Book review by Harold Trinkunas of: The Soldier and the Changing State: Building Democratic Armies in
Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. By Zoltan Barany. Princeton
University Press, 2012. 472 pp.By titling his new book as he has, Zoltan Barany consciously evokes
Samuel P. Huntington’s seminal 1957 study on civil-military relations,
The Soldier and the State. Whereas Huntington focused on great powers
and had in view militarism and the role that it played in the twentieth
century’s two world wars, Barany aims to explain civil-military relations
following democratization. His goal as an investigator—to examine
the conditions that are most likely to produce democratic civil-military
relations across a wide range of transitional settings—is ambitious. As
a theorist of civil-military relations and democratization, however, Barany’s
aims are more modest. Eschewing a general theory of how new
democracies achieve control over their militaries, he instead offers to
scholars and practitioners of democracy the wisdom that can be gained
from his case studies
