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C HAPTER 11
Culture
Michael N. Barnett
A BSTRACT
In this chapter, students will learn about the complex relationships between culture and security. Culture is present in organizations, societies, states and global affairs. Culture, like the social world in general, is ubiquitous. The chapter therefore begins by summarizing why security scholars began to think that culture might shape processes of global and national security. It then clarifies what we mean by culture and how we think it matters. Contrasting rational and cultural approaches to security, the chapter examines several important issues: (1) the importance of bureaucratic and organizational culture for understanding security issues such as military doctrine and evolution; (2) strategic culture; and (3) how organizational and global cultural factors influence peace operations.
C ONTENTS
z (^) Introduction 162 z (^) States behaving badly 162 z (^) Culture 165 z (^) Cultures in security 169 z (^) Conclusion 173
z Introduction
This chapter explores culture’s imprint and impact on various areas of security. It begins by showing how security studies tended to treat culture either as irrelevant at best or a scoundrel at worst, often because security scholars focused on culture to explain why behaviour didn’t conform to their pre-existing rationalist assumptions. Yet security scholars have increasingly recognized that culture is not only a menace but also a constant presence. The next section then explores the world of culture, surveying the implications of two leading definitions for thinking about security and repeating some lessons learned from cultural theorists regarding how to – and not to – think about culture as a category of analysis and practice. The third section explores the relationship between security and culture with reference to strategic culture and cultures of peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Whereas strategic culture is largely interested in national styles of war-making, and thus includes attitudes towards the utility of force, grand strategy and military doctrine, peacekeeping and peacebuilding cultures are interested in international styles of peacemaking, and thus operate with assumptions regarding the conditions under which it is possible to make peace and resolve conflict. The chapter concludes by asking what is gained and lost by operating with a narrow or overly ambitious concept of culture.
z States behaving badly
If security scholars were to produce a film on the relationship between culture and security they would probably title it States Behaving Badly. Security studies leans heavily on rational actor models of state behaviour. These models assume that states are unitary actors that pursue their pre-existing interests under an identifiable set of constraints and choose the strategy that maximizes benefits and minimizes costs. They also assume that actors have full and complete information, can rank order their preferences over time, and can weigh the opportunity costs of different options. Importantly, rational actor models do not pass judgement on the goals of states (or other actors) but instead are more interested in how states act in the world given their existing goals. In this sense, our assessment of Saddam Hussein’s rationality depends not on whether we agree with his goals but whether we believe that he has conformed to a rational decision process. Scholars know that most actors, especially states, rarely meet these demanding standards in the real world, but rational actor assumptions certainly make it easier to analyse the behaviour of states and even recommend do’s and don’t’s for improving the decision process. In this rational world, culture does not (and should not) exist. Individuals, organizations and states are information processors stripped of feelings, sentiments, passions, and history. The limitation with rational actor models, though, is precisely that because the assumptions are unrealistic our explanations can be distorted. Rationalist-driven security studies tends to assume that states will fluidly alter their strategies in response to changes in the security environment. Yet we often find that changes in the environment do not necessarily lead states to change their military doctrines, their strategic postures or their tactics. The failure of states to adapt accordingly
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might decide that the existing humanitarian norms against torture, which could translate into sanctions against them, being called to account before Congress or even being named at The Hague as a war criminal, makes the costs too high. To the extent that security scholars rely on rational actor models, they have diffi- culty recognizing the importance of culture and its full range of effects. Culture is about values and states, according to realists, are interested in power. Yet, culture matters not only for adding colour to our drab and technical arguments, but also because it does serious work. Over the last several decades scholars of international relations and security have recognized that we live not only in a material world but also a social world, a world comprised of culture that shapes our identity, interests and behaviour. They have done so because rationalist explanations are inadequate for explaining everything from military doctrine to alliances, to grand strategy, to the War on Terror (see Katzenstein 1996). In short, the distribution of power and rational choice assumptions leave a lot to be explained (Desch 1998; Duffield et al. 1999). It is not only scholars who are recognizing the centrality of culture. So, too, are practitioners and professionals. Consider the following confession by American Army Colonel Peter Mansoor (2011: 164), who served in Iraq during the first year of combat operations:
When U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2003, the U.S. military was not particularly concerned about the impact of culture on its operations. U.S. leaders believed that the assault would play out as a high-tech conventional conflict and would be followed by a stabilization effort only slightly more difficult than the one U.S. troops had encountered in Kosovo a few years before.... I quickly discovered that... sectarian and ethnic identities, the role of tribes in Iraqi society, and the U.S. Army’s own internal culture would weigh heavily on the course of the conflict, influence our approach to waging the war, and impact our interactions with our coalition allies.
Mansoor then proceeds to describe how the military corrected its cultural blindness and how doing so helped to turn around US operations. Culture, as he describes it, operates up and down the causal chain. Culture explains the American military’s obsession with technology and belief that somehow hyper-rationality is not a cultural attribute; the reaction of the Iraqi people to daily American security operations; and the outcome of the counterinsurgency doctrine. One of Mansoor’s important observations is that culture is not something that ‘other people have’ but something that everyone has. This is true for many Westerners who consider themselves modern and rational and somehow beyond culture. Yet modern attributes can combine to constitute a culture of rationality. We might become so obsessed with the possibility that there is a technological fix for every problem that we fail to recognize that our values might also play a role. We might become hopelessly infatuated with optimizing and decision choice models because we believe that they will improve our welfare, without sufficiently understanding the limits of these models and the presence of emotions.
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The juxtaposition of ‘us’ as rational and ‘them’ as cultural has several unfortunate effects. For one, culture gets invoked when ‘we’ cannot understand what other people do, think and feel. When coupled with judgements about what actions might have been more ‘rational’, the effect is to reduce culture to the irrational. It is only a short step from here to using culture in the most racist, ethnocentric and unthinking ways. Take for instance, the argument that Saddam Hussein refused to accept a negotiated exit from Kuwait because of an Arab culture that emphasizes honour and false pride. When American presidents also refuse to budge, and they do, rarely do we explain it with reference to an American culture but rather to personality attributes of stubbornness, a White House that is cut off from alternative sources of information and prone to groupthink, or even to domestic political considerations. In other words, while rational actor models typically overlook the presence of culture, sometimes this bias can open the door to prejudice, stereotyping and racism.
z Culture
World culture. Global culture. High culture. Low culture. Organizational culture. Bureaucratic culture. World Bank culture. UN culture. European culture. Islamic cul- ture. Christian culture. Asian culture. Maleculture. Military culture. Academic culture. Not only is the world awash in cultures, it is awash in different definitions. There is no single accepted definition of culture, not among anthropologists, who make their living studying it, and not among security scholars, who rely on anthropologists as they explore the relationship between security and culture (see Kuper 1999). Why so many choices? The easy answer is that, like power, it is an essentially contested concept. The more complex answer is that different definitions are intended to serve different purposes. In other words, most definitions of culture are purpose-built – they are intended to help us analyse the world. Definitions of culture, like definitions of power, the state and security, are not right or wrong; they are more or less useful for some identified purpose. Consequently, it can be an exercise in frustration to try to convince others that one definition is right and the other is wrong, but at the least we can be clear and precise about our definition, how it differs from others and what its advantages and disadvantages are. The rich menu of choice when conceptualizing culture has, at times, caused scholars of security to lose patience and interest. Ideally, scholars of culture would offer more consensus, clarity and precision. But the central concept of realism – power – shares these elusive qualities. There is no single definition of power. Instead, scholars recognize that it is an essentially contested concept. Power comes in many different forms. If security scholars have chosen to define power in material terms, such as geography, technology, wealth and military capabilities, it is not because these variables extinguish other forms of power but rather because they are the most easily measured. In fact, many security scholars confess that this ‘easy road’ neglects not so easily measurable aspects of power, including those associated with beliefs, opinion, perception, determination and so on. No wonder, then, that security scholars have been constantly puzzled by the disconnect between the distribution
CULTURE
practices of life and define the social fields of action that are imaginable and possible. A major claim of discourse analysis is that the categories that define the realm of consciousness and the social are not themselves natural but rather are a product of contingent developments. Richard Price (1997) expertly traces how chemical weapons became a taboo; from a strict rationality perspective chemical weapons are often not nearly as destructive as the accepted technologies of war, but there are cultural and contingent factors that made this kind of weapon unlike any other. Beginning with the 2011 Syrian civil war the Syrian government has been using acceptable weapons and committing war crimes to kill thousands upon thousands, but international actors seem to get agitated only when chemical weapons are used (and the death toll has been much lower). Some forms of death appear to matter more than others. There are important differences between these four approaches but they share various aspects that are now accepted by many students of culture and have been used by scholars interested in exploring the relationship between culture and security. First, they are interested in how actors give meaning to their world. Following Max Weber’s (1949: 81) insight that ‘we are cultural beings with the capacity and the will to take a deliberate attitude toward the world and to lend it significance ’, scholars of culture are interested in the meanings that actors give to their practices and the objects that they construct. These meanings are important not because they are colourful descriptions but rather because they shape our reactions and actions. For instance, the reason why advanced military technology might be valued has less to do with its technical qualities and more to do with its symbols of modernity. In this regard, conventional and nuclear weapons might spread not only because of their utility for war-fighting or deterrence but also because of their status (Eyre and Suchman 1996; Sagan 1996/97). Second, cultures are resilient. They do not come and go with the change in the weather but rather have an enduring aspect and help to explain continuity. If cultures are durable it is because they socialize new members and sanction existing members from flying from the flock. How are cultures transmitted and maintained? Scholars offer a variety of mechanisms, including genetics (some of us are more prone to certain kinds of cultures than others), emulation (we learn by mimicking others and keep mimicking until it becomes second nature), learning, language, and incentives that reward those who follow the group and punish those who do not. Although a culture has durability, it is not everlasting. Third, cultures do change, not always dramatically but often through small adaptations. The recognition of the possibility of change alerts us to the fact that all cultures have subcultures. There are regional differences; in the United States, for example, Yankee culture is different from Southern culture. There can be class differences; Wall Street culture is different from working-class culture. There are professional cultures. There are cultures among lawyers, doctors and academics. There is a military culture that derives from shared professional training. But there might be different military traditions that derive from different historical traditions. American military culture is different from Israeli military culture, which is different from Chinese military culture. Each of these national military cultures also can have subcultures identified with the different branches of the armed forces.
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Fourth, culture shapes but does not determine. We should be wary of assuming that people are cultural dupes. Sometimes culture can generate fairly rigid world views, but because culture often includes a process of interpretation, and different people can interpret culture in different ways, we should avoid sentiments of cultural determinism. Culture, in this respect, can operate as a constraint, representing one factor among many that shapes how actors react to situations. Ann Swidler (1986) famously introduced the notion of a ‘cultural toolkit’, which is to say that how actors choose to strategize in relationship to their environment is very much dependent on how culture shapes their sense of the world and the kinds of repertoires and strategies that are culturally available. Fifth, we should resist the claim that cultural and material forces are separate and distinct. Today, most scholars agree that culture and material are interrelated. Although some scholars speak of a ‘material culture’, where technology and artefacts drive how we think and act, others recognize that such material forces might have symbolic meaning and thus make separating the two difficult. How confident are we, for example, that Iran’s rumoured quest for nuclear weapons can be reduced to either material or cultural factors? These concerns suggest, sixth, that cultural and material explanations are neither necessarily competing nor complementary. As scholars we typically ask: how import- ant is X? In other words, we want to know if X is more or less causally significant than Y or Z. After all, culture might be important, but how important and in what ways? For security scholars, the default presumption is that power is the most important, and, therefore, our need to recognize culture depends on our assessment of whether it is as or more important than power. This ‘how important is it?’ has been a centrepiece of the debate between rationalists and constructivists, with realists insisting that constructivists demonstrate the causal importance of culture before they bother themselves with studying it (Desch 1998). This is a highly reasonable and understandable position, but only up to a point. It makes most sense if we adopt a definition of culture as constraint, but if culture is constitutive then it will shape conceptions of threat, strategy and appropriate tools. And partisans of the power variable have a tendency to smuggle in variables that might be more properly claimed under the mantle of culture. These cautionary flags are evident in the debate between anthropologists and military officials regarding how the US Department of Defense’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual (COIN) tends to treat culture. In response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense decided that it had to get smarter about counterinsurgency, and that a smart counterinsurgency campaign should ‘grab and hold’ and ‘win hearts and minds’. Both goals, though, required intimate knowledge of the local ‘human terrain’, including different political networks, tribal ties, linguistic differences, ethnic allegiances and religious beliefs, how to treat women when entering a house and on and on. In other words, from the military’s perspective it required an intimate knowledge of the local culture. The military translated this into a need for a glossary of sorts that allowed analysts, soldiers and tacticians to take into account the world views of local participants. The problem, according to some anthropologists, was that this concept was too ‘static, coherent, bounded, and one-dimensional’ (Albro 2010: 1089). Rather than speak of an Arab culture, an
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national attitudes towards the use and projection of force, peacekeeping and peacebuilding cultures draw it to international attitudes towards the diminution of violence and production of peace.
Strategic culture
Scholars began serious study of strategic culture in the 1980s in recognition that the Soviet Union and the United States varied in their strategic postures, thus defying standard realist predictions that states sitting in the same place in the international distribution of power would adopt relatively identical strategic choices. Although students of military history had long recognized the existence of national styles of strategy, it now became acceptable for students of international relations to try to identify their origins, content and effects. With the emergence of constructivist inter- national relations theory in the 1990s, more scholars began developing, refining and testing the concept of strategic culture, and it has now been applied to an impressive range of topics, from Iran’s nuclear strategy to the African Union’s changing orientation towards intervention, to the ‘ASEAN way’ of non-interference, to the preference for offensive or defensive strategic postures, to European security policy. Different scholars adopt different definitions (e.g. Johnston 1995b, 1999; O’Reilly 2013). Many scholars adopt a definition of strategic culture as shared beliefs and behaviours among militaries – derived from common experiences and historical narratives – that shape identities, influence relationships and affect the manner in which armed forces define and achieve their security objectives (Adamsky 2010). Along these lines, Iain Johnston (1995a: 36) defines strategic culture as
an integrated system of symbols (i.e. argumentation structures, languages, analogies, metaphors, etc.) that acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting grand strategic preferences by formulating concepts of the role and efficacy of military force in interstate political affairs, and by clothing these conceptions with such an aura of facticity that the strategic preferences seem uniquely realistic and efficacious.
In contrast, Colin Gray prefers to think of culture as ‘context’ and as including ‘the total warp and woof of matters strategic that are thoroughly woven together’ (1999: 51). Despite their definitional differences, these scholars are in heated agreement that culture is too important to ignore for several reasons. To begin, they are convinced that standard realist, power politics models do not explain variation in the strategic choices of countries. Second, state security policies do not adapt quickly or efficiently to changes in the strategic environment. Instead, they appear to be sticky not only because of standard bureaucratic reasons (branches of the military do not want their budgets to decline or their status to diminish) but also because of ‘tradition’, ‘history’ and other references to ‘just the way things are done’. In other words, we observe a fair bit of consistency in strategic preferences over time, even when the strategic environment changes radically and would seemingly force states to change their strategic profile. Third, strategic culture both constrains and constitutes. States’ strate-
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gic choices are limited by what fits with an existing culture. Also, the strategic culture shapes broad world views, including whether states are naturally offensive or defensive minded, whether there is a culture of action or ‘wait and see’ and whether states prefer to rely on technology or manpower for their military doctrine. In other words, culture is about identity and identity is central to forming preferences, strategies and sense of what is appropriate and legitimate in the use of force. Israel’s deterrence policies, for instance, cannot be untangled from a historically generated strategic culture that emphasizes not denial but rather punishment (Adamsky 2017: 166). Because of culture’s constituting properties, we can expect strategic culture to generate a limited set of grand strategic preferences because members learn from repeated interactions with their environment. Although there is broad agreement on culture’s analytical power, there is one difference that should be flagged: whether and how it is possible to turn culture into a standard causal argument that can be tested against ‘material’ forces. Iain Johnston argued forcefully that if scholars are going to take culture seriously, then it has to be defined clearly, operationalized systematically and distinguished from rival hypotheses. Arguments that proclaim that ‘culture is everything and everywhere’ border on triviality and must be tightened so that they can be distinguished from alternative, more standard rationalist and power politics arguments. His work has been immensely influential for precisely this reason – he offered a method for discriminating between material and cultural explanations. Critics offered three familiar objections. First, we should be careful about con- fidently distinguishing between material and culture forces. Second, the focus on behaviour and outcomes should not come at the expense of how actors make their world meaningful. Although Johnston builds on Geertz’s definition, Geertz was primarily interested in the process of interpretation and how actors make sense of the world that they give significance and meaning to. Johnston seems more interested in behaviour than the process of interpretation. Third, his argument dangerously assumes that there is a single authentic culture and thereby fails to recognize the divisions, contestations and subcultures (Gray 1999; McDonough 2011: 28–32). One last question regarding strategic culture is the extent to which it has a gendered dimension. One of the most famous articles ever written about American strategic culture posits that a gendered discourse shapes the meaning and significance the military gives weapons systems (lots of phallic representations), what counts as strength and victory and what is viewed as acceptable and unacceptable (Cohn 1987). One of the most famous movies ever made about war, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove , is organized around the intimate relationship between sex and war. The reason why Captain Jack Ripper launches a unilateral strike is because his ‘precious bodily fluids’ have been corrupted by the communist infiltration of fluoride in the water system. The B-52 pilot is reading Playboy , surreptitiously tucked inside a copy of Foreign Affairs. American leaders in the war room agree that the way to save the world after a nuclear holocaust is for the remaining male survivors to retreat to an underground compound where very attractive women outnumber the men by 10 to 1. Although Kubrick’s dark comedy takes tremendous liberty with reality, what makes it classic and timeless is because its themes of gender and war continue to resonate.
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Drawing from Bourdieu and practice theory, Severine Autesserre (2014) observes the existence of a peacebuilding culture that envelops UN operations around the world. Living in a relative bubble, shaped by their existing knowledge and ways of doing and relatively isolated from the environment that they are attempting to transform, the peacebuilding community engages in a set of durable, patterned prac- tices that are nearly immune to the effects of these interventions, that is, whether they succeed or fail (and they almost always fail). There are several distinguishing characteristics of this peacebuilding culture, though perhaps most important are: (1) a commitment to what has been called liberal peacebuilding – interventions that are intended to erase gross political, social and economic inequalities and empower once marginalized actors; and, (2) forms of paternalism that derive from the belief among peacebuilders that they know best.
z Conclusion
Students of security can deny the existence of culture, but at considerable risk. They risk failing to recognize explicitly the importance of culture in security processes, which can have immediate and long-term consequences for their theories and practices. Ignoring culture means that we are less equipped to understand the world. It also means, as Pentagon officials have acknowledged over the last decade, that militaries will be less effective at accomplishing their objectives. Scholars might want to treat culture as an ‘error’ term that is used as a last resort explanation, but practitioners do not have that luxury. The conversation should move beyond asking ‘does culture matter?’ to the more important question ‘how does it matter?’ The substantive answer to that question is: it shapes strategic preferences, attitudes towards violence, willingness to take risks, readiness to suffer casualties and obey the rules of war and on and on. The analytical answer is: it shapes identity, preferences and strategies, constrain the incentives and disincentives for certain kinds of action and shapes the meanings that we give to the world and thus how we interpret it and act on it. The challenge for those who want to work with the concept of culture is to be very clear about how they are using it and how it helps them better explain and understand the world.
Further reading
Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)making of Terrorists (Ecco, 2010). An anthropologist’s nuanced and first-hand account of the evolving and complex relationship between religion and suicide bombers. Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Cornell University Press, 2002). A look into whether and how UN officials developed a ‘banality of indifference’ to crimes against humanity. Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Force (Cornell University Press, 2003). A compelling exploration of how different global cultures shape the motives and reason for war. Peter Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security (Columbia University Press, 1996). A path-breaking volume that examines the difference that culture makes in a range of security issues.
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Laura Sjoberg (ed.), Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives (Routledge, 2009). A wide-ranging look at the role of gender in shaping fundamental security dynamics. Michael Williams, Culture and Security: Symbolic Power and the Politics of International Security (Routledge, 2006). A wonderful overview that addresses the culture in security and the culture of the study of security.
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