commitment to cross- and multidisciplinary dialogue, particularly in this case between the social scientists and artists. We have adopted this position because we recognise that warfare is only one (albeit the most newsworthy) facet of what military forces do, the conditions for which are sustained by a much broader set of everyday and often unexceptional practices.
Thus, in compiling this book we have actively sought to align ourselves with an approach which attempts to account for the manifold phenomena surrounding the preparation for war, but not necessarily including it. We do so in part because this allows us to privilege a focus on militaries, militarism and militarisation, terms and activities which, as we’ve discussed, are much debated. We also do this because critical war studies, as we see it, often fails to account for the breadth of human experiences implicated in and by militaries and militarism (partly because of its preference for theory). Critical military studies, conversely, foregrounds the empirical, focusing on applied and experiential analysis to uncover the range of encounters with the military that pervade our everyday lives.
It is in this conflicted, although vibrant, scholarly landscape that we site The Ashgate Research Companion to Military Research Methods. In order to make our argument and take these debates forward in a meaningful way, we argue for the central importance of method and a reflexive understanding of how and why research data is sought, gathered, used and presented. In the following section we discuss how methods for undertaking research on and with the military have developed. We offer a brief critique of more traditional approaches to open up space for a discussion of the range of methods articulated in the chapters of this book.
Military Research Methods: From the Traditional to the Critical
Research on the military and military phenomena is not new, but has arguably been neglected relative to other comparable organisations and phenomena of societal importance. Military research as a topic and a discipline needs reinvigorating, especially methodologically, because consideration of the most appropriate ways to account for these phenomena through empirical investigation has, with notable exceptions, been largely absent. The first attempts to account for and understand the attitudes and actions of military personnel were undertaken during and immediately after the Second World War using the relatively new techniques of statistical analysis being developed in sociology (see e.g. Stouffer, 1949; for an overview, see Boëne, 2000). This connection between quantitative methods and military research is also illustrated in the long history of geography’s engagements with investigating military phenomena where, traditionally, the development of the tools and techniques of geographical analysis (such as mapping or remote sensing) was undertaken in no small measure for the benefit of military forces (see Woodward, 2004, 2005).
These quantitative methods were innovative in their time and emerged in an academic context where structural functionalism (theoretically) and positivism (methodologically) were in the ascendancy. They were facilitated by the development of practices which enabled the efficient collection of empirical data and the application of statistical techniques for its manipulation through emergent computing technologies. This traditional model of military sociology was, and remains, characterised by a hypothetico-deductive epistemology and a resultant emphasis on positivist methodologies and the development and testing of models of social relations. A number of edited collections give a good introduction to the scope and range of applications of this traditional quantitative sociological approach to the study of the military (see Kümmel and Prüfert, 2000; Caforio, 2003, 2007; Oullet, 2005). That these perspectives have been retained by military sociology over the past four decades, when the socia...
