Introduction

There are several reasons for our decision to produce this Routledge Handbook on Civil-Military Relations. First, there is currently no handbook on this topic, although there are a few edited volumes of case studies, which are very dated.1 Second, there is no up-to-date comparative analysis utilizing a common framework to characterize civil-military relations. We are proposing such a framework here in Chapters 2 and 3, which views civil-military relations in terms of three essential components: (1) democratic civilian control; (2) operational effectiveness; and (3) the efficiency of the security institutions (i.e., the armed forces, the intelligence community, and police) in their use of resources.2 Third, there are serious impediments to research and writing on the topic of civil-military relations, especially in non-democratic regimes or developing democracies, which we attempt to overcome in this Handbook. It is with these general lacunae in mind that we established our list of topics and commissioned the chapters from country and area experts.