Military Covenants and Contracts in Motion: Reservists as Transmigrants 10 Years Later

Abstract

This article reexamines and develops the analytical metaphor of “Reserve Soldiers as Transmigrants” in three directions. First, we advance the notion of transmigration by linking it to the explicit and implicit “contracts” or agreements struck between the military and individuals and groups within and outside of it. Second, we show that the “management” model of reserve forces is not just an administrative matter but that “negotiating” with reservists involves wider issues that include managing identity, commitment, and the meaning attached to military service. Third, we examine the institutional and political meaning of the reserves at the macro sociological level. The juxtaposition and interplay of two models—transmigration and multiple contracts—allows us to introduce structural elements into the movement of soldiers between the military and civilian society, and add a dynamic dimension to the contents of the implicit contracts that organize reservists’ relations with the state and military.

Keywords

civil–military relations reserve component sociology military organization military culture

Introduction

About a decade ago, we published a paper titled “Reserves Soldiers as Transmigrants: Moving between the Civilian and Military Worlds” to suggest an analytical metaphor to examine the special characteristics of reserve service and reserve forces (Ben-Ari & Lomsky-Feder, 2011; Lomsky-Feder et al., 2008). At that time, relatively little had been written about the social scientific study of reserves. Since then, while there has been no outburst of studies, the situation has changed somewhat (although the majority of scholarly work continues to be about regulars and to an extent conscripts). These new publications—and wider recognition of the importance of reserve forces—offer a welcome opportunity to revisit our contentions and to develop them further.

Accordingly, in this article, our aim is theoretical elaboration. Specifically, our analytical move is threefold. First, we advance the notion of transmigration by linking it to the explicit and implicit “contracts” or agreements struck between the military and individuals and groups within and outside of it. It is these various agreements that organize the use and deployment of reservists within the military. We argue that the metaphor of transmigrants emphasizing the dual positioning and movement of reservists between the military and civilian worlds still holds but needs to be further developed in ways that bring out the multiple negotiations and transformations that characterize individual and groups of reservists over time. Second, and in a related vein, while much research on reserve duty and the reserves has had a very strong emphasis on dealing with personnel according to the changing needs of armed forces (Chun, 2005; Keene, 2015; Lording, 2013; Simon, 2011), we show that this “management” or HR model is not just an administrative matter. Rather, we develop the idea that “negotiating” with reservists (and related synonyms like bargaining, parlaying, or consulting) involves much wider issues including managing identity, citizenship, commitment, and the meaning attached to military service. This kind of reading makes much of the scholarship on motivation, support, deployment, or public expectations much clearer and comprehended in a dynamic manner. Third, in our previous article, we placed our analysis primarily at the microlevel of the experience of reservists and the mezzo-level of internal military dynamics centered on the reserve force. In this article, we go on much more explicitly to examine the macro-level where the political implications of the reserves as part of the military as a social institution is most evident.

Our argument. The juxtaposition and interplay of the two models—transmigration and multiple contracts—allows us to do two things; first to introduce structural elements into the movement of soldiers between the military and civilian society, and second, to introduce a dynamic dimension to the contents of the implicit contracts that organize their relations with the state and military. In short, the link between the two models “moves” the contracts and “structures” the transmigration movement. Our contention is that the movement—one we develop through the metaphor of transmigration—allows us to illuminate the ongoing formulation, and tuning, of the implicit contracts over time. In other words, in striking bargains or reaching agreements with reservists, the military can assure at once, the continued utilization of resources reservists bring with them and adapt to the limits of their schedules. This movement and consequent tuning are what allows the contracts to be maintained as “fair,” that is, as acceptable to reservists in terms of the time and effort they invest in service and the rewards they receive. While some aspects of the contracts may be institutionalized—that is, formalized and/or regularized—as in various laws and regulations, these can never cover all of the aspects of the complexity of reserve service for individuals or for groups. That is why there is always a need for an informal element that allows flexibility and handling the diversity of reservists. As peoples’ lives change and as history transforms, the fine-tuning is expressed in a host of local-based agreements.

Problems and Puzzles

While decreasing in numbers in many democracies, reserves nevertheless still represent significant components of armed forces (Bury, 2019b; Griffith, 2018; Keene, 2015; Weitz, 2007). Whereas in the past they were seen as strategic reserves for large wars around the world, they are now seen as parts of countries’ “total” military force (Dandeker et al., 2011; West, 2018) to be utilized for such things as logistics, roles where special expertise is needed or for disaster relief, national emergencies, or operations abroad (Kirke, 2008). From our perspective, a perusal of recent studies of reserves raises three clusters of issues that necessitate analysis.

Acknowledgement and continued tensions

While all soldiers (even professional soldiers) have a civilian component in their identity, reservists, in-essence, have a hybrid civil–military character which is a basic ingredient of their social and personal identity, before, during, and after their military stints. In a way, until their final release from the military, they carry this split identity with them and it potentially influences their mental vulnerability, in both worlds. From this perspective, our metaphor of transmigration seems to be valid and is a useful starting point for mapping the pressures and unique circumstances of serving in reserves.

Accordingly, the past two decades have been marked by increased awareness of the special character and problems associated with reserve service. Thus, while in Israel training and equipping have improved, formal legislation enacted and new military roles devoted solely to reservists created (Levy, 2011; Sapir-Rein, 2016), in Britain a new “Future Reserves” policy has been declared (Bury, 2019a, 2019b) leading to improvement of reservists’ perceptions about the military and the closing of gaps with regulars (Dandeker et al., 2010). Similarly, the U.S. Government has initiated new programs to address the difficulties of reservists (Vest, 2014b). Yet despite these advances, many reservists continue feeling that they are treated like second-class soldiers. These sensitivities are especially strong in regard to the effects and stresses of deployment on family circumstances and career advancement (Dandeker et al., 2010; Griffith, 2010, 2011; Harvey et al., 2011; Stetz et al., 2007; Weitz, 2007; West, 2018). Indeed, the pecking order between regulars and reservists has continued to be reproduced and reinforced by the assumptions of most military leaders that members of the regular component of the military are the true full-time professionals and must be awarded recognition as such (Dandeker et al., 2010; Kirke, 2008). This situation also holds for cases in which reservists possess higher education and superior civilian skills to those of regulars (Danielsson & Carlstedt, 2011).

These findings underscore out the first set of issues centering on explaining the continued tensions and gaps between regulars and reservists and the unique difficulties the latter face upon entering and returning from deployment. As we shall show, the structural duality of reservists—within and outside the military—explains these continued mutual perceptions and experiences and leads to continued strains between the two.

Costs, change, and social agency

The use of reservists has great advantages for militaries since they can be deployed as flexible labor and often bring with them civilian skills lacking in the force (Danielsson & Carlstedt, 2011; Kirke, 2008). Yet there are economic and political costs to their utilization. As states have invested significant sums in their reserve forces, differences with regulars have actually diminished. Of especial importance has been the allocation of budgets to gradually widen compensation, insurance, and health and welfare assistance that were previously awarded only to regulars (and to a smaller extent, to conscripts). This outcome has been the result of deploying reservists to the same combat missions as other troops making it politically difficult not to award them the same benefits (Edmunds et al., 2016; Weitz, 2007) and political lobbying by reservist groups and their allies.

These developments raise the second set of issues we deal with, ones about how the mutual expectations between reservists and the military have changed and especially about reservists’ individual and collective agency in pushing and negotiating for these changes. Here we contend that scholars need to develop a sociological and political model of the power of reservists and their capacity for individual or collective action (agency).

The changing composition of reserve forces

While often treated as a rather homogeneous group, reservists are very diverse in deployment roles and patterns, household situation, and jobs and careers as well as gender, ethnicity, class or race (for instance, in the United States, women are increasingly called up for reserve duty, Peele, 2014). In terms of deployment, the key difference is one involving reservists who go on missions in organic units and those that are integrated into regular units as individuals. This latter situation, as Edmunds et al. (2016) note, means that such individuals lack sustained networks and relations in the units to which they are deployed and thus have to undergo a process by which they must prove themselves. This reality, however, differs according to the type of unit they are seconded to: combat or support forces (Bury, 2019a; Kirke, 2008; Musheno & Ross, 2009).

At the same time, there is significant diversity in terms of the kind of the motivations driving reservists to join and be retained (Griffith, 2018). While some individuals join in order to take up a job different from their civilian one (Crompvoets, 2013; Weitz, 2007), for others reserve duty may represent variously a break or diversion from civilian life or a place to renew connections with buddies (Bury, 2019a, 2019b; Etzion et al., 1998; Lording, 2013). Moreover, as deployment may lower the income of many individuals (Griffith, 2008), Lording (2013) suggests that the motivations of the reservists she studied combine considerations of both volunteering and income-seeking.

The third set of issues is centered on the way in which this diversity is managed by the military (as an organization and by local-level commanders) and the manner by which individuals or groups of reservists negotiate with the military over conditions of service and the coordination of military duties with their own life trajectories. Here we contend that understanding of reserve forces necessitates taking account of the multiple levels by which the military manages reservists through various formal and informal, explicit and implicit contracts and agreements.

To conclude this section, although our conceptualization of reservists as transmigrants was originally developed to address the structural dual character of reserve military service, it seems to be useful to at least open new questions about the individual experiences of civilian-soldiers and about the dynamics of their relationship with regulars and the military more generally. In what follows, we take up these three clusters of issues to propose our analytical model.

The Theoretical Frame: Transmigration and Multiple Contracts

The framework we suggested in 2008 essentially likened reserve soldiers to transmigrants: Migrants who have two homes in different countries and who more or less regularly travel between them. When applied to the case of reservists, this kind of metaphor brings out both the special potentials and threats that such soldiers represent for the standing army and the implications of the processual nature of their lives involving continuous mobilization, service, demobilization, civilian life, and mobilization yet again. A number of studies have used this framework to make sense of their data. For instance, Lording (2013) found that the Australian and UK soldiers she studied have a sense of “belonging” to the reserve while not belonging to the full-time army at the same time as sensing a disconnection from civilian colleagues. According to her, these accounts support the idea of reservists “migrating” from one sphere of life to another. More important, Lording suggests that constant movement, the migration, makes it difficult for individuals to position themselves clearly within a classification of “worker-type” or “volunteer-type’ when serving. Hence, republican or instrumental motivational models of reserve service do not easily align with individual experience and may change over time. Zelcer (2012) argues that different ethical constraints on regulars and reservists can be explained by their constant movement between the military and civilian worlds and the different kinds of moral understandings that mark the two. And Vest (2012, 2014a), for her part, uses the formulation of transmigration to examine three processes by which reservists “balance” dual cultural belonging to the military and civilian worlds: behavioral practices for managing transitions, spatial displacement by attributing different identities to different spaces and times (within and outside the military), and narration implying the discourses used in different contexts. In addition, she shows how soldiers construct a life story as a “theory of events” to resolve, for example, the gap between what they expected and what happened.

An emphasis on movement, thus, underscores questions of transitions. In a small-scale study, Peele (2014) proposes that for reservists transition to civilian life is sudden since they are no longer surrounded by regular members (who return to their bases) nor like family or employers that have greater continuity with their daily lives. Griffith (2008) uses the concept of ambiguous loss, referring to equivocal events or situations that entail a separation, to show how analyses of deployments and reunions must account for reservists’ perceptions to help explain adjustment. In his study, reservists were physically present, but family members said it seemed as if they were psychologically absent. He then shows that upon reunion, families experienced boundary ambiguity around the resumption of roles and responsibilities. Moreover, for most families, boundary ambiguity was greatly reduced when their reservist returned to civilian employment since it seemed to help family members restabilize roles and relationships by returning them to a familiar (predeployment) routine. From our perspective, his findings emphasize the implications of the processual nature of reserve duty (a point we return to presently).

A conceptualization in terms of transmigration illuminates another aspect of reserve service that is often implicit in scholarly work. Most studies conceive of reservists using the idea of part-time labor. Thus, Crompvoets (2013) contends that Australian reservists’ identities fall on a continuum between a being a “part-timer” to a “full-timer.” Yet Lording (2013) suggests something that explicitly emphasizes movement. According to her, reservists should be seen as working within a “casual employee” definition who (unlike some part-time employees) are denied a range of benefits (like retirement benefits or paid leave) and whose salaries for days served are based on inequitable hourly rates. To extend this idea, we could well add that some reservists should be likened to seasonal laborers, that is, workers who transmigrate over borders to be employed for a particular time period during which they devote their full time to employment. As we shall see, this idea of casual or seasonal worker allows us to understand the contracts struck with the military and crucially the advantages that this kind of status gives militaries as employers. But as Lording (2013) cautions, these kinds of metaphors should not be taken too literally. Because they are like transmigrants, that is, reservists have two homes and identification, reserve duty includes some form of voluntarism ultimately related to facing dangerous activities (in training or operations).

The idea of movement in transmigration further sheds light on how meanings attributed to reserve service change over time, especially along individual and family life-courses. Critically, this point implies looking at transmigration not as “merely” a cyclical phenomenon but along a time axis. In this fashion, Lording (2013) thoughtfully notes that for most of the participants, the employee/volunteer motivation ebbs and flows according to individuals’ location within their own individual life cycle. We can thus also understand better how in the UK, Canada, and Australia, for university students becoming a reservist is driven by the need for money to support study (MacIssac et al., 2009) and that instrumental motivation may change according to one’s position in a civilian career (Tresch, 2011).

In a like manner, the effects of deployment on family dynamics are dependent on its timing in the family’s life journey. Basham and Catignani (2018) conclude that in the UK, as significant numbers of reservists have been deployed in the recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the expectation that women partners should be “ready” in the future has widened. This argument adds to our model an anticipatory orientation in terms of future planning within the family to meet the needs of military “readiness.” Finally, it is important to note that looking at movement along a time axis allows us to understand cumulative effects as in the argument that reservists do not leave due to a single event but as a result of accumulating reasons (Lording, 2013).

Seen against this background, it appears that almost all of the empirical work on reservists as transmigrants has taken place in the context of professional, volunteer forces. The main challenge in these armed forces is to recruit and maintain reservists, and thus the emphasis is on the personal and familial dimensions of dealing with the movement between civilian and military lives. As a consequence, this research work does not really deal with the wider meanings that reservists embody in mediating between these worlds. This role, however, is something that is much more apparent in countries marked by elements of a people’s army and within which the recruitment to the reserves is mandated by law (such as Israel, Taiwan, or South Korea).

One important addition to our model of transmigration to emerge from recent studies is related to the diversity of reservists’ experiences. From our perspective, it is difficult to talk about one, standard, “civilian home” epitomizing the civilian sphere. At the very least, we should talk about multiple civilian homes. To develop this point, we now turn to the multiplicity of formal and informal, explicit and implicit contracts or agreements struck between soldiers and commanders, their units, or the military establishment, as well as the macro links to civilian society. These diverse agreements highlight the different routes that transmigrants travel between civilian life and the military. By moving into the plural (not “the” reservist, but different kinds of reservists), we can better comprehend how each reservist’s group is characterized by a different set of experiences and expectations vis-à-vis the military. We now turn to an exploration of the relationships and negotiations between the civilian and the military worlds.

Multiple Contracts

We wish to present a complementary conceptual frame to that of transmigrants. This conceptual frame foregrounds negotiations, emerging agreements, and the idea of multiple contracts struck between reservists as individuals and as groups and the military and society on three levels (Lomsky-Feder et al., 2008; Figure 1): At the micro-sociological level, exchanges and negotiations transpire between individual soldiers and their families (and employers) and specific units (say in regard to postings in expeditionary forces or timing of service), and result in “psychological” or individual contracts; at the mezzo-sociological level within the military organization, specific groups (different types of reservists) give-and-take with the military resulting in specific group compacts; and at the macro-sociological level, transactions and bargaining occur between senior commanders and political leaders representing an undifferentiated society and result in military covenants. Each level is characterized by its own dynamic, involves different resources and expectations and diverse forms of emergent agreements. We now exemplify how this conceptual scheme can illuminate previous studies.

Figure 1.

Transmigration and multiple contracts.

Within the military, at the individual microlevel, a “contract” is agreed upon between commanders and individual soldiers and their families. This agreement is akin to what is called the “psychological contract” in organizational studies (Odysseyzone, 2006): the perceptions of employees and employers of the mutual obligations to each other. Given that military service potentially involves the use of violence and is dangerous, the psychological contract between commanders and soldiers is often emotionally charged and bears moral implications. It does not only cover regular “employment conditions,” which may be relevant to any job in the civilian sphere, but more importantly, there is an expectation that it should also relate to the nature of the mission, whether it is fighting or peace keeping missions, and the appropriate preparations to carry it.

This kind of agreement is rooted in an exchange related to the conditions of units where individuals serve and covers such things as equipment, being led in an effective manner, and individual needs being taken into account where possible in exchange for being loyal, disciplined and professional. Since unlike the formal written contract, the individual psychological contract is an unwritten set of expectations that is continually changing and open to interpretation (Odysseyzone, 2006). Kirke’s (2008) analysis of the relations between regulars and reservists in Britain can be read in this manner. He shows that upon joining a regular unit as an individual, a reservist is initially given less demanding tasks. Then, as he proves himself and makes friends with others, he is given more and more demanding roles. What happens, we surmise, is a subtle often implicit negotiation about the local contract between reservists and regulars. Similarly, when a reserve unit is assigned to be under the command of a regular unit, a comparable process of negotiation over mutual expectations ensues. In both cases, Kirke explains, it is the emergence of trust, at base of implicit “psychological” contracts that develops over time. And indeed, the policy of “twinning” a reserve unit to a regular one in the UK is meant to assure a lengthier relation of trust and thus a more long-lasting (usually implicit) contract at base of ongoing relations.

The element of trust highlights how these agreements hold not only for individuals, who Griffith (2011) characterizes as instrumental volunteers since the negotiations and agreements do not cover only pecuniary and material conditions, they also cover symbolic rewards such as recognition and awarding of responsibility. Edmunds et al. (2016; West, 2018) emphasize thus that it is problematic to extend narrowly transactional premises to reserve forces, since these miss the increasing demands of both civilian and military environments and the strains on reservists who must negotiate the movement between their two worlds. Seen in this light, given the multiplicity of reserve soldiers’ motivations (Ben-Dor & Pedahzur, 2006; Ben-Dor et al., 2008; Danielsson & Carlstedt, 2011; Griffith, 2011; Weber, 2011), it becomes clear that contracts encompass a variety of solutions to individual cases, bearing much wider significance: For example, whether the reservists are seeking challenges and adventures, discovering new experiences, or being remunerated financially, have different but clear implications for retention and readiness resulting from local-level understandings.

That these are agreements resulting from negotiations is underlined by Vest (2014a) who explains that in the U.S. National Guard—and we would extrapolate, in many reserve forces—institutional control of individuals is limited because of the dual belonging in civilian and military worlds.¹ To paraphrase Vest, we need to view individual reservists as agents who possess the ability to monitor their own goals and to negotiate their way within powerful institutions. Her analysis furthermore illuminates the processes by which individuals may shift the level at which they exert their agency, say between their co-reservists and their commanders. Furthermore, in bargaining, individuals may accept limits on their agency in some areas in order to enable their agency in others, preserving a sense of control over the course of their lives and actions (Vest, 2014a).

This point is echoed in Smith and Jans’ (2011) suggestions that today, when multiple employments along the life-course have become more and more common, it seems only normal for reservists to negotiate with the military in and around the terms and meanings of their service. Our conclusion is that decisions to join or remain within the armed forces have become more conditional and contingent than perhaps was the case in the past and that these patterns are particularly pronounced for reservists because so much of their identity formation takes place beyond the confines of the military institution. Hence, the expectations of individuals considering reserve service may be more exacting than previously assumed, and more fragile in the face of problems either in service or in the wider civilian environment, including at home or in work (Edmunds et al., 2016).

While not explicitly focused on contracts, Basham and Catignani’s (2018) study shows how family dynamics of reservists include the power of partners to negotiate deployment and readiness. They suggest that while women partners constitute a further reserve army of labor, since they are less obligated to the military’s formal hierarchy, they have significant capacity to destabilize military readiness (say by withdrawing their labor). This situation indicates how reservists try to maintain the support of women partners by compartmentalizing reserve service and minimizing its impact on “family time.” This point comes out forcefully in Basham and Catigniani’s report of how some reservists engage in “horse-trading” with their partners through forms of financial or moral “bribery” such as promising that the annual bounty reservists receive in exchange for dedicating a set number of days per year to the military will be used to pay for something beneficial to the family.

The second kind of agreement, one we call compacts, is negotiated at the mezzo-sociological level between the military as agent of the state and different reserve groups regarding their service. In the Israeli case, and perhaps in ways similar to other cases, this compact is encapsulated in a few sentences about what reservists want: “Make my service meaningful,” “Call me (only) when I am really needed,” “Utilize my time in an effective manner,” “Train me in a suitable manner,” “Respect me and my actions,” and “Give me reasonable conditions” (Lomsky-Feder et al., 2008). Zelcer’s (2012, p. 342) analysis of reservists who often belong to two professional communities is another case in point. He explains that the compact of the reserves is more complicated than that of regulars since it includes two kinds of agreements with different expectations: one governing reserves as strategic reserves to be used only as the last resort and the other governing an operational reserve that can be called upon as the military needs them (say in wars of choice).

If we understand the permeable boundaries between the military and civilian sectors as zones of negotiation, friction and fluidity, then it becomes clear how reservists are a major group that bargains with the military (Lomsky-Feder et al., 2008). Negotiations between representatives of the reserves and the military exemplify this: The Swedish officers’ union, for example, is legally institutionalized (with its own newspaper and functionaries) and is also a pressure group negotiating with the Swedish forces (Danielsson & Carlstedt, 2011). In Israel, it is extra-institutional but nevertheless recognized associations—say the movement called Reserve Battalion and Brigade Commanders or the alliance called “Buck Privates”—that lobby the military (Rein-Sapir & Ben-Ari, 2020). In addition, Israeli Knesset members who continue to serve as reservists, even after being elected to the parliament, have their own internal lobby dedicated to support and advance the reservists’ interests.

Since members of the regular military do not always make explicit the terms of the mezzo-compact (usually clearly visible only to reservists), it is in its breach that makes things become clearer. In this light, complaints about being underutilized or not trained to a sufficient degree express what reservists see as violation of agreed upon terms. Such breaches are closely related to organizational behavior since when groups of reservists perceive that their expectations have not been honored, they act in a number of ways: leave service, voice their concerns, organize in pressure groups, or turn to the media in ways that draw attention to their power in negotiating with the military.

Here we must acknowledge the difference between different kinds of reservists’ populations. While reservists who are in professional positions (e.g., engineers or physicians) may be more tolerant to such breaches and inclined to negotiate their service conditions (as in a regular civilian employment), combatants in reserves might be more intransigent in their demands. Women and men reservists and reservists from different socioeconomic class or ethnic background may also vary in their expectations and the resources they bring to bear on negotiations with commanders. Hence, it is important to take into consideration the social background of the reservists, as they carry it into the military and the effect of intersectionality on their expectations.

The Military Covenant and Reserve Forces

Derived from the wider social contract, the military covenant governs the widest set of mutual expectations between a society and its armed forces. Dandeker and his colleagues (2011) thus posit that the “gap” between reservists and regulars is folded into wider issues involved in the “military covenant” or how government and wider society ensure that military personnel—of all kinds—receive levels of support that are proportionate to the sacrifices they make. While not legally binding, the “military covenant” (or relationship of mutual promises) is nevertheless seen by many groups to be obligatory in terms of its moral force (Cook, 2004; Forster, 2006, 2012).

The covenant is intimately related to the political costs of deploying reservists. Reports from around the world make it clear that it has become more politically difficult to deploy “citizen soldiers”—conscripts or reservists—in “wars of choice” and not in real national emergencies (as was potentially the case during the Cold War; Bury, 2019a; Bury & Catignani, 2019; Dawes et al., 2018; Orkibi, 2017). In such places as Sweden and Norway, the shift toward home defense has made it even more difficult to deploy reservists abroad. And in Israel in particular, there has long been a wariness of deploying reserves in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since service there is carried out in morally and politically contested circumstances (Levy, 2011).

Moreover, since reservists are civilians who are part-time soldiers, their use touches upon the debate about the meaning of voluntarism, willingness to sacrifice one’s life and citizenship. In Switzerland, for instance, the covenant governs the very notion of citizen-soldiers as reservists; thus, a move to an all-volunteer force would constitute a violation of social expectations (the military covenant) about military service (Tresch, 2011). Indeed, the uniqueness of the military—as the handlers of legitimate organized state violence—means that it embodies notions of republican citizenship of contribution to the state through voluntarism and sacrifice. Thus, even in all-volunteer forces, there is always a value dimension of taking on an elective, noncompulsory risking of one’s life. This also explains the hesitancy of Israeli decision makers in deploying and risking reserve soldiers around the Gaza Strip in times of increased tension.

Reservists being partly civilians arguably embody these features of citizenship more than conscripts and regulars. Reservists hence add a complication to the accepted differentiation between conscript systems and volunteer forces. We suspect that in systems like the all-volunteer force, reserves more than full-time professionals have come to embody the notion of citizen-soldier and the legitimating legacies of a people’s army. As a source of legitimacy, their symbolic role is different from that of regulars. We suggest then, that today reservists thus comprise not only an operationally flexible pool of human resources (in terms of recruitment, remuneration, and deployment as individuals or units) but as providing an important source of legitimation. For example, in Argentina, reservists represent the civilianization of the military and a mechanism that can potentially limit the intervention of the armed forces in politics (Frederic, 2018; Masson, 2018). Or, as in the Netherlands where reservists act in the framework of nongovernmental organizations, they signal the civilian character of the military and its contribution to society (Moelker, 2018). And the deployment of reserves as CIMIC officers by the U.S. Military in Iraq and Afghanistan was portrayed by the media as a move by Americans to contribute to those countries’ nation-building and reconstruction efforts.

But reservists are a double-edged sword: At the same time as they can be used as flexible labor or a source of legitimacy, their structural duality gives them the potential of being critical of the armed forces and may contribute to democratic processes since they can potentially hold the military (and civilian leaders) accountable for their actions (Kuehn, 2018; Lindberg, 2009). In many countries, part of the compact with reserves involved them as links between military professionals and civilian society (Weitz, 2007). Reservists were seen as transmitting values between the two worlds and limiting undesirable divergences between them—an important concern in contested conflicts. But reservists sometimes turn from being mediators or spokespersons for the military in civilian society (Danielsson & Carlstedt, 2011) to actors critiquing its operations and policies.

Empirical examples of protests over breaches of expectations about the deployment of reservists can be found in the UK and Israel (Bury, 2019a; Rein-Sapir & Ben-Ari, 2020). In both countries after returning from deployment in armed hostilities, some reservists joined public demonstrations over their perceived lack of preparation or equipment. As a reaction, governments offered formal solutions to their demands through legislation, regulations, or policy. Such is the case of the Israeli reserve law enacted in 2008 and the British Future Reserves policy endorsed in 2013. These moves were formal responses to cumulative breaches of the compact between society, state, the military, and reservists.

Yet formalizing and making relations with reserves more instrumentally contractual reduces the voluntary republican agreement underlying their service. As “mere” employees of the military, they can no longer be perceived as having the same citizen-mandated republican right to express their political voice in the name of their contribution to the military. Accordingly, formalization weakens the potential for political protest coming from reservists since governments usually prefer the economic to the political cost. Israel’s Second Lebanon War is a case in point. In contrast to previous wars when reservists did not receive special recompense for extended periods of service, the then government decided to compensate them with a special “reimbursement for expenses,” one not dictated by law for loss of income. This special compensation, according to our perspective of negotiation and multiple contracts, can be seen as a mechanism that has been used for dampening potential protest by reservists in the past (and probably in the future; Levy, 2011).

Conclusion: Reserves and the Regulation of Movement

Theoretically, adding our model of multiple contracts to the one of reservists as transmigrants allows us, we suggest, to conceptualize the problems of movement and its regulation as a central analytical axis. To reiterate, it is the constant movement and structural position between worlds that necessitates the ongoing negotiations and multiple contracts agreed upon on all three sociological levels. The rate of movement (tempo), timing of deployment (within personal careers or family dynamics), distance of travel from home in spatial terms, the organizational context of passage into service (together as units or as individuals), or the destination within the military (to its combat core or peripheral support)—all present the military with different challenges in terms of synchronizing and controlling the movement of personnel into and out of the military organization while striving to maintain their motivation and commitment to service. At the same time, this movement shapes the resources that reservists bring into negotiations with the military: For example, as Basham and Catagnani’s (2018) article shows while they are limited at the family level, more broadly, the “exit” option may allow reservists greater “voice,” in Hirschman’s (1970) terms, in bargaining with their unit commanders. Hence, the ongoing negotiations and contracts—between individuals and commanders, their families or employers or between groups and various levels of the military—are a central mechanism of regulation, of tuning of time lines, resources and constraints.

The very multiplicity of (to emphasize again, often implicit) contracts allows us to understand how the armed forces deal with the diversity of reservists. Thus, for example, being deployed geographically near home (like in the Baltic states or Israel) involves stronger physical links to the “rear” and civilian life. Yet being utilized in expeditionary forces abroad entails for reservists different lengths of service, ties to home and management of family welfare and employment relations in ways that perhaps resemble that of regulars. Conversely, from the perspective of the reservists, bargaining and agreements are the result of their agency in managing their individual life circumstances and underlie the crucial issue of motivation that is, in turn, related to recruitment and retention.

Accordingly, while contracts and compacts ostensibly represent the fixity and formalization of relations, they are actually the result of changing dynamics and the flexibility necessitated by different tasks and missions. The military regulates the movement of reservists differentially according to its needs and interests (like considerations of personnel or legitimacy, for example) but also manages its commitment to different parts of the population. Moreover, reservists’ constant movement negates many mechanisms of silencing critical voices found among regulars who are far more dependent on the armed forces and are its most stable element. This kind of conceptualization allows to ask how different groups negotiate in different ways (with different degrees of success) based on their access to various symbolic, social, political, and economic resources.

More widely, if breaches of contracts represent potential disorder, then the negotiation and update of agreements (on all three sociological levels) are means to assure a reordering according to changing expectations about fair exchange. The need for the constant give-and-take and the reformulation of agreements derives from the “problematic” potential of reservists as transmigrants. At the same time, as they are members of the military force, their very existence is a hybrid (civilian–military). As such, they are anomalous and must constantly be managed in terms of when they are mobilized, for what missions, under what condition, the incentives they, their families, and their employers are awarded, and their relations with regulars.

To end our article, reservists have much wider meaning than is readily apparent since they illuminate many issues related to civil–military relations, the way the military is involved in nation-building and the maintenance of the nation-state, notions of citizenship, and the legitimation of using the armed forces.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank participants at the Military Reserves in the “New Wars”: Between Transmigration and Military Compacts’ Workshop at University of Exeter, Exeter, UK, for discussions about a draft of this article and to three anonymous reviewers that commented on earlier texts.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Nir Gazit

Note

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