Conscription and social transformations: Estonia between security needs and social expectations

ABSTRACT

While most scholarly works on conscription in democracies focus on its abolition, the few works that explain its retention usually attribute it to countries’ security needs. Using the Estonian case, the article shifts the focus to ask how conscription systems are maintained to adapt to changing defense challenges, as well as transforming public expectations about security, military effectiveness and efficiency, recruitment policies, and social diversity. It offers a conceptual framework that opens-up the ‘black-box’ of conscription to analyze the actual organizational practices and arrangements by which this adaptation comes about. In this way, the article suggests comparative questions pertinent to other countries preserving mandatory military service.

KEYWORDS:

• Military conscription
• social transformations
• security needs
• social expectations

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Elisheva Rosman-Stollman for commenting on a draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See, for example, Tanner (2020).

2. In 2018, a conscript of the infantry battalion sustained injuries in an explosion when a piece of unexploded ordnance went off (Postimees 2018).

3. A doctor responsible for the health evaluations of young men for compulsory military service diagnosed draftees with illnesses they did not have in exchange for money (Värk 2017).

4. Alternative service in Estonia is about to change. While conscripts who went through alternative service were previously not called up to the reservist trainings or considered part of the reserve forces, soon they will have these responsibilities and will participate in trainings in supportive roles (Kirjanen 2020).

5. In 2019, the EDF started to teach Estonian language to conscripts who were lacking in their knowledge of the language. In one year, the number of conscripts who took the course was around 310 (Kook 2019).

6. That the EFD is expected to fulfill social functions was already reflected in a newspaper article from 2003 (Päevaleht 2003).

7. As part of the autumn call-up in 2016, around 1,200 young people started their conscript service, including 12 women volunteers (Postimees 2016).

8. One example outlines how these information days are provided in both the Russian and Estonian language (ERR 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This research was carried out in cooperation with the Estonian Military Academy and University of Tartu, under projects no. SSVUH18330, and R-006.

Notes on contributors

Eleri Lillemäe

Eleri Lillemäe is a researcher-survey coordinator at the Department of Applied Research at the Estonian Military Academy and a PhD student at the University of Tartu. She conducts research related to human resources in the Estonian Defense Forces, focusing on conscription as part of life course, agency in military system, and public perceptions of AI based technologies in military use.

Kairi Kasearu

Kairi Kasearu, is a professor of empirical sociology at the Institute of Social Studies at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Since 2013, she has been leading different projects on human resources in the Estonian Defense Forces. Her research interests include family sociology, policy, intergenerational relations, and military sociology. Her recent work concentrates on military families and conscripts’ value profile attitudes and well-being.

Eyal Ben-Ari

Eyal Ben-Ari is a Senior Research Fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and a research fellow at the Kinneret Center for Society, Security, and Peace. He has carried out research in Israel, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. He studies the armed forces (including gender issues and combat units), early childhood education, and popular culture in Asia. By the time of writing this article he was a Visiting Professor at the Estonian Military Academy.