Drawing on Reserves: Enhancing capability through civilian employer-military relations

As part of an increased recognition and utilisation of military Reserves in Western nations, and following various successful post-Cold War deployments of Australian Army Reservists, the Australian Department of Defence is increasingly looking to Reserves as a way for the ADF to ensure it is Ready Now and Future Ready. However, there is a distinct dearth of available data and analysis on factors that relate to the recruitment and retention of Reservists in Australia. Specifically, we know little about the flexibility of employers to accommodate Reservist service, and of the capacity of employees to combine paid employment with being a part-time member of the Armed Forces. In addressing this dearth of knowledge, this research program seeks to develop a more multidimensional comprehension of contemporary civilian-military relations in Australia at a time when such insights are strategically significant. 

Funding: AUD $71,500 Australian Army Research Centre

Integrated Influence for Engagement and Resilience

‘Grey zone’ tactics, that include the use of para-military forces and the coercive use of diplomatic, trade, foreign investment and cyber-influence levers, are increasingly being integrated into statecraft and have the potential to undermine confidence in the rules, norms and institutions that have provided stability within the Indo-Pacific for over half a century. The Influence Theories & Models Project develops state-of-the-art research on influence theories and models with the purpose of countering coercive statecraft, positively exercising influence and securing partnerships. At the micro (individual) level this means better understanding the role of emotion, bias and heuristics as well as personality factors, social identity factors and social influence processes such as polarisation and in-group/outgroup dynamics. At the meso (group) level this means developing tools and frameworks for analysing group structure, networks, culture, norms, interactions, power and conflict dynamics as well as resilience to malign forms of influence. At the macro (nation state) level this entails understanding the geopolitics and geo-economics of strategic competition such as deterrence, containment, alliances and balance of power theories in addition to softer approaches to influencing states which include the role of international institutions, imagined communities, diplomacy, people-to-people ties and other forms of strategic cooperation that builds trust and respect over the longer term.

Funding: AUD $372,901 Defence Science and Technology Group

Civil sphere and the military 

Analysis of the interconnections between the civil sphere and military are under researched and theorised in sociology. In cultural analysis the area is dominated by a reductionist ‘militarisation thesis’ that idealises and universalises the military in ways that are then looked for in representations and agencies involved in social control, emergency response and national commemoration. Most empirical research on the military itself is undertaken within the subfield of military sociology and while it has a better appreciation of the armed forces as an institution that not only has an influence on the civil sphere but is shaped by it, the area is dominated by a civil-military relations framework in which the civil is largely constitution by government agencies and political elites. Within the context of Russia’s further territorial invasion of Ukraine and the growth of China’s military capability and grey-zone warfare activity, this research program adopts and develops Civil Sphere Theory to strengthen  comprehension of the complexity in the relationship between the civil and military. Following the work of Jeffrey Alexander, the research program contends that justice is often reliant upon not a complete autonomy of the civil sphere but it appearing to serve the interests of non-civil spheres. 

Funding: AUD $7000 Centre for Defence Leadership and Ethics, Australian Defence Force