Conclusion

Abstract

This handbook, compiled with the collaboration of many of the leading scholars of the sociology of the military from different countries and continents and representative of dif-ferent currents of thought, ends up being a picture of the state of the art of the discipline at the start of the new millennium. Beyond being a manual for consultation and study for those who pursue this discipline—or are setting out on that road—the book constitutes a kind of summa of sociological thought on the military as it presents itself in the year 2002. But not only of sociological thought because the approach to our field of investigation is often interdisciplinary, as is evident from the essays presented in this volume. Indeed, the reader will have noted that the slant of some of them owes more to political science than to sociology, and others present approaches and aspects of social psychology, cultural anthropology, or strategic thought in general. As Gerhard Kuemmel observes in his essay in this volume, the reasons for this interdisciplinarity lie “in the simple truth that the mil-itary is a highly complex social phenomenon in itself and one that cuts through various levels, touches several different contexts and is thus subject to multiple processes of inter-penetration.”