Enemies or allies? How NGOs can push military administrations towards transparency around the use of force

This paper examines the conditions under which non-governmental organisations (NGOs) gain access to military administrations when campaigning for transparency around the use of military force. It is a longstanding belief in western democracies that civilians should remain the principal of the military branch. Yet, secrecy concerns, confidentiality procedures and military resistance against political interference make this far from self-evident. While the role of parliaments in overseeing the use of military force has been studied in great detail, we know little about how NGOs can play a role in advocating for transparency. In particularly, if and how NGOs can interact with the military has received little attention so far. We take a resource dependency approach to show that NGOs can gain direct access to militaries by offering them certain valuable political resources, contrary to what we would expect from a traditional perspective on NGO advocacy. Empirically, we focus on the activities of Airwars, an international NGO that monitors military air strikes, and its campaigns to foster transparency about civilian casualties. We build on insights from Airwars’ successful campaigns in the USA and the Netherlands and show how – under favourable political conditions – their credible, on-the-ground information about air strikes gave them direct access to military administrations and allowed them to effectively advocate for transparency. We firstly contribute to the literature on NGO advocacy by extending common concepts used in the literature on access to policymaking targets to include military administrations, a typically secluded domain. Moreover, we add to the field of civil-military relations by expanding the set of actors that pursue civilian oversight to include advocacy groups such as NGOs.