Rogues,degenerates,and heroes: Disobedience as politics in military organizations

Abstract

Disobedience in military organizations affects critical outcomes such as the quality of civil–military relations, the likelihood of civilian abuse, and battlefield effectiveness. Existing work on military disobedience focuses on group dynamics; this article instead investigates the circumstances under which individual officers disobey. We argue that officers interpret military orders based on their concurrent positions in multiple social networks and that, contingent on the soldier’s environment, such orders can “activate” tensions between overlapping social network identifications. These tensions create motivations and justifications for disobedience. We develop this theory via in-depth case studies of individual officers’ disobedience in the Chinese military and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), combined with an examination of 10 additional cases outlined in an online appendix. Relying on primary sources, we demonstrate how identifications with overlapping social networks led two ostensibly dissimilar officers to disobey in similar ways during the Sino-French War (1883–1885) and the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1989). Our theory thus shows how overlapping social networks create conditions of possibility for even well-trained, loyal commanders to disobey their superiors. In doing so, it highlights the critical fact that even within the context of intensive military discipline and socialization, individuals draw on identifications with varied social networks to make decisions. Further, it implies that individual disobedience should be studied as conceptually separate from collective events such as mass desertion or unit defection.