“Culture” is a concept that few international relations (IR) scholars have embraced, but represents yet another example of their conceptual borrowing from a different discipline. It has been used primarily in IR by those who work in a broadly constructivist vein, exploring the way in which norms and identities shape behavior via the “logic of appropriateness” or are constitutive of interests. A subset of this literature focuses on “strategic cultures” or “military cultures” to examine the ways in which states generate and use (or not) force, interpret threats and challenges, and interact with friends and rivals.
Mary Kaldor has weighed into this debate with her latest book Global Security Cultures, based on a five-year European Research Council project. Her central claim is that four different and somewhat incompatible “security cultures”— geopolitics, new wars, liberal peace, and the War on Terror—can be identified in contemporary world politics. Roughly speaking, geopolitics is associated with traditional national security discourses and has a long historical trajectory related to the rise of the nation-state and the use of military force to defeat internal and external rivals, consolidate territory, or balance power globally.
The remaining three “cultures” are more recent. The “new wars” culture encompasses conflict dynamics as they have developed since World War II (about which Kaldor has written a previous book, placing emphasis on the material forces of globalization to explain their rise); it focuses on nonstate armed groups pursuing not power but political and material resources (p. 84) and the resulting large-scale civilian victimization. By contrast, the “liberal peace” security culture is a post–Cold War development associated with UN peacebuilding and related practices, including mediation, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration, and democracy promotion. The War on Terror is largely a post–9/11 development that incorporates geopolitical logic with a focus on surveillance and targeted attacks (via drones or special forces) against individuals and small groups rather than masses of fighters.
After a conceptual overview and a sketch of each of these four cultures in successive chapters, Kaldor examines how they interact in specific conflicts. She highlights some of the contradictory forces at work that frustrate the aims of each “culture,” from the difficult pursuit of military victory to the emergence of unstable “hybrid peace” formations.
Global Security Cultures has certainly tapped into the phenomenon of fragmentation of security policies and practices since the end of the Cold War, and the volume captures well the different communities of practice that have been engaged both conceptually and practically with the four distinct approaches to tackling security challenges. Kaldor also surveys well the evolution of the literature from strategic culture (and its different manifestations) to more recent work on security cultures, following the lead of Christopher Daase to incorporate elite beliefs and practices as well as broader social attitudes. And she adopts a fairly loose approach to “culture,” albeit claiming to “adopt an interpretative notion of culture…so as to understand and interpret their differing internal logics” (p. 25).
As an overview of four different and often clashing approaches to contemporary security challenges, the book is a useful contribution. Yet the value added of the concept of global security cultures remains somewhat unclear. If culture is to represent more than, say, what one has for breakfast or how one interacts with colleagues, then it has to be more than (as the volume notes) “the persistence of particular ways of doing ‘security’” (p. 12). Rather, the “persistence” has to be explained in terms of the norms and beliefs that shape action and choices even in the face of dysfunctional or perverse outcomes, such as the commitment to offensive military action in World War I or to democracy promotion in the face of repeated failures. And if it is more than a descriptive label it has to provide explanatory leverage beyond a purely rationalist or materialist account.
Two issues can illustrate how tricky is the concept of security cultures. First, the four security cultures identified are not as self-contained or hermetically sealed as the volume sometimes implies. Combating and preventing violent extremism (as part of the War on Terror) has been internalized as part of many UN postconflict (or conflict prevention) operations and practices, in part in response to the interaction of the War on Terror with peacebuilding efforts in places such as Mali or the Horn of Africa. “Liberal peacebuilding” has had likewise to confront the “new wars” of South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in which a myriad of formal and informal armed actors thwart and subvert the aims of constructing stable and legitimate central state institutions. Some of these complexities are captured in a chapter focusing on the Bosnian, Afghan, and Syrian conflicts, but the takeaway— that “the geo-politics and war on terror security cultures have overwhelmed the liberal peace” (p. 173)—is hardly surprising. The conclusion attempts to adapt the liberal peace to this reality, but it is too brief to detail a clear alternative conceptualization.
Second, insofar as culturalist explanations are based on the logic of appropriateness (as opposed to a rationalist logic of consequences), it is difficult to argue that the new wars or geopolitical constructs can be regarded as “cultures.” These constructs are supremely the realm of instrumental and rational action, and although they can be constitutive of certain cultural forms (such as militarism), culture is not doing any analytic work, serving merely as a description of particular identities and forms of action. The idea of “geo-politics as culture” (p. 46) leans heavily on Charles Tilly’s account of state formation and material-technological changes, which is compatible with realist/rationalist explanations of state behavior. And Kaldor’s own earlier work on new wars was largely materialist/rationalist in its approach, identifying globalization and technological change as drivers of new wars (albeit it also focused on the politics of identity as a mobilizing force).
These issues are not unique to Global Security Cultures, and recent scholarship has turned away from broadly culturalist explanations toward practice theory or the examination of material and nonmaterial assemblages, which capture well the interaction of technologies, ideas and practices. Although it is unfair to criticize an author for a book not written, the argument would have been considerably strengthened by a sustained engagement with this literature, especially since the text makes several references to assemblages, biopolitics, and hybridity.
In the end, however, these issues will matter little for the book’s audience, which is not the circle of scholars working within one or the other of the four “cultures,” or to theoretically inclined security studies scholars. The volume is intended to speak to a broader audience, and in this respect it does present a useful primer or overview of four different and often contradictory approaches to contemporary security challenges.
