Obstacles to Civil–Military Cooperation in Conflict Areas
The Canadian government applied a whole-of-government approach to its role in the Afghanistan mission with the Provincial Reconstruction Team (prt) in Kandahar. Institutional resistance was a foreseeable risk on the mission, given the diversity of organizations called on to work together there. The author looks into the reasons that organizational tensions emerged in the prt and how those tensions affected the dynamics of interdepartmental cooperation. She examines those sensitivities in light of the literature of organization theory and integrates a feminist perspective to characterize the phenomenon of organizational subordination. The results shed new light on the study of civil–military cooperation and yield policy lessons for optimizing Canada’s international interventions.