Clausewitz’s aphorism—‘War is a continuation of politics by other means’—may be read as a policy prescription identifying the appropri­ate relationship between state authorities and institutions of violence.

The construction of war as a form of policy, subject, as any other, to the will of the political authorities, presents an instrumental understanding of the use of force that represents and informs a long intellectual tradition extolling the benefits of the political/civilian control of the military.

Currently, major organisations actively promote the democratic con­trol of the armed forces, often referred to as ‘DCAF’ or, as is increasingly

common, ‘security sector reform’, as an explicit policy aim in the context of new and transitional states. As DCAF typically employs the exhorta­tive language of transparency, accountability, morality, and, often, peace, rather than formal argumentation, this chapter suggests that DCAF may be understood as a particularly powerful, even ‘meta’, international policy myth. Placing the policy of DCAF in the context of Dvora Yanow’s under­standing of the characteristics and functions of policy myths, and utilising the Foucauldian concepts of discipline and normalisation to elaborate this understanding further, the chapter argues that not only is the popular understanding of the purportedly pacific nature of DCAF a potent pol­icy myth; it itself is subtly dependent upon a secondary, academic myth, namely militarism. The chapter maps and unpacks the implication of poli­cymakers and, primarily, academics in the construction and reification of these mutually reinforcing myths.

Overall, it is argued that the discourse of militarism identifies the valori­sation of, and participation in, violence by democratic societies as ‘deviant’ exceptions to the generally constraining, rational tendencies of DCAF, thus normalising the quotidian reliance of democracies upon the (poten­tial for) political violence.