The Study of Civil–Military Relations in Israel: A New Perspective

The aim of the article is threefold: first, to define and examine the major approaches to the study of the relationship between Israel's security sector and civilian realms (political, social, economic, and discursive), which we refer to as the "traditional," "critical" and "new critical" approaches; second, to emphasize the theoretical and empirical "gaps" that exist in the scholarly treatment of the relationships between actors operating within both types of spheres, and particularly with regard to the more informal aspects of their interplay; finally, to suggest ways to overcome the lack of adequate treatment of these highly informal exchanges by employing insights from the expanding literature on policy networks and social networks and demonstrating how these networks, which can be identified in the Israeli case, influence general and concrete policymaking on both the national and local levels.