A School for the Nation? How Military Service Does Not Build Nations, and How It Might

Overview

Does military service play a critical role in nation building? Ronald Krebs of the University of Minnesota explores the relationship between the armed forces, the state, and society, on the one hand, and the military as a potential nation builder, on the other. Krebs identifies three “seemingly plausible mechanisms” that he “teases out” of the existing literature on the military and national cohesiveness—socialization, communication and contact, and elite transformation—and subjects them to theoretical and empirical scrutiny. Finding all three unpersuasive, he proposes a research agenda “premised on a more social and concrete conceptualization of identity.”