Peacekeeping and the postmodern soldier

Armed Forces and Society

Volumn 23, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 467-484

  Battistelli, Fabrizio ^a  

^a Archivio Disarmo   (Italy)

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EID: 0031534803     PISSN: 0095327X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X9702300308     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. Although women are a substantial presence in the armed forces of many countries, they are not yet so in Italy. My use of male gender pronouns is descriptive only.
2. Charles C. Moskos and James Burk "The Postmodern Military," in The Military in New Times, ed. James Burk (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 142. The application of the category of postmodern to the military had already been suggested by a group of Italian sociologists, the author among them. See Michele Marotta, ed., Il militare e la complessità: sociologia e strategia nel "postmoderno" (Roma: La Goliardica, 1990).
3. Charles C. Moskos and James Burk "The Postmodern Military," in The Military in New Times, ed. James Burk (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 142. The application of the category of postmodern to the military had already been suggested by a group of Italian sociologists, the author among them. See Michele Marotta, ed., Il militare e la complessità: sociologia e strategia nel "postmoderno" (Roma: La Goliardica, 1990).
4. See Charles C. Moskos and Frank R. Wood, eds., The Military: More Than Just a Job? (Washington, D.C.: Pergamon-Brassey's, 1988).
5. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
6. Emile Durkheim, Le suicide. Etude sociologique (Paris: Alcan, 1897).
7. Cf. studies on strategic acting in organizations carried out by Crozier and his school: Michel Crozier, Le phénoméne bureaucratique (Paris: Seuil, 1963). For an application to the military, see Hubert Jean-Pierre Thomas and Christian Rosenzveig, ́French NCO's: Career Strategies and Attitudes,́ Armed Forces & Society 8 (Winter 1982): 275-301.
8. Cf. studies on strategic acting in organizations carried out by Crozier and his school: Michel Crozier, Le phénoméne bureaucratique (Paris: Seuil, 1963). For an application to the military, see Hubert Jean-Pierre Thomas and Christian Rosenzveig, ́French NCO's: Career Strategies and Attitudes,́ Armed Forces & Society 8 (Winter 1982): 275-301.
9. The question that cannot be exhaustively dealt with in this context and, therefore, must remain substantially unanswered, is how an organizational system can accept a situation in which actors not only do not define themselves in terms of a sense of belonging to the organization (as had been the case in the paleomodern) and are unwilling to negotiate such belonging in exchange for certain benefits (as in the modern), but are even using the system to pursue an "unfathomable" subjective aim such as individual identity. This issue presents itself as the real challenge that the postmodern military will have to face in terms of recruiting and management of human resources in the future.
10. After an initial phase in which they were frequently referred to, especially in sociology and social psychology as applied to organizations, the thematics of motivation lost much of their impetus in the wake of the sixties. This was due not only to general reasons but also to the difficulties inherent in using the concepts efficiently to obtain nonstereotypical, nonidealized, and nonabstract representations on the part of respondents. In our case, the solution that was adopted has been that of correlating motivation with satisfaction about the experience of going on mission, measured by a specifically designed rating (see note 12).
11. The choice of the two operations (Albania and Somalia) in which Italy took part in the course of the last five years is not arbitrary. Setting aside the fact that every mission has a history of its own, Albania and Somalia represent the two opposite poles of the possible spectrum of peacekeeping efforts. The first, in fact, was an exclusively humanitarian operation consisting of the distribution of food and medicine to the population of a country that was nearing the acme of a dramatic economic crisis; it was carried out without the use, or even without the possession, of arms. The second, in contrast, represented a typical case of the second-generation peacekeeping operations that also began with essentially humanitarian aims, but became (in the wake of political circumstances that are beyond the scope of our analysis) something very similar to a peace-enforcement operation. The research in Albania was carried out in April-July 1993 and was based on background interviews, participatory observation, and the results of a questionnaire that was distributed to 246 of the 350 soldiers taking part in the mission. The research in Somalia was carried out in March-July 1994 and was based on a questionnaire given to 808 Italian soldiers. The questionnaire was divided among three sample groups representing the various corps and units, deployment locations, and temporal phases of the operation. Regarding the last point, it will never be sufficiently emphasized that the mission to Somalia consisted, in reality, of two missions that were quite different from one another: the first (UNOSOM I) was a humanitarian aid operation (albeit complex and critical) and the second (UNOSOM II) soon became a war operation proper (albeit one that was relatively "low intensity"). This makes extreme caution obligatory in comparing my results with those of other researchers, (e.g., those of Laura L. Miller and Charles Moskos, "Humanitarians or Warriors? Race, Gender and Combat Status in Operation Restore Hope," Armed Forces & Society 4 (1995): 615-637) carried out exclusively in regard to UNOSOM I.
12. Cf. James Burk, "Patriotism and the All-Volunteer Force," Journal of Political and Military Sociology 12 (Fall, 1984): 229-241, which suggests a similar typology of motivations to explain why young American males joined the all-volunteer force.
13. The perceptions of differences between the two types of service were analyzed by unifying into a single sample the two samples from Albania and Somalia.
14. The index of satisfaction was devised by adding the scores reported in items aimed at measuring: (a) the degree of satisfaction in regard to extra wages (very much/a little, lower than equitable vs. equitable, a little/very much higher than equitable); (b) will-ingness, if one could go back, to reiterate the request to go on mission; (c) willingness to request to go on a new mission. After having duly recodified the data, we obtained an index of satisfaction with a 0-3 range (0=unsatisfied; 1=rather unsatisfied; 2=rather satisfied; 3=satisfied), which was dichotomized (0=unsatisfied, 1=satisfied).
15. I was provided with empirical evidence to this effect in previous studies of the Italian military. See Fabrizio Battistelli, Soldati. Sociologia dei militari italiani nell'era del peacekeeping (Milano, Angeli, 1996).