This book is unrivaled in its comprehensiveness in conceptualizing and operationalizing democratic civil-military relations and its meticulousness in demonstrating the theory at work, for the cases of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. Having experienced democratic transitions in the 1980s and 1990s following repressive military rule, these countries stand prominently in the literatures on Latin American militaries and Third Wave transitions to democracy. Yet Soldiers, Politicians, and Civilians is the first thorough, systematic comparative analysis of their civil-military relations. Its treatment of each country is exceptional in breadth and depth, drawing on sources ranging from surveys to laws and regulations to interviews to the vast secondary case literatures. Though the authors’ empirical analysis focuses on Latin America, they ground their theory in universalistic expectations of democratic civil-military relations, often rooted in standards set by “old” democracies. The book is a valuable resource for assessing civil-military relations in any national context and an exceptional model of rigorous comparative research.

Pion-Berlin and Martínez develop six dimensions to characterize relations among the military, society at large, and the executive, legislature, and judiciary. They therefore move beyond the dominant tendency in the field of civil-military relations to study executive-military dynamics. A “military power” dimension captures civilian control of policymaking, external defense, internal security, past military human rights abuses, the state defense industry, and political and military leadership selection. “Defense institutions” includes civilian presence and control in the defense ministry, congressional defense committees, the joint military staff, and the national security council. “Legal framework” encompasses civilian state control of the armed forces based on the constitution and defense- and military-related laws, and the relative power of the civilian judicial system compared to that of the armed forces.

A fourth dimension, “effectiveness,” gauges the grounding of defense spending and force-size decisions in defense strategy, transparency in defense decisionmaking and spending, the move away from conscription to a volunteer force, and the military’s concentration on external defense without the distraction of internal missions. Two final dimensions mainly consider relations between soldiers and civilians in the national population. “Convergence” evaluates the extent to which the armed forces and society reflect and understand each other, as measured by surveys and military organizational shifts. “Generating knowledge” is about civilian influence in military training institutions, the educating of civilians in defense matters, and the channeling of civilians into the defense ministry.

Each dimension serves as a window into the civil-military complex, differing from but often encompassing elements viewed using one or more of the other dimensions. For instance, as noted, both “generating knowledge” and “defense institutions” concern the presence of civilians in the defense ministry. “Military power,” “defense institutions,” and “legal framework” each encompass elements of high-level civilian control of security and defense policies. And “military power” and “legal framework” address civilian state structures and actions for holding the armed forces accountable for past human rights abuses.

The study’s presentation and application of the six dimensions reveal important cross-national and longitudinal variation. Argentina and Chile exhibit great progress toward democratic civil-military relations relative to Brazil and Uruguay. In all cases, reforms that moved countries forward in this regard mainly occurred well after democratization. In a final chapter, the authors explain the variation by pointing to incentives and opportunities for reform during the democratic transition and to actions taken by leftist governments in later years, when the very stability of democracy was no longer seriously in question. For the first period, they draw on insights from previous research to argue that incentives of civilian governments to rein in the military were greater where the military regime had been more abusive, and that the government’s opportunity to follow through with reforms depended on the military’s influence during the transition. That influence was determined, in turn, by the armed forces’ coherence, exit strategy, and performance while in power, especially in the economic realm.

Yet as Pion-Berlin and Martínez observe, incentives and opportunities during the transition are insufficient to explain reform outcomes. The authors therefore explore actions at a later moment by leftist leaders who assertively pursued justice for past human rights abuses. These leaders also sought to guarantee the armed forces a respected, professional place in external defense: “Using the ‘stick’ of judicial retribution alone is often short-sighted. It can tilt the scales of power toward civilians for a while but cannot ensure the scales remain that way” (365). Simply raising defense budgets would be insufficient in the longer term:

The authors’ emphasis on promising the military a professional defense role in democracy echoes an insight that O’Donnell and Schmitter made in the 1980s, amid the uncertainties of political liberalizing and democratization in South America: “What seems crucial is not so much a crude buying off of the military as the devising of a shift in the strategic doctrines and operational capabilities of the armed forces which can provide them with a credible role in society” (1986, 36).

Just as striking as the book’s impressive development and application of a novel, general framework for understanding civil-military relations is the emergence, over the course of the study, of a slightly different set of factors that cut across the authors’ six dimensions. Two alternative categories are the central components of the causal argument—the treatment of past human rights abuses and the assurance of the military’s external defense role, with institutionalized civilian oversight. In Soldiers, Politicians, and Civilians, holding the military accountable for human rights abuses is discussed using the military power and legal framework dimensions. For its part, control and effectiveness in external defense encompasses Pion-Berlin and Martínez’s effectiveness dimension and is also considered in the chapters on military power, legal framework, defense institutions, and generating knowledge.

Another mission-centered dimension, internal missions, also comes through— in effectiveness (as a distraction to otherwise defense-focused armed forces) and within legal framework, legal states of exception, military constitutional entitlements, military and civilian court jurisdictions, and security and defense laws. Internal missions could logically merit a separate dimension: in contrast to the authors’ approach to external defense, in the internal arena the emphasis is not on expertise, effectiveness, and control but on the removal of the military from the work. This perspective is consistent with other research on Latin American militaries, and most famously Alfred Stepan’s finding that military engagement in internal missions contributed to military coups and regimes starting in the 1960s (Stepan Reference Stepan and Stepan1973).

Finally, Pion-Berlin and Martínez’s human rights, internal security, and external defense dimensions might be accompanied by the convergence dimension and a political power dimension summarizing civilian training for and authority in matters of high-level defense policy and organizations—that is, combining portions of the current military power and organizations dimensions. Such an alternative frame-work would align with previous conceptualizations of civil-military relations in Latin America that have measured military influence and autonomy according to categories that include leadership selection, policymaking, the judicial arena, internal security, and external defense (e.g., Stepan Reference Stepan1988, Trinkunas Reference Trinkunas2005).

In sum, Soldiers, Politicians, and Civilians shows, dramatically, that we should continue to appreciate the civil-military relations patterns in Latin America, in all their richness, while we also turn to this book to guide our analysis of civil-military relations in any national or regional context.