Political repression

At the beginning of his career, Pion-Berlin's research dealt with the question: why do governments resort to the most severe forms of intimidation and punishment of political opponents when other forms of political control may suffice?^[7] Departing from convention that state violence is usually a proportional, tit for tat response to societal violence, he focused on the doctrines and perceptions that guided the military's disproportionate and excessive attacks on its opponents. Threat perceptions, he discovered, were not grounded in objective appraisals of the opposition but rather in skewed preconceptions that derived from security doctrines popular among military regimes during the Cold War era.^[8][9]

Civil-military relations

Following that, Pion-Berlin's research turned to the theme of civil-military relations. As a Fulbright scholar, he conducted numerous and extensive field trips to Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, including interviews with leading political and military figures. Based on his findings, he developed new analytical approaches to the study of how governments and their militaries interact. He found that, in order to know whether politicians or soldiers will prevail when they conflict over policy, one needs to know the characteristics of the agencies that have policy jurisdiction, and whether they create more formidable obstacles for one side than the other. Thus, a key and original finding of his book Through Corridors of Power: Institutions and Civil-Military Relations in Argentina, was that as the design of state institutions differed, so too did the civil-military balance of power.^[10][11][12]

During this period, an important, related topic of research included the nature of military autonomy. His work on this subject has influenced other scholars in coming to realize that military power is neither uniform nor absolute: the armed forces exert greater control over internal, organizational issues and less control over ostensibly political issues, each with different impacts on civilian control.^[13]

His edited volume, Civil-Military Relations in Latin America: New Analytical Perspectives brought together work by leading scholars of the armed forces. The book bridged the divide that often separated Latin Americanists from others in the discipline by having contributors adapt some theoretical approaches within the political science literature to the issue of civilian control over the armed forces.^[14][15]

Pion-Berlin's thematic emphasis then turned to an assortment of civil-military topics: defense organization, informal civil-military interactions, military responses to civilian uprisings, deficits in civilian attention to defense topics, and military missions. These resulted in numerous articles and chapters. His book, Military Missions in Democratic Latin America, culminated a long-term research project on whether the armed forces could be usefully deployed in domestic, non-traditional missions, both lethal and non-lethal.^[16] He found that when tasked with missions that draw on pre-existing organizational strengths, Latin American militaries can sometimes be utilized in appropriate and humane ways. As conservative institutions resistant to change, they are at a disadvantage when forced to reinvent themselves. This was the first book written in any language that analyzed Latin American military missions cross-nationally.^[17]

Later in his career, Pion-Berlin refocused attention on the three-sided nature of civil-military relations: soldiers, politicians, and civilians within society. In the book Soldiers, Politicians and Civilians: Reforming Civil-Military Relations in Democratic Latin America, he and his co-author, Rafael Martínez, devised a novel framework and measurement tools to assess what progress if any had been made in improving civil-military relations in four Latin American countries.^[18]

Pion-Berlin's most recent research has focused on three themes. The first is the role of the defense ministry in asserting greater civilian control and military effectiveness. Pion-Berlin and his associates have been exploring the reasons why some well-developed democracies have failed to adequately build up their defense ministries.^[19][20] The second research theme has to do with the deployment of the armed forces in Latin America for internal public security missions, and how governments and the military try to balance concerns with civilian control and human rights. The third is to assess the impact of the military's participation in the campaigns to fight the covid-19 pandemic.