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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Why do politicians think that war is the answer to terror when military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Mali, Somalia and elsewhere has made things worse? Why do some conflicts never end? And how is it that practices like beheadings, extra-judicial killings, the bombing of hospitals and schools and sexual slavery are becoming increasingly common?
In this book, renowned scholar of war and human security Mary Kaldor introduces the concept of global security cultures in order to explain why we get stuck in particular pathways to security. A global security culture, she explains, involves different combinations of ideas, narratives, rules, people, tools, practices and infrastructure embedded in a specific form of political authority, a set of power relations, that come together to address or engage in large-scale violence. In contrast to the Cold War period, when there was one dominant culture based on military forces and nation-states, nowadays there are competing global security cultures. Defining four main types - geo-politics, new wars, the liberal peace, and the war on terror she investigates how we might identify contradictions, dilemmas and experiments in contemporary security cultures that might ultimately open up new pathways to rescue and safeguard civility in the future.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1: Introduction
Notes
2: Security Cultures
Ambiguities and Complexities of ‘Security’
The Term ‘Culture’
Ideal Types of Security Culture
Analytical Implications
Conclusion
Notes
3: Geo-Politics
The Discourse of Geo-Politics
The Evolution of Geo-Politics as Culture
The Cultural Adaptation of Geo-Politics in the Twenty-First Century
Conclusion
Notes
4: New Wars
The Evolution of New Wars
Adaptation of New Wars
Conclusion
Notes
5: Liberal Peace
Liberal Peace as a Concept and Narrative
Liberal Peace as a Security Culture
Contradictions and Dilemmas of the Liberal Peace
Conclusion
Notes
6: War on Terror
From Geo-Politics to the War on Terror
The War on Terror as a Security Culture
Implications
Notes
7: Geographies
Bosnia-Herzegovina: New Wars and Liberal Peace
Afghanistan: New War, War on Terror and Liberal Peace
Syria: New War, Geo-Politics and the War on Terror
Conclusion
Notes
8: Conclusion
Main Findings
Adapting the Liberal Peace
Notes
Index
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Components of security cultures
Table 2.2 The dimensions of security cultures
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the European Research Council (ERC) for funding the five-year research programme Security in Transition: A Multidisciplinary Investigation of the Security Gap, on which this book is based. I am also grateful to the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Department for Science and Technology Laboratories (DSTL) for funding a complementary project called Strategic Governance of Pathways to Security that focused on the role of technology in security cultures and really helped to further the ideas in this book. I want to thank the teams in both projects for the exciting and productive discussions and collaborations that they involved. Special thanks to Sam Vincent for identifying the key readings that enabled me to write the book, for helping me undertake interviews in Washington DC and elsewhere, and for his work on drones and the war on terror security culture; Sabine Selchow, who pushed the boundaries of my thinking and co-developed the concept of security culture; Christine Chinkin, with whom I worked on a parallel book project International Law and New Wars that enormously helped to advance my understanding; Domenika Spyratou, who managed the research and kept on top of all the complexities, intellectual and administrative; Iavor Rangelov for helping me run the ERC programme and for his application of the cultures concept to justice; Anouk Rigterink for help with numbers and data; Rim Turkmani for explaining Syria and for her work on the war economy and on ISIL, and also Ali Ali; Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic for help and insights on Bosnia, and also Denisa Kostovicova; Florian Weigand and Marika Theros for keeping me up to date on Afghanistan; Ruben Andersson for invaluable comments on the concept of cultures and his work on Mali; James Revill for his work on new wars and IEDs; Paul Nightingale for collaboration on technology and culture; Stefan Bauchowitz for helping me with German-language sources; Shalaka Thakur for research assistance on the geo-politics chapter; and, last but not least, Julian Robinson for discussing the arguments, applying them to chemical warfare, reading bits of the manuscript and, in general, being very encouraging. I am also very grateful to the reviewers for Polity Press, especially James Der Derian, whose constructive and detailed comments have been incredibly helpful.
During the period that I was writing the book, I was also CEO of a research programme funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) called the Justice and Security Research Programme (JSRP). Discussions and research undertaken for JSRP also had a considerable influence on this book, especially the chapters on new wars and the liberal peace, so I would also like to thank all my colleagues in JSRP.
Abbreviations
AIPAC
American Israel Public Affairs Committee
AQIM
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
ASEAN
Association of Southeast Asian Nations
AU
African Union
AUMF
Authorization for Use of Military Force
BAE
British Aerospace
CARE
Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere
CFE
Conventional Forces in Europe
CIA
Central Intelligence Agency
COIN
counter-insurgency
CSTO
Collective Security Treaty Organization
CWC
Chemical Weapons Convention
DDR
disarmament, demobilization and reintegration
DIA
Defense Intelligence Agency
DPKO
Department for Peacekeeping Operations
DRC
Democratic Republic of Congo
EBO
effects-based operations
ECHO
Directorate General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations
ECtHR
European Court of Human Rights
ECOWAS
Economic Community of West African States
EU
European Union
EXORD
execute order
FLN
National Liberation Front
FOFA
follow-on force attack
FSA
Free Syrian Army
G4S
Group Four Securicor
GDP
gross domestic product
GPS
global positioning system
HVT
high value target
ICC
International Criminal Court
ICISS
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
ICRC
International Committee of the Red Cross
ICT
information and communications technology
ICTY
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
IDPs
internally displaced persons
IED
improvised explosive device
IHL
international humanitarian law
INF
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
IRA
Irish Republican Army
IS
Islamic State
ISAF
International Security Assistance Force
ISI
Inter-Services Intelligence
ISIL
Islamic State in the Levant
ISIS
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
ISKP
Islamic State Khorasan Province
JAN
Jabhat al-Nusra
JNA
Yugoslav National Army
JSOC
Joint Special Operations Command
KLA
Kosovo Liberation Army
LACM
land attack cruise missiles
LSE
London School of Economics and Political Science
MIME-NET
military-industrial-media-entertainment network
MOAB
Massive Ordnance Air Blast
MSF
Médecins sans Frontières
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NCW
network-centric warfare
NGO
non-governmental organization
NPT
Non-Proliferation Treaty
NSP
National Solidarity Programme
OCHA
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
OHR
Office of the High Representative
O-RMA
other revolution in military affairs
OSCE
Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe
PGM
precision-guided missile
PKK
Kurdistan Workers’ Party
PLA
People's Liberation Army
PMC
private military contractor
PRT
Provincial Reconstruction Team
PTBT
Partial Test Ban Treaty
PYD
Democratic Union Party
RENAMO
Mozambican National Resistance Movement
RMA
revolution in military affairs
SAA
Stabilisation and Association Agreement
SADC
South African Development Community
SAIC
Science Applications International Corporation
SALT
Strategic Arms Limitations Talks
SAS
Special Air Service
SBS
Special Boat Service
SEAL
Sea, Air and Land
SSR
security sector reform
UAV
unmanned aerial vehicle
UN
United Nations
UNDP
United Nations Development Programme
UNHCR
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNICEF
United Nations Children's Fund
UNITA
National Union for the Total Independence of Angola
WEU
Western European Union (integrated into EU after 2009)
WMD
weapons of mass destruction
YPG
People's Protection Units
1Introduction
At the time of writing, there is a general sense of foreboding, rather like in the 1930s: the feeling that there is going to be some terrible worldwide tragedy, just as there was in the twentieth century. As a matter of fact, the tragedy is already happening; refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, the bombing of hospitals and medical facilities, the killing of thousands of young men (as well as women, children and older men) at long distance with drones, cruise missiles and aircraft, the use of hideous weapons prohibited in international law like nerve gases, incendiaries or cluster munitions, the reintroduction of sex slavery, the starvation of ordinary people as a consequence of sieges, the use of lorries and aircraft as weapons of mass destruction in crowded cities, or the beheading, forced detention and torture of innocents. These are phenomena that anyone growing up in the aftermath of World War II hoped would disappear for ever. Yet what we are experiencing is not a war in the twentieth-century sense. It is something else.
This book is an attempt to make sense of this ‘something else’. I use the term ‘global security culture’ as a conceptual tool to help us describe or explain what is happening in a way that might open up possible answers. A security culture is a specific pattern of behaviour, or constellation of socially meaningful practices, that expresses or is the expression of norms and standards embodied in a particular interpretation of security and that is deeply imbricated in a specific form of political authority or set of power relations. A security culture comprises different interconnected combinations of ideas, rules, people, tools, tactics and infrastructure, linked to different types of political authority that come together to address or engage in large-scale violence. The term ‘culture’ helps to explain why certain practices become normalized or habituated even if they appear to be contrary to logic. Why, for example, sixteen years after 9/11, are military means still being used to attack terrorists when the phenomenon of terrorism is more pervasive than ever? Why do politicians think that war is the answer to terror when the wars that have been conducted – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Mali, Somalia and elsewhere – have made things worse? And why do conflicts in places like Syria or Democratic Republic of Congo never end? Why do armed groups go on fighting when it is clear that they will not win? The argument is that this kind of behaviour makes sense from within the vantage point of the culture, that the culture structures narratives, career paths, material incentives and political power in such a way as to inculcate and naturalize ways of thinking and doing.
The term ‘security’ is used because not all methods of addressing large-scale violence are military. There is much military history that describes different ways of war, what one might call different military paradigms, associated with different epochs1 – feudal knights, clan warfare, slave armies, industrial warfare, guerrilla warfare and so on. A security culture is similar to a way of war but it does not necessarily involve military force. A central proposition of this book is that the utility of military force has been transformed as a consequence of technological change. Because all military technology is increasingly destructive and accurate, differences in capabilities have narrowed. As a consequence, military force is a very clumsy instrument for imposing order or for what in the military jargon is called ‘compellance’. It is often pointed out that the United States has more military capabilities than all the other nations combined; it possesses well-trained, professional military personnel equipped with the most technologically advanced weapons that exist in the world today. Yet the United States has been unable to impose order in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. As in World War I, conventional battles have become hugely destructive and difficult to win. Towns like Grozny in Chechnya, Fallujah in Iraq and Vukovar in Croatia have been razed to the ground and yet insurgents pop up again when the battle is over. This is not to say that the use of military force has no utility; but it has other utilities for those engaged in military operations than winning or losing – political, psychological or economic utilities – as will be discussed in subsequent chapters.
At the same time a security culture is something more than a way of addressing large-scale violence that is not necessarily military. Security is bound up with authority and power. It is only meaningful if it underpins belief in political authority either out of fear or because the culture conforms to subjective perceptions about security. The production and reproduction of security cultures can only be understood in terms of the way in which they are both enabled by and enable a particular set of power relations.
The term ‘global’ is used to draw attention to the way in which security cultures are about ways of doing security or patterns of behaviour rather than about national or ethnic cultures. In the strategic studies literature, the term ‘strategic culture’ is used to describe different national ways of war. My concern is with different ways of doing security that cross borders and that emerge out of the interconnectedness of the contemporary world and, yet, are embedded in power. During the Cold War, the world was characterized by what could be described as a single international security culture. Nation-states and blocs of nation-states possessed regular military forces and associated armaments, and the main threat to security was considered an inter-state war on the model of the European wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The scale of military spending and the number and sophistication of armaments were imagined to indicate how well a state or bloc would do in a future confrontation and this then shaped the hierarchy of power in the international system. Domestically, of course, there were differences between rights-based, law-governed societies and more repressive societies. Today, by contrast, we face several competing global security cultures jostling for position; security cultures that are both international and domestic, ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, and that are associated with different types of political authority.
Distinguishing different security cultures and drawing attention to the different ways of doing security is illuminating for debates about intervention in wars.2 There is a tendency to conflate all types of intervention and to assume, at any rate among critical scholars, that intervention should be avoided. But there is no such thing as non-intervention in an era of interconnectedness. The issue is whether the intervention is managed through political authorities – the state or international institutions – and whether it is aimed at ending wars or assisting one or other side in war, and how.
In this book, I distinguish four main types of security culture, although there is a lot of overlap and it would of course be possible to use the approach to identify others. One is geo-politics, the security culture of the Cold War based on military forces and nation-states. A second is new wars, the rise of networks of state and non-state actors associated with sub-state forms of political authority. A third is what I call the liberal peace, the combination of peace-keepers and a range of international agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), under the umbrella of the United Nations (UN) or regional organizations like the European Union (EU) or the African Union (AU). And the final security culture is the war on terror, involving a new group of actors – intelligence agencies, special forces, and private security actors – as well new technology such as mass surveillance and drones. The war on terror is associated with American exceptionalism although many other countries are following the path set by the United States.
This book is the outcome of a five-year research programme entitled Security in Transition: An Interdisciplinary Investigation into the Security Gap. The programme was concerned primarily with the transition from a Cold War model of security to a different set of security arrangements. What we called the security gap expressed the notion that the Cold War security model no longer fits contemporary times. By the security gap, we referred to the proposition that millions of people live in conditions of deep insecurity and yet our security apparatus, largely consisting of military forces, does not address their problems; indeed it often makes things worse. At the time the project was conceived, still basking in the afterglow of post-Cold War optimism despite 9/11, it was hoped that the project would substantiate this proposition and put forward proposals for alternative ways of doing security. In particular, I was preoccupied with the notion of human security, the security of the individual rather than the state, and how a human security approach might be implemented.
Parallel to our research was a concern in the strategic studies community with the way in which new technologies would impact the military. Both George W. Bush, when president, and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, argued that the advent of information and communications technologies (ICTs) was as significant for military practice as the stirrup in feudal times, or the combustion engine in the twentieth century. Following earlier Soviet writers, American defence analysts had, for a decade or more, talked about a revolution in military affairs (RMA). Our argument was that the transition is not just about technology. Indeed, as I argue in chapter 3, the RMA ended up in introducing new technology into the geo-politics security culture in such a way as not to disturb existing organizational structures – merely making existing cumbersome weapons systems even more complex and expensive.
So it was hoped that the programme would come up with new ideas about how to address contemporary insecurity in terms of social relations, new ways of organizing, new tactics, new strategies, rather than in terms of technology even though new technologies would be relevant. What became painfully evident during the course of the research programme was how misplaced was my optimism. Ways of doing security are changing but not in the direction of human security. The new wars have made use of new technologies within a very different pattern of behaviour. Armed groups that participate in contemporary wars in places like the Balkans, the Middle East or Africa have been able to organize in the form of loose networks or coalitions primarily as a consequence of improvements in communication. They were able to develop what might be called vernacular technology, for example improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that combine household ingredients with sophisticated triggering devices such as mobile phones.3 And their tactics were shaped at least in part by the need to get around concentrations of high-technology military force.
Just as important, by the end of the first decade of the new century, a new war on terror way of doing security (or insecurity) came together in the long-distance campaign of kill-or-capture operations, using mass surveillance and drone technology.
The insight that was most helpful in unpacking these developments was the realization that ‘security’ is a highly ambiguous concept. From one viewpoint, it means safety, freedom from care. But from another, it refers to an apparatus or a set of practices – locks, airport scanners, welfare budgets, police, military and so on. The security gap is actually a rather trivial proposition because it involves comparing apples and pears; the objectives (safety) are defined very differently from the practices. This difference can be observed in the scholarly literature on security, as I discuss in chapter 2. Some scholars are preoccupied with the objectives of security – whose security (that of the individual, the nation or the world) and from what (violence, poverty, environmental disaster and so on) – while other scholars are more concerned with the practices of security.4 Among the latter group are the ‘securitization’ scholars who point out that by performing security, we draw attention to the urgency of what is being performed and, by the same token, we respect and submit to those who are responsible for the performance. For example, when we go through security procedures at airports, we are reminded of the terrorist threat and how grateful we should be to our government for protecting us against this threat. During the Cold War, military exercises on the East German plain for the deployment of missiles had a similar function; it was a way of telling us that a world war would be the worst thing that could possibly happen and that the Western Alliance was our bulwark against that eventuality.
A security culture brings together objectives and practices. It helps to explain how objectives are shaped by practices as well as vice versa. Cultures are constructed and the various mechanisms (money, experience, technology) through which they are reproduced evolve over time even though they tend to follow prescribed pathways. This method allows us to identify openings – contradictions or niche experiments – where alternative pathways might be possible. The human security approach could still find a way through the maze of contemporary tragedies that are the consequence of current directions of change.
As part of our research programme, one of my PhD students was undertaking fieldwork in Afghanistan. My institution, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), became concerned about whether we had conducted the risk assessment properly and what this implied for the institution's insurance policy. A private security company was hired to conduct a new risk assessment. Unfortunately, one of the company's personnel had been killed the previous week and everyone was confined to their protected base. The task was therefore subcontracted to the notorious firm G4S.5 My student, living in a compound in Kabul with Afghan colleagues, became extremely nervous that G4S would arrive conspicuously in an armoured car, potentially making him and his colleagues targets. Luckily G4S also decided that it was too dangerous for them to venture out of their base and they decided to conduct their risk assessment on the telephone. Its report, when it was completed, proposed that the LSE needed to invest in armoured cars and security guards to protect its researchers, and that G4S not surprisingly would be happy to assist.
The story illuminates two different security cultures. One is the ‘hard’ security approach embedded in a nexus of security companies, insurance agencies and equipment providers. The other is the researchers' ‘soft’ security approach, based on keeping a low profile, blending in to the community, and being extremely well informed about the situation in areas where fieldwork is to be undertaken so as to avoid dangerous times and places. It is a model that also has its social underpinning, shaped by ethnographic methods and links between foreign researchers and local people.
The story also provides an illustration of the utility of thinking about different security cultures that I investigate in this book. In chapter 2, I develop the concept of global security cultures and show how it relates to the notion of strategic culture as well as to parallel concepts such as assemblage (Sassen), communities of practice (Adler and Pouliot), techno-economic paradigm (Freeman), field (Bourdieu) and dispositif (Foucault).6 The next four chapters represent a first stab at the genealogy or evolution of each of the four main security cultures.
Chapter 3 on geo-politics charts the origins of geo-politics as a culture in the rise of nation-state and regular military forces. I show how in the post-Cold War period, geo-politics has remained the dominant culture both in terms of levels of military spending and in terms of the national security discourse. Yet although geo-politics is very persistent in terms of both discourse and apparatuses, I argue that the practices have become increasingly bio-political instead of geo-political, that is to say, the use or possession of military force has more to do with the control of population than military capture of territory. This is partly because the main form of power projection is communicative; power is performed through displaying the supposed instruments of power. But it is also because military force is used against people as opposed to military forces, against civilians for example or terrorists.
Chapter 4 is about the new wars culture, and it traces the evolution of new wars from the irregular wars of the post-World War II period. It treats new wars as a culture in contrast to a political and military contest in order to explain their persistence and spread. It describes how new wars are continuing to change and how the new wars culture interacts with other cultures. Thus the combination of new wars and liberal peace produces hybrid peace, an uneasy and unstable peace in which the warring parties remain the dominant political and economic actors. The combination of new wars and geo-politics leads to hybrid war as in Ukraine, while the outcome of the interaction between new wars and the war on terror is the spread of jihadism.
Chapter 5 is about the liberal peace, a security culture associated with international institutions such as the UN, the EU or the AU, that came into its own during the 1990s. The chapter addresses the contradictions and dilemmas associated with the liberal peace and its various components – humanitarianism, peace-making, peace-keeping and peace-building. The liberal peace as a culture is still anchored in old war or geo-political thinking; the founding ideas derive from a traditional view of peace that developed in response to European wars in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What we can observe is a continuing tension between the traditional conception of peace and new initiatives that emerge from experience and from local civil society groups. It is out of this tension that new possibilities open up.
Chapter 6 is about the war on terror, which I depict as a new type of long-distance manhunt rather than a war. While the war on terror was initially shaped by geo-politics, it has evolved into a distinct culture making use of specific tactics (mass surveillance, identification based on a set of algorithms and technical criteria, air strikes especially by drones, and raids by special forces) with a dedicated infrastructure that includes the multiplication of intelligence agencies, private security contractors and special forces. The war on terror together with terror has produced a generalized sense of insecurity. Together with new wars, it constitutes that ‘something else’ other than a twentieth-century war that we experience today.
Chapter 7 is called ‘Geographies’. It is about how global security cultures play out in specific contexts. The three sites chosen were those where we conducted research for the Security in Transition research programme – Bosnia, Afghanistan and Syria. Bosnia is an example of hybrid peace – the combination of a new war culture and the liberal peace. Afghanistan represents a combination of new wars, the liberal peace and the war on terror. And Syria has become the laboratory for the worst aspects of new wars, geo-politics and the war on terror, marginalizing the liberal peace. The security cultures framework has been applied primarily in these areas. The book does not deal with Latin America, for example, where armed criminal gangs represent many elements of the new wars culture, or Asia, where wars in Xinjiang or Tibet can also be analysed in similar terms.7
The final chapter is about what we can learn from this analysis in order to develop approaches that can begin to reverse what is happening. It asks what can be done to rescue civility. This new ‘something else’ is hugely fragmented; alongside all the horrors are relatively peaceful areas where people continue to live together or negotiate alternative forms of security. I ask how those ‘islands of civility’ to be found in regions of pervasive insecurity – civil society groups, local municipalities that have negotiated local ceasefires, safe areas where legitimate economic activities take place – and that are either attacked or neglected by all the security cultures, including the liberal peace, could become the basis for a new peace or post-liberal peace. Are there ways to take advantage of the tensions and contradictions in the main security cultures and build on experiments in civility?
Notes
1
See, for example, John Keegan,
A History of Warfare
, Random House, 1994; Michael Howard,
War in European History
, Oxford University Press, 2009.
2
Mary Kaldor and Sabine Selchow, ‘From Military to “Security Interventions”: An Alternative Approach to Contemporary Interventions’,
Stability: International Journal of Security and Development
, 4(1), p.Art. 32, 2015.
3
See James Revill,
Improvised Explosive Devices: The Paradigmatic Weapon of New Wars
, Palgrave, 2016.
4
Particularly important are the groups of scholars who explicitly use the language of practices to analyse international politics. See, for example, Emmanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot,
International Practices
, Cambridge University Press, 2011.
5
G4S (Group Four Securicor) is said to be the biggest private security contractor in the world. It won the contract for security for the 2012 London Olympics but was unable to implement the contract and the British army had to be brought in. It has been responsible for operating prisons in which riots have taken place. It was responsible for deportations, and one deportee died after being restrained by a G4S security guard. Omar Mateen, responsible for the worst shooting in US history in June 2016, was a G4S security guard.
6
Saskia Sassen,
Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages
, Princeton University Press, 2008; Adler and Pouliot,
International Practices
; Christopher Freeman and Francisco Louca,
As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolution to the Information Revolution
, Oxford University Press, 2002; Pierre Bourdieu,
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,
Routledge, 1979; Michel Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’ (1977) interview, in Foucault,
Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings
, ed. Colin Gordon, Harvester Press, 1980, pp. 194–228.
7
Kunal Mukerjee, ‘ “New Wars” in Contemporary China?’,
Canadian Military Journal
,
www.uighur.nl/new-wars-in-contemporary-china
2Security Cultures
Millions of people live in conditions of deep insecurity – in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and large parts of Africa. Yet the international repertoire of responses is not only inadequate but often makes things worse. On the one hand, a knee-jerk reaction to problems of insecurity, especially terrorist attacks, is air strikes or drone campaigns. We know that air strikes are never as accurate as claimed and that there is always so-called ‘collateral damage’, and we also know that air strikes do not end insecurity. On the contrary, whether we are talking about Hamas in Gaza, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), air strikes are used to legitimize further attacks and as an argument for recruitment. On the other hand, it is also suggested that the only alternative to air strikes is talks with the fighting groups and brutal regimes responsible for inflicting insecurity. Yet we know that it is very difficult to bring such groups together and, moreover, any agreement that follows from talks can only succeed by entrenching their positions of power, thereby permitting continued insecurity. We also know that state-building and peace-building agendas associated with such agreements, despite extensive resources, rarely if ever succeed in establishing everyday security. A growing critical social science literature has drawn attention to the limitations of standard responses.1 Yet the same mistakes are repeated time and time again.
This chapter introduces the concept of security culture as an analytical tool to help us make sense of the persistence of particular ways of doing ‘security’, and to analyse the pathways through which different ways of doing security evolve so as to identify openings and closures that might allow or prevent different approaches. The starting point is the notion of transition or change. Whether it is because of the end of the Cold War or because of dramatic changes in technology or because of violent events, or a complex combination of all of these and more, we are in the midst of a profound transition in the way security policy is both conducted and experienced. But there is no clear trajectory or pathway which can be defined to help us navigate this transition. Instead we are faced with a plethora of concepts, paradigms, practices, norms and ideas. The term ‘culture’ is adopted as a method of analysing the transition through which we are living and to help us to identify different pathways or trajectories.
In an interview with Atlantic magazine, President Obama said: ‘There's a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It's a playbook that comes out of the foreign policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes different responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses.’2 My question is whether it is possible to diverge from the playbook – under what circumstances can different responses be adopted that might be more in tune with the lived experience of insecurity in difficult places? Understanding how a specific set of institutions and interests produces routines and standard practices might also enable us to identify dilemmas, contradictions and resistances that could call into question the playbook and produce change.
The chapter starts with a discussion of the complex and ambiguous term ‘security’. It then introduces the concept of security culture and elaborates the concept through a description of four ideal types, to be expounded in the rest of the book. It then discusses the analytical implications of this approach and it ends with a preliminary conclusion about the changing nature of security culture in the post-Cold War transition period.
Ambiguities and Complexities of ‘Security’
As Buzan and Hansen point out in their history of international security studies, it was only after 1945 that the term ‘security’ came to supplant terms like ‘war’, ‘defence’ or ‘strategy’ among both policy-making and academic circles. This conceptual shift, they argue, has ‘opened up the study of a broader set of political issues, including the importance of societal cohesion and the relationship between military and non-military threats and vulnerabilities’.3
Yet the term ‘security’ is very difficult to pin down. When we use the term in everyday language it can refer to an objective, what we might call safety, or to stability and predictability (as in repressive societies). And at one and the same time, it tends to refer to a security apparatus or set of practices from locking doors, to airport scanners, to pensions, to surveillance, police, intelligence and military forces and even nuclear weapons. And both these different meanings can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. Whose safety are we talking about – that of the individual, the nation, the state, the world? And are we talking about what Wolfers defined as ‘objective’ security (security from actual threats) as opposed to ‘subjective’ security (perceptions of threats)?4 And what threats (or risks?) are we talking about – an attack by a foreign state, a terrorist threat, or the dangers of hunger, poverty, disease or crime? And what constitutes a security apparatus or practice – the existence of a state or some other form of political authority, the security sector (military, police, intelligence agencies, etc.) or wider forms of social insurance?
This ambiguity is reflected in the security studies literature. Broadly speaking, it is possible to identify two strands of inquiry. One has to do with security as an objective that has spawned a debate about the referent of security and the kinds of threats or risks that are faced by the referent. In the Cold War period, security tended to mean national or bloc security and the main threat was assumed to be an armed attack from an enemy nation or bloc. Even at that time it was unclear how the nation or bloc was defined: did it relate to the state or the alliance, or did it relate to ways of organizing society (democracy or socialism), or did it relate to the inhabitants of the nation or state? Karl Deutsch famously developed the concept of ‘security community’, which he defined as a group of people who have become integrated to the point where there is ‘a real assurance that the members of that community will not fight each other physically but will settle their disputes some other way’.5 In the aftermath of the Cold War, scholars began to consider alternative referents – human, regional or planetary security, for example – as well as security from non-military threats. In its well-known introduction of human security, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) defined seven types of security that referred to different types of threats or risks – economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political.6
The other line of inquiry that tended to be taken up by critical scholars was an emphasis on the political loadedness of the concept of security. The provision of security is intrinsically bound up with political authority, whether we are talking about the state, the blocs, international institutions or emerging hybrid forms of authority. The concept of ‘securitization’ developed by the Copenhagen School defined security as a ‘speech act’ designed to emphasize the importance or indeed exceptionalism of something defined as security, thereby underpinning political authority. By a ‘speech act’ they did not merely mean calling something a security issue; they also referred to a set of practices that give meaning to the concept of security.7 Thus, for example during the Cold War period, military exercises, spy stories and hostile propaganda all drew attention to the possibility of war between the West and the Soviet Union, thereby emphasizing the threat each posed to the other and, by the same token, framing the dominance of the two superpowers in world affairs as the primary source of protection.8
The problem with those who are preoccupied with the objective of security is the implicit assumption that the relevant political authority is a unitary rational actor that will adjust its behaviour to meet the objective, once the objective is defined. That is to say, once a government or international institution has agreed that the goal is human security, say, rather than national security, it is assumed that this will lead to the adoption of appropriate policies – yet we know that, despite the rhetoric of human security by various governments or the UN, the goal is far from being fulfilled. The problem with the alternative line of inquiry linked to notions of ‘securitization’ is that while it opens up our understanding of the power relations that underpin and shape security provision, it does not address the problem of insecurity experienced by people who live in difficult places. Those critical scholars who analyse the way in which Western security practices are designed to legitimize Western power, or to ‘police’ a hierarchical world order, rarely offer specific ideas about how to address the problem of terrorism or conflict in Africa and the Middle East.
A useful way around this problem has been developed by Luckham and Kirk, who talk about the ‘two faces’ of security.9 They argue that security has a supply side and a demand side. They define the supply side as ‘a process of political and social ordering established and maintained through authoritative discourses and practices of power, including but not confined to organised force’. And they define the demand side as ‘an entitlement of human beings to protection from violence and other existential risks including their capacity in practice to exercise this entitlement. As such it is dependent upon the social contexts, cultural repertoires and vernacular understandings of those who are secured.’ Their demand-side definition has something in common with ideas of human or citizen security but it differs from ‘existing formulations … in focussing on the vernacular understandings of the people and groups who are secured – how they experience, understand and respond to their own security and insecurity’.10 They suggest that research should focus on empirical investigations of the tensions that inevitably exist between these two faces of security.
The concept of security cultures is in line with this dual approach but it draws attention to the enmeshment of supply and demand. The demand for security – the objective of security – is framed through practices of security and vice versa. There are different ways of defining security and different ways of framing and practising security. Thus vernacular understandings of security may be influenced by fears of the Soviet threat, by moral panics about witches or vampires, or by ethnicized or xenophobic constructions of insecurity, and all of these feed into specific security discourses and practices; what Wolfers called the subjective version of security is shaped by public discourses of security. To be sure, there is always a tension between different ways of practising security and different objectives, however framed, but in some cases they are more closely aligned than in others. The concept of a security culture is a way to bring together the objectives and the practices of security, and by investigating the relationship in specific contexts, the aim is to analyse blockages and openings that might or might not allow for shifts in both objectives and practices, as is expounded in the subsequent sections.
The Term ‘Culture’
The term ‘culture’ has been used in relation to strategic studies since the 1940s, when the US government employed cultural anthropologists to study the ‘national character’ of Germany and Japan.11 More importantly, the term ‘strategic culture’ was developed in the 1970s as a way of critiquing the dominant rationalist approach of defence planners. Analysts at the Rand Corporation developed the concept in order to explain why the Soviet Union did not respond to American strategy in a way that might have been expected from the game theorizing that was prevalent among defence planners during that period.12 Writers like Colin Gray or Alastair Johnston sought to ‘challenge the ahistorical, non-cultural neorealist framework for analysing strategic choices’.13 These thinkers shared a common understanding of ‘strategic’ as relating to ‘the threat or use of force for political purposes’,14 or to the role of war in human affairs and of culture as something that applies to nations or territorially based security communities.
Where they differed was in their conception of ‘culture’. Some scholars talk about three generations of strategic culture theory.15 For first-generation scholars like Colin Gray, culture is understood both as surroundings (context) and as enmeshment (weaving in) in which ideas and behaviour cannot be separated. ‘Culture or cultures consist of the persisting (though not eternal) socially transmitted ideas, attitudes, traditions, habits of mind, and preferred methods of operation that are more or less specific to a particular geographically based security community that has had a necessarily unique historical experience.’16 Culture explains, for example, why the British persisted in maritime conceptions of strategy despite the experience of two world wars where naval operations played a lesser role. ‘Strategic culture is the world of mind, feeling and habit in behaviour.’17
