Casualties and Civil-Military Relations: The German Polity between Learning and Indifference
The issues of casualties and presumed casualty aversion in democratic societies were of marginal importance in the German debate about civil-military relations in the 1990s. Although these issues were ever present, they were never studied in detail. This article analyzes the reactions to German casualties by the political and military elites and by the press. It focuses on a number of recent cases of German soldiers who were killed in out-of-area missions. Our findings indicate that German society seems to be less casualty averse than is widely assumed. Two explanations for this are put forward: First, that Germany appears to have undergone a substantial learning process and seems ready to accept casualties for the “right” cause. Second, German society has become indifferent to military matters. Further research is needed to specify the extent to which these two hypotheses apply to different segments of German society.
Gender and conflict is a growing area of study. The authors show how an empirical and theoretical focus on gender and its multifaceted meanings yields entirely different explanations of conflict than traditionally understood. They highlight especially the ways in which attention to women and men, femininities and masculinities, gender norms, and gender relations challenges given categories in International Relations such as levels of analysis, and reconceptualizes security along a “continuum of violence”