This book focuses on military conscription in 22 countries that represent the world's regions. The purpose is to shed light on the history, politics, and main events that led to the choice of conscription or professional military forces in the countries under study. While we acknowledge that practical and technological developments played major roles in this choice, we also understand that racial and gender relations, social group and political regime dynamics, regional influences, and international forces also affected military composition and relations to the rest of the society. Through this review, we aim at providing an easy-to-access source of knowledge about military mobilization policies and historical developments as well as the main ideas, politics, and events that shaped them. Through this review, we offer a glimpse on developments that influenced societies and political systems and were reflected in their militaries.
This book focuses on military conscription in 22 countries that represent the world's regions. The purpose is to shed light on the history, politics, and main events that led to the choice of conscription or professional military forces in the countries under study. While we acknowledge that practical and technological developments played major roles in this choice, we also understand that racial and gender relations, social group and political regime dynamics, regional influences, and international forces also affected military composition and relations to the rest of the society. Through this review, we aim at providing an easy-to-access source of knowledge about military mobilization policies and historical developments as well as the main ideas, politics, and events that shaped them. Through this review, we offer a glimpse on developments that influenced societies and political systems and were reflected in their militaries.
Universal conscription has been the main form of military recruitment in the 19th and 20th centuries. In central Asia and the Middle East it has been ruthlessly imposed on agrarian and undeveloped societies, with little regard for individual interest, economic disruption, or intense local resistance. Providing a study of conscription, this work includes contributions from social and political historians on a subject traditionally covered by military historians. It focuses on Ottoman Turkey, Egypt (where some of the most extreme forms of conscription occurred), Iran, central Asia and the Balkans, and covers feudal militarization, unfree service and conscription of serfs, the press gang, military slavery, recruitment in the labour market, mercenaries, privateers, sales of Bedouin services, and resistance.
The creation of Finland’s national conscription army in the wake of its independence from Russia in 1917 aroused intense but conflicting emotions. This book examines the struggles of a new army to find popular acceptance and support, and explores the ways that images of manhood were used in the controversies. Ahlbäck places the situation of interwar Finland within a broad European context to reveal the conflicts surrounding compulsory military service and the impact of the Great War on masculinities and constructions of gender.
The development of modern military conscription systems is usually seen as a response to countries' security needs, and as reflection of national political ideologies like civic republicanism or democratic egalitarianism. This study of conscription politics in France and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century challenges such common sense interpretations. Instead, it shows how despite institutional and ideological differences, both countries implemented conscription systems shaped by political and military leaders' concerns about how taking ordinary family men for military service would affect men's presumed positions as heads of families, especially as breadwinners and figures of paternal authority. The first of its kind, this carefully researched book combines an ambitious range of scholarly traditions and offers an original comparison of how protection of men's household authority affected one of the paradigmatic institutions of modern states.
A frustrating war and an endless occupation. The very real prospect of more conflict overseas. A military stretched beyond its breaking point. The stage is set for the resumption of the draft. Now, in an explosive and provocative book, Philip Gold, a former Marine and a disaffected conservative, reveals why selective service should never come to pass–but might. In The Coming Draft, Gold charts the path that brought us to this treacherous point and posits an “exit strategy” for America to change its course. In candid language and through authoritative research, he uncovers the flaws of forced enlistment from ancient to recent times and suggests serious and more effective methods to protect the homeland. “Plans/reality mismatch” is how Gold describes the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war. This conflict’s deadly, years-long duration–with overtaxed volunteer troops–has led to the Marines missing their monthly recruitment quotas by up to 25 percent, soldiers over sixty being called out of retirement to serve, and in some cases National Guard tours being extended to 2031. Though the House of Representatives made a show of voting against the draft idea in 2004, Gold believes that a collusion of neoconservatives and liberals could eventually cause conscription to be reinstated. The neocon argument for the return of universal conscription rests in the expectation that American military presence will need to increase in order to combat the spreading threat of terrorism, while the left wing hopes that the revival of the draft will expand the scope of the debate about U.S. military policy, thereby making American involvement in wars an issue that potentially touches every household. Asserting that selective service has been neither effective nor historically validated, The Coming Draft provides evidence that the Founding Fathers’ concept of common defense differed from our own and allowed for “proper refusal” in addition to service. More damning, Gold insists that starting with the Universal Militia Act of 1791, the draft has been rife with demoralizing corruption and bad faith, whether it was exceptions for civilian slave owners in the Civil War or loophole-laden systems from World War I to Vietnam. Gold’s practical and innovative alternatives include the redefinition of service (to include earthquake and weather-related relief work), and a drastic rethinking of the duties of the National Guard. All this, he believes, must begin with setting limits on any president’s ability to launch an undeclared war. Written with an acute awareness and fierce intelligence, The Coming Draft is an indispensable work for anyone who is, or who might have to be, a soldier–and any citizen concerned about the future of our country.
Military service in Bolivia has long been compulsory for young men. This service plays an important role in defining identity, citizenship, masculinity, state formation, and civil-military relations in twentieth-century Bolivia. The project of obligatory military service originated as part of an attempt to restrict the power of indigenous communities after the 1899 civil war. During the following century, administrations (from oligarchic to revolutionary) expressed faith in the power of the barracks to assimilate, shape, and educate the population. Drawing on a body of internal military records never before used by scholars, Elizabeth Shesko argues that conscription evolved into a pact between the state and society. It not only was imposed from above but was also embraced from below because it provided a space for Bolivians across divides of education, ethnicity, and social class to negotiate their relationships with each other and with the state. Shesko contends that state formation built around military service has been characterized in Bolivia by multiple layers of negotiation and accommodation. The resulting nation-state was and is still hierarchical and divided by profound differences, but it never was simply an assimilatory project. It instead reflected a dialectical process to define the state and its relationships.
