The purpose of this paper is to assess the extent to which the Ministry of Defense, an institution of critical importance for today's societies, is impacting civil-military relations in Brazil. Ultimately, this translates into a strengthening of civil controls geared toward achieving civil supremacy over the Armed Forces, which are a fundamental tool that the government has at its disposal. The process of establishing and implementing a Ministry of Defense is not linear, but winding. It depends both on the policies adopted by the Ministry of Defense itself and on the relationships established among the military personnel, the Government and the rest of society. After a brief analysis of the problem and of the Brazilian situation, we tried to examine the "hits and misses" of the Ministry of Defense in connection with civil-military relations in Brazil. We also looked at the organization of the defense system in our country. Indeed, Brazil is still far from a situation where civil supremacy is a reality, notwithstanding the fact that major gaps in the "echelons" of civil supremacy are being bridged. Since the creation and implementation of a Ministry of Defense is a process, the decisive involvement of the country?s politicians and of large segments of the civil society become necessary in order to do away with much of the apathy that Brazil is currently experiencing.
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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the involvement of civil police forces in peacekeeping operations. The theoretical background of civil police forces, as well as their characteristics and specific elements, will be examined. This paper also contains a discussion of the participation of the Chilean police forces in peacekeeping operations.
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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the principles that underlie the creation of an Inter-American System for Cooperation in Security and Defense Matters that would be utilized to respond to the new threats facing the hemisphere. The paper reviews the theoretical background of international regulations and of the Rio Treaty with a view to determining whether there is a current Inter-American system for cooperation in defense-related matters, or whether there is no such system and efforts need to be made in order to create it.
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This paper describes the organizational structure of the Peruvian National Defense System. After discussing the role of the different entities that make up the Defense System, the budget assigned to each sector is analized. Special emphasis is placed on transparency of the defense sector budget and, in particular, of the budget of the intelligence service. The initial analysis of the defense sector and its budget indicate that the available information is scarce and almost useless given that it does not allow for analysis of the social worth of individual projects associated with that sector. Likewise, a large part of the budget is destined for actions oriented toward social spending programs. This causes a distorsion in the analysis of the rest of the government's social spending policy. It is difficult to measure how defense spending destined for social programs complements or substitutes other government actions. A common theme throughout the sector is the cult of secrecy and the lack of transparency, as well as difficulty in accessing data. The situation has recently improved with the publication of the Defense White Paper. However, in our opinion, there is still much to done.
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This article provides a general introduction for the so-called intelligence activities. Intelligence means the collection, analysis and dissemination of information needed by policy makers and decision takers. But it does not include all kinds of information or data in general, since intelligence is part of a conflict dealing with denial of knowledge and secrets. The unique methods, procedures, technologies and techniques of intelligence make it more relevant in some fields than others. National defense, foreign policy and law enforcement are the main users of intelligence. The article also addresses the tensions between intelligence and democracy and the expected impacts of the intelligence in peace and war.
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Despite early recognition of the importance of military institutions for understanding social organization and social change, sociology established no strong research tradition to study the military until after World War II. This paper explores the origins of this sub-field by focusing on the pioneering contributions of Morris Janowitz. Relying on a comprehensive review of primary source documents, it provides a history of the first twenty years of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society (IUS), an organization Janowitz founded in 1961 to support, extend, and routinize sociological study of the military as a social institution. Special attention is paid to the relation between the development of this institution and Janowitz's intellectual biography and to the strains resulting from the IUS's attempts to pursue multiple and sometimes conflicting goals.
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