Samenvatting

This paper focuses on three questions. Firstly, what causes civilian actors and the military to cooperate? Secondly, is civil-military cooperation limited to specific areas and, finally, how to decide to which civil-military alliances time and energy should be devoted? The authors describe an episode of the repatriation of Kosovar refugees during operation Allied Harbour in 1999. In this section the authors point out some of the collaboration processes that have developed between the military and civilian actors within the Emergency Management Group (EMG). In addition, they present some examples of failing civil-military cooperation. In the next section some conditions for civil-military cooperation to occur will be discussed and the authors describe some of the characteristics of civil-military alliances. Section 4 focuses on the ways in which specific kinds of military contributions may influence the need for prolonged cooperation from the civilian actors perspective. In section 5 some notes are provided on how to decide which civil-military alliances are important to enter into. Finally, section 6 summarises the findings of the paper.