Full-Spectrum Social Science for a Broader View on Cohesion

• Author: Peter Haldén,Ilmari Käihkö
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X19841669
• Date: 01 July 2020
• Subject Matter: Commentaries

Commentary
Armed Forces & Society
2020, Vol. 46(3) 517-522
Full-Spectrum Social
ª The Author(s) 2019
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Science for a Broader
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X19841669
journals.sagepub.com/home/afs
View on Cohesion
Ilmari Ka¨ihko¨1 and Peter Halde´n1
Abstract
In October 2018, Armed Forces & Society published a special issue dedicated to
broadening the perspective on military cohesion from the narrow focus on 20th and
21st Western state militaries and the microlevel. The special issue emphasized the
need for a theoretical and methodological broadening of the study of cohesion: In
order to understand the majority of armed groups in the world, it is necessary to
investigate macro- and mesolevel preconditions of microlevel cohesion. Such pre-
conditions include the existence of states, nations, and modern military organization.
These are specific to modern, Western contexts, and rarely feature in historical or
non-Western cases. In many cases, investigating these preconditions requires qua-
litative methods. In a critical response, Siebold contested some of the arguments of
the special issue, claiming that our argument was exaggerated and our methodol-
ogies inadequate. In this reply, we seek to clarify some of the issues and arguments at
stake.
Keywords
cohesion, Eurocentrism, military cohesion, sociology, social science
1 Department of Strategy, Security and Leadership, Swedish Defence University, Stockholm, Sweden
Corresponding Author:
Ilmari Ka¨ihko¨, Department of Strategy, Security and Leadership, Swedish Defence University, Stockholm,
Sweden.
Email: ilmari.kaihko@fhs.se

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518
Armed Forces & Society 46(3)
A recent Armed Forces & Society special issue on broadening the perspective on
military cohesion argued that previous studies of cohesion have struggled to explain
and/or understand cohesion and its preconditions in non-Western, nonstate, and
nonmodern cases (Ka¨ihko¨, 2018a, 2018b). The special issue and the workshop
organized at the Swedish Defence University in December 2015 that led to it
stemmed from the previous debate between King (2006, 2007) and Siebold
(2007) in the pages of this journal. Unfortunately, this debate offers a classroom
example of how scholars ignore each other’s comments and fail to engage in dia-
logue. With this as a background, we welcome Siebold’s (2018) response in the
collegial and positive manner he intended. Our response should be taken in the same
constructive way.
The special issue advocated for broadening the view of military cohesion of
the King–Siebold debate—which focused on Western state militaries of the 20th
and 21st centuries—to encompass nonstate and pre-20th-century armed groups
as well as non-Western state militaries. Attempts to investigate cohesion in these
kinds of cases almost immediately bring up a problem with the bulk of the
literature of military cohesion to date, namely the fact that microlevel cohesion
rests on preconditions found at a macro- and mesolevels of social analysis.
Briefly put, at the macrolevel, we locate institutions, concepts, and semantic
fields like the nation (or other forms of political community) and the state. At
the mesolevel, we locate military organizations such as the Army or individual
...