New Military Missions and Involved Military Personnel: A Sociological Approach

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Notes

1. Here we shall chiefly use the following acronyms and terms with the meanings specified below.MOOTW, Military Operations Other Than War. They include: missions of peacekeeping, peace-enforcing, peacemaking, domestic territorial control, control of mass immigration, fighting the illegal arms trade and drug trafficking, and intervention in public disasters. In short, all operations carried out by military units that are not actual war operations.

PSOs, Peace Support Operations. They include missions of peacekeeping, peace-enforcing, peacemaking. Actually they are already included in MOOTW, but at times it is necessary to indicate only operations aimed at bringing peace to an area.

Peacekeeping, a term originally used to define solely operations of peace maintenance (different therefore from peacemaking and peace-enforcing), but used here in a more general sense for all peace operations, like PSOs.

Peacekeeping and warfighting: expressions that are used here to contrast two situations, that of pacification operations and that of war-making.

2. Rightly she includes not only military soldiers in her study but also policemen and civil servants, because on several occasions and from different countries they too have been employed in PSOs.

3. In military sociology studies the data are increasingly based on cross-national researches, also because the dimensions of the operations treated here are now always international, whether under the UN or other coalitions. The evolution in empirical research has accompanied the evolution of the military operations examined here. Cross-national empirical research underwent rapid expansion in the area of the sociology of the military in the 1990s. Comparative studies between the various countries had been done previously, but they were mainly studies on national surveys already carried out independently and were based on secondary analysis of already acquired data. The difficulty of comparing data from surveys performed using different questionnaires and on samples selected with different criteria convinced military sociologists, in the early 1990s, of the necessity of planning and carrying out joint cross-national empirical researches using the same tools and samples chosen with the same criteria.