ABSTRACT
Since the 1950s, research on military and politics in Asia has moved in various directions. Its initial preoccupation was with the role of military elites in the processes of decolonization and state-building in new nations (Lovell and Kim 1967; Johnson 1972). From the 1960s onward, the scholarship moved toward analyzing the origins of military rule and the capacity of military institutions to steer socioeconomic development as many governments in the region fell due to military intervention (Olsen and Shurika 1986). Since the late 1980s, a growing body of empirical studies has provided insights into the role of military elites in transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy (and vice versa) and how post-authoritarian democracies struggle with the challenge of creating a military that is strong enough to fulfill its functions, but still subordinate to democratically elected institutions (Alagappa 2001a; Croissant et al. 2013; Lee 2014). Yet, with the exception of the People’s Republic of China, research on political-military relations in Asian non-democracies is still small and often outdated, and few contributions discuss the topic from a comparative perspective.
