Acta Politologica (Oct 2018)
Výzkum vládně-armádních vztahů v Latinské Americe
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to review the contemporary research on civil-military relations in Latin America. Existing researches of the civil-military relations in Latin America either work with the topic in general, accenting long-term trends (Pion-Berlin 2001), or they focus mostly on publishing output of prominent scholars in this scientific field (Pion-Berlin 2012). This particular text, however, aims at analyzing eighty-five scientific articles that were published between 1990 and 2015 in some of the leading journals. The first part of the text is quantitative and deals with the direction of research in civil-military relations in Latin America. This part uses criteria very similar to those used by a prior study by Gerald L. Munck and Richard Snyder (2007), which allows the comparison with the direction of research in comparative politics (Munch, Snyder 2007) and the direction of research in civil-military relations (Olmeda 2013). The next part of the text is qualitative and summarizes the results of causal research in this field. Based on the analysis of literature about research of civil-military relations in Latin America, we can claim that the contemporary research in this field, while not reaching the academic levels of the contemporary research in comparative politology, does nevertheless in many aspects surpass the general level of research of civil-military relations. Several avenues of prospective research can be suggested based on this review. In terms of methodology, it seems desirable to shift more attention to comparative studies, either using statistical methods or through set theoretic-methods. As far as topics are concerned, the following three directions of research seem most advisable: a deeper orientation on the topic of military entrepreneurship (Mani 2011a, 2011b), research of army on a lower analytical level than just dealing with the relationship between political and military elites and, above all, research of specific relationships between the army and some of the current left-wing regimes in Latin America - mostly because the growing de facto influence of the army in these countries (Diamint 2015).
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