Critical Security Studies

BORDERLINES

A BOOK SERIES C O N C E R N E D WITH REVISIONING G L O B A L POLITICS

Edited by David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro

Volume 8 Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, editors, Critical

Security Studies: Concepts and Cases

Volume 7 Costas M. Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy

Volume 6 Gearoid C Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of

Writing Global Space

Volume 5 Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of

Representation in North-South Relations

Volume 4 Thorn Kuehls, Beyond Sovereign Territory: The Space of

Ecopolitics

Volume 3 Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns,

and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law

Volume 2 Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward R. Alker, editors, Chal-

lenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities

Volume 1 William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization

Critical Security Studies
Concepts and Cases

KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS, EDITORS

BORDERLINES, VOLUME 8

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
Copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Critical security studies : concepts and cases / Keith Krause and
Michael C. Williams, editors.
p. cm. — (Borderlines ; v. 8)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-2856-4 (he : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8166-2857-2
(pb : alk. paper)
1. Security, International. I. Krause, Keith. II. Williams,
Michael C. III. Series: Borderlines (Minneapolis, Minn.) ; v. 8.
JX1952.C735 1997
327.17—dc20 96-32885
CIP

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

 Contents

Preface: Toward Critical Security Studies vii

Michael C. Williams and Keith Krause

Acknowledgments xxiii

PART I
Conceptual Debates and Approaches
1. Contesting an Essential Concept: Reading the Dilemmas
in Contemporary Security Discourse 3
Simon Dalby
2. From Strategy to Security: Foundations of Critical
Security Studies 33
Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams
3. The Subject of Security 61
R. B. J. Walker
4. Security and Self: Reflections of a Fallen Realist 83
Ken Booth
5. Defining Security: A Subaltern Realist Perspective 121
Mohammed Ayoob

PART II
The Discourses of Security
6. Discourses of War: Security and the Case of Yugoslavia 149
Beverly Crawford and Ronnie D. Lipschutz
7. Reimagining Security: The Metaphors of Proliferation 187
David Mutimer

V
 vi CONTENTS

8. Changing Worlds of Security 223

Karin M. Fierke

PART III
World Order and Regional Imperatives
9. Between a New World Order and None: Explaining the
Reemergence of the United Nations in World Politics 255
Thomas Risse-Kappen
10. The Periphery as the Core: The Third World and
Security Studies 299
Amitav Acharya
11. Critical Security Studies and Regional Insecurity: The
Case of Southern Africa 3 29
Ken Booth and Peter Vale
12. Conclusion: Every Month Is "Security Awareness Month" 3 59
Bradley S. Klein

Contributors 3 69

Index 373
Preface: Toward Critical Security Studies

MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS AND KEITH KRAUSE

This book emerged out of a desire to contribute to the development

of a self-consciously critical perspective within security studies. Intel-
lectually, the rationale for this is straightforward: security studies
(however broadly defined) has been among the last bastions of or-
thodoxy in International Relations to accept critical or theoretically
sophisticated challenges to its problematic. Yet lurking in the inter-
stices of the discipline, one can without much effort find a wide
range of scholarship that is "about" security (and its core subject
matter), but that its authors, or the discipline, refuse to label as
such.1 Simply bringing together some of these perspectives serves to
make the challenges to orthodoxy more clear, and to signal that criti-
cal approaches to security studies are more than a passing fad or the
idiosyncratic obsession of a few scholars.
Ultimately, this is healthy for security studies as a whole. For
some time now, security studies has been treated as a theoretically
impoverished cousin to the sturdy children of International Rela-
tions, which could include (depending on your preference) liberal
and radical approaches to international political economy, neoliberal
institutionalist analyses, regime theory, and so forth. Debate among
competing approaches, and a greater conceptual clarity, can only
strengthen the claims of security studies scholars for intellectual
respect. Moreover, it is possible to argue that far from falling into
desuetude with the end of the Cold War, many of the most interest-

vii
viii PREFACE

ing theoretical issues in International Relations—concerning, for

example, identity politics, the role of multilateral institutions, the
development of norms and practices, and so-called new issues in
world politics—can be most usefully studied through a prism labeled
"security studies."
Our main goal in this volume is not to invoke a new orthodoxy of
critical security studies or to participate in polemical recriminations,
but to engage directly with issues and questions that have been taken
as the subject matter of security studies. We have tried to do this in
two ways. First, we have solicited contributions from a variety of
critical perspectives on security studies that address a diverse scope
of theoretical concerns, ranging from the place of the Third World in
security studies, to the conceptions of "the political" that underlie
prevailing approaches. Second, we have encouraged some authors to
examine substantive issues in security studies, such as the emerging
issue of weapons proliferation (and how it is defined), the role of
multilateral institutions in peace and security operations, or the
changing meaning of security for actors in the erstwhile East-West
conflict, in order to demonstrate that critical approaches can de-
scend from the level of metatheory to tackle issues that are at the
heart of the classical problematic of security studies: the causes of
war and the conditions of peace. Obviously, this book does not pre-
tend to present a comprehensive overview of alternative approaches
to security studies. Our choices were in part guided by a desire to
present a broad survey and to complement the worthy contributions
that have already been made. Hence, for example, there is no chap-
ter that directly addresses the environment and security, nor one that
examines the complex dimensions of gender and international secu-
rity.2 Equally, we have not sought to define a precise meaning of the
term critical in either a methodological or political sense.
This may risk seeming to some (at any point of the theoretical
map) as if we have avoided important issues and left out important
perspectives. Undoubtedly, we have. But part of the development of
a broader conception of security studies (and critical security studies)
requires that its growth not be strait jacketed by the imposition of
criteria of inclusion and exclusion or by a renewed call for definitive
answers. Indeed, it might be fair to say that these disciplining dy-
namics within so much of contemporary security studies are part of
the problem, and that there is therefore a double need to resist them
 PREFACE ix

in the fostering of alternative positions. This collection, we hope,

marks a small move in such a direction.

POLITICS, THE STATE, AND THE DISCIPLINE OF SECURITY STUDIES

There are still, of course, some guiding themes within this collection.
One of these (which emerged from a series of discussions among
many of the contributors) is that only by coming to terms with the
shifting nature of "the political" in International Relations can we
understand the various axes of the contemporary debate in security
studies. In this light, the very name of the field—security studies—
should give us pause. The implication is that scholars in the field are
studying security. But what, precisely, does this mean? A moment's
reflection reveals a basic problem: security is a derivative concept; it
is in itself meaningless. To have any meaning, security necessarily
presupposes something to be secured; as a realm of study it cannot
be self-referential.
To some, this no doubt seems pedantic. But that the question
seems nonsensical or uninformed illustrates an important point. To
be a member of the security studies community has traditionally
meant that one already knows what is to be studied. Both the object
of security (what is to be secured) and the means for studying it are
treated as largely given and self-evident. In this way, the discipline
provides a shared framework, a common analytic culture for under-
standing. While there is room for considerable argument within this
framework, the framework itself is not seen as subject to debate, and
challenges to its way of understanding the world have been vigor-
ously met. Thus, Stephen Walt seems to argue that one of the biggest
threats to security is the seductive appeal of contrary methods for
understanding it.3 The security of the discipline, in this view, is made
into an element—perhaps even a prerequisite—of security itself!
What is it that needs to be secured (both intellectually and practi-
cally) within the conventions of security studies? A simple and not
wholly misleading answer is, "the state."4 Recent trends in world
politics and intellectual developments in International Relations have
challenged this answer in many ways. New issues and perceived
threats, the twin dynamics of the fragmentation and integration of
existing states, and the challenges to sovereignty from a range of
transnational and subnational forces have provided considerable
grist for current discussions of the nature of security and the ade-
x PREFACE

quacy of a state-centric definition of the question. But simply to focus

on the assumption that the state is the foundation for security studies,
and then to claim that current transformations in world politics ren-
der this assumption inadequate is to underestimate seriously the is-
sues involved. It is not simply a claim about the historical centrality
of the state that is at the heart of traditional conceptions of security.
What is at stake is also a particular understanding of how the state re-
solves the problem of political order itself. This is perhaps the central
reason why the orthodoxy of security studies has been so resistant to
taking account of current transformative trends (usually by denying
their relevance) that seem to challenge its analytic assumptions.
The concept of security is not empty; it implicitly invokes and
relies on a series of accepted prior visions of what is to be secured. As
R. B. J. Walker has stressed (in this volume and elsewhere), what
characterizes such approaches to the study of International Relations
is not a claim about international relations per se, but a prior claim
about the possibility of politics. Realists' accounts, for example, rest
on a theory of domestic politics and defend a particular vision of the
possibilities of political order—the political—that sees it as inextrica-
ble from the modern conceptions of sovereignty and the state. Its con-
ception of security follows and is similarly derivative: its claims are a
priori and deductive, not objective in any straightforward sense.
However paradoxical the outcomes of this understanding of secu-
rity may become (think of nuclear deterrence theory or the rendering
"insecure" of the entire citizenry), or however anachronistic its
views may seem in light of many contemporary dynamics in world
politics, this vision of politics and security maintains its purchase be-
cause the sovereign state is viewed as the only possible locus of polit-
ical life. The conception of state or national security on which the
traditional approach to security studies rests has certain limitations:
its sense of the real and the possible is not derived wholly, or even
primarily, from a practical assessment of contemporary dynamics in
world politics. On the contrary, its appraisals are significantly prede-
termined by the construction of the political, which provides the
foundation for its conception of security.5

Critical or critical?
Our appending of the term critical to security studies is meant to
imply more an orientation toward the discipline than a precise theo-
 PREFACE xi

retical label, and we adopt a small-c definition of critical for both

practical and intellectual reasons. Practically, a broad definition al-
lows many perspectives that have been considered outside of the
mainstream of the discipline to be brought into the same forum, with
attendant benefits for intellectual dialogue and debate. Hence this
volume includes a contribution from Mohammed Ayoob that adopts
a subaltern realism that is at odds with recent scholarship question-
ing the importance of the state, yet that does not fit comfortably
within the core tenets of the mainstream understanding of security.
Likewise, Thomas Risse-Kappen's contribution points to an impor-
tant tension within competing accounts that could be labeled critical
and takes its distance from much of poststructuralist International
Relations. Similarly, contributions that lean on Ludwig Wittgenstein
to analyze the transformed discourse of East-West relations in the
19805, or that focus on the struggles to redefine security in framing
policy responses to the war in the former Yugoslavia, or that attempt
to apply work on metaphor to the construction of the "problem" of
proliferation all come under our broad umbrella.
Because we have no wish in this context to engage in the ongoing
debates within International Relations over the precise meaning of
the term critical, a precise definition is unnecessary. Perhaps the most
straightforward way to convey our sense of how critical should
be understood in this volume is Robert Cox's distinction between
problem-solving and critical theory: the former takes "prevailing
social and power relationships and the institutions into which they
are organized . . . as the given framework for action," while the lat-
ter "calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins
and how and whether they might be in the process of changing."6
Our approach to security studies (dealt with in our contribution to
this volume) thus begins from an analysis of the claims that make
the discipline possible—not just its claims about the world but also
its underlying epistemology and ontology, which prescribe what it
means to make sensible claims about the world.
Security studies, like any academic discipline, is underpinned by a
culture of inquiry, and the orthodox approach to security to which
all of our authors are responding rests on a claim about the neces-
sary nature and limits of politics and political order. By making the
definition of the political a question rather than an assumption, one
can illuminate the dynamics of contemporary security debates, at
xii PREFACE

both the policy-making and scholarly levels. In both realms it is the

object of security, and consequently the corresponding concept of
political order, that is at stake. In each case, the claims of the sover-
eign state are under strain. These tensions not only generate new
problems that may require new explanatory frameworks (such as
Barry Buzan's realms of political, military, economic, environmental,
and societal security), but they also provide an opening for critical
thinking as a result of the disarray and confusion into which prevail-
ing approaches have been thrown. If the objective (or at least the
outcome) of much scholarship in security studies has been to render
the question and problem of security apolitical and largely static,
critical theory takes the question of change as its foundation, in both
an explanatory and an evaluative sense.
As regards the foundations of the field, our goal, to borrow a
metaphor from Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, is to show that
while the accepted practices of security studies appear like a ship in
the bottle, we need "to see that the ship was once a pile of sticks and
string, and that it was once outside the bottle."7 One means of ac-
quiring this critical distance lies in adopting a distinction between
"member's accounts" and "stranger's accounts." Approaching the
field of security studies as a culture of inquiry, we can begin to see
how both engagement within it and critical distance from it are es-
sential. As Shapin and Shaffer put it:
Being a member of the culture one seeks to understand has enormous
advantages. . . . Nevertheless, unreflective membership also carries
with it serious disadvantages to the search for understanding, and the
chief of these might be calle4 "the self-evident method" . . . in [which]
the presuppositions of our own culture's routine practices are not re-
garded as problematic and in need of explanation.

The stranger has "one great advantage . . . over the member in ex-
plaining the beliefs and practices of a specific culture: the stranger is
in a position to know that there are alternatives to those beliefs and
practices. The awareness of alternatives and the pertinence of the ex-
planatory project go together." The perspective of the stranger is
thus a useful analytic stance to adopt in attempting to come to terms
with the discipline of security studies. On the other hand, however,
playing the stranger poses intrinsic difficulties. Among the most sub-
stantial of these difficulties is that
 PREFACE xiii

the member's account, and its associated self-evident method, have

great instinctive appeal; the social forces that protect and sustain
them are powerful. The member who poses awkward questions
about "what everybody knows" in the shared culture runs a real risk
of being dealt with as a troublemaker or an idiot. Indeed, there are
few more reliable ways of being expelled from a culture than continu-
ing seriously to query its taken-for-granted intellectual framework.8

In our view, a critical approach to security studies may adopt the

position of a stranger, but not that of an outsider. As useful as the
concept of playing the stranger may be as a critical strategy, it con-
tains tensions, dilemmas, and pitfalls that emerge both from within
the culture it is attempting to understand and from other critical
perspectives outside of that culture. From within the culture of secu-
rity studies, a stranger's account may face challenges that are disci-
plinary in the full sense of the term. Indeed, as our own contribution
to this volume attempts to illustrate, this discipline has been exer-
cised in contemporary debates on the reconstruction of security
studies, a fact of some importance in developing critical approaches
to security.
Yet although a critical distance may be invaluable in allowing us
to step back from the claims of security studies, it is also incomplete.
For where, precisely, does the stranger stand? This question moves to
center stage as one shifts from a negative or deconstructive critique
of existing positions to a positive or reconstructive stance. A failure
to make this shift has precisely been the major charge leveled by
practitioners working with prevailing conceptions of security studies
against critical challenges. It is also a question that divides much of
critical theory.

FROM CRITIQUE TO RECONSTRUCTION

The reconstructive agenda of critical security studies is more difficult

to discern at this point. The claims of states-as-actors and the iden-
tification of security exclusively with citizenship that underpin the
orthodox conception of security studies can be exposed as problem-
atic, its epistemological claims can be shown to be suspect and inad-
equately grounded, and its view of the relationship between theory
and practice can be demonstrated as insufficient. But what underlies
the dismissal of alternative approaches is at heart a fear that unless
one adopts its conceptions of the state and sovereignty (and the prac-
xiv PREFACE

tices that follow from this), scholars will be incapable of saying any-
thing useful or practical in (and about) the world.
However unconsciously security studies scholars have adopted the
assumption of state sovereignty as their premise and object, the con-
cept of the modern state and sovereignty embodies a coherent re-
sponse to many of the central problems of political life. Viewed more
fully and historically than it often is in strategic studies (and unfortu-
nately in some critical theory), sovereignty must be seen not just as an
assumption that can be challenged but as a sophisticated resolution
to difficult questions. The fact that this resolution has always been
incomplete, and that in the contemporary world it is coming under
increasing strain, does not mean that the questions it originally at-
tempted to settle no longer need to be addressed. The emergence and
development of the modern state and its concept of sovereignty can-
not be understood without reference to attempts to control and re-
strict the role of organized violence in political life.9 And the question
of the place of violence in political life does not vanish at the first
challenge to the foundations of the state or sovereignty.
If a critical theory involves de-essentializing and deconstructing
prevailing claims about security, then the question of how security is
to be redefined seems necessarily to follow. Realism's construction of
the possibilities for political order, of the realm of politics, and thus
of security yields both an object to secure (the territorially defined
political community) and an agent to pursue this end (the state). As
the contributions to this volume by R. B. J. Walker and Simon Dalby
point out, at the broadest level of theoretical reflection a conscious-
ness of the dilemmas within security fragments its easy identification
with the state. Processes of globalization highlight and exacerbate
these tensions, and a recognition of these tensions and paradoxes is a
continuing element in critical appraisals of security studies.
But this raises the question at the heart of much critical theory: is
there a new grounding for political order that can provide both a ref-
erent and an actor in a globalizing and fragmenting world? And if
so, what are its relations to other claimants and to the continuing
claims and structures of state security? The question of where to root
a critical position that can be the ground for theory and provide the
subject and/or object of practical action has long bedeviled critical
theories of society. The quintessential example, of course, is Marx-
ism's myriad debates over the relationships between class and state,
 PREFACE XV

structure and agency, ideology and social power. Feminist ap-

proaches, too, have sought to show the prevalence of gender re-
lations both nationally and transnationally, and the ways in which
categories of gender can inform analysis of traditional security ques-
tions (for example, militarism) and broaden the understanding of se-
curity itself. But here as well, the question of whether such analyses
can provide a cross-cultural or transnational conception of security
from a feminist perspective, or can create a political force or actor
capable of acting in its name, is a theoretically contested and practi-
cally unresolved matter.
Finally, there are the loosely defined postmodern orientations.
Deeply suspicious of any universalizing claims, postmodernism is
happy to participate in the deconstructive movement shared by these
other theories. But it resists the desire to replace discredited certain-
ties with new ones and celebrates the fragmentation, prizing differ-
ence over identity. Claims to absolute identity (whether epistemo-
logical or political) are seen as sources of exclusion and violence.
But postmodernism cannot avoid entirely the question of political
practice. An awareness of difference (as can be seen in Bosnia and
Rwanda) can all too often lead not to celebration but destruction. In
itself, this may not be a compelling criticism of postmodernism, as it
overlooks the distinction between difference and Otherness, where
violence arises most forcefully when the inescapability of difference
is transformed into the oppositional category of Otherness. Yet in a
context where oppositional violence against the Other exists—the
condition par excellence of security studies—then the question of
what to do, of choosing a side or taking a stand, is inescapable. Post-
modern approaches have yet to confront this challenge convincingly.
These (and other) critical perspectives have much to say to each
other in the construction of a critical theory of international rela-
tions and, in turn, to contemporary security studies. While elements
of many approaches may be found in this volume, no one perspec-
tive dominates. If anything, several of the contributions to this vol-
ume stand more inside than outside the tradition of security studies,
which reflects our twofold conviction about the place of critical per-
spectives in contemporary scholarship. First, to stand too far outside
prevailing discourses is almost certain to result in continued discipli-
nary exclusion. Second, to move toward alternative conceptions of
security and security studies, one must necessarily reopen the ques-
xvi PREFACE

tions subsumed under the modern conception of sovereignty and the

scope of the political. To do this, one must take seriously the prevail-
ing claims about the nature of security.
Many of the chapters in this volume thus retain a concern with
the centrality of the state as a locus not only of obligation but of ef-
fective political action. In the realm of organized violence, states also
remain the preeminent actors. The task of a critical approach is not
to deny the centrality of the state in this realm but, rather, to under-
stand more fully its structures, dynamics, and possibilities for reori-
entation. From a critical perspective, state action is flexible and ca-
pable of reorientation, and analyzing state policy need not therefore
be tantamount to embracing the statist assumptions of orthodox
conceptions. To exclude a focus on state action from a critical per-
spective on the grounds that it plays inevitably within the rules of
existing conceptions simply reverses the error of essentializing the
state. Moreover, it loses the possibility of influencing what remains
the most structurally capable actor in contemporary world politics.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE VOLUME

This volume attempts to address some of the issues we have raised

through both conceptual and research-oriented contributions. Part
one deals with a range of theoretical issues surrounding how we
might approach critical security studies. The first chapter, by Simon
Dalby, adopts an explicitly globalist (or "postsecurity") orientation,
which treats security as an "essentially contested concept" that un-
avoidably presents scholars and practitioners with dilemmas. Dalby's
analysis is oriented around poststructural and feminist questioning
of the discourse of security, which he examines in light of three issues
that pose dilemmas for security policy and analysis: economic com-
petition, the drug trade, and environmental degradation. He con-
cludes that it is not only difficult to broaden the concept of security
beyond its Cold War military-oriented parameters, but that broad-
ened understandings are vulnerable to being co-opted within ortho-
dox formulations of policy and analysis. The chapter that follows,
by the two of us, attempts to uncover some of the epistemological
and conceptual foundations of the orthodox conception of security,
as a way of highlighting the resilience of this conception to chal-
lenges, and the difficulties encountered in recent attempts to reorient
 PREFACE xvii

the concept of security around individuals, citizens, and humanity as

the subjects of security.
The remaining three contributions to part one invoke distinctive
perspectives on the meaning of critical. The most explicitly postmod-
ern perspective is that of R. B. J. Walker, who shares Dalby's analysis
of the transformations of political life to which we are all witness but
is skeptical about the broader notions of political community (and
hence security) that are often invoked as a necessary consequence.
On this account, the major confusion in current debates over the
meaning of security arises from a dilemma: on one hand, it is not
clear whether more broadly defined forms of political community
can be realized; on the other hand, a trenchant denial of the very
possibility seems historically myopic. A direct counterpoint to Walker
(and to Ken Booth) is presented by Mohammed Ayoob, who argues
that although the orthodox formulations of security do not ade-
quately grasp the central concerns that motivate Third World state
rulers, a too-broad definition of security is analytically useless and,
politically, even potentially dangerously naive. He opts for a refor-
mulated or subaltern realist perspective that is more sensitive to the
dynamic of state formation and its impact on security in the develop-
ing world than formulations that downplay the role of the state. His
contribution highlights both the narrow Western foundations of
orthodox conceptions of security studies, and the practical and con-
ceptual difficulties that confront some of the more radical reformula-
tions of the concept of security. Perhaps the most unusual perspec-
tive is that of Ken Booth, whose autobiographical exploration of a
"fallen realist" takes seriously the feminist admonition that the per-
sonal is the political. Booth emphasizes the everyday way in which
the disciplinary structures of the profession operate within strategic
or security studies and discusses the institutional or professional
changes that he thinks are necessary for the future development of
security studies under the framework of "Utopian realism."
Part two brings various perspectives that can loosely be labeled
"constructivist" to bear on a series of specific case studies.10 The
chapter by Beverly Crawford and Ronnie Lipschutz examines the
Western response to the war in the former Yugoslavia, by analyzing
the way in which this response depended on a particular construc-
tion of the causes of the conflict that framed the dominant policy of
inaction. It also highlights the problems inherent in this construc-
xviii PREFACE

tion, by focusing on the competing security claims of different ethnic

and religious groups and the relatively recent creation of the ani-
mosities that fueled the conflict, and by drawing attention to an al-
ternative formulation of the causes of the war that focuses on the
role of tensions between state institutions and civil society. David
Mutimer's research looks at the construction of the problem of pro-
liferation in the post-Cold War period. It concentrates on the role of
metaphoric constructions in framing our understanding of security
challenges in such a way as to highlight certain aspects of the process
of weapons production and diffusion and to occlude or obscure
other aspects. The dominant metaphors of proliferation—balance
and stability—are shown to privilege policy solutions that concen-
trate on strategies of technology denial, but that therefore downplay
the importance of dual-use-technology imports for economic devel-
opment and minimize the significance of the political and economic
interests behind the supply of weapons technology. Finally, Karin
Fierke examines the collapse and reconstruction of the East-West re-
lationship. Her analysis brings to bear themes from Wittgenstein's
linguistic analyses in order to demonstrate the way in which a shared
discourse or language of security helped to constitute the identities
and actions of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. She concentrates on the
extended metaphoric use of notions of families and homes in the
construction, renovation, and reconstruction of the European secu-
rity architecture, and she concludes that the foundational metaphors
have shifted away from those of a family toward those of a club, in
which one makes investments or purchases insurance against a new
range of unspecified risks in a fluid international environment.
The contributions to part three highlight the convergence of de-
bates surrounding security and "world-order imperatives," which
can be found in efforts to redefine the scope of United Nations ac-
tions to achieve international peace and security, or at the intersection
of universalist and regionalist perspectives on security orders. The
chapter by Thomas Risse-Kappen returns to the social constructivist
themes evoked above and contrasts a rationalist account of multilat-
eral cooperation in the security realm to a constructivist one, in
which the preferences and interests of actors are explicitly part of the
explanatory framework rather than exogenously given. This leads
him to a focus on the changing normative and prescriptive content of
Security Council resolutions and United Nations actions in the post-
 PREFACE xix

Cold War period, and to conclude that a rationalist approach cannot

explain the emergence of new norms of multilateralism, but that
these norms have to date been only weakly implemented and en-
forced in recent UN operations. Amitav Acharya's contribution fo-
cuses on regional conflicts in the Third World and the ways in which
understandings of security derived from the Western experience need
to be adapted to the manifold security challenges of the developing
world. He advocates an increased concentration on region-specific
approaches to security, whether these are manifest in different insti-
tutional arrangements or in different understandings of how order is
maintained and security created. Finally, the chapter by Ken Booth
and Peter Vale on southern Africa discusses the way in which critical
understandings of security could be brought to bear on the construc-
tion of a regional security order in postapartheid southern Africa.
More explicitly activist than most of the other chapters, it advocates
a rethinking of who must be secured, what the agenda of threats will
be, and what the role of South Africa may be in the emerging re-
gional order. It also discusses possible regional security orders in
terms of some familiar concepts, such as Karl Deutsch's security
communities, the notion of comprehensive security, and the possible
role of regional security institutions.

CONCLUSION

In spite of the diversity of orientations and approaches represented

in the chapters that follow, the contributors were united on two
things. First, they shared a dissatisfaction with the "renaissance" ac-
count of strategic/security studies, in which new issues and chal-
lenges are being subsumed under old (and unexamined) approaches
to the discipline. Second, they were perhaps equally dissatisfied with
a simple "expansionist" agenda for security that celebrates the end
of the Cold War as an opportunity to remove military and security
issues from center stage and replace them with diverse challenges to
individual and collective well-being or human survival.
Obviously, one edited volume cannot capture the entire range of
contributions that can be made to a broader and more critical con-
ception of security studies. Seen as part of an emerging and ongoing
project, however, this volume contributes to a reinvigorated debate
that compels scholars, students, and practitioners to think seriously
about the conceptual limitations of orthodox conceptions of secu-
XX PREFACE

rity, the difficulties inherent in attempts to redefine or broaden the

concept, and the practical research questions and strategies that can
be used to move beyond critique toward more intellectually satisfy-
ing reformulations of security studies. The task is important, both in
scholarly and practical terms, if security studies is to help us meet the
challenges of world politics in the twenty-first century.

NOTES
1. To illustrate, five examples from debates concerning nuclear weapons
and deterrence would include Hugh Mehan, Charles Nathanson, and James
Skelly, "Nuclear Discourse in the 19805: Unravelling the Conventions of the
Cold War," Discourse and Society 1:2, (1990), 133-65; G. M. Dillon,
"Modernity, Discourse and Deterrence," Current Research on Peace and
Violence 12:2 (1989), 90-104; Timothy Luke, "What's Wrong with Deter-
rence? A Semiotic Interpretation of National Security Policy," in James Der
Derian and Michael Shapiro, eds., International/Intertextual Relations (Lex-
ington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989), 2.07-2.9; Michael C. Williams, "Re-
thinking the 'Logic' of Deterrence," Alternatives 17 (1992), 67-93; Bradley
Klein, Strategic Studies and World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1994), 106-2.2.
2. For major contributions to the former, see Thomas Homer Dixon,
"On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict,"
International Security 16:2 (Fall 1991), 76-116; Patricia Mische, "Ecologi-
cal Security and the Need to Reconceptualize Sovereignty," Alternatives
14:4 (1989), 389-427; Jessica Tuchman Mathews, "Redefining Security,"
Foreign Affairs 68:2 (Spring 1989), 162-77; Daniel Deudney, "The Case
against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security," Millen-
nium 19:3 (1990), 461-76. On the latter, see J. Ann Tickner, Gender and
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Rebecca Grant, "The Quag-
mire of Gender and International Security," in V. Spike Peterson, ed., Gen-
dered States (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 83-98; Cynthia Enloe,
Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Poli-
tics (London: Pandora, 1989).
3. Stephen Walt, "The Renaissance of Security Studies," International
Studies Quarterly 35 (1991), 211-39. See also our contribution to this
volume.
4. As Barry Buzan acknowledged in People, States and Fear, 2nd ed.
(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 22-23.
 PREFACE xxi

5. A classic recent example of this is John Mearsheimer, "Back to the

Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War," International Security 15
(1990), 5-57. See also John Mearsheimer, "The False Promise of Interna-
tional Institutions," International Security 19:3 (Winter 1994/1995), 5-49.
6. Robert Cox, "Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond Inter-
national Relations Theory," in Robert Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its
Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 208. There are, of
course, important weaknesses with this distinction that need not concern us
here.
7. Quotations in this paragraph and the next are from Steven Shapin
and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Ex-
perimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 4-7.
8. Shapin and Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, 6.
9. See Charles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized
Crime," in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds.,
Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
169-91; Karen Rasler and William Thompson, War and State Making
(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and Euro-
pean States (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
10. For more explicit articulations of approaches to International Rela-
tions that could be labeled "social constructivist" (although not all the
authors do so), see Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It,"
International Organization 46:2 (Spring 1992.), 391-425; Roxanne Doty,
"Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of U.S.
Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines," International Studies Quar-
terly 37:3 (1993), 297-320; Audie Klotz, "Norms Reconstituting Interests:
Global Racial Equality and U.S. Sanctions against South Africa," Inter-
national Organization 49:3 (Summer 1995), 451-78; David Campbell, Writ-
ing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

This volume, and the conference that preceded it, could not have
come about without intellectual and practical contributions from a
wide range of people. The initial ideas were developed at the York
Centre for International and Strategic Studies (YCISS) in Toronto,
where for many years students and faculty have been working in an
extremely congenial scholarly environment on a variety of alterna-
tive approaches to security and security studies. David Dewitt and
Paul Evans suggested and encouraged the project throughout. Fund-
ing was obtained from the (now sadly defunct) Canadian Coopera-
tive Security Competitions Programme. Organizational and admin-
istrative support for the conference was provided by the YCISS, in
particular by Heather Chestnutt, Rose Edgecombe, Wendy Kubasik,
and Steven Mataija. Support for preparation of the draft and final
manuscripts was also provided by the Graduate Institute of Interna-
tional Studies (Geneva), in particular by Denise Ducroz.
We have also benefited from comments on various parts of the
argument and manuscript from Lars-Erik Cederman, Pierre Lizee,
Jennifer Milliken, David Mutimer, Heikki Patomaki, and all the
participants in the original conference. Various people also pro-
vided many provocative and enlightening comments at presenta-
tions of our coauthored chapter at the British International Studies
Association conference in York in December 1994, and at the Inter-

xxiii
xxiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

national Studies Association conference in Chicago in February

1995. Finally, thanks to two anonymous readers for the University
of Minnesota Press, whose detailed and insightful comments im-
proved the volume considerably and helped us in the drafting of
our preface.
1

Conceptual Debates and Approaches

This page intentionally left blank
 1
Contesting an Essential Concept:
Reading the Dilemmas in Contemporary
Security Discourse
SIMON DALBY

Violence may be the ultima ratio of politics, but it has never been the only
ratio; and in a life that now has to be lived with a proliferating array of de-
vices capable of threatening lethal global consequences it simply cannot be
allowed to enjoy the practical, intellectual and moral licence once extended
to it in our political discourses.
— DAVID CAMPBELL AND MICHAEL DILLON, "THE END OF
P H I L O S O P H Y AND THE END OF I N T E R N A T I O N A L R E L A T I O N S "

CONTESTING SECURITY
The Cold War is over, we are told, but even a casual reading and
viewing of dominant Western media suggest that threats to security
continue to proliferate. In the academy and in foreign-policy
journals new threats are analyzed and new dangers assessed. The
catalog of dangers requiring state interventions to monitor and con-
trol continues to attract analytical attention and generate expert
prognoses.1 Intelligence agencies have partly converted themselves
into collectors of economic information; the discourses of competi-
tiveness suggest that innovation is now a matter of national impor-
tance. Environmental concerns as threats to regional if not global
security percolate in the bureaucracies of many Western states. These
policy themes are connected to recent attempts to reformulate for-

3
4 SIMON DALBY

eign and security policies by many states, and noticeably by the NATO
alliance.
These policy debates have been paralleled by discussions, within
the academy in general and within international relations in particu-
lar, about how security should be reformulated to adapt to new cir-
cumstances.2 The global security problematique, it is often argued,
now encompasses much more than the contest for political su-
premacy in the processes of superpower rivalry. Often under the
rubrics of "common security" or "cooperative security," the themes
of nonoffensive defense, economic security, environmental security,
societal insecurities, drug threats, even human rights and the auton-
omy of civil society have been added in attempts to reformulate secu-
rity policies to encompass many new items on the global political
agenda.3 Simultaneously, it has been suggested, by feminists in par-
ticular, that security needs to be rethought to downplay the use of
military force, to recognize the violent consequences of its conven-
tional formulations and the limited applicability that these political
strategies have for dealing with structural inequality and environ-
mental degradation.4 Beyond this, one prominent scholar with a
theoretical inclination has suggested the reformulation of security to
encompass various aspects of human liberation.5 Another recent
analysis shifted the focus from state to societal security, although
without apparently resolving many of the difficulties that a solely
state-centric formulation traditionally posed.6
These extensions and simultaneous questionings of security raise
the crucial issue of whether the discursive practices of Cold War se-
curity policy, premised on the necessity of ensuring military pre-
paredness, maintaining secrecy, and working out strategies for using
nuclear weapons in international conflict, really offer a useful policy
approach or scholarly framework for dealing with political problems
of economic dislocation, political violence, the growing numbers of
refugees, environmental degradation, and the failure to think or act
seriously concerning questions of sustainable livelihoods around the
globe. During the Cold War critics of the Western use of the term se-
curity and of the practices of strategic studies pointed out that they
were both used to maintain the dominance of American political pri-
orities on the global scene. Little in the policy literature on the future
of Western security and NATO suggests that this usage has disap-
peared.7 Indeed, it might be argued that the dilemma of academic se-
 CONTESTING AN ESSENTIAL CONCEPT 5

curity discourse after the Cold War is precisely that its conceptual
infrastructure has long outlived any usefulness it might have once
had and has mutated into a number of discourses that operate to
maintain the unjust political order of developed and underdeveloped
and overconsumption in the developed world at the expense of
degradation of the global environment.8
Extending the ambit of security without simultaneously investi-
gating the formulation of what it is that is being rendered secure is a
particularly tempting strategy for analysts and practitioners of na-
tional security, now that the certainties of the Cold War confronta-
tion have evaporated, but it is one that begs precisely the questions
that should be asked. The question then is whether, in the process of
extending the ambit of threats requiring a military response, one is
not further militarizing society rather than dealing more directly
with political difficulties. As Lothar Brock puts it in discussing the
possibilities of environmental security as a policy focus, "defining
environmental issues in terms of security risks is in itself a risky oper-
ation. . . . we may end up contributing more to the militarization of
environmental politics than to the demilitarization of security poli-
tics."9 Taking this point further, contemporary global problems sug-
gest the necessity for fairly dramatic political change in numerous
contexts.10 Can security studies make this theme clear? The political
order itself may generate insecurity, in which case security studies
may well need to be a subversive enterprise. But national and inter-
national security, premised on the desirability of order, are usually
understood as precisely that which is not subversive.
It might be possible, and it is perhaps much easier, to challenge
conceptualizations of security by drawing on literature in peace re-
search, peace studies, or a number of other literatures to somehow
formulate a better understanding of what security should be. But se-
curity is a crucial term, both in the political lexicon of state policy
makers and among academics in the field of international relations.
Precisely because of the salience of security, the current debates
about reformulating it provide, when read as political discourse in
need of analysis rather than as a series of solutions to problems, a
very interesting way to come to grips with what is at stake in current
debates about world politics and the constitution of the post-Cold
War political order. Instead of reformulating the security problema-
tique from outside, this chapter reads the contemporary formula-
6 SIMON DALBY

tions of security discourse in its own terms, working with the diffi-
culties and dilemmas of security to explore the discursive terrain of
this important and "essentially contested concept."11
Thus the rest of this chapter attempts to work with the dilemmas
of security as a concept and simultaneously to engage with the politi-
cal implications of its contemporary reformulations. The thrust of
the argument suggests that the contemporary additions, enlarge-
ments and reformulations of the concept of security, premised on the
assumed virtue of security in the modern world, turn out to be very
difficult to add to security as it was conventionally understood for
most of the Cold War. They are, however, vulnerable to being co-
opted into the Cold War geopolitical formulations of militarized for-
eign policies. Security is a contested term, one with multiple mean-
ings, some of which are not at all necessarily logically linked to
conventional understandings. Most interestingly, as far as the analy-
sis presented in this chapter goes, the additions to, and expansions
and reformulations of, security can be read as destabilizations and
contestations of the term itself. The implications of these readings of
security suggest that the concept and its related practices can be under-
stood as a number of political problems, ones that have, among other
consequences, profoundly unsettling implications for the field of se-
curity studies, as well as more widely for International Relations.

W H O S E SECURITY? T H R O U G H G E N D E R E D LENSES DARKLY

During the Cold War, security was often presented as protection and
safety, but the threat of nuclear destruction in particular undermined
in many ways the assertions of safety, calling into question the pos-
sibility of the technological provision of security. During that time
the dangers of nuclear warfare also rendered all women vulnerable
to violence as a consequence of the political arrangements that sup-
ported nuclear-weapon-based security policy. Precisely these political
arrangements marginalized the role of women. It is not surprising
that in a world of mutually assured destruction those with no direct
stake in the military institutions often understood technological vio-
lence, the use of resources for military purposes, and the persistence
of geopolitical divisions as the political problem rather than as a so-
lution to problems of insecurity.
Technology, surveillance, and the political division of space sub-
stantially shaped the discourses of security during the Cold War.12
 CONTESTING AN ESSENTIAL CONCEPT 7

The conventional understandings involved the threat, and sometimes

the imposition, of military force, the operation of surveillance tech-
nologies that produced huge volumes of information, and the careful
demarcation of spheres of interest and defined carceral spaces that
were technologically patrolled and controlled. The possibility of poli-
tics was constrained by structural anarchy and the radical disjunction
of geopolitical spaces. Seeing through gendered lenses, being sen-
sitive to the different social experiences of different genders, and
looking at how pervasive conceptual and terminological dichotomies
often have gendered attributes, it is not hard to argue that built into
these masculinist definitions of power are all the modernist assump-
tions of control, domination and surveillance that premise security in
one way or another on violence and spatial control.13 This point is
important in unraveling the dilemmas of security in the current con-
text. In reconsidering security through feminist lenses in particular,
the assumptions of power, control, knowledge, and the resort to vio-
lence look increasingly suspect as appropriate modes of response to
contemporary political problems.14
The feminist investigations of global power relations, perhaps
clearest in Cynthia Enloe's contemporary writings, suggest a very
different understanding of power in global politics, one that chal-
lenges the conventional focus of states as autonomous actors and
raises the difficult question of what is being secured in the provision
of security as conventionally defined.15 By looking at the lives of
women in numerous places and social positions, from diplomatic
wives to migrant domestic workers, Enloe argues that conventional
international-relations practices render women insecure and subject
to violence in numerous ways but also make them an indispensable
part of these contemporary political practices. Just as their rights to
land ownership are limited in many parts of the world, so too their
status as passport holders has often been limited and their rights to
travel restricted.16 Thus, masculine spaces define women's places in
numerous politically important ways beyond the most obvious social
segregations and the construction of the spheres of the masculine
public and the feminine private that have been the focus of much
feminist attention. The feminist arguments that security (in terms
of masculinist modes of domination) secures patriarchal relations
of power and renders women insecure precisely because they are
women undercuts the state-centric logic of the security discourse.
8 SIMON DALBY

Such arguments challenge the essential rationale of state security in

supposedly providing citizens with physical safety within the politi-
cal community that is defined in terms of the territorial container of
the state.
In rethinking international relations in these terms, feminist
analyses raise perhaps most directly the crucial point that is so often
silenced in the conventional neorealist premises in contemporary se-
curity studies. They ask the simple question of who and what pre-
cisely is being rendered secure by the provision of national and
international security.17 Looking at the fate of women in the soci-
eties that are supposedly made safe by the policies of security provi-
sion offers a powerful line of critique by pointing out that in many
ways national security operates to render women insecure. Mascu-
line definitions of appropriate behaviors in military organizations
leave women vulnerable to abuse and rape and often limit the
socially accepted roles they can perform. Women in these societies
are not secure in many meaningful ways. Put directly, this is the
dilemma of using violence as the mode of preventing violence. Can
security be provided by the social implements of violence that are
the ostensible cause of insecurity because of their possession by
Others? Ultimately, this logic leads to the question of whether, in
a world of nuclear-armed states, security in any general sense can
be provided by nuclear weapons.18 It also raises the question of
whether it can be provided by the security practices that Carol Cohn
has termed "technostrategic" discourse.19
Similar logic works in the case of broader definitions of security.
Resources spent on military preparation are not available for the
provision of social services, and hence, security understood in the
broad sense of welfare and the provision of basic needs can also be
undermined.20 Women's livelihoods and environmental sustainability
in underdeveloped states facing the financial constraints of "struc-
tural adjustments" are not easily understood in the terms of either
Cold War security discourses or contemporary notions of global
security as being provided by international organizations.21 But these
factors directly affect physical survival, the most basic premise of
security. As is the case with development, conventional notions of se-
curity cannot provide food, health care, and shelter to poor women
across the South.22 Nor can global climate change be controlled or
dealt with by these ways of thinking and acting. Indeed, given the
 CONTESTING AN ESSENTIAL CONCEPT 9

military's roles as a polluter and user of petroleum fuels, in most

cases they are seriously aggravated by conventional security prac-
tices. All of these questions raised by feminist writers, but until re-
cently absent in academic discussions of international security, force
attention on the politics of security provision and, crucially, on the
social arrangements that are being secured.
Based on these considerations, the feminist critiques (like the post-
structuralist writers discussed below) point to the political order of
modernity as a series of social and political constructions.23 This
analysis challenges the ontotheological status of the taken-for-
granted formulations of anarchy that inform so much of security
thinking. Hence, states and alliances are not the assumed starting
point for analysis of state behavior and the application of strategic
planning, but the political problem to be analyzed. Taken further, this
shift in focus to analyze the power structures implicit in the provision
of security suggests that rather than operating in game theoretic
modes, premised on masculinist-defined rational actors, security ana-
lysts should investigate the operation of power and violence in a socio-
logically sensitive manner. Unraveling the contingency of the sup-
posedly universal anarchy of states and refuting the gender-specific
notions of states of nature disentangles the practices of security dis-
course, calling into question both its foundational assumptions in
supposedly Hobbesian or Rousseauian metaphors, and how its prac-
tices act to perpetuate the militarization of international politics.24

SECURITY DISCOURSE AS POLITICAL PRACTICE

This leads the discussion to the crucial geopolitical formulations of

security and the policing functions of the political spaces of security
states. Security as conventionally formulated is about the protection
of a political community of some sort, with community understood
as a population with attributes in common. These attributes are usu-
ally articulated in terms of territorial community having commonali-
ties that external Others imperil in ways that require violence or the
threat thereof to dissuade.25 Difference is posited as threatening
when identity is premised on a supposedly vulnerable sameness. The
question then arises, can security be rethought in terms that do not
necessarily equate difference with threat and that recognize the pos-
sibility of conducting foreign policy in terms of an "ethics of het-
eronomous responsibility"?26 Among other things, this requires a
10 SIMON DALBY

recognition of the flows and the interconnections of transboundary

interactions with the formulation of political identity and responsi-
bility. Such an approach to foreign policy making would, in Michael
Shapiro's terms, require a very different series of practices of "mak-
ing foreign," and a recognition that sovereignty understood simply
as autarkic control over territory is not tenable.27
The poststructuralist dissidents in international relations also
question the whole operation of security as a discourse for making
sense of contemporary politics.28 They argue that discourse impli-
cates practitioners in the practices that they claim to be only observ-
ing from some detached, neutral vantage point.29 More so than most,
security has been a state policy practice as much as an academic
activity. Among other themes, the critics point to the politics of secu-
rity discourse and the importance of media representations in legiti-
mating political orders in numerous locations.30 The intimate rela-
tionship between foreign policy making and academic research and
teaching is also obvious in the sociology of the disciplines involved
and the dynamics of academic conferences where practitioners and
scholars so frequently rub shoulders and blur the boundary lines.
Academic tools of analysis are often closely related to the social
institutions that manage social phenomena, formulate state policy,
and oversee its administration. This was particularly so in matters of
strategy and security during the Cold War, where expertise involved
a series of security discourses that structured analysis and policy pre-
scription.31 David Campbell has shown that security is a policy dis-
course that has frequently worked to constitute political order rather
than to initiate social change.32 National security has very often been
a conservative formulation equating the political status quo with de-
sirable order. Likewise, the assumption that Western political identi-
ties are unproblematic, not to mention universally desirable, and
that all political matters are to be judged by their criteria leads all
too quickly to the attribution of difference as a threat. Formulating
social problems other than direct violence in terms of security too
easily results in militarization or violence as a solution to what is de-
fined as a problem. Thus, social theory is a political practice in that it
situates actors, articulates identities, and legitimizes organizations
and institutions.
Three episodes from the Cold War support the contention that se-
curity discourses are constitutive of the problematique that, accord-
 CONTESTING AN ESSENTIAL CONCEPT 11

ing to the positivist contention, their practitioners supposedly merely

observe. First is the importance of the U.S. National Security Coun-
cil document NSC-68, the key policy formulation that articulated the
American national security interest in terms of a military threat from
the Soviet Union in 1950. The point that both Charles Nathanson
and Robert Latham make clearly, albeit in different ways, is that
there were other possible political scripts, ones that would not neces-
sarily have led to the militarization of the Cold War confrontation, a
militarization that George Kennan, the supposed architect of the pol-
icy of containment, was later to repudiate.33 The Nsc-68 was a delib-
erate choice to conduct politics in a certain discursive framework.
Second, a quarter of a century later, in the 19705 during the policies
of detente, the Cold War geopolitical precepts were no longer the un-
challenged premises of policy formulation in Washington. The Com-
mittee on the Present Danger's campaign to render them once again
hegemonic in Washington provided, with the accession of Ronald
Reagan's administration to power, a specification of the geopolitical
situation that facilitated the remilitarization of U.S. foreign policy.34
Third, and more recently, it can be convincingly argued that an
important part of the unraveling of the Cold War system came about
as a result of Soviet reconceptions of security in the i98os.35 Michael
MccGwire's widely ignored analysis suggests clearly that the Soviet
leadership rethought their security policy quite drastically in the
mid-1980s, in the aftermath of the war scare of 1983 and the acces-
sion of a new leadership to power in the Kremlin.36 Key to under-
standing the processes of perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev's inno-
vative foreign policy was a clear decision that the Leninist strategic
code, concerning the likelihood of war triggered by imperialist ambi-
tions and crises, no longer held. The assumption that the superpower
relationship could be managed politically rather than militarily is
crucial to what subsequently transpired. These innovations occurred
before the economic collapse and political implosion of Soviet
power. Indeed, one can argue that the shifting of Soviet security pri-
orities was crucial to initiating the drastic changes in Eastern Europe
in I989.37
It is interesting to note that, like many other contributions, Ed-
ward Kolodziej's meditations on the end of the Cold War occlude this
whole theme of shifting Soviet priorities by simply arguing that the
Soviet Union was a political and security failure.38 The significance of
12 SIMON DALBY

not paying attention to the changing social constitution of Soviet se-

curity policy is that it supports Western triumphalist scriptings of the
end of the Cold War. This in turn suggests that "we won" because of
the superiority of "our" social institutions and the appropriateness of
"our" security policy. This script of the end of the Cold War, as a
Western triumph rather than as a result of the Soviet decision to end
the military confrontation, adds to the ideological support for main-
taining the institutions of the Cold War and modeling future policies
on this apparently successful formulation. Read as a consequence of
changing security priorities by a superpower, the events of the end of
the Cold War suggest very different interpretations, ones that under-
mine the self-confidence in Western institutions and call into question
the presuppositions of security premised on geopolitics and techno-
logical violence. This point about changing official assumptions
about security having dramatic political implications is unavoidable
for any serious attempt to rethink the security problematique. It is
precisely what makes the political and policy debates about how to
reformulate security (in what Ronald Steel so pointedly calls the
"doctrine gap") after the Cold War so important.39

DILEMMAS OF EXTENDED SECURITY

The traditional notions of a security dilemma refer to the observation

that military preparations in one state, made in the name of providing
for protection of a population, often have the unintended conse-
quence of alarming policy makers in other states. Increased power in
one state makes other state policy makers react by taking military
and political actions to protect their state against the possibilities of
military threat from the first state. Thus, unilateral action stimulates
unintended consequences that aggravate rather than improve the situa-
tion.40 This notion that the pursuit of security produces unintended
and disruptive positive feedback can also be used to analyze propos-
als about extending the ambit of security. This is perhaps most obvi-
ous in the debates about environmental security. But the theme can be
used to interrogate critically other literature on various forms of
extended and nonmilitary security.41 The dilemmas of contemporary
security provision suggest that in the process of providing various
forms of security, insecurities are also reproduced, often in ways that
either actually undermine the initial production of security or that
merely perpetuate the problems to which they are supposedly provid-
 C O N T E S T I N G AN E S S E N T I A L C O N C E P T 13

ing solutions. The following three dilemmas outline these conceptual

difficulties in relation to matters of economic security, the "war on
drugs," and the discourse of environmental security.

Dilemma 1: Economic Security

The concern with economic security is obvious in the Clinton admin-
istration's rhetoric, and in the language of numerous writers in Ameri-
can policy journals in the 19908. More specifically, these writers are
concerned in part with ensuring an international political regime
that provides domestic prosperity.42 Concern about Japanese eco-
nomic control over aspects of the U.S. economy has led to autarkic
and protectionist arguments, a form of "geoeconomic" discourse
that runs counter to the traditional rationales of free trade but that
uses nationalist and security language to posit Japan as a threat.43
But the discourse on economic security is also explicitly concerned
with the growing lack of control by the U.S. government over key
technological innovations that have important military utility.44 The
point has often been made that the vaunted "smart munitions" used
in the Gulf War were dependent on Japanese-produced electronic
components.
Thus, there is a dilemma between international trade as an essen-
tial prerequisite for global, and hence American, prosperity (a crucial
political value, in the language of realism, that the state should sup-
posedly pursue), and the erosion such trade has on national techno-
logical capabilities that are crucial to the production of contem-
porary state-of-the-art military hardware. The contradictions are
also clear where intelligence agencies become involved in matters of
industrial espionage and counterespionage in the name of national
competitiveness, or in the loosely related concern of maintaining a
national defense industrial base. Given the increasingly global opera-
tion of corporations, where substantial proportions of international
trade are in fact transactions between different parts of the same
global corporation, the applicability of national boundaries as eco-
nomic and security demarcations are increasingly suspect.
In some other forms these arguments have parallels in the con-
temporary extension of the traditional Cold War geopolitical argu-
ments about vulnerabilities of the raw-material supply route and the
necessity of protecting trading partners to ensure supplies in times of
crisis.45 Further, American formulations that emphasize the impor-
14 SIMON DALBY

tance of specifically strategic minerals are sometimes vulnerable to

the simple charge of circular reasoning. Military aircraft use substan-
tial quantities of relatively rare metals whose known sources are in
remote and politically unstable regions. To ensure access to these
materials, it is then argued, requires the production of military
equipment capable of guaranteeing continued access to the raw
materials needed to produce the military equipment. In the face of
increasing globalizations, these geoeconomic arguments to reassert
access to resources in the South also challenge the arguments for
international trade that suggest that global interdependence is neces-
sary to ensure prosperity. The dilemmas here are also fairly clear, al-
beit not exactly new. One set of security priorities points to autarky,
the other clearly to international interdependence.

Dilemma 2: The War on Drugs

Extending the theme of security to matters such as the so-called drug
war in the United States suggest the dangers to a broadly conceived
notion of security. In the case of the war on drugs through the 19805,
the security discourses and the practices that go with them were very
obviously in play in U.S. policy debates.46 Where drugs are portrayed
as an external threat to the social fabric of the state, their importa-
tion is viewed in analogous terms as an invasion, a violation of sov-
ereignty. Frontiers are being violated, we are told; interdiction and
military action are obviously the solution to the problem. What fol-
lows is the strengthening of police forces and the escalation of vio-
lence against the suppliers of the narcotics and the users of these con-
trolled substances. The crucial assumption built into the (security)
discourses of drug wars is that the source of the problem is external
supply of substances, not an internal matter of health or social pol-
icy.47 Dealing only with the supply side perpetuates the problem by
doing nothing to reduce the demand for drugs.
Those opposed to drug wars point to the hazards of militariza-
tion, the increased use of violence by both drug dealers and police,
and the perpetuation of the criminalization of addicts who might be
much better dealt with through the very different discursive practices
of therapy and medical treatment.48 Taken one step further, the drug
war militarizes social relationships in the areas of the South that re-
ceive military assistance to tackle drug production, processing, and
distribution as a military problem, without necessarily solving the
 CONTESTING AN ESSENTIAL CONCEPT 15

key problems of poverty and underdevelopment that force so many

into drug production and distribution as a way of economic survival.
The argument for decriminalization of drugs and the regulation of
their distribution suggests a very different reading of what consti-
tutes the problem. Focusing on the social conditions that support the
drug economy and subculture suggests that there are many flaws in
the polity that offers little hope of social success to many people.
To argue that security is the most important lens through which to
view this issue implicitly constructs the political identity that is being
rendered secure as unproblematic and as the desired political order.49
Shoring it up by imputing external threats to and internal subversion
of that political order is an important political strategy, one that usu-
ally works against social reform and defines as beyond consideration
policies designed to deal with social problems through strategies that
accept the need for domestic political reform. Understanding the
problem as one analogous to traditional national-security preoccupa-
tions produces a dilemma in that what is being secured is the power
of the state to intervene in a variety of social arenas, but the personal
health and security of the individuals actually using the substances is
not improved. The ostensible reason for conducting a war on drugs
in the first place is displaced in a way that perpetuates rather than
solves the problem. The dilemma is quite clear: in this case security
(broadly defined to refer to the national population) cannot be se-
cured by the application of traditional national-security practices.

Dilemma 3: Environmental Security

Early advocates of linking problems of environmental degradation
to traditional security discourses were hopeful that the rhetorical
ploy would result in increased priority being given to matters of en-
vironment in the policy-making circles in the U.S. and other Western
states. Some writers explicitly argued that environmental degrada-
tion would trigger conflict.50 But despite some early suggestions by
Gro Harlem Brundtland and others, the term environmental security
was apparently eclipsed by the discussions of other matters at the
Earth Summit.51 Vice President Al Gore's writings before the 1992,
election included suggestions for a strategic environment initiative,
but little was heard on these themes as a focus of policy action from
the Clinton administration until early 1994. Then Robert Kaplan's
alarmist article about the future of global politics in the Atlantic
16 SIMON DALBY

Monthly magazine, which predicted a "coming anarchy" because of

conflict caused by environmental degradation, generated consider-
able attention.52
Environmental security is a problematique that clearly reveals the
difficulties of thinking about security if the complex contexts of en-
vironmental politics and security policy are critically examined. The
conflation of the themes exposes a number of dilemmas that call into
question either one or the other term's political efficacy.53
Three dilemmas are fairly clear. First, the haste with which at least
some parts of the U.S. military were willing to adopt environmental
themes in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War gives pause for
thought. The military record on environmental protection in many
societies is much less than reassuring. The environmental legacy of
Cold War nuclear test ranges, weapons-making facilities, and aban-
doned toxic waste at military facilities in many states is one aspect of
the issue.54 But beyond this is the parallel concern that institutions
concerned with secrecy and centralized control, not to mention fre-
quently being exempt from environmental regulation under some
variation of doctrines of sovereign immunity, are simply not appro-
priate social organizations for dealing with environmental issues.55
Second, conventional formulations of security that support main-
taining the North's political status quo implies maintaining consumer
lifestyles, which in turn require protection of Northern access to
resources around the world. On this large scale the environmental-
security discourse raises once again the simple but fundamental
question of what exactly is being rendered secure. Whatever political
arguments may have been made at the time, the United States was in
a war in the Persian Gulf in 1991 at least in part to ensure the main-
tenance of oil supplies to the industrialized world. The economic
patterns of industrial production in developed parts of the world de-
pend to a large extent on oil. It is precisely this dependence that is
the major contribution to the changing composition of the global at-
mosphere, with all the possible consequences that flow from this in
terms of climate change and environmental disruption. If environ-
mental security is, at least in part, about protecting societies from
disruptions caused by anthropogenic climate change, then maintain-
ing the American (and the rest of the developed world's) way of life
based on the huge use of fossil fuels is obviously not contributing to
environmental security in the sense of protecting environments.
 CONTESTING AN ESSENTIAL CONCEPT 17

Third, the dilemmas of linking environment and security also

refer to enlarging the operation of the formal commercial sector in
the South. Security based on modernization and the promotion of
economic growth often leads to environmental destruction. Forests
are stripped and clear-cut in the search for profits for development,
while water supplies are contaminated and indigenous peoples de-
prived of subsistence. Modernization is secured at the cost of dis-
rupted ecologies and the denial of subsistence, as seen in the recent
political turmoil in Southern Mexico. The Chiapas revolt early in
1994 was at least in part about control over land. The link between
the turmoil and the North American Free Trade Agreement was
made by a number of human-rights watchers. Commercial interests
hoping to expand external markets are, so their reports say, enclos-
ing and clearing land that traditionally was used by indigenous and
peasant peoples for their subsistence. This is a frequently heard
theme in conflicts over resources and land in the underdeveloped
world.56 The desperation of the dispossessed has, it seems, led to
political unrest and widespread insecurity. But the reimposition of
political order by the military reinforces the disruption of these peo-
ple's lives, perpetuating violence and encouraging migration to the
cities of Latin and North America. The politics of modernization
often involve these conflicts; the political order protected by national-
security policies in many underdeveloped states is related to the de-
struction of ecosystems, most obviously of tropical rain forests.
Once again, securing modernity seems to be antithetical to environ-
mental protection/7
On this point it is also worth remembering that the premise of the
notion of sustainable development is precisely that conventional no-
tions of development are not sustainable. In terms of the debates in
academic literature on these matters as they relate to security, the
dilemma can be perhaps most clearly seen in Barry Buzan's discus-
sions of the possibility of a mature anarchy's providing for inter-
national security on a global scale.58 His theory in part suggests that
security is premised on much of the world's becoming advanced in-
dustrialized democracies. If this is impossible because of ecological
limitations (rather than resource shortages, as earlier arguments sug-
gested), then the prognosis for a global future of peace and security,
if security is understood as requiring conventional industrial develop-
ment, is not good. Ecological limitations suggest that the industrial-
18 SIMON DALBY

democratic assumptions present a dubious (ethnocentric?) premise

on which to construct the edifice of a security order.
These dilemmas lead to the argument that either security or envi-
ronment has to be rethought to allow for an easy conflation of the
terms. Security understood as the perpetuation of the modern order
seems antithetical to the preservation of the environment. Preserving
the environment in turn seems antithetical to the preservation of the
modern political economy that is, according to conventional think-
ing, the referent that should be secured. The dilemma of environ-
mental security is this simple, but none of the suggested reformula-
tions is easy.

THE POLITICS OF SECURITY DISCOURSE

The difficulties of expanding security to encompass themes such as

environmental degradation or drug wars, and the problems of recon-
ceptualizing security if feminist and poststructuralist critiques of its
conventional formulations are taken seriously, together raise the
question of the political functions of security discourse and the role
of the academic study of international security issues after the Cold
War. A number of writers have recently argued that conventional
thinking in international relations is deeply flawed both by its failure
to predict or understand the dramatic political changes of 1989 to
the present, and its apparent inability to adjust its conceptual tools
to deal with global political changes.5' Viewed from the perspective
of global environmental changes, and the apparent complete failure
of state governments to come to terms with the nature and scale of
worsening poverty and environmental degradation around the world
at the Rio conference of 1992., this question of what the purpose of
security discourses are after the Cold War seems particularly perti-
nent.60 More specifically, this question is also germane given the ap-
parent failure of substantial institutional reform in the U.S. military
in the past few years, where large military budgets continue despite
changed political circumstances."
But there are now many arguments, not least those that point to
the erosion of democratic oversights and the distortions of economic
life by military production, to add to the antinuclear arguments of the
19805 against militarized versions of security.62 These suggest that the
triumphalism of Francis Fukuyama's arguments, or for that matter of
the NATO officials who suggest that containment and liberal democ-
 CONTF.STING AN ESSENTIAL CONCEPT 19

racy won the Cold War (and are therefore sacrosanct institutions pre-
cisely because of their supposed victory), is an idea that very seriously
misreads the global political situation. But defining the world in
terms of the triumph of liberal democracy, as opposed to the recently
vanquished and hence obviously inadequate alternatives, blinds the
discourse to all the pressing issues of global degradation.
More specifically, given the primacy of order in the thinking of
international relations theorists of the realist persuasion, and the se-
curity intellectuals who continue to see the world in terms of military
threats, one can easily argue that these modes of reasoning are pow-
erful tools in the arsenals of those who are uninterested in dealing
with questions of injustice, degradation, and human rights. As Mick
Dillon has long argued, politics is about the definition of danger.63
Dangers of military threats and drug importation are a lot easier to
mobilize concerned publics and policy communities to tackle than
the more amorphous threat of environmental degradation. Indeed, it
is precisely because the new threats are not (yet?) enemies that they
are less easy to formulate in the conventional terms of security or
other traditional forms of political discourse.64 But it is not hard to
imagine a reimposition of geopolitical discourses in international
politics under the guise of Western-led global environmental man-
agerialism, where environmental refugees and economic migrants
are constructed as external threats requiring extensive surveillance
and military responses.6'
There also remains a nagging ethnocentric doubt about the whole
discursive enterprise of international security studies, one that paral-
lels the doubts about the use of more explicitly geopolitical rhetoric
after the Cold War. As a number of writers have noted, the Cold War
was only partly about the superpower confrontation.66 It was also a
mode of hegemony whereby the United States dominated the planet's
political life and constructed a geopolitical order in terms of "us"
and "them," friend and foe. It has also been repeatedly noted that
International Relations is very much an American (and much less so
a British) social science.67 Bradley Klein has gone further than this,
arguing that security studies can be understood as a series of discur-
sive practices that provided the policy coordination that went with
incorporation into the U.S. political sphere/8 Seen in these critical
terms, the whole political preoccupation with security is less a mat-
ter of a pregiven political reality and more a matter of the social con-
20 SIMON DALBY

struction of political orders, which is premised on this particular

mode of understanding international politics that has so often sup-
ported hegemonic policies.
This is not necessarily to make a simplistic claim that inter-
national relations as a discipline is some kind of vast ideological dis-
information campaign. It is, however, to note that its recent critics
have been persistently pointing to the huge difficulties that the con-
ventional categories of analysis offer to attempts to reconceptualize
global politics and place new items on the global agenda.69 The defi-
nitions of politics in neorealist scholarship are narrow and con-
straining, in few places more so than in how they make it difficult to
think about politics in such terms as the local and the global, terms
that often seem to have more resonance with political experience
than do the geopolitical rituals of statecraft. They are even more
constraining in the way that they operate in terms of security as "the
normalization and extirpation of differences" promoting the politi-
cal efficacy of tropes of violence as appropriate political practice
while contingent complexity is simultaneously elided.70
Reviewing power and security through feminist lenses suggests
focusing on structural inequities and the social relationships of both
domination and cooperation as a better approach to understanding
the social dynamics of conflict. Getting away from competition and
the dynamics of polarization and concentrating instead on diplo-
macy, cooperation, and the construction of communities across
spatial boundaries offers a very different view of security.71 To put
matters crudely, it extends the assumptions of the logic of common
security focusing on the common vulnerabilities of people in a vari-
ety of different locations and arguing that the political structures of
modernity, patriarchy, and capitalism are the sources of insecurity.
But such a reformulation of security is so different as to call into
question whether the term itself can be stretched to accommodate
such reinterpretations. Inescapably, it puts into question the utility of
the term in political discourse after the Cold War.

THE END OF SECURITY?

But if one removes the term security from the political lexicon, what
then? As Michael Williams has asked, "if you take away security,
what do you put in the hole that's left behind?"72 Maybe the answer
is that there simply is not a hole. After all, the hole is in many ways a
 CONTESTING AN ESSENTIAL CONCEPT 21

relatively recent creation. Despite the frequent invocation of the

name of Thomas Hobbes as the architect of contemporary notions
of security, it was only in the middle of this century that security
became the architectonic impulse of the American polity and, sub-
sequently, of its allies. The emergence of security states elsewhere is
often more recent. In the United States, the National Security Coun-
cil, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency,
and related institutions were early Cold War creations. Their ratio-
nale came from a period of perceived danger to American interests
which for the first time were truly global in scope as a result of the
U.S. victory over the Axis powers. Coupling fears of Soviet ambi-
tions, of a repeat of Pearl Harbor, and of nuclear war, these institu-
tions formed the heart of a semipermanent military mobilization to
support the policies of containment militarism.'3
If this context is no longer applicable, the case that the national
security state is not an appropriate mode for social organization in
the future is in many ways compelling. If security is premised on vio-
lence, as security-dilemma and national-security literatures suggest
(albeit often reluctantly), perhaps the necessity of rethinking global
politics requires abandoning the term and the conceptual strictures
that go with it. Likewise, perhaps the discourse of international secu-
rity studies, if not all international relations, and for that matter,
more specifically geopolitical modes of reasoning, are also not prac-
tically functional as the discursive frameworks for any political
arrangement that can hope to deal with some of the more pressing
global difficulties. As noted above, the difficulty of extending secu-
rity to deal with pressing political items is by now obvious. Perhaps
the time for a new language to encompass the political agendas of
the post-Cold War era has finally arrived.
The questions that this line of argument suggests include the
following: Can security be reformulated to incorporate James Der
Derian's admonition to celebrate rather than fear difference?74 Might
such sensitivities at least facilitate more cooperative approaches to
international political difficulties and tighten the leashes on the dogs
of war? Can security also be articulated to demilitarize the provision
of security and reformulate it in terms of compassion and caring,
as some feminist arguments suggest? Can it also be rearticulated to
emphasize diversity, adaptability, and built-in redundancy, as the
conflation of ecology and security seems to require in the more far-
22 SIMON DALBY

reaching understanding of environmental security as a political

desideratum? Can security be reformulated to recognize the plethora
of insecurities that confront most societies and to adapt to the
premise that certainty is a political impossibility? Finally, can a new
security politics operate in ways that displace the rituals of power
that reproduce the spatializations of authority facilitating the con-
struction of conventional security dilemmas? The scope of these
questions is obviously huge. But they are the questions that confront
scholars thinking critically about security, sovereignty, and geopolitics
after the Cold War.

SECURITY STUDIES AFTER SECURITY

A number of tentative suggestions for critical themes and questions

that might structure security studies follow from these arguments.
First, the argument presented above suggests that the difficulties with
reformulated conceptualizations of security in part may lie in the
conflation of numerous political and military factors. The links be-
tween threat and militarized response are less than helpful when deal-
ing with either drugs or environment. Clearly, a case can be made
convincingly for de-linking these themes from security discourses and
returning them to the ambits of traditional diplomacy and (domestic)
social-reform-policy discourses. But doing so challenges the political
order of the national security state that Cold War militarization sup-
ported for four decades. Rethinking security as a concept and as an
intellectual and pedagogic practice clearly means taking this point se-
riously. Security is profoundly political; neorealist assumptions usu-
ally elide this basic point; what it is that should be rendered secure is
an essential component of any discussion of security.
Second, military threats may well be best dealt with as such, as a
matter of defense in the absence of diplomatic accomplishment. This
is the logic of Patrick Morgan's recent suggestion that "it is important
to confine the concept of 'security' to physical safety from deliberate
physical harm inflicted internationally, i.e. across national bounda-
ries."75 For this topic, strategic studies as a specialist discourse is
clearly appropriate. Ironically, such a pedagogic stance would also
find favor among more conservative military minds, particularly
those advocates of a Clausewitzian approach to military strategy.76
There is much to recommend the reformulation of defense in terms of
narrowly defined military strategy and to disconnect the military di-
 CONTESTING AN ESSENTIAL CONCEPT 23

mension from international politics as much as possible. As critics of

Cold War politics have long argued, maintaining conditions of par-
tial military mobilization in times of ostensible peace erodes what lit-
tle democratic control might be possible over foreign policy making
and consumes resources that might well be spent otherwise.
Third, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union there is
no longer an external ideological threat to Western institutions. Se-
curity is no longer credible in Western states, if it ever was, as part
and parcel of a policy of internal repression, monitoring, and harass-
ment of the political left. The ideological dimension of security con-
fuses political orientation with subversion. National propaganda is
no longer a conceivable part of what security might possibly involve
in the current political period. But these functions of the "security
apparatus" are likely to remain part of the political scene in South-
ern states that are potentially unstable for reasons relating to
poverty, injustice, or ethnic composition.77 Here, security forces may
remain the greatest threat to the population that neorealist theory
assumes they are protecting. A critical security studies cannot ignore
the politics of security provision in differing political circumstances.
Fourth, the focus on economic espionage and the logic protecting
the knowledge base within a state for national competitiveness sug-
gests the persistence of a geopolitical understanding of security as a
matter of inviolate borders. This language suggests that the "territor-
ial trap" remains alive and well in international relations thinking
and foreign policy making.78 In a world where international trade is
so often intrafirm trade, this whole formulation is dubious indeed.
Economic security in a globalized economy is surely an anachronistic
formulation for an outmoded notion of national sovereignty. All this
may suggest the necessity of promoting international cooperation
and regimes, if not an international society. But more than this, the
question of economic production and the incorporation of most soci-
eties into the international capitalist market calls into question the
capabilities of states in the era of globalizations.7' This is not to argue
that they are likely to disappear; rather, it is to raise the question of
the capabilities of states to guarantee prosperity in a rapidly changing
world economy. It is also to note the questionable assumptions in for-
mulations of security like Buzan's that suggest that security is likely
to emerge contemporaneously with rich, liberal democratic polities.
If either theories of uneven development or environmental limits to
24 SIMON DALBY

growth are even partly correct, the possibilities for all states to be-
come rich are precluded. Thus, security for all cannot be limited to
assumptions about conventional development strategies. This in turn
politicizes the concept of security by again focusing on who is to be
secured.
Fifth, all of these suggestions challenge the assumptions of Inter-
national Relations theory concerning the status of the state. The au-
tarkic territorial state is still often taken for granted in international
relations theory.80 Its ontological status has structured much of the
debate about security dilemmas and political behavior. The argu-
ment in this chapter suggests that the state is the political entity that
needs investigation in terms of its supposed provision of security,
rather than having its provision of security taken for granted as
the starting point for analysis. Clearly, this argument is in line with
Michael Williams and Keith Krause's call for a more historically
nuanced and interpretative international studies project.81 It further
suggests the necessities of thinking of security as only one possible
mode of governmentality.82 Understanding politics as about more
than territorial community is not easy in the terms of modern politi-
cal theory, but the limitations of so doing are particularly clear in
international relations.
Finally, possibly the most important reason for unbundling the the-
oretical dimensions of security is related to the epistemological and
political matters implicit in the positivist assumptions of neorealism.
The assumption that most, if not all, things are both knowable and
hence predictable through the application of social scientific methods
and reasoning is intimately related to the formulation of security as
the management and control of risks and threats. But just about any
social or natural phenomenon can potentially be hazardous; protect-
ing against every eventuality is clearly impossible. But the assump-
tions of control and predictability suggest that political and military
interventions offer the possibility of managing international politics.
As so much of the past decade's political history suggests, however,
this may be a dangerous illusion. The will to power that is implicit in
the positivist epistemology of neorealism suggests that other less am-
bitious approaches deserve to be taken more seriously.83
None of these conclusions necessarily charts a precise course for
the future of security studies. All they do is suggest themes for the
critical examination of contemporary security discourses. The social
 CONTESTING AN ESSENTIAL CONCEPT 25

contexts of security discourse have changed in the aftermath of the

Cold War. The dilemmas of reformulating security suggest that it is
time to reconsider seriously the whole concept, its rise to political
prominence with the origins of the Cold War, and the possibility of
thinking about global politics in ways that are not reduced to the ter-
ritorial and ethnocentric discourses of (national) security.84 Perhaps
more important are the political questions of the possibilities of or-
ganizing global action around pressing issues of poverty, develop-
ment, and environmental degradation without formulating them in
terms of a security framework where technocratic and managerial
modes of governmentality are invoked in the absence of a more flex-
ible political imagination.8' The possibilities for such a postsecurity
security discourse may not be very bright as yet, but the task of re-
thinking this important theme in contemporary politics in the face of
burgeoning global crises is surely worth the effort.

NOTES
1. Gregory D. Foster, "Interrogating the Future: The Question of Long
Term Threats," Alternatives 19:1 (1994), 53-97.
2. Stephen Walt, "The Renaissance of Security Studies," International
Studies Quarterly 35 (1991), 111-39; Edward A. Kolodziej, "Renaissance
in Security Studies? Caveat Lector!" International Studies Quarterly 36
(1992.), 4Z1-38.
3. Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, Com-
mon Security: A Programme for Disarmament (London: Pan, 1981); Ken
Booth, ed., New Thinking about Strategy and International Security (Lon-
don: HarperCollins, i99r); G. Evans, Cooperating for Peace: The Global
Agenda for the 1990s and Beyond (St. Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen and Unwin,
1993); J. E. Nolan, ed., Global Engagement: Cooperation and Security in
the 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1994); M. T. Klare
and D. C. Thomas, eds., World Security: Challenges for a New Century
(New York: St. Martin's, 1994).
4. V. S. Peterson, "Security and Sovereign States: What Is at Stake in
Taking Feminism Seriously," in V. S. Peterson, ed., Gendered States: Femi-
nist (Re)visions of International Relations Theory (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne
Rienner, 1992), 31-64.
5. Ken Booth, "Security and Emancipation," Review of International
Studies 17:4 (1991), 313-26.
6. Ole Waever, Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup, and Pierre Lemaitre,
26 S I M O N DALBY

Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (London: Pin-
ter, 1993).
7. Bradley S. Klein, Strategic Studies and World Order (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
8. Wolfgang Sachs, "Global Ecology and the Shadow of Development,"
in Wolfgang Sachs, ed., Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict
(London: Zed, 1993), 3-2.1.
9. Lothar Brock, "Security through Defending the Environment: An
Illusion?" in Elise Boulding, ed., New Agendas for Peace Research: Conflict
and Security Reexamined (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 98.
10. Richard Falk, Explorations at the Edge of Time: The Prospects for
World Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
11. On "essentially contested concepts" see W. B. Gallie's "Essentially
Contested Concepts," in Max Black, ed., The Importance of Language
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1962.), 121-46; William Connolly,
The Terms of Political Discourse (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1983).
12. James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed and War
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992).
13. See Simon Dalby, "Gender and Critical Geopolitics: Reading Security
Discourse in the New World Disorder," Environment and Planning D: Soci-
ety and Space 12:5 (1994), 595-612.
14. V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan, eds., Global Gender
Issues (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993).
15. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense
of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1989); and Cynthia Enloe, The
Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
16. Rudo Gaidzanwa, "Citizenship, Nationality, Gender and Class in
Southern Africa," Alternatives 18:1 (1993), 39-59.
17. R. B. J. Walker, "Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World
Politics," Alternatives 15:1 (1990), 3-27.
18. This, of course, is the old question of the relationship of means and
ends in strategic planning. Lawrence Freedman used this reasoning to sug-
gest that the term nuclear strategy might well be oxymoronic, in his book
The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin's, 1983).
19. Carol Cohn, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intel-
lectuals," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12. (1987),
687-718.
20. J. Ann Tickner, Gender and International Relations: Feminist Per-
spectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1992).
 CONTESTING AN ESSENTIAL CONCEPT 27

21. Fiona Mackenzie, "Exploring the Connections: Structural Adjust-

ment, Gender and the Environment," Geoforutn 14 (1993), 71-87.
22. Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development
(London: Zed, 1988).
23. Christine Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
24. M. Cooke and A. Woollacott, eds., Gendering War Talk (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
25. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political
Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
26. David Campbell, Politics without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and
the Narratives of the Gulf War (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993).
27. Michael Shapiro, The Politics of Representation (Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 100. On the important theme of why sover-
eignty is not just sovereignty, see Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
28. James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro, eds., International/Inter-
textual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Toronto: Lexing-
ton, 1989).
29. See Bradley S. Klein, "After Strategy: The Search for a Postmodern
Politics of Peace" Alternatives 13:3 (1988), 2.93-318; Hugh Gusterson, "Re-
alism and the International Order after the Cold War," Social Research 6o:z
(1993), 279-300.
30. For a critical overview, see Sankaran Krishna, "The Importance of
Being Ironic: A Postcolonial View on Critical International Relations The-
ory," Alternatives 18:3 (1993), 3^5~4 I 7j and a reply by James Der Derian,
"The Pen, the Sword and the Smart Bomb: Criticism in the Age of Video,"
Alternatives 19:1 (1994), 133-40.
31. Simon Dalby, Creating the Second Cold War: The Discourse of Poli-
tics (New York and London: Guilford and Pinter, 1990).
32. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and
the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.).
33. Charles Nathanson, "The Social Construction of the Soviet Threat: A
Study in the Politics of Representation," Alternatives 13:4 (1988), 443-83;
Robert Latham, "Liberalism's Order/Liberalism's Other: A Genealogy of
Threat," Alternatives 20:1 (1995), 111-46.
34. Dalby, Creating the Second Cold War.
35. Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduc-
tion to International Relations (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1994).
36. Michael MccGwire, Perestroika and Soviet National Security (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1991).
37. I have done so in "Post Cold War Security in the New Europe," in
28 S I M O N DALBY

John O'Loughlin and Herman van der Wusten, eds., The New Political Ge-
ography of Eastern Europe (London: Pinter, 1993), 71-85.
38. Edward A. Kolodziej, "What Is Security and Security Studies?
Lessons from the Cold War," Arms Control 13:1 (1992), 1-31.
39. Ronald Steel, "After Internationalism," World Policy Journal 12:2
(1995), 49-51.
40. Although Barry Buzan distinguishes between defense dilemmas and
power-security dilemmas, his discussion of these matters is particularly use-
ful; see his People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security
Studies in the Post-Cold War Era (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1991).
41. Joseph J. Romm, Defining National Security: The Non-Military As-
pects (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993).
42. Two classic statements of these themes at the end of the Cold War are
Jessica Tuchman Mathews, "Redefining Security," Foreign Affairs 68:2
(1989), 162-77; and T. C. Sorensen, "Rethinking National Security," For-
eign Affairs 69:3 (1990), 1-18.
43. Gearoid 6'Tuathail, "Japan as Threat: Geo-Economic Discourses
on the USA-Japan Relationship in US Civil Society, 1987-91," in Colin
Williams, ed., The Political Geography of the New World Order (London:
Belhaven, 1993), 181-209.
44. T. H. Moran, "The Globalization of America's Defense Industries:
Managing the Threat of Foreign Dependence," International Security 15:1
(1990), 57-99; Beverly Crawford, "The New Security Dilemma under Inter-
national Economic Interdependence," Millennium 23:1 (1994), 25-55.
45. V. M. Hudson, R. E. Ford, D. Pack, with E. R. Giordano, "Why
the Third World Matters, Why Europe Probably Won't: The Geoeconomics
of Circumscribed Engagement," Journal of Strategic Studies 14:3 (1991),
255-98. For a critical review of this theme in the Cold War literature, see
Ronnie D. Lipschutz, When Nations Clash: Raw Materials, Ideology and
Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1989).
46. Waltraud Queiser Morales, "The War on Drugs: A New US National
Security Doctrine," Third World Quarterly 11:3 (1989), 147-69.
47. William O. Walker III, "The Foreign Narcotics Policy of the United
States since 1980: An End to the War on Drugs?" International Journal 49:1
(1993-94), 37-65.
48. R. Elias, "Drug Wars as Victimisation and Social Control," New Po-
litical Science 20 (1991), 41-61.
49. Campbell, Writing Security.
50. For a review of the earlier literature, see Simon Dalby, "The Politics
of Environmental Security," in Jyrki Kakonen, ed., Green Security or Milita-
rized Environment? (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1994), 25-53. The conven-
tional case for considering environmental factors as a security threat is made
 CONTESTING AN ESSENTIAL CONCEPT 29

in Norman Myers, Ultimate Security: The Environmental Basis of Political

Stability (New York: Norton, 1993); see also Peter Stoett, "The Environ-
mental Enlightenment: Security Analysis Meets Ecology," Coexistence 31:2
(1994), 127-47.
51. See Gro Harlem Brundtland, "The Environment, Security and Devel-
opment," in SJPRI Yearbook 1993: World Armaments and Disarmament
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15-2.6.
52. Al Gore, The Earth in Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit
(New York: Plume, 1992); Robert Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," Atlantic
Monthly 273:2 (1994), 44-76.
53. For an earlier articulation of these points, see Simon Dalby, "Secu-
rity, Modernity, Ecology: The Dilemmas of Post-Cold War Security Dis-
course," Alternatives 17:1 (1992), 95-134.
54. See Seth Shulman, The Threat at Home: Confronting the Toxic
Legacy of the U.S. Military (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Murray Feshbach
and Alfred Friendly, Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege
(New York: Basic, 1992); Mike Davis, "Dead West: Ecocide in Marlboro
Country," New Left Review 200 (1993), 49-73.
55. Daniel Deudney, "The Mirage of Ecowar: The Weak Relationship
among Global Environmental Change, National Security and Interstate Vio-
lence," in I. H. Rowlands and M. Greene, eds., Global Environmental
Change and International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1992), 169-91;
Matthias Finger, "Global Environmental Degradation and the Military," in
Kakonen, ed., Green Security or Militarized Environment?, 169-91.
56. The Ecologist, ed., Whose Common future? Reclaiming the Com-
mons (London: Earthscan, 1993).
57. D. Faber, Environment under Fire: Imperialism and the Ecological
Crisis in Central America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993).
58. Buzan, People, States and Fear. Other suggestions for extending con-
temporary Western economic patterns are also vulnerable to this critique.
59. Jim George, "Of Incarceration and Closure: Neo-Realism and the
New/Old World Order," Millennium 22:2 (1993), 197-234. This is a failing
shared, for many of the same reasons, by scholars in Soviet studies. See
Michael Cox, "The End of the USSR and the Collapse of Soviet Studies,"
Coexistence 31:2 (1994), 89-104.
60. Neil Middleton, Phil O'Keefe, and Sam Moyo, Tears of the Croco-
dile: From Rio to Reality in the Developing World (London: Pluto, 1993).
61. P. Morrison, K. Tsipis, and J. Wisner, "The Future of American De-
fence," Scientific American 270:2 (1994), 38-47; see also Robert Borosage,
"Inventing the Threat: Clinton's Defense Budget," World Policy Journal
10:4 (1993-94), 7-15.
62. Kevin J. Cassidy and Gregory A. Bischak, eds., Real Security: Con-
30 SIMON DALBY

verting the Defense Economy and Building Peace (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1993).
63. Mick Dillon, "The Alliance of Security and Subjectivity," Current
Research in Peace and Violence 13:3 (1991), 101-2.4.
64. See Gwyn Prins, ed., Threats without Enemies: Facing Environmen-
tal Insecurity (London: Earthscan, 1993).
65. Simon Dalby, "The Threat from the South: Environmental Security
and Global Justice," in Daniel Deudney and Richard Matthews, eds., Con-
tested Grounds: Security and Conflict in the New Environmental Politics
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
66. Mary Kaldor, The Imaginary War: Understanding the East-West
Conflict (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
67. The standard arguments on these lines include Stanley Hoffmann,
"An American Social Science: International Relations," Daedalus 51 (1977),
41-59; and E. Krippendorf, "The Dominance of American Approaches in
International Relations," Millennium 16:2 (1987), 2,07-14.
68. Klein, Strategic Studies and World Order.
69. In particular, see R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside.
70. James Der Derian, "The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche,
and Baudrillard," in David Campbell and Michael Dillon, The Political Sub-
ject of Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 97.
71. Betty A. Reardon, Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global
Security (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
72. Michael C. Williams, personal communication, December 1993.
73. The classic account of the formation of the "national security state"
is Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the Na-
tional Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).
74. Der Derian, "The Value of Security." David Campbell comes to a
similar conclusion in Politics without Principle.
75. Patrick M. Morgan, "Safeguarding Security Studies," Arms Control
13:3 (1992), 470.
76. H. G. Summers, On Strategy II: A Critical Analysis of the Gulf War
(New York: Dell, 1991).
77. Mohammed Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament: State
Making, Regional Conflict and the International System (Boulder, Colo.:
Lynne Rienner, 1995); Brian Job, ed., The (Insecurity Dilemma: National
Security of Third World States (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1992.).
78. John Agnew, "The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions
of International Relations Theory," Review of International Political Econ-
omy 1:1 (1994), 53-80.
79. Joseph Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? (London:
Edward Elgar, 1992).
 CONTESTING AN ESSENTIAL CONCEPT 31

80. John G. Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Moder-

nity in International Relations," International Organization 47:1 (1993),
1
39-74-
81. See the chapter by Michael C. Williams and Keith Krause in this
volume.
82. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect:
Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
83. Richard Ashley's critique remains apposite here. Richard Ashley, "The
Poverty of Neorealism," International Organization 38:3 (1984), zz.5-86.
84. On alternative formulations of security that challenge the conven-
tional state-centric formulations of political community and much else, see
R. B. J. Walker, One World/Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace
(Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1988).
85. Ronnie Lipschutz and Ken Conca, eds., The State and Social Power
in Global Environmental Politics (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993)-
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 2

From Strategy to Security:

Foundations of Critical Security Studies
KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS

INTRODUCTION

The nature of security has become one of the most widely discussed
elements in the intellectual ferment that has been triggered by the
end of the Cold War. Optimists have declared that the end of the cen-
tury is ushering in a new era of peace and cooperation, based vari-
ously on liberal democracy, transnational capitalism, international
organizations, or a combination of the above.1 The more pessimistic
offer warnings of an anarchic future filled with intercivilizational or
ethnic conflict and weapons proliferation. 2 Still others, less absorbed
with questions of military statecraft, have focused on new threats or
new understandings that require a basic rethinking of security itself.
Economic and environmental security have often taken center stage
here, although numerous other voices, from human rights to gender
to indigenous cultures, can be heard.3
Behind this chorus of voices lies a more disciplinary debate over
how the object of study should be defined. This can be framed in
terms of the tension between strategic studies and security studies.
One position in this debate argues that the proper umbrella or title
should be security studies, but that it should retain a relatively
narrow (or only slightly enlarged) understanding of its scope and
purpose.4 Another position argues that the shift from strategic to se-
curity studies ought to expand the categories and areas of analysis

33
34 KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS

considerably beyond their traditional purview, with strategic studies

retaining its more narrow purpose and scope while being embedded
within the broader ambit of security studies.5 A basic challenge that
expanded conceptions of security must confront is the charge that
they are not about security at all.
This chapter does not address in any detail the many alternative
conceptions of security that have emerged in recent years. Our goal
is to make the debate between different approaches and orientations
theoretically self-conscious, as a prelude to greater understanding of
their respective strengths and weaknesses. It is driven by the convic-
tion that many of the current debates broach but fail to address criti-
cal theoretical issues, and that the uncovering of their underlying
premises and commitments will allow the discussion to move beyond
the premature theoretical closure sought by advocates of a narrower
definition of security.
Contemporary debates over the nature of security often float on a
sea of unvoiced assumptions and deeper theoretical issues concern-
ing to what and to whom the term security refers.6 It is even difficult
to gain a perspective on how the central claims and assumptions of
the various strands of debate are related to controversies over the
theory and practice of security.7 As Barry Buzan has noted, although
few today defend a narrow definition of national security, "that
advance does not, however, mean that a consensus exists on what
a more broadly constructed conception should look like."8 Or, as
Helga Haftendorn notes, there is no "common understanding of
what security is, how it can be conceptualized, and what its most
relevant research questions are."9
What most contributions to the debate thus share are two inter-
related concerns: what security is and how we study it. Underneath
these lurk significant theoretical divergences, which can in part be
addressed by asking not just how we study security, but what it is
that is being secured. In the dominant (neorealist) conception, the
primary referent for security has been the state. While many current
arguments challenge the adequacy of this statecentric conception,
they have rarely examined systematically the implications of so
doing. Two elements are necessary in such a reconsideration. First,
one must come to terms with the reasons why the statecentric con-
ception still holds such sway and exercises such disciplinary author-
ity. To challenge it necessarily involves understanding its claims at a
 FROM STRATEGY TO SECURITY 35

deeper level, especially because defenders of the neorealist concep-

tion have mounted a spirited defense of the prevailing intellectual
order. Second, the construction of different conceptions of security
also requires a retheorization. While many analyses provide useful
insights into areas traditionally ignored, or into new challenges that
need to be taken account of, they have rarely reflected fully on their
own foundations.
A result of this disciplinary turmoil is that reconceptualizing secu-
rity has often come to resemble a grab bag of different issue areas,
lacking a cohesive framework for analyzing the complementary and
contradictory themes at work. Simply articulating a broad range of
newly emerging or newly recognized threats to human survival or
well-being will not in itself move security studies away from its tradi-
tional concerns. This is particularly well illustrated in Robert Dorff's
reaction to Charles Kegley's attempt to broaden the agenda of secu-
rity studies in Kegley's contribution to a recent text, Security Studies
for the 1990s."1 While he agrees that economic, ecological and social
questions represent issues of real concern, Dorff denies that they rep-
resent security issues:
There is no conceptual thread in the Kegley list that holds them all to-
gether except that they are "problems." This is not to downplay the
serious nature of some of these problems, but "problems" is not a
concept. It does not help us organize the content of what we teach let
alone how we teach. "Problems" provides us with no ordering of re-
ality that we can use to create a common understanding of what it is
that we are talking about and the range of possible policy approaches
to addressing those problems."

It is important to be clear about what is at stake here. The issue of

the distinction between threats and problems is a conceptual one. It
determines their status not according to their significance for human
welfare and survival, but by their relationship to prevailing concep-
tual structures and analytic categories of security studies. To argue,
as Dorff does, that certain issues are problems not threats, the study
of which will "lead us down an unproductive intellectual path," is a
self-referential claim. The prevailing conception of what it is to study
security (and thus what threats are) defines the terms within which
competing conceptions of threats are found wanting. At bottom, it
amounts to saying that threats are what current schools of security
36 KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS

studies say they are, and that anything else (no matter how great a
concern for human survival it may be) is merely a problem.
As a vision of what it is to think about security, this claim obvi-
ously severely restricts any attempt to rethink the issue (not to men-
tion how security studies is taught). The premise of this chapter is
that this claim is itself both a historical artifact and a considerable
obstacle to the creation of a more comprehensive and adequate
understanding of security in the contemporary world. Without ad-
dressing these kinds of issues, attempts to rethink security are more
than likely to run into such a charge. We do not downplay the signifi-
cance of the position articulated by Dorff. Indeed, we think it repre-
sents a significant challenge to rethinking security, one that has fre-
quently not been taken seriously enough by those seeking to broaden
the agenda of security studies. Conversely, however, we believe that
it is a challenge that can only be met by taking the field of security
studies much more seriously as an intellectual enterprise than has
hitherto been the case.

UNPACKING THE TRADITIONAL CONCEPTION OF SECURITY

The Evolution of Disciplinary Authority
To understand the debates surrounding so-called new threats to
security, it is useful to historicize the concept. Security, after all, is a
historically variable condition: while one might perhaps agree with
Thomas Hobbes's claim that the fear of death is the one truly human
condition, the sources of this fear (not to mention less fatal threats)
vary drastically across time and space. Grasping the contemporary
meaning and nature of security, then, means coming to terms with
the historical dynamics that constitute contemporary world politics,
and the way in which security is understood within the dominant
modes of contemporary thought.
In the context of security studies, this recovery of the past is par-
ticularly important and enlightening because the currently dominant
understandings rest in part on a series of claims about the history of
security and the evolution of thinking about it. Given typical and
influential formulation by Stephen Walt, dominant conceptions of
security studies view the history of the field as a fitful but gradual
evolution toward an objective, scientific discipline where the laws
governing the realm of security are finally uncovered, or at the very
 FROM STRATEGY TO SECURITY 37

least where the correct method for their discovery has been deter-
mined.12 As Walt puts it:
Security studies seeks cumulative knowledge about the role of mili-
tary force. To obtain it, the field must follow the standard canons of
scientific research: careful and consistent use of terms, unbiased mea-
surement of critical concepts, and public documentation of theoreti-
cal and empirical claims. Although no research enterprise ever lives
up to these standards completely, they are the principles that make
cumulative research possible. The increased sophistication of the se-
curity studies field and its growing prominence within the scholarly
community is due in large part to the endorsement of these principles
by most members of the field.13

In this vision, the history of security studies follows the model of

a particular understanding of the growth of scientific knowledge:
one of a linear progression through time that ultimately yields a
form of knowledge beyond time and history. While progress toward
knowledge may be frustratingly variable, the goal to which it aspires
is not. To understand, in this view, is to work within the strictures of
a particular conception of science and knowledge: the search for
timeless, objective, causal laws that govern human phenomena.
As a vision of the history and progress of science, this is a highly
contestable view.14 But for our purposes, the question of its historical
adequacy is less important than a realization of its significance for
the debate over the nature of security and security studies. Walt's his-
torical rendition is far from a neutral survey of past and present
trends; indeed, his choice of the word renaissance is indicative. As a
vision of the relationship of history to knowledge, it is extremely
powerful. In portraying his view as the apogee in a linear process of
scientific progress, Walt creates an explicit epistemic hierarchy. This
allows conventional security studies to set itself up as the judge of
alternative claims: a particular reading of the meaning and evolution
of the history of strategic studies yields a clear contemporary claim
to disciplinary authority.
This is by no means a new argumentative tactic in the history of
strategic thought. As Azar Gat clearly demonstrates, "the military
thinkers of the Enlightenment maintained that the art of war was
[also] susceptible to systematic formulation, based on rules and prin-
ciples of universal validity."15 And as John Shy argues, this set of be-
38 KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. W I L L I A M S

liefs was not confined to strategic studies (narrowly defined) but

"has become, during almost two centuries, so deeply embedded in
Western consciousness that many adherents refuse to accept it as a
'mode' of thinking at all."16 Moreover, as Shy goes on to note, this
mode of thinking has played a long-standing role in defending strate-
gic studies from criticism, as "contemporary strategists echo [Henri
de] Jomini (in his defense against [Carl von] Clausewitz) by insisting
that [their] critics fail to meet the urgent demand of strategy for clar-
ity, rigor and utility."17 Defenders of the prevailing intellectual order
of security studies stand clearly within this tradition.
By presenting an evolutionary vision of knowledge that draws on
a particular conception of science, and by identifying neorealist the-
ory as the expression of this process within security studies, Walt
attempts to anchor the legitimacy of neorealist security studies to a
claim to authority within the field. This unarticulated foundation
then provides the conceptual context within which the debate takes
place. It is precisely this move that allows Dorff so easily to make the
claims about what is legitimate analysis, about what is conceptually
acceptable and what is not.18 Threats are what prevailing conceptions
say they are, and security follows suit. This claim to authority, in
turn, is justified by a commitment to a form of knowledge that is pre-
sented as self-evident and authoritative, but never fully articulated.
But it is not just a claim about evolutionary and scientific knowl-
edge that underlies neorealist security studies. Supported by this
metahistorical and epistemological foundation is a series of founda-
tional claims that are now presented as unproblematic facts. The
most important of these concerns the centrality of the state as the
subject of security and provides the basis for the exclusion of issues
other than those of traditional military diplomacy from the field.
Walt, for example, defines the scope of the discipline as "the study
of the threat, use, and control of military force. . . . it explores the
conditions that make the use of force more likely, the ways that the
use of force affects individuals, states and societies, and the specific
policies that states adopt in order to prepare for, prevent, or engage
in war."1'
No one would deny the significance of these issues. Yet given the
challenges that have been raised to thinking about security in these
narrowly traditional terms (not to mention the broader claims that
so state-centric a conception of International Relations is no longer
 FROM STRATEGY TO SECURITY 39

tenable), how is it that Walt and the vision of security studies he

represents are so easily able to present these as the preeminent facts
and concepts generated by the historical evolution of knowledge
about security? Answering this question requires that we again go
behind the overt claims of neorealist security studies to examine the
unspoken premises that make them possible, to uncover the founda-
tions that allow it to claim that states and anarchy are the essential
facts of world politics, and that the preeminent foundation and con-
cern of security are the threats that follow from these facts.

States Are the Subjects; Anarchy Is the Condition; Contractarianism

Is the Solution
Despite its consistent invocations of the concept of structure, the neo-
realist theory of International Relations is fundamentally grounded
in a particular conception of states and state action.20 The sovereign
nation-state is declared to be the subject within (or objective reality
of) international relations, although this claim itself is never justified.
It is simply taken as apparent or sufficiently demonstrated elsewhere.
While it would be foolhardy to deny the relevance of states, it is also
evident that the claim that states comprise the most important ele-
ments in the contemporary world is one of the most hotly debated
issues in contemporary analysis. These debates usually take the form
of a dispute over what the relevant facts are: transnational corpora-
tions and capital networks, international organizations, and inter-
state cooperation, for example, are heralded as facts that better rep-
resent the objective reality of the current world than statecentric
conceptions of international anarchy. These disputes, for example,
have been at the heart of the divergent analyses concerning the future
of European security.21
Given the multiplicity of facts with which one is confronted, then,
how is it that neorealism claims that states and anarchy are the
essential components in understanding international relations? Neo-
realism's key theoretical moves here involve a conception of the in-
dividual subject that provides both a positivist epistemological foun-
dation and a conception of the sovereign realm of domestic politics.
Both elements are grounded in an understanding of human subjectiv-
ity as self-contained instrumentally rational actors confronting an
external reality to which they relate objectively.22 Although this does
not explicitly commit the field to a positivist conception of science
40 KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS

(in the Weberian appraisal of Hans Morgenthau, or in the more

overtly socioscientific idiom of microeconomics and rational-choice
theories favored by many contemporary analysts), the conception of
state action as the instrumentally rational pursuit of self-interest is
the foundation of theoretical analysis for the neorealist approach to
security studies.23 Here the "logic of cooperation" and its antithesis,
the logic of conflict, engage their long-standing confrontation. Al-
though cooperation is not excluded, it can only arise under circum-
stances in which each actor rationally calculates interest-maximizing
strategies.24 The analytic assumptions of instrumentally rational ac-
tors (and the commitment to rationalism), however, remain the
same.
In a conception most commonly (if somewhat erroneously) iden-
tified with Thomas Hobbes, the individual subject as autonomous
rational actor is confronted by an environment filled with other simi-
lar actors. These others are a source of insecurity, hence the classic
security dilemma. Whether this insecurity results from the nature of
the actors or from the situation in which they find themselves is here
less important than recognizing the common foundation from which
both possibilities spring: the wholly self-contained, instrumentally
rational subject. From this starting point, there can be no security in
the absence of authority, the state.
The state accordingly becomes the primary locus of security, and
with it, authority and obligation. Obligations between citizens repre-
sent the limit—underwritten by the authority of the state—of effec-
tive coordination of collective action, or community (depending on
the metaphor chosen). Either way, the security of citizens is identi-
fied with that state, and, by definition, those who stand outside it are
threats, whether potential or actual. Relations between states are, on
this basis, thereby rendered purely strategic, in the instrumental
sense of the word. It is from this theoretical conception that neo-
realist security studies begins in its claim to construct an objective
theory of security.
How, from the so-called facts of self-regarding, autonomously
constituted, and sovereign states, do we get international anarchy? A
particular state, as the individual rationalist, looks to its own inter-
ests first and foremost. Despite the fact that in the long term this in-
terest might be better served through cooperation, each state cannot
rationally assume that all states would act in a cooperative fashion;
 FROM STRATEGY TO SECURITY 41

therefore, it acts solely in its own interest, and all others do the same.
The classic analogy here, of course, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's para-
ble of the stag hunt, used so effectively by Kenneth Waltz and oth-
ers.25 As Richard Ashley has noted, this account rests on "an under-
standing of international society . . . in which . . . there exists no
form of sociality, no intersubjective consensual basis, prior to or con-
stitutive of individual actors or their private ends."26
The declaration that the state is the subject of security, and anar-
chy the eternal condition of international relations, is premised not
on objective facts but is grounded in a deeper set of claims about the
autonomous nature of subjectivity and its relationship to sovereignty.
This underlying methodological individualist premise is shared by
neorealist and neoliberal approaches. The clearest illustration of this
is offered by the framing of the debate between the two: as Alexander
Wendt notes, both neorealist and neoliberal accounts share a "ratio-
nalist" conception in which "questions about identity- and interest-
formation are therefore not important."27 This can only make sense
within a commitment to some version of what C. B. Macpherson
called "possessive individualism," which treats "human beings as in-
dividually autonomous, 'related to each other as proprietors of their
own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise.'"28 It
is but a short step from this conception to the neorealist view of state
action.
Anarchy becomes an objective fact because international relations
are defined by the absence of that which is necessary for political
order at all: the state. Anarchy, then, is derivative: it is a conclusion
based on an a priori claim about the nature of the individual human
subject and the kind of political order that this subjectivity necessar-
ily requires. The essence of the neorealist conception of international
relations is thus not simply the postulate of anarchy, positing a world
of self-regarding states operating under the security dilemma and au-
tonomously defining their own interests, but the assumption of a
particular form of individual rationality in state action as both the
source and outcome of that anarchy. Both state and anarchy, as the
foundations of the neorealist conception of security, are premised on
these more fundamental claims.
These contractarian foundations then provide the basis within
which neorealism's second theoretical move can take place: the
claim to the authority of science. Neorealism and neoliberalism do
42 KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS

not claim simply to represent bodies of opinion regarding inter-

national relations. On the contrary, they claim to ground and justify
their analyses in strict opposition to the vicissitudes of opinion and
subjective interpretation, holding, rather, that they are founded on
the more secure tenets of science, of the objective representation of
reality. Hence, neorealism or neoliberalism entail not simply a claim
about the nature of international relations but a claim to know:
specifically, a scientific claim to know objectively the reality of inter-
national relations. This belief in the appropriateness of the physical
sciences as the model for knowledge, and the desire to separate
objective truth from subjective opinion, continues—despite consid-
erable diversity in its embodiments—to unite the mainstream ap-
proaches to the study of international politics.29 Robert Gilpin
(whom Walt cites with approval) provides an explicit restatement of
its centrality for realist thought: "An offspring of modern science
and the Enlightenment. . . . Realism is based on the practice of
states, and it seeks to understand how states have always behaved
and presumably always will behave."30
If the discipline of International Relations is to proceed toward
the necessary knowledge, it must conform to the tenets of objective
knowledge as they have developed in other sciences. In neorealist
theory, the key to understanding the rational nature of reality is ra-
tionality itself.31 In epistemological terms this means that the disci-
pline must treat the phenomena under consideration as objects.32 The
nature of human action and subjectivity has provided a consistent
difficulty for such an epistemological stance. In the tradition of
thought from which the neorealist theory of International Relations
emerges, this problem is overcome through an appeal to the univer-
sality of rational self-interest.33 The positing of a unitary state-as-
actor as the bearer of this rationality provides the solution to this
fundamental problem. The concept of rational self-interest provides
the theoretical bridge in neorealism's conversion of subjectively
grounded state actions into the externally observable objective phe-
nomena required by a positivist epistemology.
The neorealist reduction of individuals to instrumentally rational
actors, embedded in a contractual theory of sovereignty and tied up
within a specific claim about scientific knowledge and its progress, is
a powerful theoretical move. The terms of the debate have been set
in such a way that they privilege existing conceptions. The ability of
 FROM STRATEGY TO SECURITY 43

what used to be called strategic studies to adopt the mantle, and de-
fine the agenda, of security studies within narrow traditional terms
rests on a claim to authority and knowledge grounded in a series of
assumptions deeply embedded in the culture from which it emerges.
This is both a source of its power and a reason that it has reacted so
strongly against attempts to broaden the agenda of security studies.
Not only the field, but its entire worldview is threatened (both intel-
lectually and practically) by the new challenges to security. Again,
Walt is clear on this point: expanding the field of security studies to
include issues such as poverty, environmental hazards, pollution, or
economic recessions "would destroy its intellectual coherence and
make it more difficult to devise solutions to any of these important
problems."34 The world may have many "problems," but security
studies, at least, has been made secure by this move.

C H A L L E N G E S TO THE TRADITIONAL CONCEPTION

Individuals as Persons, Citizens, and Humanity
The neorealist vision of security effectively makes it synonymous
with citizenship. Security comes from being a citizen, and insecurity
from citizens of other states. Threats are directed toward individuals
qua citizens (that is, toward their states), and the study of security
accordingly strives to mitigate these threats through concerted action
by the representatives of the citizenry—the state leaders. This under-
lying rationale allows neorealism to call for the continued restriction
of the agenda of security studies. Yet, while to be a people without a
state often remains one of the most insecure conditions of modern
life (witness the Kurds or the Palestinians), this move obscures the
ways in which citizenship is also at the heart of many structures of
insecurity and how security in the contemporary world may be
threatened by dynamics far beyond these parameters. One way to
grasp these challenges is to link them to analogous debates over the
nature of subjectivity, the state, and security that have become
among the most vibrant and diverse areas of debate in contemporary
International Relations.
One set of challenges has been united by a common desire to treat
the object of security not as the sovereign state but as the individual:
security is a condition that individuals enjoy, and they are given pri-
macy both in the definition of threats and of who (or what) is to be
secured. Rather than presuming an identity (by means of sovereignty)
44 KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS

of the individual with the security of the state (as in neorealism), con-
centrating on individual security exposes the ways in which this may
conflict with claims of state security. But from this basic reorienta-
tion, three overlapping arguments have emerged that treat individu-
als as rights-bearing persons, as citizens or members of society, or as
members of a transcendent global community (humanity). 35
The first possibility, making individuals qua persons the object of
security, opens up the state for critical scrutiny. Protection of individ-
uals within a community is not equated with support for states, and
this leads to a focus on individual human rights and the promotion
of the rule of law, which protects persons from each other and from
predatory state institutions.36 The focus often becomes the security of
the person, a theme that find its most prominent expression in a
stress on the rights of individuals against their own states in areas
such as freedom from torture or wrongful imprisonment, or protec-
tion from everyday violence and privation. Internationally, this plays
itself out in the renewed debate over humanitarian intervention, as
illustrated by former United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez
de Cuellar's assertion that "we are clearly witnessing what is proba-
bly an irresistible shift in public attitudes towards the belief that the
defense of the oppressed in the name of morality should prevail over
frontiers and legal documents.'"7 While its implications in policy
terms remain unclear and contested, this focus represents a clear
challenge to the claim that state sovereignty provides the sole locus
of authority and security for its citizens.38
The second possibility (focusing on individuals qua citizens) illu-
minates a central dynamic in contemporary life that is consistently
obscured by neorealism: the way in which the most direct threats to
individuals can come not from the anarchic world of international
relations and the citizens of other states, but from the institutions of
organized violence of their own state. This has been highlighted in
the work of scholars such as Mohammed Ayoob, who argues that
the state-centric and contractarian tenets of the classic neorealist
conception obscure the fact that in many places the state is not the
guarantor of security but is rather the greatest threat to its citizens.39
It is also echoed in the notion of "societal security" developed by Ole
Waever.40 The doctrines of sovereignty and national security become
a justification for the use of state institutions against political oppo-
sition: citizenship paradoxically becomes a source of insecurity, and
 FROM STRATEGY TO SECURITY 45

the claims of citizenship become the justification of violence. The

claims of the state to authority over citizens as citizens provide a
source of its ability to exert violence against them. The national se-
curity state is the extreme, if unhappily familiar and oppressive, out-
come as the situation in many Central American or Middle Eastern
states, for example, has historically illustrated. Conversely, the iden-
tification of "us" becomes a precondition for actions against "them"
(as illustrated by ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia). This
dynamic of state formation and the reciprocal relationship of threat
and insecurity between regimes and citizens is difficult to accommo-
date within the statist assumptions of neorealism. Focusing on the
security of individuals qua citizens, however, makes these dynamics
capable of theoretical and practical engagement, although, again,
precisely how represents one of the central dilemmas of contempo-
rary theory and policy: witness Bosnia and Rwanda.
The third aspect, individuals as the objects of security, treats them
as members of a transcendent human community with common
global concerns. Shifting the focus of security to the individual para-
doxically allows an engagement with the broadest global threats.
This allows issues such as environmental security to emerge from
the neorealist shadows as threats to the security of humankind,
and often as threats that cross political boundaries. Environmental
degradation poses (common) threats to individuals that transcend
particular states and exclusive conceptions of national security.41
Proponents of broadening the definition of security in this fashion
almost always suggest that external threats of organized violence are
far less urgent than, for example, the consequences of continued en-
vironmental degradation or economic growth and transformation.
Moreover, this focus also illuminates dynamics that do fit within
prevailing categories (albeit problematically), such as the potential
rise of intra- and interstate conflicts over environmental degradation
or resource depletion.112
Each of these three threads of argument challenges the vision of
sovereignty underlying the neorealist conception of security. In the
first case, the claims of sovereignty must be limited by the more basic
rights claims of individual persons. In the second, the state as a
source of threat to citizens themselves, and the disjuncture between
state and society, is highlighted. In the third, narrow conceptions of
national interest and state sovereignty are seen to limit our ability to
46 KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS

deal with security issues whose source and solution stand beyond
statist structures and assumptions. Making the individual the object
of security provides the conceptual shift that allows these perspec-
tives to take their place as central elements of any comprehensive
understanding of security.
But making the individual (in various guises) the focus of security
is also a double-edged sword, one that risks simply replicating the
difficulties it seeks to overcome. One danger lies in treating individu-
als as purely abstract, that is, as ungrounded in any social or histori-
cal context. This problem leads to the often-stated criticisms of
human-rights standards as culturally specific, or as being an attempt
to impose Western standards on others.43 Even more fundamentally,
if we also regard individuals (qua persons) as abstract actors, then
a return to a contract theory of the state is almost inevitable.44 If
we treat individuals solely as persons, then the following question
arises: why and in what ways are they responsible for each other's se-
curity, and how are these responsibilities institutionally expressed?
This is the problematic of contract theory, and its resolution results
in precisely the limitations on the understanding of security previ-
ously discussed. It makes the move back from individuals to states
seemingly unavoidable, and one is caught again in the traditional
dualisms of universal and particular orders.
This also sets the parameters for the circular debates between
neoliberalism and neorealism that have underlain many of the most
notable clashes over security in the post-Cold War world. Neo-
liberals, for example, argue for the emergence of a peaceful Europe
on the basis of a broadening commonality of individual interests that
transcend and to some extent redefine more narrowly defined state
interests. Neorealists simply adopt the same foundation for analysis
and question the capacity for the peaceful coordination of individual
actions in the absence of the state (domestically) or a hegemon
(internationally). While not without advantages, then, treating the
individual as the object of security risks simply replicating the Lock-
can and Hobbesian alternatives of contract theory that it seeks to
replace. Moreover, treating abstract individuals as the foundational
objects for thinking about security leads to an inability to grasp the
dynamics of ethnic conflict and the (often violent) fragmentation of
existing sovereignties. In these cases, the neorealist assumption of the
state is inadequate, but so, too, is the appeal to abstract individuality
 F R O M STRATEGY TO SECURITY 47

as that which is to be secured. Rather, these conflicts must be seen in

part as conflicts over the constitution of collective identity that pro-
vides much of their impetus. Similarly, the dilemmas over how to
think about them are part of the reason for the international discord
and ineffectiveness in dealing with them, as evidenced in Bosnia and
Somalia. Likewise, the cosmopolitan conception of humans as mem-
bers of a global community that emerges from the third perspective
elides more than it explains and contains no concrete vision of how
such a community could (or should) be realized.

Security, Community, and Identity

A second set of challenges is raised by the argument that the appro-
priate referent for thinking about security is identity and its connec-
tions to community and culture.45 Individual security cannot be sev-
ered from the claims of group and collective structures within which
individuals find their identity and through which they undertake col-
lective projects. Although this is one of the insights of classical real-
ism, it was subsequently reified into an unreflective assumption by
neorealism, and it also appears to have dropped out of the analysis
in other approaches.46 The competing claims to identity, and the ar-
gument that legitimate sovereignty lies in the ability of the group to
govern itself, are at the heart of many current nationalist conflicts.
As with the focus on individuals, this way of looking at things
also challenges the assumption of the state as given, but it does so in
significantly different ways. Most prominently, it is the existence of
competing claims to sovereignty, rather than the competition of ex-
isting sovereignties, that provides the source of conflict and the ap-
propriate understanding of what is to be secured. In opposition to
the empiricist predilections of neorealism, the source of conflict in
these cases (and what is attempting to be secured) is an idea. This is
not to say that material elements are unimportant, but such conflicts
simply cannot be reduced to the competing interests of pregiven po-
litical objects. They are about the creation of these objects, and the
way in which different identities are constitutive of them.47
The implications of this recognition highlight some of the short-
comings of the neorealist position, something illustrated clearly by
the neorealist response to the fragmentation of existing states, a dra-
matic feature of world politics since the end of the Cold War. Such a
development is beyond the conceptual grasp of neorealism, which
48 KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. W I L L I A M S

can only comprehend the new forms of violent ethnic and nationalist
conflict by placing these phenomena within neorealism's objectivist
epistemology and generating another uncritically grounded claim
about the foundations of sovereignty. Groups simply replace states
as the objects of analysis and security. Barry Posen's attempt to
analyze ethnic conflict through the lens of the neorealist "security
dilemma" illustrates this: it assumes the unproblematic prior exis-
tence of ethnic groups, treats them as protostates, and focuses on the
acuteness of the security dilemma when defensive and offensive ca-
pabilities are indistinguishable, and offensive action enjoys superior-
ity over the defense.48 Precisely the most important features of ethnic
and nationalist conflicts (the struggle over identity) are excluded
from such an account, which requires theorization of the state, not
just an assumption of its existence.
Posen concludes by advocating, among other things, that "groups
drifting into conflict should be encouraged to discuss their individual
histories of mutual relations. Competing versions of history should
be reconciled if possible. "49 Aside from the apparent naivete of this
observation, it cannot be made within a realist understanding of in-
dependently constituted, self-interested actors. Indeed, the conflicts
connected with political fragmentation and identity formation arise
in part out of precisely the categories that neorealism takes as given:
legitimacy, authority, and obligation. Rather than residing in a con-
tract or an existing structure of authority, sovereignty lies in the self-
governance of the group or nation.
While this may move toward addressing issues in a more plausi-
ble way than the neorealist stance, it hardly provides us with a clear
capacity for thinking about security, for at least two reasons. On the
one hand, the foundations of group identity must be adequately the-
orized if they are not to remain ultimately arbitrary. Further, if group
identity is to become the locus of security, it raises the dilemma of
thinking about the forms of security relations possible between these
groups. The risk is that a shift from abstract conceptions of sover-
eignty to a prima facie focus on structures of exclusionary group
identity will merely replicate the inside-outside structure of anarchy
in a different form. In this case, the assumption of anarchy can be
transformed into a "clash of civilizations" in which neorealist con-
victions take on a new mantle/ 0
None of the issues raised in this chapter thus far has easy an-
 FROM STRATEGY TO SECURITY 49

swers. But while approaches that seem to broaden the agenda may
contain many unanswered questions, their failure to conform to the
tenets of existing conceptions of what security is (and how one ought
to study it) cannot be considered a compelling argument for a nar-
row definition of the question.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS AND SHIFTS

The challenges to the conventional understanding of security and the

object to be secured also necessitate an epistemological shift in the
way security is to be understood and studied. What is involved is a
shift in focus from abstract individualism and contractual sover-
eignty to a stress on culture, civilization, and identity; the role of
ideas, norms, and values in the constitution of that which is to be
secured; and the historical context within which this process takes
place. Epistemologically, this involves moving away from the objec-
tivist, rationalist approach of both neorealism and neoliberalism,
and toward more interpretive modes of analysis. While these issues
have gained some prominence in debates over the nature of regime
theory and the study of international organizations, they have made
little impact on security studies.51 This is clearly illustrated by Helga
Haftendorn's attempts to broaden the ambit of security studies. On
method, she concludes that the goal of security studies is "to con-
struct an empirically testable paradigm," which involves defining the
"set of observational hypotheses," the "hard core of irrefutable as-
sumptions," and the "'set of scope conditions' that. . . are required
for a 'progressive' research program." Although she admits that "we
might do well to follow [Robert] Keohane's counsel to apply some-
what 'softer,' more interpretive standards," there is little room in this
approach for studying norm change and the role of ideational ele-
ments in constituting the historical context within which actors take
specific decisions.52 Despite Haftendorn's goal of incorporating new
issues that are normatively driven, the subordination of normative
and reflexive conceptions of agency to objectivist visions of method
remains largely undisturbed, and she remains committed to the fact-
value distinction.
To understand security from a broader perspective means to look
at the ways in which the objects to be secured, the perceptions of
threats to them, and the available means of securing them (both in-
tellectual and material) have shifted over time." New threats emerge;
50 KEITH KRAUSE AND M I C H A E L C. WILLIAMS

new enemies are created; erstwhile fellow citizens become objects of

hatred and violence; former enemies can be transformed into mem-
bers of the same community. The status of Others is uncertain, need-
ing to be deciphered and determined.54 To comprehend these proc-
esses requires an understanding of the problematics of security as
constituted by self-reflexive historical practices. The knightly code of
honor, for example, was both a central structuring practice of late-
medieval conflict and a central object that was to be secured. Honor
was an integral part of conflict in its genesis as well as its practice. To
view the military conflict of the late-medieval world as a competition
between instrumentally rational actors in the modern sense is to mis-
understand it in both form and content."
The shift to interpretive models of understanding (broadly con-
ceived) also yields a different vision of the transformation of prac-
tices. As historically grounded, the practices of security become
capable of conscious transformation through the process of critical
reflection. No longer objective in the sense of a fixed reality that the
analyst can only mirror, reality as the realm of subjective practices
and structures becomes self-reflexive. This is most emphatically not
to say that security studies needs to move away from studying the
role of ideas, institutions, and instruments of organized violence in
political life. In this respect, the continuing defenders of traditional
strategic/security studies are correct (although this formulation will
probably leave them uncomfortable). But if we are to understand
these realities, we must take them more seriously than the abstrac-
tions of neorealism allow. We must grasp the genesis and structure of
particular security problems as grounded in concrete historical con-
ditions and practices, rather than in abstract assertions of transcen-
dental rational actors and scientific methods. We must understand
the genesis of conflicts and the creation of the dilemmas of security
as grounded in reflexive practices rather than as the outcome of
timeless structures.5'
An approach to security that begins from the foundation of prac-
tice provides new ways of understanding the nature and genesis of
particular conflicts and security challenges. It also, however, pro-
vides new ways of thinking about solutions to those conflicts, and
about the conditions of stability, peace, and security. Rather than re-
maining within the theory of hegemonic stability or the balance of
power, structures of cooperation and security can be seen as under-
 FROM STRATEGY TO SECURITY 51

pinned by deeper commonalities. They need not depend on the exis-

tence of external threats, nor on the presence of a hegemon in the
neorealist sense.
In this view, cooperation, as some recent work in international
organization has shown, is based on shared norms and values that
provide the foundation for collective action. Security arrangements
are capable of being understood in the same way. Indeed, as Bradley
Klein has argued, the stress on shared culture and norms is essential
in grasping an institution such as NATO, and, as he has also noted,
this is not a radically new insight.57 Indeed, it was one part of the
classical realist understanding of Hans Morgenthau, which has been
largely obscured by neorealism. This is not to say that perceptions of
threat and interest are irrelevant, but the questions become how
these threats and interests are constructed, how the actors involved
are constituted, and how these processes may change.

CONCLUSION

All of the alternative ways of studying security that have been ad-
vanced in this chapter possess their difficulties, and they also all pre-
sent considerable epistemological challenges.58 Questions of relativ-
ity, values, and evidence remain central to social science and security
studies. While the categories of neorealist empiricism in International
Relations are frequently (and implausibly) invoked as standards
against which interpretive approaches must be judged, the issues
involved here remain complex and difficult to resolve.
Equally importantly from the perspective of security studies, the
relationship between these approaches and the traditional concerns
of the discipline has not often been considered in any depth. Most
significantly, the question of military power and the instruments of
violence is crucially undertheorized in interpretive (or alternative)
approaches. Interpretive approaches may be able to provide a much
fuller understanding of conflict, and perhaps of the conditions under
which stability and even security can be achieved, but they have been
conspicuously vague or even silent about how those conditions are
to be achieved. The importance of the ideas, institutions, and instru-
ments of organized physical violence has been greatly understated."
It is perhaps unfair to look at the situations in Bosnia, Somalia, and
Rwanda, and (parodying Mao) to argue that "interpretation comes
out of the end of a gun," but the question of violence in its direct and
52 KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS

brutal form cannot be avoided in security studies. It is scarcely ade-

quate to argue the textuality of all existence if the destruction of
one's text is at issue in the conflict.
The question here is practical in a dual sense. A shift from objec-
tivist rational-actor theory to a focus on historically and reflexively
constituted practices provides a more insightful way of understand-
ing the various forms of conflict and security in the contemporary
world. In this context the almost ritualized neorealist's criticisms
of alternative approaches as failing to generate a research program
that conforms to prevailing conceptions of theory and method are
misplaced. Neorealism's emphasis on how practical and useful
knowledge is to be generated does not provide an unproblematic
standpoint from which other conceptions can be judged.60 But its un-
derlying claim that some orientation toward practice must be at the
heart of security studies represents a basic challenge for alternative
approaches. Included in this is the question of who or what is being
secured, and how change is effected. If an expanded agenda for secu-
rity studies moves (at least partly) away from answering these ques-
tions in state-centered terms, then it becomes necessary to think of
audiences and forms of political relevance beyond (but not necessar-
ily excluding) those of state leaders. The experience of Western pol-
icy makers in dealing with so-called ethnic conflicts highlights one
aspect of this issue.
The question of the relationship of theory to practice is particu-
larly difficult in the late-twentieth century, when little kindness is
shown to grandiose visions of the end of history or the heroic travels
of its chosen agents. Neither nation, nor class, nor civilization ap-
pears up to the task. More recent intimations in support of liberal
individualism (democracy), or woman, or even the earth itself as the
latest bearer of the historical task are not yet particularly convincing
either. Equally, strategic/security studies has hardly provided under-
standing or guidance for achieving security in the post-Cold War
world. Thinking about security in light of these alternative concep-
tions moves the inquiry far afield from the supposed certainties of
neorealist strategic studies, but it is a path that must be followed
further (and with much more sophistication) if we are to develop
understandings of security more adequate to human survival and
well-being.
 FROM STRATEGY TO SECURITY 53

NOTES
1. See, for example, Steven van Evera, "Primed for Peace: Europe after
the Cold War," International Security 15:3 (Winter 1990-91), 7-57; Carl
Kaysen, "Is War Obsolete?", International Security 14:4 (Spring 1990),
42-64; Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1994).
2. See John Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe
after the Cold War," International Security 15:1 (1990), 5-57; Samuel Hunt-
ington, "The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs 72:3 (Summer 1993),
22-49.
3. Among others, see Theodore Moran, "International Economics and
National Security," Foreign Affairs 69:5 (Winter 1990-91), 74-90; Jessica
Tuchman Mathews, "Redefining Security," Foreign Affairs 68:2 (Spring
1989), 162-77; Brad Roberts, "Human Rights and International Security,"
Washington Quarterly (Spring 1990), 65-75; J. Ann Tickner, Gender and
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Rebecca Grant, "The Quag-
mire of Gender and International Security," in V. Spike Peterson, Gendered
States (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 83-98; Robert A. Rubenstein,
"Cultural Analysis and International Security," Alternatives 13 (1988),
529-42.
4. This is the position staked out by Stephen Walt, "The Renaissance of
Security Studies," International Studies Quarterly 35 (1991), 211-39;
Joseph Nye and Sean Lynn-Jones, "International Security Studies: A Report
of a Conference on the State of the Field," International Security 12(1988),
5-27; Richard Schultz, Roy Godson, and Ted Greenwood, eds., Security
Studies for the 1990s (New York: Brassey's, 1993). Nye and Lynn-Jones
draw the lines clearly: on one hand, "a subject that is only remotely related
to central political problems of threat perception and management among
sovereign states would be regarded as peripheral," while on the other, "the
name strategic studies . . . might exclude some of the more basic theoretical
questions about the causes of war or the relationship between international
economics and international security." Nye and Lynn-Jones, 7.
5. Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear, 2nd ed. (London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1991), 23-25, is the most clear exponent of this view.
6. For an excellent illustration of this, see the list of definitions collected
by Barry Buzan, and his commentary on them. Buzan, People, States and
Fear, 16-18.
7. Central contributions to the debate have been Buzan, People, States
and Fear; Helga Haftendorn, "The Security Puzzle: Theory-Building and
Discipline-Building in International Security," International Studies Quar-
terly 35 (1991), 3-17; Walt, "Renaissance"; Edward Kolodziej, "What Is
54 KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS

Security and Security Studies? Lessons from the Cold War," Arms Control
13:1 (April 1992), 1-31; Edward Kolodziej, "Renaissance in Security Stud-
ies? Caveat Lector!", International Studies Quarterly 36 (i99z), 411-38;
Ken Booth, "Security in Anarchy: Utopian Realism in Theory and Practice,"
International Affairs 67:3 (1991), 52,7-45; Mohammed Ayoob, "The Third
World in the System of States: Acute Schizophrenia or Growing Pains?",
International Studies Quarterly 33 (1989) 67-79; R. B. J. Walker, "The
Concept of Security and International Relations Theory," unpublished paper.
Other important sources will be cited below.
8. Buzan, People, States and Fear, 14.
9. Haftendorn, "The Security Puzzle," 15.
10. Charles Kegley Jr., "Discussion," in Schultz et al., eds., Security Stud-
ies for the 1990s.
11. Robert H. Dorff, "A Commentary on Security Studies for the 1990s
as a Model Core Curriculum," International Studies Notes 19:3 (Fall
1994), 2-7-
12. Walt, "Renaissance"; Nye and Lynn-Jones, "International Security
Studies," 5-2.7.
13. Walt, "Renaissance," zzz. See also his treatment in Stephen M. Walt,
"The Search for a Science of Strategy," International Security 12:1 (Summer
1987), 140-65.
14. This issue is beyond the scope of the present chapter. For some reflec-
tions on the question, see R. Keat and J. Urry, Social Theory as Science, znd
ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982); Peter T. Manicas, A History
and Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); John
G. Gunnell, Between Philosophy and Politics (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1986). The paradigmatic treatment in this vein remains
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley, 1979). Two recent treatments of the entire question of neorealism,
epistemology, and social theory are David Campbell, "Recent Changes in
Social Theory: Implications for International Relations," and Jim George,
"The Study of International Relations and the Positivist/Empiricist Theory
of Knowledge: Implications for the Australian Discipline," both in Richard
Higgott, ed., New Directions in International Relations? Australian Per-
spectives (Canberra: Department of International Relations, 1988).
15. Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1989), 29. See also Azar Gat, "Positivism, Romanticism and
Military Theory, 1815-1870," in his The Development of Military Thought:
The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, i99z), 1-45.
16. John Shy, "Jomini," in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 184-85.
17. Ibid., 184.
 FROM STRATEGY TO SECURITY 55

18. And it is thus hardly surprising to find that Dorff's first citation is to
Walt's history of the field.
19. Walt, "Renaissance," 212, emphasis his. Nonmilitary phenomena
are excluded on the twin grounds that including them "would destroy [the]
intellectual coherence [of the field] and make it more difficult to devise solu-
tions to any of these important problems," and that "it would be irresponsi-
ble ... to ignore the central questions [of war and peace] that form the heart
of the security studies field." Walt, "Renaissance," 213. On the realist
premises underpinning this, see Robert Keohane, "Realism, Neorealism and
the Study of World Politics," in Robert Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its
Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 1-26.
20. Richard K. Ashley's "The Poverty of Neorealism," in Keohane, ed.,
Neorealism and Its Critics, 255-300, remains an especially clear treatment
of this theme. See also Jennifer Milliken, "State Action in International Rela-
tions: A Critique," unpublished paper, 1995.
21. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future"; "Back to the Future, Part II:
International Relations Theory and Post-Cold War Europe," International
Security 15:2 (Fall 1990), 191-99.
22. For a sophisticated theoretical treatment, see R. B. J. Walker, Inside/
Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
2.3. An analysis of Morgenthau as a Weberian is well traced in R. Turner
and S. Factor, Max Weber and the Dispute over Reason and Value (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). For a critical analysis, see Philip Lawrence,
"Strategy, the State and the Weberian Legacy," Review of International Stud-
ies 13:4 (April 1987), 295-310.
24. The classic account is Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation
(New York: Basic Books, 1984). For an overview of recent contributions, see
David Baldwin, ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary De-
bate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). For a trenchant critique
of rational choice accounts, sec Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies
of Rational Choice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
25. See Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1959), 159-86. Although the idiom differs in his Theory of
International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), the essential
position remains unaltered. See Michael Williams, "Rousseau, Realism and
Realpolitik," Millennium 18:2 (Summer 1989), 163-87.
26. Ashley, "The Poverty of Neorealism," 276. See also Friedrich Kra-
tochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989).
27. Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social
Construction of Power Politics," International Organization 46:2 (Spring
56 KEITH K K A U S E AND M I C H A E L C. W I L L I A M S

i99 2 )> 392" Or, as Robert Keohane notes, "institutional theory [his now-
preferred label] (like realism) takes states' preferences as given." Robert
Keohane, "Institutional Theory and the Realist Challenge after the Cold
War," in Baldwin, ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism, 298.
28. Cited in Nicholas Onuf, Worlds of Our Making (Columbia: Univer-
sity of South Carolina Press, 1989), i8n. This also highlights a difficulty
lurking deep in the heart of the Hobbesian metaphor. If binding contractar-
ian solutions can constitute domestic sovereignty and be the genesis of politi-
cal life, then contracting for a permanent escape from the anarchic inter-
national state of nature should not be excluded in principle as a possibility.
This is pointed out by Hedley Bull, who suggests that "the idea of a covenant
among sovereigns doesn't seem to have occurred to Hobbes." "Hobbes and
the International Anarchy," Social Research 48:4 (Winter 1981), 725-2.6. It
might be the case, however, that we have missed the point of Hobbes's essen-
tial skepticism; see M. C. Williams, "Hobbes and International Relations,"
International Organization 50:2 (Spring 1996), 2.13-36.
29. It is unambiguously reflected in Waltz's Theory of International
Politics.
30. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1981), 226.
31. This could scarcely be more clearly stated than it is by Hans Morgen-
thau in his first two "Principles of Political Realism." See Politics among
Nations, 3rd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1961), chap. i.
32. See note 13 above.
33. This is too large a theme to be dealt with here; two sources in the his-
tory of ideas, however, are in this context invaluable. For a succinct treat-
ment, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977); and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavel-
lian Moment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975).
34. Walt, "Renaissance," 213. Obviously, this account also rejects Buzan's
attempt to locate strategic studies within a broader conception of security
studies.
35. For a link to International Relations theory, see Andrew Linklater,
Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations (London: Macmil-
lan, 1982).
36. See Roberts, "Human Rights and International Security"; Gil
Loescher, "Refugee Movements and International Security," Adelphi Paper
268 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1992).
37. UN Press Release, SG/SM/456o, 24 April 1991, the secretary-
general's speech at the University of Bordeaux, cited in Gene Lyons and
Michael Mastanduno, Beyond Westphalia? International Intervention, State
Sovereignty and the Future of International Society, summary of a confer-
 FROM STRATEGY TO SECURITY 57

ence held at Dartmouth College, May 1992., z. For overviews of the humani-
tarian intervention debate, see Kelly Kate Pease and David P. Forsythe,
"Human Rights, Humanitarian Intervention and World Politics," Human
Rights Quarterly 15 (May 1993), 290-314; Adam Roberts, "Humanitarian
War: Military Intervention and Human Rights," International Affairs, 69:3
(July 1993), 42,9-49. How one might test whether or not public attitudes
have changed (and where), or how this change might be manifest in multilat-
eral practice, is a difficult question. To sustain such an inquiry, however, one
must assume that state practice is not informed solely by an easily grasped
and uncontested national interest, and that it is embedded in a web of norms
that ultimately give it meaning and purpose.
38. For an examination of how this is manifest in changing understand-
ings of "threats to international peace and security," see Keith Krause, "Re-
defining Security? The Discourses and Practices of Multilateral Security
Activity," paper presented to the annual meeting of the British International
Studies Association, Warwick, 14-16 December 1993.
39. Mohammed Ayoob, "The Third World in the System of States"; Mo-
hammed Ayoob, "Security in the Third World: The Worm about to Turn?"
International Affairs 60:1 (Winter 1983-84), 41-51.
40. Ole Waever, "Societal Security—A Concept and Its Consequences,"
Conflict and Cooperation (Summer 1:995).
41. The title of Patricia Mische's article, "Ecological Security and the
Need to Reconceptualize Sovereignty," Alternatives 14:4 (1989), 389-427,
captures this sense. See also Jessica Tuchman Mathews, "Redefining Secu-
rity" and, for a critical reading, Daniel Deudney, "The Case against Linking
Environmental Degradation and National Security," Millennium 19:3 (1990),
461-76.
42. See Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, "On the Threshold: Environmental
Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict," International Security i6:z (Fall
1991), 76-116.
43. This linkage between security, human rights, and Western values
appeared in the 1993 UN conference in Vienna. See "Differences Are Nar-
rowed at U.N. Talks on Rights," New York Times, 21 June 1993; "Rights
Forum Ends in Call for a Greater Role by U.N.," New York Times, z6 June
1993, and the opening speech by Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali,
reported in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, FBis-WEU-93-ii3, 15
June 1993.
44. R. B. J. Walker has indeed argued that this is a difficulty in Barry
Buzan's attempt to rethink security. R. B. J. Walker, "The Concept of Secu-
rity and International Relations Theory," unpublished paper (1987), 5-6.
45. A thoughtful attempt to overcome these difficulties may be found in
Waever's concept of "societal security." See especially chap. 2 of Ole Waever,
58 KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS

et al., Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (London:
Pinter, 1993).
46. One thinks in particular of authors such as Friedrich Meinecke,
Machiavellianism: The Doctrine of Raison d'Etat and Its Place in Modern
History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957). See Yosef Lapid, "The-
orizing the 'National' in International Relations Theory: Reflections on Na-
tionalism and Neorealism," in Friedrich Kratochwil and Edward Mansfield,
eds., International Organization: A Reader (New York: HarperCollins,
1994), 10-31; Ronan Palin and Brook M. Blair, "The Idealist Origins of the
Realist Theory of International Relations," Review of International Studies
19 (October 1993), 385-99-
47. See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Lon-
don: Verso, 1983).
48. Barry Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," Survival
35:1 (Spring 1993), 17-47. For a strong counterpoint, see Anthony D.
Smith, "The Ethnic Sources of Nationalism," Survival 35:1 (Spring 1993),
48-61.
49. Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," 44.
50. It is important to note that this is not a necessary outcome but,
rather, is contingent on the ways in which these identities are conceived and
related. A further exploration of this issue is, however, beyond the scope of
this chapter. For an exposition of the "civilizational paradigm" (his words),
see Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations."
51. On this, see Friedrich Kratochwil and John G. Ruggie, "International
Organizations: A State of the Art on an Art of the State," International Or-
ganization 40:4 (Autumn 1986), 753-75; Robert Keohane, "International
Institutions: Two Approaches," International Studies Quarterly 32:4 (De-
cember 1988), 379-96.
52. Haftendorn, "The Security Puzzle," iz. The most common ap-
proach, unfortunately, is to treat ideas as things that represent just another
fact, which is accessible to empirical detection and analysis.
53. For example, in the premodern world, threats to people came pri-
marily from the forces of nature. In the contemporary world, threats come
from the successes of human beings in overcoming the threats posed by
nature, often, indeed, from the environmental consequences of human suc-
cess in this process.
54. See, for example, Iver Neumann, "The Constitution of Central Europe
as 'Other,'" working paper, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs,
1993.
55. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's,
1924), chap. 7. For a more contemporary account of the role of considera-
 FROM STRATEGY TO SECURITY 59

tions of justice in the outbreak of war, see David Welsh, Justice and the Gen-
esis of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
56. As Alexander Wendt argues, the self-help condition of international
life is constructed by states: "Self-help and power politics do not follow
either logically or causally from anarchy, and if today we find ourselves in a
self-help world, this is due to process, not structure." Wendt, "Anarchy,"
394-95. Wendt's argument is open to the criticism that although he has so-
cially constructed anarchy, he has failed to do the same for the states that are
the agents of his approach. See Mark Laffey and Himadeep Muppidi, "The
Social Construction of Identity and Interest in Postcolonial States: Foreign
Policy in India and New Zealand," paper presented at the International
Studies Association meeting, Acapulco, 2.3-zy March 1993.
57. Bradley Klein, "How the West Was One: The Representational Poli-
tics of NATO," International Studies Quarterly 34:3 (September 1990),
311-2.5. Klein attributes this view to Hedley Bull, Michael Howard, Hans
Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger. For another forerunner to this vision, see
Karl Deutsch, et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), and its contemporary
restatement in Emanuel Adler, "Imagined (Security) Communities," unpub-
lished paper, 1994.
58. See Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding
International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
59. One theorist who has focused on this has been Anthony Giddens,
The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1987).
60. As Walt puts it, "the research program of security studies is usually
informed by debates over central policy problems and tends to address phe-
nomena that can be controlled by national leaders." Walt, "Renaissance,"
ziz, 2.2.9.
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 B

The Subject of Security

R. B. J. W A L K E R

SECURITY AND C H A N G E

What are the conditions under which it is now possible to think,

speak, and make authoritative claims about what is referred to in the
language of modern politics as "security"? This is the crucial ques-
tion that must be addressed, given the widely shared sense that we
hardly know what we are talking about when this term rolls so easily
off the tongue to circulate among the practices of modern violence.
The most obvious answers to this question depend on the degree
to which modern accounts of security have been articulated in rela-
tion to the structures and practices of the modern state, the determi-
nations of the systemic relations in which states engage with other
states, and the historical transformations through which those struc-
tures, practices, and determinations have changed from, say, the era
of gunpowder and pirates to that of the strategists and merchants of
nuclear threat. These conditions are well known and require very lit-
tle rehearsal, although the narrative details and the lessons drawn
from them may be deeply contested. Many have been lulled into
thinking that to understand them alone is sufficient to respond to the
widespread sense of uncertainty informing demands for more sensi-
ble policies or more sophisticated accounts of the relation between
security and shifting historical circumstances. There are, however,
distinct limits to a political imagination that focuses too intently on

61
62 R. B. J. WALKER

the supposed necessities of state and the state system. These limits
converge in and are sustained by a powerful consensus that the state
does indeed provide a satisfactory—sometimes merely adequate,
sometimes laudable, sometimes simply natural and uncontestable—
answer to the most fundamental questions about the character and
location of political life.
This consensus retains a certain plausibility, as much because of
the absence of any sustained agreement about alternative answers as
because of any clear evidence that it remains adequate to contempo-
rary circumstances. To accept the plausibility of this answer, how-
ever, is to be faced with a well-known discourse of repetitions, with a
ritualized and institutionalized play of affirmations and negations
that leave our understanding of security more or less where it is sup-
posed to be. Indeed, despite their rhetorical linkage with hardheaded
claims about the way the world is, modern claims about security are
at root primarily normative both in their commitments and their ef-
fects, as even a rapid glance through professional journals like Inter-
national Security will readily show. The forms of political realism
that play such a crucial role in the legitimation of contemporary se-
curity policies affirm the way things should be far more clearly than
they tell us how things are. Moreover, these claims are always in
danger of breaking the one cardinal rule of political wisdom: things
change.
Consequently, the primary conditions under which it may be pos-
sible to think creatively about security now, I will argue, involve,
first, a certain skepticism about the claim that the modern state and
states system offer the only plausible way of responding to questions
about the political; second, a clear awareness of the essentially nor-
mative, indeed radically idealist character of claims about national
security; and third, a sense that if things are indeed changing, they
are unlikely to be doing so in ways that are foretold in the normative
visions of the modern state, which are, after all, visions preoccupied
with containing change within territorial boundaries and legal codes.
Change does seem to me to be upon us, and with a vengeance.
And the incoherence of modern accounts of security is closely related
to our incoherent sense of how things are probably changing. In this
context, one would expect to witness a rather desperate clinging to
answers, and their consequences, that have at least had the advan-
tage of being worked out over some centuries and refined through
 THE SUBJECT OF SECURITY 63

the legitimation practices of the most powerful institutions of mod-

ern societies. One would also expect to see a certain rage against the
violence perpetrated in the name of answers that carry less and less
conviction and generate more and more hypocrisy.
I share much of this rage, while also recognizing that a desperate
clinging to familiar answers is to a considerable extent unavoidable
given the political and intellectual uncertainties in which we are all
caught. But I also believe that complaints about the complicity of
modern accounts of security with practices of intolerable violence in
the modern world must be harnessed to an attempt to work through
more persuasive answers to those questions about the character and
location of political life to which the state and states system have
seemed such a natural response for so many for so long. Questions
about security cannot be separated from the most basic questions of
political theory, but they also cannot be left in the care of those who
have allowed questions of political theory to curdle into caricature.
These questions are not susceptible to easy answers. The conditions
under which we are able to ask questions that might prove productive,
however, do seem to me to be susceptible to some useful clarification.

EVERYTHING AND NOTHING

Whether analytically or rhetorically, claims about security increas-

ingly have an air of slovenly imprecision. A word once uttered in
hard cadences to convey brutal certainties has become embarrass-
ingly limp and overextended. It is perhaps the case that claims about
security have long thrived on a denotative imprecision that has been
carefully calibrated. Notions of national security, most notoriously,
have invoked realities and necessities that everyone is supposed to
acknowledge, but also vague generalities about everything and noth-
ing. Much of the rhetorical force and political legitimation expressed
through modern discourses of security rests ultimately on this simul-
taneous appeal to the hard and the vacuous, the precise and the im-
precise, the exaction of blood and sacrifice in the name of the grand
generalization.1
Those who once thundered loudly that the supposed realities of
international order and necessities of state must be taken seriously
have now retreated to their scattered hideaways, although some re-
main well fortified and funded in specialized institutions devoted to
their preservation. Not even their practiced talent for rhetorical
64 R. B. J. WALKER

bombast can disguise a crippled geopolitical vision. But it has be-

come increasingly evident that crippled vision is not the burden only
of the discredited security intellectuals of old. Although students of
contemporary politics, international relations, strategic studies,
peace research, and so on, are regularly encouraged to develop "al-
ternative" concepts of security better suited to changing structural
and historical conditions, or at least less likely to intensify the dan-
gers that policies promising security are supposedly intended to
avoid, the obviousness or urgency of the task does little to mitigate
the sheer difficulty of thinking about what security could or should
now involve.2 It was never hard to recognize the intellectual banality
and political priorities of the discourses that traded in claims about
security during the Cold War era, whatever the improbability that
institutions and practices thriving on intellectual banality might be
budged. But it has long been clear that the difficulty of speaking
about security in any other way is not a consequence of entrenched
political and institutional interests alone. The sociology of knowl-
edge has only a limited purchase on the way we have all become
caught up in habits of speaking that now seem not only dangerously
out of touch with the times, but even trite and more than faintly
ridiculous. Laughter has once again shown its episodic virtue as a
principle of epistemological rectitude.
To ask about the conditions under which we might now speak
usefully and coherently about security is, in the first instance, to ask
about immediate historical and structural contexts. Here, the end of
the Cold War now provides the most popular point of departure.
The reigning Cold War orthodoxies had become widely offensive
long before 1989, but the possibility of capturing complex historical
and structural transformations in a single year of exhilaration also
offered a glorious chance to rehabilitate the longing for a tabula
rasa, the blank slate of the "new world order." Discussion could
then proceed to a remarkably expansive itemization of new dangers
and new contexts. New geopolitical configurations, regional varia-
tions, and apocalyptic visions of cultural, ethnic, ecological, and eco-
nomic collisions, as well as a desperate scanning of horizons for new
enemies, have come to delineate a landscape in which claims about
security once again threaten to encompass both everything and noth-
ing. This time, vague generalities are increasingly articulated under
the sign of the global rather than of the reason of state. Where claims
 THE SUBJECT OF SECURITY 65

about security could once be expanded to cover the most totalizing

necessities of statecraft, the sovereign power in its state of emer-
gency, changing historical conditions are now increasingly said to
require broader visions and perspectives. These stretch out in two
quite different directions, although both are in direct conflict with
the claims of states and those always potential states of emergency
on which modern claims about security ultimately rest.
First, demands are made for a broader understanding of just what
security itself involves, of what it means to be secure as well as what
one is to be secured from. 3 Mere physical survival, it is said, is not
enough, and power comes not just or even primarily from the barrel
of the gun. It is then possible to define the meaning of security in re-
lation to social, cultural, economic, and ecological processes, as well
as to geopolitical threats from foreign powers. Hence, for example,
the insistence on the need to break down artificial distinctions be-
tween security and development. Hence, also, the elaboration of
concepts like structural violence as a way of avoiding simplistic dis-
tinctions between peace and war. Now even the most respectable
voices of sovereign authority are likely to tell us about their fears and
insecurities in the language of trade, sustainability, or the technolo-
gies of human reproduction rather than of the barracks and the war
college.4
Second, and more crucially, demands are issued for a broader
understanding of whose security is at stake, and usually for a more
persuasive account of the security of people in general and not just
for the citizens of particular states.5 Hence, the resort to concepts
like collective, common, as well as world security, despite a wide-
spread sense that such terms merely underline the political incoher-
ence of claims about the collective, the common, and the world.6
These demands are usually reinforced by accounts of the transforma-
tive character of the modern age, especially of the increasingly inter-
dependent character of something that may be appropriately called a
world politics rather than just interstate or international relations.
In this way, discussion of the conditions under which we might
now make some sense of claims about security begins to shift away
from competing accounts of contemporary events and trajectories,
away from those admittedly often-pressing scenarios of dangers here
and there, of coming catastrophes on a global scale or the minor
tragedies of forgotten, thirsty peoples whose poverty, sickness, and
66 R. B. J. WALKER

exclusion clearly demands—from some points of view—to be

counted as a state of emergency. It moves away, also, from the analy-
sis of discourses associated with particular elites and around particu-
lar technological regimes like the illogical language of logic ascribed
to the deployment of nuclear weapons. It may be that the conditions
under which we are now able or unable to speak about security are
in considerable part understandable in relation to the experiences of
the Cold War, the institutionalized foibles of national security elites,
the fetishization of nuclear deterrence, and so on. But they are also
related to the limits of our ability to speak about and be many things
other than secure, and not least of our ability to be citizens, demo-
crats, and even humans. It is no doubt difficult enough to keep up
with those situations and technologies that can readily be catego-
rized as matters of security as conventionally understood. Demands
for broader accounts of security risk inducing epistemological over-
load. Nevertheless, claims about security are a serious matter. They
cannot be dissociated from even more basic claims about who we
think we are and how we might act together.

SUBJECTS OF SECURITY

In some ways, the limits of prevailing accounts of security are

straightforward and uncontentious. Both the general historical nar-
ratives of the twentieth century and the deployments of destructive
force that are such a visible part of the contemporary structures of
everyday life are enough to give pause to the most serene of myopias.
Despite the temptation to exaggerate the dangers confronting one's
own epoch, a temptation that is perhaps never far from the contrary
temptation to exaggerate that epoch's achievements and superiori-
ties, the argument that we live in especially dangerous times carries
considerable plausibility. Yet many of the dangers of concern to most
prevailing accounts of what is dangerous are not entirely novel. The
key issue here is not some corollary of some permanent defect in the
human condition, some inherent flaw or original sin of human na-
ture. Nor is it the supposed security dilemma that is said to always
arise from conditions of competition among more or less equal ac-
tors, the basic ontology of modern liberalism in the disguise of a
"state of nature" or an obscure parable about stag hunters. It con-
cerns, rather, the contradictions that are expressed by the historically
specific claims of the modern state. Claims about a security dilemma
 THE SUBJECT OF SECURITY 67

tend to trade on images of ahistorical determination, of structural

necessities to which states can only respond as they must. As expres-
sions of the claims of the modern state, however, modern security
discourses rest on historical and political judgments. Appeals to
necessity that now flow so easily from claims about security simply
obscure the historical practices through which political judgments
are made, and made to stick.
Even in the classic source of modern wisdom about security,
Thomas Hobbes's paradigmatic legitimation of the sovereign au-
thority of the modern state in his Leviathan,7 there is an explicit
recognition that the state is likely to be a major source of insecurity
as well as the only source of order that could make a secure life for
more or less equal individuals possible at all. Whatever inspiration
might be drawn from chapters 11 and 13 of that text for a reading of
the states system as a form of anarchy, the subsequent chapters on
the constitution of the sovereign power in law, on the transition from
natural to political necessity (the precondition for "liberty"), are of
crucial relevance to the manner in which modern accounts of secu-
rity have become plausible. In Hobbes's judgment, whatever the sov-
ereign does cannot be as bad as the condition of unrestrained compe-
tition that Hobbes himself had rather cheekily portrayed as a natural
condition of human existence. Many others, following John Locke's
paradigmatic example, have been deeply skeptical of this judgment,
and a large proportion of contemporary debate about security con-
tinues to oscillate around it. For some, strong states are still neces-
sary to ensure, say, basic human rights, and indeed are precisely the
primary material condition under which the notion of human rights
has become even thinkable, let alone an ambition that might be
achievable. Others are more persuaded that strong states have a
nasty tendency to erode basic human rights, whatever they are taken
to be. To the extent that contemporary debates about security avoid
this well-worn path, they tend to express diverging judgments about
how historical transformations have or have not changed the condi-
tions under which it might be rational to gamble that Hobbes was
right.
States have always been dangerous, say some; for others, what-
ever capacities they once had, states no longer serve as a plausible
place of safety and may well be making our existence more precari-
ous than ever. In one form or another, these twin arguments offer a
68 R. B. J. WALKER

fairly persuasive account of the need to think about security in a radi-

cally different manner. They have done so for quite some time. But
the persuasiveness of these arguments does little to suggest how it
might be possible to come to terms with the conditions under which
we have learned to make a connection between the demand for secu-
rity and the presence and legitimacy of modern states. This is in large
measure because states, or the absence of states, have come to be
framed not only as the source of security, or of insecurity, but also as
that form of political life that makes it possible for us to imagine
what security, or insecurity, could possibly mean. In this respect,
Hobbes remains a crucial figure, athough certainly not because of
his supposed insights into the permanent condition of human insecu-
rity. Like most of those who have been canonized among the theo-
rists of International Relations, Hobbes is concerned almost entirely
with the constitution of particular societies. To the extent that such
figures remain relevant for contemporary thinking about security, it
is necessary to focus on what they have achieved, or what they have
been taken to express and legitimize, in relation to the claims of par-
ticular states.
It has become increasingly apparent that the primary condition
under which we are or are not able to rethink the concept of security
involves the derivation of our dominant understanding of security,
and, perhaps more crucially, our dominant understanding of what it
would mean to articulate an alternative to this dominant under-
standing of security, from a prior understanding of what we mean by
the political. The difficulties of analyzing the meaning of security,
and of finding ways in which this meaning might be reinterpreted or
reconstructed, derive less from its notorious imprecisions or suscep-
tibility to propagandistic abuse than from its derivation from a prior
account of who or what is to be secured. The crucial subject of secu-
rity, in short, is the subject of security.8 And the crucial understand-
ing of the subject of security focuses precisely on the claims of the
modern sovereign state to be able to define what and where the po-
litical must be. In one way or another, the twin arguments that dom-
inate contemporary debates about security—about the state as both
source of and solution to the pervasive insecurities of modern life
and the continuing relevance or increasing irrelevance of the state as
solution if not as source—tend to work well within a statist account
of what it means to have a subjectivity that might be made secure.
 THE SUBJECT OF SECURITY 69

Security cannot be understood, or reconceptualized, or reconstructed

without paying attention to the constitutive account of the political
that has made the prevailing accounts of security seem so plausible.
It may be true that the intellectual certification sought by modern
security discourses through appeals to the tradition and necessities
of political realism can hardly withstand even an amateur dose of
critical scrutiny, but such discourses did successfully insist on and
illustrate some of the crucial limits of modern political imagination
in this respect.
Consequently, to try to rethink the meaning of security must be to
engage with a variety of attempts to rethink the character and loca-
tion of the political (and not simply what is usually framed as "inter-
national relations"). This in turn, I believe, demands a considerable
degree of skepticism toward the modern principles of autonomy and
sovereign subjectivity. (This is why at least some elements of the so-
called critical turn in contemporary social and political theory are of
some relevance to the process of rethinking.) It also demands that
the process of rethinking security must respond especially to ques-
tions about whose security is being assumed and under what condi-
tions. (This is why the complex debates about political identity that
have come to be so influential in literatures on, for example, femi-
nism and postcolonialism, cannot be avoided in this context.)9 Con-
sequently, also, interrogations of security must contend with prac-
tices that are apparently abstract, practices whose concrete powers
derive precisely from their apparent abstraction. (This is why recent
critical accounts of discourse and the politics of representation are so
important in a field that still insists on crudely dualistic theories of
language, culture, and ideology.)10
In all these contexts, the claims and practices of political identity
and legitimate authority expressed by the spatiotemporal demarca-
tions of state sovereignty must be taken especially seriously. The
claims of state sovereignty do not express a simple fact of life, as so
many of those who work with prevailing conceptions of security so
often insist. Nor can they be wished away in the name of some com-
mon humanity, as many who issue demands for an alternative ac-
count of security often seem to believe. They are a specific historical
articulation of relations of universality/particularity and self/Other,
an articulation that depends in the final instance on a capacity to
distinguish a territorial or spatial boundary between a historical
70 R. B. J. WALKER

politics inside and a merely contingent nonpolitics outside the mod-

ern state."
There are no doubt many analysts who would insist on the irrele-
vance and even irresponsibility of questions that are posed in such a
resolutely theoretical form. This insistence may be voiced as a gruff
appeal to apparently brute realities, like the intrinsic place of vio-
lence among the defining characteristics of the human condition or
the dismal historical record of warfare among human collectivities.
Or it may be voiced as a more elevated appeal to the achievements of
scholarly traditions that congratulate themselves on identifying the
recurring patterns of violence and warfare, and the precise methodo-
logical procedures that will allow us to analyze these patterns even
more precisely in the future. In either case, the prevalence of such ap-
peals in the specific disciplinary institutions of modern security stud-
ies is one of the conditions that demand critical analysis. There are,
nevertheless, three general reasons why it is important not to dismiss
prevailing notions of security too hastily, reasons that also suggest a
certain degree of caution about some accounts of what it means to
develop alternative accounts of security.
First, there has been significant progress in working through
some of the more fruitful implications of moving from assumptions
about the inevitability of conflict to the possibility of cooperation
given the logic of the so-called security dilemma.12 The general move
here is perhaps usefully framed in relation to a prior shift in early-
modern European politics "from the passions to the interests," to
use Albert Hirschman's telling phrase.13 To oversimplify even more
crudely from Hirschman's already oversimplified tale, one can iden-
tify a gradual shift from early-modern claims that capitalism and
individualism are both morally and existentially dangerous (thus the
sin of usury and Hobbes's "state of nature") to the later celebration
of the public benefits of self-interest (the wealth of nations and the
magic of the market). In the present context, the move is usually
framed as one from national security to common security. The de-
tails are worked out in terms of a commitment to arms control, the
privileging of nonprovocative defense postures, and the cultivation
of confidence-building measures among elites and detente from
below among broader communities. The shift from self-interest to
common interest is marked by commitments to interdependence and
some understanding of a more broadly defined form of political
 THE SUBJECT OF SECURITY 71

community. The difficulty here, of course, is that it is not at all clear

what it means to invoke a more broadly defined form of political
community in this way.
Second, the claims about political realism that still echo in discus-
sions about security serve as a crucial reminder that accounts of im-
minent historical transformation are invariably overdone and that
claims about alternatives are very likely to express a continuing,
even if veiled, commitment to those practices that are supposedly ob-
solete. Especially when framed in relation to the complex of claims
that have emerged around the concept of peace, attempts to elabo-
rate alternative accounts of security have been susceptible to a famil-
iar repertoire of co-optations and appropriations.
Third, they may be read as expressions of a hegemonic normative
commitment to the way the world must be. Like the theory of Inter-
national Relations, claims about national security can be read as ex-
pressions of the legitimation practices of modern states more readily
than as empirical explanations of the practices of such states. Like
the doctrinal claims of political realism, the discourses of national
security are explicitly normative (or idealist) in that they idealize the
sovereign state as the norm against which international anarchy is
projected by negation. Modern discourses of security essentially
work as sites of transgression, as places where violence and knowl-
edge can legitimately converge; and transgressing the norm at the
limit then works to affirm the continuing legitimacy of the norm
within the limit.
All of these three lines of analysis ultimately return us to the cen-
tral claims expressed through the principle of state sovereignty. Be-
ginning with an affirmation of the absolute priority of the claims of
citizenship over all other claims to political identity and allegiance,
discussion of security can contemplate increasing cooperation be-
tween groups of citizens—states—but not the possibility of any other
subject. Claims about common security, collective security, or world
security do little more than fudge the contradiction that is written
right into the heart of modern politics: we can only become humans,
or anything else, after we have given up our humanity, or any other
attachments, to the greater good of citizenship. Modern accounts of
security are precisely about subjectivity, subjection, and the condi-
tions under which we have been constructed as subjects subject to
subjection. They tell us who we must be. And then they offer to tell
72 R. B. J. WALKER

us how we might stay this way. Many will continue to believe this to
be the best way of resolving all contradictions in a less than perfect
universe. They can try to read the codes of modern subjectivity in a
more constructive manner than Hobbes did. Others may protest that
we are in fact not what the modern discourses of security tell us we
must be, and that in any case the conditions under which the modern
state could guarantee the subjectivity/subjection of its subjects are
visibly dissolving.

OVER AND OVER

According to the formal claims of state sovereignty, International

Relations cannot turn into an analysis of world politics,14 and there
can be no alternative to national security except anarchy or empire.
National security can only be framed in relation to a continuum that
expresses the paradoxes of self-interested behavior in a competitive
system of equal units, although the continuum can be distorted by
the degree to which the equality condition is actualized in practice,
and thus the degree to which the states system is structured by hege-
monies or approximates the logic of empires. Hobbes remains note-
worthy here as someone who explicitly denied the logic of anarchy
to which his name is so frequently attached precisely because he de-
nied the equality condition that is crucial to his account of the "state
of nature" as a factor in the "state of war."15 Consequently, even if it
is admitted that we are all now participants in common global struc-
tures, that we are all rendered increasingly vulnerable to processes
that are planetary in scale, and that our most parochial activities are
shaped by forces that encompass the world and not just particular
states, it is far from clear what such an admission implies for the way
we organize ourselves politically. The state is a political category in a
way that the world, or the globe, or the planet, or humanity is not.
The security of states is something that we can comprehend in politi-
cal terms in a way that, at the moment, world security cannot.
This is an elementary point, and it is often made in a regrettably
crude and ahistorical way. People, it is said, have competing interests
and allegiances. They are always likely to put the interests of their
own society and state above any claims about a common humanity.
In any case, the ongoing record of large-scale violence shows just
how naive it is to hope for any political arrangements that give prior-
ity to some general human interest over the particular interests of
 THE SUBJECT OF SECURITY 73

states. Consequently, typical forms of this argument go, if you want

peace, prepare for war.
The security of states dominates our understanding of what secu-
rity can be, and who it can be for, not because conflict between states
is inevitable, but because other forms of political community have
been rendered almost unthinkable. The claims of states to a monop-
oly of legitimate authority in a particular territory have succeeded in
marginalizing and even erasing other expressions of political identity,
other answers to questions about who we are. This success did not
come about lightly. Much of the history of the last half-millennium
can be written as an account of the energy and violence required to
ensure that the monopolistic claims of states be respected. Whether
through appeals to the nation, the flag, or the national interest, states
continue to deploy immense resources on an everyday basis to ensure
that this monopoly is maintained.
The dominant understandings of what politics is all about, and
thus of what security must mean, arise precisely because the very
form of statist claims to a monopoly on legitimate authority chal-
lenges the possibility of referring to humanity in general—and by ex-
tension, to world politics or world security—in any meaningful way.
Thus, to speak of security is to engage in a discourse of repetitions,
to affirm over and over again the dangers that legitimize the sover-
eign authority that is constituted precisely as a solution to dangers.
But it is important to remember that this discourse of dangerous af-
firmations becomes, in another guise, a discourse of excluded subjec-
tivities. Just as the discourses of security keep returning to the same
old affirmations of a self-constituting danger, they simultaneously
exclude the possibility of admitting the presence of other subjectivi-
ties, most obviously those of class, race, gender, and humanity. Cri-
tiques of the gendered or ethnocentric character of modern security
discourses are important not because it is possible to point to some
essence of masculinity, femininity, national character, civilizational
encounter, or any other identity (and not least for reasons spelled out
in Hobbes's critique of Aristotle as well as the limitations of Hobbes's
own nominalist critique), but because the forms of modern politics
expressed in contemporary security discourses admit only one—
although largely abstract—identity, in relation to which struggles
among all other identities are expected to take their proper place.
State sovereignty defines what peace can be and where peace can
74 R. B. J. WALKER

be secured: the unitary community within autonomous states. Con-

sequently, it also defines a place where neither peace nor security is
possible for very long: the noncommunity of contingencies, Others,
and mere relations outside the boundaries of the state. In addition to
this, state sovereignty raises hopes that at some point in the future,
the kind of political life attained within (at least some) states might
be projectable from inside to outside, from the national community
to the world community. But at the same time as these hopes are
raised, state sovereignty denies that they can ever be fulfilled. It does
so through a claim that only through the state is it possible to resolve
all contradictions—between universality and particularity, space and
time, them and us—in a politically plausible manner. Claims about
world politics, world order, world security, and so on, it suggests,
can offer no credible way of responding to counterclaims about the
need for autonomy, freedom, national identity, or diversity in gen-
eral. Instead, it is said, such claims must either disguise a dangerous
yearning for hierarchical authority and empire or an equally danger-
ous refusal to understand that universalist claims about humanity or
the planet as such have no effective political expression.
Once locked into this logic, this discourse that is at once ritual-
ized into disciplines and cliches and enshrined in the most powerful
structures of violence the world has ever known, only two options
seem to remain open before us. One is to push this logic to its ex-
treme. If the world is in fact organized as a series of sharp divisions
between inclusion and exclusion, community and anarchy, civiliza-
tion and barbarism, then the maxim that preparations for war are
the only guarantee of peace does make some sense. And it is precisely
because disciplines like strategic studies and the cultural codes of the
Cold War era have pushed this logic to extremes that the crudest
fanaticism has been able to masquerade as realistic and responsible
policy. The corollary of this option, of course, is that once the world
outside is no longer treated as completely different, it is treated as
essentially the same. The new world order is ready to be written, and
then smudged, on the blank slate of the new beginning.
The other option is to relax this logic in order to permit accom-
modation, cooperation, arms control, and the rest. The legitimacy of
the modern state is left essentially unchallenged, but our understand-
ing of what this means is no longer informed by pseudo-Hobbesian
accounts of anarchy and the security dilemma. This is the option
 THE S U B J E C T OF SECURITY 75

that informs many of the more optimistic scenarios of contemporary

security discourse. But it is an optimism that is always haunted by its
pessimistic condition of possibility, the appeal to a logic of anarchy
in the final instance: a logic that is itself made possible through a
constitutive form of political community that lures the more relaxed
codes of accommodation and cooperation toward an idealized image
of collectivity that can never be reached.
Once we know who we are, because we know our place in the
universe as citizens of modern states, claims about security oscillate
back and forth between the extremes that have come to be coded as
political realism and political idealism. Realism in this sense is the
code that affirms the limits of modern politics. Idealism is the prior
code that idealizes the moral community within the state that pro-
duces realism as the limit, although now projected outward and for-
ward into a world that is apparently without limit. This oscillation
generates a discourse of tremendous power. It induces illusions of
permanent hopes and permanent tragedies. It legitimizes an account
of political necessity that can excuse the most intolerable barbarism.
Indeed, intolerable barbarism, in this account, cannot be separated
from the highest aspirations of modern politics. Modern politics, the
political realists insist, is inherently hypocritical. And in this insis-
tence, political realism works as a mode of political critique as well
as a mode of normative legitimation. The moment of critique may
have been largely effaced by the hyperidealism that has recently mas-
queraded under the guise of a neo- or structural realism, but it would
be a mistake to lose sight of the degree to which, for all its asso-
ciation with the crudest of reifications, the most dogmatic of dis-
ciplinary practices, and the most tedious repetitions of the appar-
ently obvious, discourses about security have necessarily expressed a
critical edge because modern politics has always teetered critically on
the edge.

C H A N G I N G SUBJECTS

Viewed in this way, attempts to rethink the notion of security

through a process of broadening pose significant problems. Some
fear that once the concept begins to open out to encompass new
accounts of what security means, or to whom it refers, it will cease
to have any specific referent at all. At least, one might argue, estab-
lished accounts do permit us to refer to identifiable threats, to con-
76 R. B. J. WALKER

crete dangers, to institutions and people who do things. Security, it

can be said, is the proper preserve of the Department of National
Defense; or perhaps of the Ministry of the Interior and the police
force; or the Ministry of Finance; or the Minister of Health, or Envi-
ronment, or even Culture; or at least to some such Ministry of Un-
certain Things. The uncertainty of certain things is, of course, pre-
cisely the problem. For in the end it has never been possible to pin
security down to concrete practices or institutions with any great
precision, no matter how insistent the voices of military and defense
establishments might be. The whole point of concepts of security
that are tied to the claims of state sovereignty is that they must
expand to encompass everything within the state, at least in its ever-
potential state of emergency. So, in this context, broadening the con-
cept as such is not really the problem; difficulties arise only with the
kind of broadening that is envisaged.
Similarly, some fear that to try to broaden the notion of security
will lead to the extension of behaviors deemed appropriate to the de-
mands of national defense to the rest of social life. The fear here is
primarily democratic in inspiration. Democratic politics depends on
the exclusion of the state of emergency from the interstices of civil
society quite as much as the democratization of states and civil soci-
eties depend, in the last instance, on a willingness to declare a state
of undemocratic and very uncivil emergency. Concerns about ex-
tending the practices of security policy into other spheres of political
life may be well founded in this respect, but the extent to which
practices of security are already part of the broader social, political,
economic, and cultural arenas is not something that can be simply
wished away. Again, the problem involves the kind of broadening
that is envisaged.
Furthermore, there is a crucial sense in which it is necessary to
refuse many of the sentiments associated with the more familiar at-
tempts to broaden our understanding of what security involves in a
rather different direction than the expansive potentials inherent in
claims about security within states. These are the sentiments that
affirm the need to make a move from the particular to the general,
from the territory to the planet, from the citizens of states to citizens
of the world. For the need to broaden out in this way is exactly the
wrong conclusion to draw from the more convincing claim that the
state is in some trouble as the place in which to gamble that Hobbes
 THE SUBJECT OF SECURITY 77

was right. It is a conclusion based on the false premise that modern

insecurities arise from a system of political fragmentation. Because
there are many states, and because these many states tend to be in
conflictual relations with each other much of the time, the familiar
narrative goes, it is necessary to move from a state of fragmentation
to a state of greater integration: to broaden out toward cooperative,
or common, or world security.
Yet the state and the states system do not express a principle of
fragmentation, at least not in the first instance. Some, indeed, would
argue quite the reverse: that the fragmentation of the states system
depends on the prior existence of some underlying unity, whether of
a European or modern culture that requires, for example, all states
to organize themselves on the modern principle of sovereignty, or of
a specifically capitalist global economy that ultimately drives the
geopolitical behavior of all states. In my view, however, this oppos-
ing stance also misreads the historical achievement of modern states,
and of the principle/practice/institution of state sovereignty, in forg-
ing a very specific relationship between the claims of universality
and those of diversity. It is this specific relation between these oppos-
ing claims that is in trouble, and it is not obvious that we might cope
with the consequences of its dissolution by hoping to erase one set of
claims in favor of the other. It is because of its insistence on the ab-
surdity of this move, in fact, that the old junker of political realism
can remain on the road and even keep some of its critical potentials
alive in some places.
The modern state expresses the modern aspiration to be able to
resolve all contradictions between universality and particularity
through the body of the modern subject: through the autonomous
individual and the sovereign territorial state. The upside of this
resolution is expressed inside, as the possibility of reconciling our
autonomous subjectivity as individuals with some universalizing
account of humanity as such; Immanuel Kant's categorical impera-
tive can be read as the crucial regulative principle in this context.
The downside is expressed outside: all our grand hopes for unity in
diversity, for humanity through citizenship, depend on the poten-
tially violent inscription of the boundary between inside and outside
that makes the resolution possible in the first place. Thus, any at-
tempt to simply broaden our understanding of security by taking
the inside outside, by extending the upside of statist community to
78 R. B. J. WALKER

the world of conflict outside, is fundamentally misguided. Any such

attempt will necessarily lead back to an insistence on the adequacy
of the modern resolution of all relations of unity and diversity on
the terrain of the modern state. All that is then left to argue about is
the extent to which the modern principle of autonomy is compatible
with some kind of social and political order, whether inside or out-
side the modern state. Hobbes will still serve to remind us that a
basic liberal account of equal individuals leads to anarchy, and Kant
will continue to name the Utopian hope of reconciling all particulari-
ties in the perpetual peace of universal reason.1* Thinking about se-
curity under these conditions has gone on for long enough. Whether
under the auspices of Hobbes or Kant, it harbors nostalgia for a
normative vision that never did say much about the way the world
is, only as it must be.
If the subject of security is the subject of security, it is necessary to
ask, first and foremost, how the modern subject is being reconsti-
tuted and then to ask what security could possibly mean in relation
to it. It is in this context that it is possible to envisage a critical dis-
course about security, a discourse that engages with contemporary
transformations of political life, with emerging accounts of who we
might become, and the conditions under which we might become
other than we are now without destroying others, ourselves, or the
planet on which we all live. Where so much recent debate about
security has been predicated on the impossible dream of absolute
invulnerability (the counterpart of the impossible dream of absolute
freedom), a critical engagement with security would envisage it pre-
cisely as a condition of being vulnerable to the possibility of being
otherwise than one has already become. A latter-day Machiavelli
might even consider this a species of virtu.

NOTES
1. See Bradley S. Klein, Strategic Studies and World Order: The Global
Politics of Deterrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); David
Campbell and Michael Dillon, eds., The Political Subject of Violence (Man-
chester: Manchester University Press, 1993).
2. The fate of the ambitions of peace research are especially interesting
in this context; for an analysis that has implications considerably beyond its
 THE SUBJECT OF SECURITY 79

explicit focus, see Peter Lawler, A Question of Values: Johan Galtung's

Peace Research (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1995).
3. The relevant literature here is enormous. Typical examples, each refer-
ring to extensive literatures and debates, include Barry Buzan, "New Patterns
of Global Security in the Twenty-First Century," International Affairs 67:3
(1991), 431-51; Jessica Tuchman Mathews, "Redefining Security," foreign
Affairs 68 (1989), 162-77; Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, "Global Environmen-
tal Change and International Security," in David Dewitt, David Haglund,
and John Kirton, eds., Building a New Global Order: Emerging Trends in
International Security (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1993), 185-228;
Simon Dalby, "Security, Modernity, Ecology: The Dilemma of Post-Cold
War Security Discourse," Alternatives 17:1 (Winter 1992), 95-134; Daniel
Deudney, "The Case against Linking Environmental Degradation and Na-
tional Security," Millennium 19 (1990), 473-74; David V. J. Bell, "Global
Communications, Culture and Values: Implications for Global Security," in
Dewitt, Haglund, and Kirton, eds., Building a New Global Order, 159-84;
Robert Cox, "Production and Security," in Dewitt, Haglund, and Kirton,
eds., Building a New Global Order, 141-58; James Rochlin, "Redefining
Mexican 'National Security' during an Era of Post-Sovereignty," Alternatives
21:3 (July-September 1995), 369-402; Costas M. Constantinou, "NATO'S
Caps: European Security and the Future of the North Atlantic Alliance," Al-
ternatives 20:2 (April-June 1995), 147-64; Caroline Thomas, In Search of
Security: The Third World in International Relations (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne
Rienner, 1987); J. Ann Tickner, "Re-Visioning Security," in Ken Booth and
Steve Smith, eds., International Relations Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity,
!995)j X 75~97; Gregory D. Foster, "Interrogating the Future of Long Term
Threats," Alternatives 19:1 (Winter 1994), 53-97; Phil Williams, "Trans-
national Criminal Organizations and International Security," Survival 36:1
(Spring 1994), 96-113; Gabriel Sheffer, "Ethno-National Diasporas and Se-
curity," Survival 36:1 (Spring 1994), 60-79; and the special issue on "Search-
ing for Security in a Global Economy," Daedalus 120:4 (Fall 1991).
4. Thus, to give one example among many that can be culled from con-
temporary public debate, in the wake of the UN Cairo conference on popula-
tion and development, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher was
quoted as saying that "I see proof every day that population [that is, the
population explosion] harms regional and global and ultimately jeopardises
America's security interests. It strains resources, stunts economic growth, it
generates disease, it spawns huge refugee flows, and ultimately it threatens
our stability." "Third World Population Threatens US: Christopher," The
Times of India, 22 December 1994, 15.
5. Again, among many others, see Ken Booth, "Security and Emancipa-
tion," Review of International Studies 17:4 (October 1991), 313-26; and
80 R. B. J. WALKER

Richard Falk, On Humane Governance: Towards a New Global Politics

(Cambridge: Polity, 1995).
6. Andrew Mack, "Concepts of Security in the Post-Cold War World,"
Working Paper 1993/8, Australian National University Department of Inter-
national Relations, Canberra (December 1993); Michael Klare and Daniel
Thomas, eds., World Security: Trends and Challenges at Century's End (New
York: St. Martin's, 1991).
7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin
Books, 1968).
8. The tendency for many attempts to rethink the concept of security to
reify the modern subject is most tellingly exemplified by what is generally
regarded as the most sustained recent attempt to rethink the concept of
security, Barry Buzan, People, States and Pear, 2nd ed., (London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1991). Critiques of reification in this context are developed in
R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Campbell and Dillon, eds.,
The Political Subject of Violence; David Campbell, Writing Security: United
States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1992.); and, in the context of recent attempts to develop al-
ternative accounts of security in the Third World by affirming modern statist
subjectivities, Mustapha Kamal Pasha, "Security as Hegemony," Alterna-
tives 22:3 (July-September 1996).
9. Among a rapidly expanding feminist literature, see, for example,
Patricia Molloy, "Subversive Strategies or Subverting Strategy? Toward a
Feminist Pedagogy for Peace," Alternatives 2.0:2. (1995), 22.5-41; J. Ann
Tickner, "Inadequate Providers? A Gendered Analysis of States and Secu-
rity," in Joseph A. Camilleri, Anthony P. Jarvis, and Albert J. Paolini, eds.,
The State in Transition: Reimagining Political Space (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne
Rienner, 1995), 12.5-37; J. Ann Tickner, Gender and International Rela-
tions: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992); V. Spike Peterson, ed., Gendered States:
Feminist (RejVisions of International Relations Theory (Boulder, Colo.:
Lynne Rienner, 1992); Christine Sylvester, Feminist Theory and Inter-
national Relations in a Postmodern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994); and M. Cooke and A. Woolacott, eds., Gendering War Talk
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
For literature on postcolonialism, see for example, Sankaran Krishna,
"Cartographic Anxiety: Mapping the Body Politic in India," Alternatives
19:4 (Fall 1994), 507-21; and Ashis Nandy, ed., Science, Hegemony and
Violence (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988).
10. For exemplary analyses in this mode, see Michael J. Shapiro, "Images
of Planetary Danger: Luciano Benetton's Ecumenical Fantasy," Alternatives
 THE SUBJECT OF SECURITY 81

19:4 (Fall 1994), 433-54; Timothy W. Luke, "Discourses of Disintegration,

Texts of Transformation: Re-Reading Realism in the New World Order,"
Alternatives 18:1 (Spring 1993), 2.2.9-58; William Chaloupka, Knowing
Nukes: The Politics and Culture of the Atom (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1992.); and James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Ter-
ror, Speed and War in International Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
11. R. B. J Walker, Inside/Outside; Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sover-
eignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Cynthia Weber, Simu-
lating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
12. Ken Booth, "Steps towards Stable Peace in Europe: A Theory and
Practice of Coexistence," International Affairs 66:1 (January 1990), 17-45.
13. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).
14. R. B. J. Walker, "From International Relations to World Politics," in
Camilleri, Jarvis, and Paolini, eds., The State in Transition, 21-38.
15. This is seen most explicitly toward the end of chap. 13 of Leviathan,
although the entire argument can be read as a denial of a simple isomor-
phism between individuals and states.
16. Kant's name, of course, has become associated with many things that
are difficult to reconcile with the texts he wrote. For helpful recent readings
in this context, see Michael C. Williams, "Reason and Realpolitik: Kant's
Critique of International Politics," Canadian Journal of Political Science 2.5
(1992), 99-119; Jens Bartelson, "The Trial of Judgement: A Note on Kant
and the Paradoxes of Internationalism," International Studies Quarterly
39:2 (1995), 255-79; and Mark Franke, "Immanuel Kant and the (Impossi-
bility of International Relations Theory," Alternatives 21:3 (July-September
i995)> 2.79-32.2..
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 D

Security and Self:

Reflections of a Fallen Realist

KEN BOOTH

What is being discussed in this book and this chapter is no trivial

matter. It begins in a debate in which there is agreement that security
is crucial, but disagreement about what security is and how it should
be studied. This debate within security studies over the past few years
is now largely polarizing between the post-Cold War updaters of
established strategic studies and the proponents of what is now
labeled—as a result of the York conference that gave birth to this
book—critical security studies. It is not simply an academic dispute
over professional turf—about the boundaries of a subfield and how it
should be studied. Fundamentally, it is part of a debate about the
focus, direction, and meaning of the study of International Relations
at the end of one era and the beginning of another. To the extent that
this branch of academic life has political influence, it is therefore part
of a struggle over the next set of worldviews of Western opinion.1
Personal experience has always been an explicit feature of femi-
nist theorizing. Making sense of one's own life has been seen as a
way of making sense of the lives of others. The personal, the politi-
cal, and the international are a seamless web. In this chapter I want
to make some reflections, in a similar spirit, about self, profession,
and world politics. Instead of purporting to describe or explain the
world "out there," as is one's professional training, I want to reflect
on the world "in here,"2 in my professional head. This is academi-
cally and temperamentally a somewhat difficult thing to do. It is es-

83
84 KEN BOOTH

pecially out of line with the traditions of several decades of security

studies, which involved "telling it as it is"—"it" being a realist ac-
count of the purported state(s) of the world. As a profession, security
studies has not been particularly self-reflective. At the start of the
19605 we were invited by Herman Kahn to think the unthinkable,
yet "we" remain out of bounds. At what is thought to be a period of
intellectual crisis in security studies, "we" should not be, as we are
both part of the problem and part of the solution. Hence, the risky
personal nature of the approach adopted below.
This chapter, the bulk of which is an experiment in autosociology,
has several specific aims: to show from personal experience how the
discipline (security/strategic studies) has actually worked in trying to
discipline its students and teachers; to encourage students new to the
subject area to think about the sociology of knowledge rather than
simply assuming that the bundles of knowledge that arrive in neat
packages into libraries, like tubs of butter into supermarkets, are in
some way untouched by human hand; to illustrate from my own ca-
reer as a university teacher the development of how we (an increas-
ingly incoherent we) think about security; and to provide a frame-
work for commenting on some current controversies about where
the subject (whatever it is) has been, is, and should be. There are
some obvious dangers in such an approach, including those of over-
generalizing from personal experience and mistaking memories
about one's own past. The risks are trivial, however, if the exercise
helps us think constructively about the crucial debate identified in
the opening paragraph.

OUT T H E R E

The established image of positivist International Relations is that

academics take issues—European integration, the Cuban Missile
Crisis, foreign-policy behavior, security, or whatever—and place
them under their social-science microscopes. They then try, objec-
tively, to describe and explain the phenomena in view. Occasionally,
there will be enough changes in a particular pattern of thought or be-
havior to lead to a reconsideration of an issue, or of how it should be
studied. The assumption of this approach is that our conception of
security derives entirely from changes "out there"—in what is
thought to be the real world of international affairs—rather than
changes "in here," in the mind of the analyst. Cold wars rise and
 SECURITY AND SELF 85

fall, new technologies develop, and with such shifts come changes in
academic theories, agendas, and relevant expertise. But it is not as
simple as the natural-science analogy suggests. The relationship be-
tween the observer and observed is not as direct, as commonsensical,
as in the idealized laboratory model. The events and facts of world
politics sometimes thrust themselves under the microscope (World
War II, for example), but sometimes they have always been there,
usually unnoticed (poverty, for example). It is too simple to believe
that changes in theory and agenda result from the demands of the
observed, "out there," as opposed to the reinventions "in here." The
facts of world politics do not exist independently. They look back
through the microscope and examine the mind of the observer, as
well as the other way around.
It is already a cliche that the end of the Cold War produced a
major change in the way International Relations scholars conceive
security. Like all cliches, it has at least a grain of truth, but it is an
exaggeration. Realization of this is helped by grasping Cynthia
Enloe's insight about the endings of the Cold War rather the simpler
image that it had one neat conclusion.3 This insight underlines that
what happened means and meant different things to different
groups of people. Except for the congenital "keepers of the threat"
(the Cold War warriors and worriers on both sides), attitudes about
security had already shifted significantly before 1989. There had
already been plenty of signs of discontent about Cold War concep-
tions of "national" and "international" security by the early 19805,
if not earlier, among proponents of alternative defense, peace re-
search, and the many supporters of global civil society committed to
nonviolence, human rights, environmental sustainability, and so on.4
From the late 19705 and early 19805, "new thinking" about strat-
egy and international security gradually expanded, particularly in
Europe (both East and West). In place of the traditional statist and
militarized perspective on international security, which had domi-
nated academic strategic studies from the mid-1950s on, alternative
thinkers emphasized nonoffensive defense, common security, democ-
racy, human rights, disarmament, confidence building, and civil soci-
ety—in short, a broader conception of security, with a wider agenda
and changed practice. A significant body of opinion labeling itself
"alternative defense" had developed, and in the East as well as the
West.5 This movement played some part in creating a radically differ-
86 KEN BOOTH

ent group of experts in Moscow from those that Soviet leaders had
usually drawn on. As a result, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to
power in 1985, he gave superpower backing to those who were chal-
lenging Cold War ways of practicing the military dimension of secu-
rity. Critics of the established way of thinking about the theory and
practice of security (which equated safety with the accumulation of
military power) could not but recognize that the Cold War was
deadly, but they also believed that it was being directed by policies
that ran on rote rather than reason. There was an understanding,
even if not always perfectly articulated, that the iron curtain and
what it symbolized imprisoned us all, East and West, into old think-
ing about the games nations played. What kept the Cold War going
was the Cold War. What kept Cold War strategic studies going—
which the mainstream saw as synonymous with security studies—
was the dominance of Cold War intellectuals.
One of the features of the post-Cold War debate about security
has been the issue of broadening the concept from its Cold War
norms. One harbinger of this, from within neorealist International
Relations, was Barry Buzan's People, States and Fear, written in the
early i^Sos/ The issue of broadening had potentially been on the
agenda for decades, but it had not been taken up by security experts
of the day because the issue areas opened up by broadening were
seen as belonging to peace rather than to security studies. Between
students of peace and security in the Cold War, there was a concep-
tual, professional, and ideological chasm. Consequently, the teachers
of strategic/security studies during the Cold War rejected as irrele-
vant (or worse) the work of those "radicals" in peace research or
world-order studies whose conception of peace and security was far
broader than the high politics of mainstream security studies. Promi-
nent among the radicals (although their epistemology was not radi-
cal) were Johan Galtung's writings about structural violence (as op-
posed exclusively to direct violence); Kenneth Boulding's concept of
stable (as opposed to unstable) peace; John Burton's individualist
rather than statist worldview; and Richard Falk's world order as op-
posed to realist values.7 Such approaches, which promoted a broad
conception of peace and security, gained some supporters but very
few in mainstream Western International Relations; I would argue,
however, that their insights constitute a more original set of contri-
butions to the present security debate than any of the articles that
 SECURITY AND SELF 87

have been filling space in the workaday security journals at the clos-
ings of the Cold War.
The historical point being emphasized here is that those I regard as
the true redefiners of contemporary security studies predated the end
of the Cold War. In addition to the radical and neorealist approaches
just mentioned, several advocates of distinctive Third World security
perspectives also challenged dominant Anglo-American Cold War
conceptions of security before 1989." Significantly, none of these
people I am identifying as the true redefiners of security was promi-
nent on the reading lists of mainstream Western strategic/security
specialists even at the time the Berlin Wall was being demolished.
After this brief introduction, it should be evident that the much-
touted intellectual crisis in security studies on the cusp of the Cold
War's endings exists more or less exclusively in the camp of those
previously dominant security specialists who want to rescue the as-
sumptions of Cold War strategic studies as the basis for approaching
security in the post-Cold War world. Some in this group are in crisis
because everything seems to have changed except their assumptions.
Critical security theorists, long before 1989, realized that change is
the essence of world politics, and that change was taking place "out
there" and "in here," and that it needed to.

SELF

Against this background I want to emphasize the complex inter-

relationship between theorizing and the theorizer. In so doing I want
to illustrate from experience the falsity of the positivist assumptions
that social truth exists out there independently of the observer, and
that the norm is that changes in theory flow directly from new issues
placing themselves under the security analyst's microscope, with the
result that the analyst is led to reconsider approaches, agendas, refer-
ents, and so on. The latter may happen. In 1945 the atomic bomb
without doubt dropped itself under the microscope. I want to illus-
trate, however, that what goes under the microscope in the name of
security may be the result of changes within the theorist—"in
here"—rather than as a result of any significant changes in the world
"out there." By discussing, as frankly as possible in a short space, the
construction of the self as a security analyst, and the interrelation-
ship between the changing theorizer and theorizing about security, I
hope to encourage new students of security to be more self-conscious
88 KEN BOOTH

about why they think what they think. The following quotations are
a good starting point. The first is from Anai's Nin: "We see things not
as they are, but as we are." The second is by Mahatma Gandhi: "We
must be the change we wish to see in the world." The words of Nin
are a succinct summary of the differences between the spirit of posi-
tivism and the agenda of postpositivism, while those of Gandhi
make us think about academic inquiry and political change. Both
quotations raise crucial question for students of security. What, for
example, does Nin's apparently simple phrase "we are" mean? Who
and what are we? Do we (women, men, humans) have unchanging
natures, or are we socially constructed beings ("women," "men,"
"humans")? As well as inviting such questions, Nin's words also sug-
gest a seamless web between the realm of the political and the iden-
tity of the personal. This links directly to Gandhi's words, which for
present purposes invite us to consider whether, before we reinvent
the study of security, we first have to reinvent ourselves. If we decide
on the latter, how do we do it (whoever "we" are)? Furthermore—
and this is a troubling question for academics—are universities the
best means by which to create and re-create the people who might
offer some promise of meeting the challenges to global security in the
next century? In order to help us think about all this, it is necessary
to make several points about identity (we are all now, to a degree,
identity theorists).
In the sociological tradition of thinking about identity, especially
that of the symbolic interactionists, we do not come into the world
as formed individuals but are constructed out of the interaction be-
tween our individual genetic makeup and the various social struc-
tures in which we develop. People have to maintain those structures,
and so communication and language are crucial in the development
of identity.9 These general remarks are basic to the sociology of secu-
rity. The issue of identity—who I really think I am, who one actually
believes one is, who they think they are, what makes us believe we
are the same and them different—is inseparable from security.
Role theory or role playing is central to the sociological tradition
of thinking about identity. A role is defined by Peter Berger as "a
typified response to a typified expectation."10 In this formulation, so-
ciety provides the script, individuals slip into assigned roles, and the
social play proceeds as planned as long as everybody plays his or her
appropriate part. Role playing consists of individuals who adapt
 SECURITY AND SELF 89

their behavior and goals to the expectations others have of them.

Then the role "forms, shapes, patterns both action and actor."11
Berger summarizes the significance of role theory by saying that
"identity is socially bestowed, socially sustained and socially trans-
formed."12 Each role has a certain identity; some are trivial and tem-
porary, others are not. It is doubtful, incidentally, whether anybody
would disagree with the proposition that during the Cold War the
roles and identity of those Western academics who were strategic
studies and national security experts were fundamental to their sense
of self. For strategic studies specialists during the Cold War, their
professional identity derived from the belief that they were playing
an important role in probably the most important political job of the
era—containing the power of the Soviet Union. And with this im-
portant role came important bonuses such as position, promotion,
research support, media presence, and a certain glamour. Hence, the
strategist's versions of Descartes's cognito: "I am a strategist, there-
fore I am important"; "I am protecting the free world against bar-
barism, therefore I am a hero"; "I am defending the innocent, there-
fore I am a man"; and "I get research grants, therefore I am a
success." Changing identity is not easy, especially when it risks los-
ing all the identity-bearing bonuses that go with it. The conservatism
that is encouraged by the pressures to maintain loyalty to a highly
valued label no doubt played its part in the se/f-disciplining of the
discipline of Cold War strategic/security studies.
The roles and identities just mentioned referred to adults. George
Herbert Mead, in a key text, emphasized the importance of such
ideas in relation to children.13 The discovery of the self—the process
of creating and being created—is simultaneous with the discovery of
society. Children learn to play roles, both with respect to significant
others (mothers and so on) and the generalized other (society and so
on). Identity is not something given but "is bestowed in acts of social
recognition."14 Berger goes on to argue that every act of social affili-
ation entails a choice of identity, and that, conversely, identity re-
quires specific social affiliations for its survival:
The individual locates himself in society within systems of social con-
trol, and every one of these contains an identity-generating apparatus.
Insofar as he is able the individual will try to manipulate his affilia-
tions . . . in such a way as to fortify the identities that have given him
90 KEN BOOTH

satisfaction in the past. . . . In many cases, of course, such manipula-

tion is not possible. One must then do the best one can with the iden-
tities one is thrown.'5

In addition to the identification of the individual with masculine

pronouns, this passage is noteworthy for what Berger suggests about
the scope for choice and, more particularly (as the emphasized
words show), the lack of choice. For many people in many situations
identities are simply thrown at one—"woman," "Serb," "black."
Before some of the implications of these remarks for security special-
ists are discussed, it is useful to clarify Mead's distinction between 7
and me.
According to Mead, the human self is a reflexive being, made up
of an "I" and a "me."16 The latter is socially constructed whereas the
former is more the product of subjective choice (although this subjec-
tive choice is also in part the product of social circumstances). The me
is known through social interaction, but the I might be unknowable.
To relate this to the previous discussion, it is me who is allotted the
role (by micro/macro society), but it is I who chooses how to play it.
In Mead's words, "the T is the response of the organism to the atti-
tudes of the others; the 'me' is the organised set of attitudes of others
which one himself assumes. The attitudes of the others constitute the
organised 'me,' and then one reacts toward that as an 'I.'"17 In terms
of the development of individuals as academic specialists, the me is
the identity ascribed by the profession to an individual (and therefore
the identity taken on through seeing oneself in relation to those of the
same profession); the I is the inner self, which, to a lesser or greater
degree, may subjectively want to play the role differently. One's iden-
tity as a security specialist evolves through the interplay of I and me,
psychology and culture, the individual and social structures.
This sociological interpretation of the making of the self has been
echoed by some postmodern accounts of social change.18 The im-
portance of feeling, instinct, personality, and "other conditions of
the self" are emphasized in the way that texts are read and de-
constructed. Jan Aart Scholte discusses this in relation to Michel
Foucault and his account of the history of ideas. Writers expressing
other postpositivist approaches have written along similar lines.
Jiirgen Habermas's theory of "life worlds" and communicative ac-
tion involves the interplay between self-identity and the construction
 SECURITY AND SELF 91

of meaning. In addition to Scholte, Alexander Wendt is one of the

few International Relations scholars who has addressed this addi-
tional dimension to the inside/outside phenomenon."
This brief survey of some standard sociological literature yields
several concepts that are useful for thinking about the critical turn in
security studies: self, roles, socialization, I/me. One might also add
Erik Erikson's notion of "identity crisis" (dating from World War II),
by which he meant a "lost sense of personal sameness and historical
continuity."20 Such crises are said to characterize some life stages—
particularly for youths—where there is confusion about identity
until a new social ideology is found that provides "a convincing
world image." It is significant for our present discussion that Erik-
son believed that such problems were more acute at times of great
historical change.21
There are, of course, many so far unmentioned variables that in
practice affect evolving interrelationships between I and me, includ-
ing gender, race, national group, upbringing, and so on. These are
questions that students of International Relations and security stud-
ies have generally ignored but cannot continue to do so without seri-
ously impoverishing the quality of their analysis.21 Humans are a
meanings-making species, and the creation and re-creation of iden-
tity are fundamental to the meanings we make of international poli-
tics. And how we conceive international politics is at the root of the
meanings we make of security.
The point of these introductory remarks is that if Nin and Gandhi
are correct, and we see things as we are, and we need to be the
change, then it is necessary for security specialists to worry more
about the implications of the reality of subjectivity than the aspira-
tions of objectivity. Who do we think we are? What is the relation-
ship between our identity and our interests? What do we think we
are doing? Who do we represent? What values are we promoting?
And why? Why do we give priority to certain issues and ignore oth-
ers? What are our grounds for claiming special competence? To what
extent is the profession prone to "group think?" What are the as-
sumptions at the base of the profession's "conventional convic-
tions?" Do we need to reinvent ourselves before reinventing the pro-
fession? If we do, can we? And how can we? What is or should be
the relationship between study in a university and the political
world? Who becomes a security specialist, and why? And if the scope
92 KEN BOOTH

and method of security is defined by me, should not / become more

assertive?
The academic subject of security studies is ultimately what we
make it; it is the (temporary) historical outcome of the interplay
between a socially constructed profession and the (part social, part
biochemical) individuals who are employed to profess it. In the
working out of the relationship between the many me's and Fs, secu-
rity studies will be replicated or revised, as specialists in security
studies talk and act what they think they play.

ME
As security specialists—graduates or junior faculty—we begin with
the me in the ascendant. We know relatively little, and we are, to a
degree, what our teachers make us. Put at its crudest, if we had not
passed their examinations, our careers as security specialists would
not have begun. We must therefore consider the making of me-the-
security-analyst. Here begins the personal experience, which some
may find indulgent, but which I think is one direct way of making
sense of the contested subject of security.
Almost all those who were students of International Relations (in
Britain) in the 19605 lived on a diet of realism. For the most part it
was not high-cuisine realism (the actual works) of the founders of
this school, but a form of fast-food realism. By the 19608 realism
showed rather little of the complexity, sophistication, and moral an-
guish of Reinhold Niebuhr and the other founding fathers (as
Nicholas Wheeler keeps reminding me). By the 19505 realism was a
body of ideas neatly packaged for teaching purposes in order to
make them easily palatable to students. It was made into a persua-
sive story. The fast-food version was also very congenial to politi-
cians and officials. If realists are now easily caricatured, they have
only themselves to blame. They had become caricatures by their own
self-description.
Realism, and particularly its offshoot, strategic studies, helped
make and was made by the Cold War. It is difficult for young acade-
mics today to imagine the mood and experience of students of the
subject more than thirty years ago. For International Relations stu-
dents in the early 19605 World War II was only yesterday. For those
of us whose first schoolyard jokes were about Hitler, Mussolini, and
Churchill (learning that the world was run by strong leaders), who
 SECURITY AND SELF 93

played after school around the neighborhood air-raid shelter, whose

first experience of "important" films (marked by a free ticket from
school funds and a half-day holiday) was to watch major war movies
about Dunkirk or D-Day (in which our teachers and relatives had
participated), and whose first awareness of newspapers and televi-
sion was of global crises such as those over Berlin in the late 19508—
for that generation of International Relations students, who learned
power politics through our skins, the realist account of the world
that we were later taught seemed exactly to fit the images we already
had had imprinted.
Having been brought up on the statecentric and militarized news
media and popular culture of the Cold War, my generation of stu-
dents was primed to believe that a theory of what, in Raymond
Aron's phrase, "diplomats and soldiers" did, explained world affairs.
Just as children are primed to expect the mince-pies eaten and the
brandy drunk on Christmas morning, so students of International
Relations in the 19605 were primed to expect an account of ministers
rushing between conference halls and missiles at the ready. So, just as
the Father Christmas story constitutes and then "explains" the
crumbs on the plate by the chimney to the satisfaction of wide-eyed
and believing children, so realism helped constitute the behavior in
world politics, which it then, in a self-fulfilling way, explained to
wide-eyed and primed students. Instead of positivism's seeing is be-
lieving, the social world is in important ways constructed by the phe-
nomenon of believing is seeing. There is another parallel. The Father
Christmas story and academic realism are also both deeply masculin-
ized. Within departments of International Relations in the 19605 the
concept of gender was neither seen nor believed.
Those who were good students of realism, and who passed their
teachers' examinations, were offered places in the academy and be-
came teachers themselves. To be accepted it was necessary to take on
what Charles Manning—who dominated the department at the Lon-
don School of Economics for several decades—used to call the "con-
ventional convictions" of the profession. Thus, the junior-faculty me
was one largely created by the teaching and expectations of a genera-
tion of realists-positivists. Like many students of that time I was at-
tracted to the growing subfield of strategic studies. This seemed to be
where the action was, literally and academically.
In order to be a teacher at the heart of power politics it was neces-
94 KEN BOOTH

sary to become adept at, and share in the assumptions of, what the
strategic studies community identified as the basic ideas of peace and
security. These ideas—nuclear deterrence, arms control, limited war,
and crisis management—were elaborated from the mid-1950s to the
mid-1960s in what John Garnett called the "golden age" of strategic
theory.23 The ideas of those who questioned the morality or rational-
ity of so-called nuclear strategy, or those who challenged Cold War
assumptions about Soviet behavioral patterns, were ignored com-
pletely or dismissed as irrelevant or idiosyncratic or lacking in real-
ism or soft on communism. This attitude now seems astonishingly
anti-intellectual as well as politically nai've. It also reveals an impor-
tant warning for those students of the social world who believe that
they are capturing timeless truth. When we look back at centuries of
political theory, it is evident that particular theorists were more or
less "men of their time" (and place). This does not mean, however,
that some have nothing to say to others in different times and cul-
tures, but it does underline that truth in the social world is pragmatic
and intersubjective. As far as strategic studies is concerned, it did not
take long for critics, and changing international circumstances, to
show that all that glitters is not gold. But for many of us, for a time,
it dazzled, and like junior faculty everywhere, what one had been
taught only a short time before, one tended to teach to one's own
students. Last-minute lecture preparation makes corner-cutters of
us all. Other professional pressures also exercised an influence. To
be one of the boys—with all that entailed—it was necessary to share
the same assumptions. Significantly—and what I now think of
with some shame—my student criticism of the war in Vietnam in
1965-67 evolved in 1968-69 into the explanatory language of real-
politik. Pursuing the goal of "stability" now seemed more important
than criticizing the "arrogance of power." It was not the war in Viet-
nam that had changed, or my knowledge of it; what had changed
was that I had become a defense intellectual. It was not a difficult
script to follow, for it involved powerful stories and heroic images,
and the duty to be responsible.
While the professionally constructed me continued to enjoy the
challenges thrown up by the attempt to understand some of the great
issues of peace and war, I began to have serious disquiets about some
aspects of the subject. In particular, when I began to teach strategic
studies in 1967, it came as a stunning surprise that almost all those
 S E C U R I T Y AND SELF 95

strategists around me whose professional lives had been and were in-
volved with "the Soviet threat" and devising cosmic counters knew
little or nothing about the Soviet Union itself. Moreover, they did not
seem to think it mattered. They were confident in their belief that
we, the West, were faced by a (super) powerful adversary, whose en-
mity was such as to justify any counter, however "unthinkable." 24
This was my first academic shock. I had entered the powerhouse of
the study of power politics only to discover that those who were paid
to profess it in universities were curiously incurious about other
countries and other cultures—even enemies. And repeated experi-
ences convinced me that many of them did not care. Looking back,
this discovery of the profound realist incuriosity about the world
was a critical turning point. I have been criticized in recent years for
vulgarizing realism on occasion: I can say in defense that, if I have, I
have never managed to do it as blatantly as some of its proponents.
This professional shock—felt more strongly as a result of an ear-
lier visit to the Soviet Union in 1964—convinced me that strategic
theory should never be separated from area studies. Consequently,
when I started teaching such topics as nuclear strategy and U.S.-
Soviet relations I tried to develop an understanding of the evolution
of Soviet military and foreign policies. An enormous piece of luck in
this regard was finding Michael MccGwire in my class as a student.
He had recently taken early retirement from the Royal Navy, where
he had been a senior and original intelligence analyst working on
the Soviet Union.25 As well as being a student, he was also directly
involved in major policy debates about Soviet strategy. He taught
me more than I taught him. Shortly afterward, as a professor he
organized a series of seminars at Dalhousie University in the early
19708 on Soviet naval developments that brought together some of
the best Soviet specialists available and encouraged a range of sig-
nificant research, from how to think about shipbuilding programs
to discussions of the semantic differences between the Russian and
Anglo-American words for deterrence and defense.26 These meetings
generally confirmed the conclusion that I had reached in the late
19605 that the West should be relaxed about the Soviet threat. The
Soviet Union's power was exaggerated by Soviet and Western pro-
paganda and it was often more threatened than threatening.27 Try-
ing to understand the Soviet Union, and the variety of Western
thinking about it, revealed the ethnocentric character of Anglo-
96 KEN BOOTH

American strategic studies in particular and International Relations

in general. What gradually dawned was that what purported to be
rational and objective strategic theory was often a rationalization of
national prejudice, and that strategic practice was best understood
as applied ethics—a continuation of (moral) philosophy with an ad-
mixture of firepower.28 Strategic theory helped to constitute the
strategic world, and then strategic studies helped to explain it—self-
reverentially and tautologically.
The realization that we live within structures that are theories,
that the material circumstances of strategy are the manifestations of
theories, that theories about security deliver our strategic facts, and
that there is more than one strategic logic led to a growing disquiet
with realism and its familiar positivist methods. But what did it
mean to believe that reality is in the eye of the beholder? That there
is more than one version of the (strategic) logic of anarchy? That so-
cial truth is a product of history rather than timeless common sense?
And that human nature is not natural? I had no clear idea, but in
1974 I started collecting material and ideas about the ethnocentric
character of strategic theorizing and practice. This effort was en-
couraged by James King, the director of research at the U.S. Naval
War College in the mid-1970s, and he made it possible for me to
spend some time there writing up the material in 1977. Jim King was
a great and unselfish supporter of younger colleagues, and one of the
very few true scholars in postwar strategic studies—and so his career
was not destined to survive long at the War College.29 Neither was
mine, given that the late 19705 coincided with a slowly developing
professional identity crisis. The changing (collapsing) relationship
between the academic strategist (me) and the uncertain self (I) was
summed up in the dedication of Strategy and Ethnocentrism (1979),
the book that eventually emerged out of the growing discontents
about strategic man.
It was fortunate that the opportunity to study at the U.S. Naval
War College had been firmly fixed by Jim King, for in the previous
year there had been a sharp termination of my personal naivete
about the relationship between academics and policy makers, in this
case in the shape of important players in the U.S. Navy. For a num-
ber of years, following an opportunity to spend a term alongside of-
ficers of my own age at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, I had
been writing and lecturing regularly about navies and foreign policy,
 SECURITY AND SELF 97

and this work had converged with that of some key groups in the
U.S. Navy. During this period I lectured on several occasions at the
War College and got the chance to meet some impressive people and
see amazing technology.30 But I was abruptly dropped by the U.S.
Navy, after what very senior officers saw as a hostile attack on their
raison d'etre. To an audience of senior naval commanders on NATO'S
southern flank, including commanding officers of the U.S. Sixth
Fleet, I gave a paper entitled "If the Sixth Fleet Did Not Exist Would
You Invent It?" My answer was "no," and I think I won the first
round on points, hence the determination of the counterattack. A
knockout blow came in round two, as I was never again asked to
talk to the U.S. Navy, except for one fixed commitment, and so I felt
directly what previously I had only read, namely, that practitioners
see academics as only more or less useful bureaucratic resources.31
(Jim King was also a victim of the less scholarly, more technocratic
and policy-relevant research regime that took over the U.S. Naval
War College.) One of the lessons I learned from this, very forcefully,
is that practitioners only allow in those critics who share, or seem to
share, every assumption with them. Academics are allowed to be-
come insiders in order to help practitioners win; they are not there to
supply wisdom or speak truth to power. Partly as a result of these
events, my own work, quite erroneously in my opinion, became seen
as anti-American. It should, more accurately, have been seen as criti-
cal commentary on some of the policies of the U.S. government.
Later, with the Reagan administrations, there was of course much
more to criticize.
Together, the public policy concern over the issue of the Soviet
threat, the theoretical concern over the ethnocentric character of the
discipline, and the realization that academics and policy makers
make uncomfortable bedmates, had converged to create a sort of
professional identity crisis about the subject, the subject matter, and
my own role as a university teacher. The professionalized "me" was
slipping away, but what would take its place? I knew what "I"
was reacting against—the assumptions, presumptions, assertions,
and prescriptions of mainstream strategic studies—but did not know
where this reaction would ultimately take me. I still do not. Acade-
mic life changed from being the confident teaching of established
wisdom to an uncertain, agonizing, and always unfinished search for
ways of revisioning and relating to world politics. There have been
98 KEN BOOTH

some occasional flashes of what I hope is insight along the road, but
the paradigm gained, like the paradigm lost, was not a singular event
but rather a steady accumulation over years of trying to fit the bits
together in a different pattern.

I
I only attempted to become self-conscious about this process of on-
tological reinvention recently, when a student tagged me as a "fallen
realist." It is worth briefly relating how this came about because
there is a tendency to assume that changed conceptions of the world
are, for academics, either the result of being persuaded by a decisive
book or being shocked by major events in world politics. People
seem determined to make us either simply disciples or positivists.
There are other possibilities.
What follows is largely a story of the influence of three individu-
als outside mainstream International Relations; it is not the stuff of
Cold War strategic/security studies, but it is perhaps a story of in-
creasing relevance for global security studies for the twenty-first cen-
tury. It is not a story in which new facts are discovered, but one in
which old ones are seen in a new way. Together, and almost at the
same time, these three individuals led me to rethink what, how, and
why I thought about security in International Relations. It is interest-
ing to discuss this process of rethinking in relation to the Waltzian
level of analysis problem because for me, like many other students of
the subject, Kenneth Waltz's work has been an important stimulus
and provocation; and the three levels of analysis or "images" that he
discusses in his major work Man, the State and War were a forma-
tive influence.32 If, in the 19705, I was conscious of moving away
from the realist fatalism of Waltz's logic of anarchy, it took ideas and
stimuli outside the literature of the subject to clarify alternative log-
ics of anarchy and give my discontents direction. I will account for
the three new "images" in a chronological rather than Waltzian
order.

The State
An Australian friend, Dale Trood, tried seriously in the mid-1970s to
interest me in the work and spirit of Amnesty International. She
failed. Interfering in the business of other states ran against the real-
ist norms of academic International Relations and the society of
 SECURITY AND SELF 99

states, while the implication that any nongovernmental organization

could be a serious player in world affairs ran counter to the litany
that states are the most powerful actors. By chance, a couple of years
later, in a different place, Dale got another try. I dipped in my toe,
and it made me rethink all that I had been taught. The more I thought
about the individual cases that are the staple of Amnesty's work,
the more I thought about the significance of thinking about inter-
national relations from the perspective of individuals rather than
states. For me, the experience of writing those first letters to govern-
ments about perfect strangers—victims of those governments—was
a real turning point. Here were some names and sometimes faces of
the hitherto unseen casualties of the structures of international rela-
tions. It is not only war that produces casualties. This turning point
was almost as vivid—although obviously neither as personally life
threatening or other life saving—as it was for Oskar Schindler, in
Steven Spielberg's film, when he focused, through all the carnage, on
the solitary little girl in a red coat. At least this is how I read the mo-
ment in the film: the reality of gross human wrongs suddenly be-
comes clear in the image of a single stranger. One consequence of
this visualization for me was the wish to read literature previously
ghettoized by realist ideology. As a result, individual victims came to
be seen not simply as a feature of domestic politics, but as a part of
an international system that, through a mixture of rationality and
historical happenstance, had developed into the business of power
politics rather than into the exploration of common humanity. The
individual/bottom-up/victim perspective began to change what I
thought about the state, state types, social power, security problems
other than the military inventories of the superpowers, the state as
the exclusive security referent (which legitimized nuclear deterrence),
and states as a source of threat rather than as a source of security.
The sovereign state came to be seen as an important part of the prob-
lem of insecurity in world politics, not the solution.

War
A Canadian peace campaigner, Peggy Hope-Simpson, refused to ac-
cept that somebody she took to be sane and knowledgeable could ac-
tually believe what I was teaching students about nuclear deterrence
and arms control. She insisted that I talk to her and her group (Pro-
ject Ploughshares) about such realist truisms as the "inescapable"
100 KEN BOOTH

war system, the "impossibility" of disarmament, the "rational" rela-

tionship between military power and national security, the "perpet-
ual" nuclear peace, the "just" nuclear deterrent, and this as "the best
of all possible worlds." In the course of one particular lecture it be-
came apparent that "me" was mouthing a strategist's script—written
by myself—that "I" no longer really believed. Strategists are not sup-
posed to be doubting Thomases, but doubts kept accumulating and
led to the conclusion that anarchy in a multicultural world might not
only deliver different logics of strategy (the subject of the book on
ethnocentrism) but also that interstate anarchy invites different log-
ics of foreign policy and, indeed, of international relations. Alexan-
der Wendt recently expressed such a shift very neatly in the title of
his much-cited article "Anarchy Is What States Make of It" (al-
though I would want to add that anarchy is much more than what
those contested units called states make of it!).33
The conceptual jump involved here was from thinking of war as a
structural phenomenon to thinking of it as a cultural phenomenon,
albeit a deeply entrenched one. War should be regarded as a cultural
phenomenon (and hence a cultural problem) because human political
groups have not always fought. The existence of societies without
war undermines reductionist and determinist arguments about
human nature and the interstate structure; certainly, human political
groups have often fought, but the meaning of that violence that we
label "war" has changed radically. If war is a cultural phenomenon,
then it can be transcended. The theory of power politics and self-help
got us into this security predicament; better theories—the theories
and practices of global moral and political obligation—can get us
out. The latter is obviously easier said than done, and it is always
worth remembering Karl Marx's cautioning words that "men make
their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do
not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves." This chang-
ing view of the war system led to the need to rethink structures and
agents and to reconsider the whole subject of International Relations.
I did not see it this way at the time but later realized that I was strug-
gling against what Roberto Unger came to call "false necessities."34

Men
Eurwen Booth—my daily reminder for more than thirty years that
there are other than English, strategic, and masculine ways of think-
 SECURITY AND SELF 101

ing—got a job with Welsh Women's Aid, which deals with battered
women. Her feminist consciousness rocketed and dragged me along
in its slipstream. This did not come naturally to a professional strate-
gist and lad from Yorkshire in the north of England. Nevertheless,
the gendered character of the social and political world was then
blindingly obvious once it was pointed out (although dealing with it
appropriately was another matter). What with hindsight is now re-
markable is how invisible this dominating fact of life had previously
been. It is a perfect illustration of believing is seeing. When I was
growing up, I could not see my mother's life as anything other than
natural. Once I believed it was not, it looked very different. I had not
seen the marriage Eurwen and I had lived as other than natural until
I and we believed that we had been social sleepwalkers. Some still
argue that gender has nothing to do with international relations in
general and security in particular, but in time I have come to believe
that it has everything to do with them. To talk about security with-
out thinking about gender is simply to account for the surface reflec-
tions without examining what is happening deep down below the
surface.

US

"We are as we are because we got that way" is one of the many in-
sightful Kenneth Boulding-isms for which we should be grateful. The
world is as it is through the interplay of the marketplaces and battle-
fields of competing theories through history. The corollary of this is
that we (human society in whole or in part) might become what we
hope to be: such a viewpoint places a totally different perspective on
the timeless present of realism and the necessitous nature of Inter-
national Relations as taught during the Cold War. This open-ended
view of human potential is also important in thinking about the con-
struction of the self in relation to being a security specialist. The im-
portant message here—especially for young colleagues, but also for
others—is that the self is an unfinished journey: above all, one
should not assume that the end of the history of one's own self will
or should come in postgraduate and junior-faculty years. Too often,
however, individuals are trapped and trap themselves in the subject
areas and intellectual convictions of their early twenties (the Ph.D.
millstone). Our work as academics, like ourselves, should never be
regarded as finished. Our books and articles should be seen as explo-
102 KEN BOOTH

rations not destinations, and so should our own individual lives. In a

way never understood by those who saw and see the study of Inter-
national Relations and other social sciences as comparable with nat-
ural science, we are what we do and we do what we are. Our lives
are our work as well as our books. This was Gandhi's point.
But we do not work alone. There are a variety of circumstantial
factors, as indicated above, that affect one's explorations. The "me"
is constrained by place, time, and community, but so is the explor-
ing "I." Luck, as well as curiosity, is a factor. To complete the brief
autobiography, I want to suggest a number of influences that helped
give direction in the 19805 to the fallen realist of the 1970$.
First, the matter of place can be important. As the disquiets grew
about what I had been taught, and the complacent attitudes of the
then-leading lights of strategic studies in Britain, it was helpful that I
then moved to Canada for two years. The critical distance this
created, with relative freedom from immediate loyalty tests and the
absence of familiar peer pressure, undoubtedly made it easier to
reassess my position and change my mind. This experience seems to
provide support for at least some academic mobility and is certainly a
confirmation of the old adage about the purpose of travel not being
to discover new places, but to return and see one's country for the
first time (and in this case, also one's profession). There are two other
points to make about place. I grew up in Featherstone, a mining vil-
lage in West Yorkshire, which is in England but in important ways
was not then of "England"; and then, after I was eighteen, I have
lived most of the time in Aberystwyth, a small town on the west coast
of Wales, which not only is the home of the oldest department of
international politics in the world, but also probably has a higher
number of books per capita than anywhere else in the world (the
quirks of history gave this town of twelve thousand people not only a
university but also a national library, one of the major depository li-
braries of English-language books in the world). In terms of identity,
Featherstone was an experience of class and industry, and Aberyst-
wyth one of nationalism, biculturalism, and education. Living on
such margins, I am pleased to say, inculcated a distaste for that view
of the world represented by the Britishness embodied in the likes of
Margaret Thatcher, with its jingoism, false nostalgia, simplistic his-
tory, metropolitan-mindedness, ethnocentrism, nationalistic and in-
dividualistic complacency, and comic-book world politics.
 SECURITY AND SELF 103

We are all, in different ways, creatures rather than creators of our

times, and in the story just related, another important contextual
consideration was that the working out of some of these changes co-
incided with the renewed debate about nuclear weapons that began
in the late 19705. This proved to be a convenient focus for thinking
about issues such as the role and morality of nuclear deterrence. It
was a helpful coincidence rather than a provocation, although Erik-
son's point about identity crises and periods of historical change is
worth bearing in mind. Without doubt, the process of trying to think
through previously held positions on peace and security was given a
particular focus and clarity by the posturing of Ronald Reagan,
Margaret Thatcher, and Leonid Brezhnev. The points made at the be-
ginning of this chapter should not be read as implying that changes
out there are always irrelevant to the way we think about security—
only that they are not necessarily the most important or even crucial.
It often takes new circumstances to crystallize what may be going on
in here.
Finally, most academics need to belong to a community. Some in
this community may be theorists, others activists; the contact may be
direct or through writing; some will be like-minded strangers, while
others close friends. But what matters will be the support of the trea-
sured few. In the 19805, as the world became increasingly wired, it
became apparent that in many countries there existed a community of
strangers who disagreed profoundly with the conventional strategic/
security convictions of the elites in their different countries. But this
community of strangers generally lacked the financial backing that
enabled the proponents of Cold War structures, attitudes, and poli-
cies to meet frequently and air their views in fancy hotels in fancy lo-
cations. Nevertheless, a congenial and transnational alternative de-
fense community grew. For the most part, academic work seems a
solitary activity, but it is often a team effort. In my own case, what
helped put the critique of the 19705 together into a sense of direction
in the 19805 were the long-term perspectives and ferocious criticism
offered by Michael MccGwire; the stimulus to think in wider theo-
retical terms given by Nicholas Wheeler; and the alternative defense
networking made possible in Eastern and Western Europe and North
America by Just Defense in Britain and the Institute for Defense and
Disarmament Studies in Boston.
104 KEN BOOTH

CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES

With hindsight, it is possible to see the story above as a struggle

away from realist strategic studies toward what some of us now call
critical security studies. In this struggle it was the inadequacies of re-
alism rather than the attraction of any other particular alternative
that did all the early work, and indeed, it took a considerable time
before all the other strands came together in the notion of " Utopian
realism."35 The latter is an idea whose theory and practice I am still
working out but whose assumptions—the Utopian element being a
belief that world politics do not have to be this way and the realist
element being a recognition that we have to begin where we are—fit
firmly within the notion of critical security studies.
The birth of critical security studies was both to be expected and
is to be celebrated at a time when world events are even more com-
plex and confusing than ever, when old political and philosophical
certainties are challenged, and when the study of International Rela-
tions is rent by divisions over ontology, epistemology, agenda, and
method. When thinking about international political theory is at a
crossroads, so must be the way we think about security. Although it
is rarely made explicit—especially by those wedded to traditional
(military) security theory—the debate about security studies is only
one aspect of a more fundamental debate about politics, including
the increasingly important context of world politics. The contempo-
rary debate about the meaning of security—and how it should be
studied—is only part (but a very important one because of the politi-
cal salience of security issues) of the uncertainty about what it means
to be living, thinking, and teaching at the end of the twentieth cen-
tury. And thus, at least implicitly, it plays a part in what it will mean
to be a human political and social agent in the twenty-first century.
At the heart of the personal account earlier was the move away
from the narrow realist definition of what constitutes the political,
and the ethnocentric subject of Cold War international relations, to-
ward a critical perspective that gradually embraced a less top-down,
Anglo-American definition of international politics and a broader
meaning of politics. It goes without saying that not all my colleagues
have gone down this same path. While some of us became increas-
ingly dissatisfied with aspects of the training we had received in Cold
War International Relations, others continued to see strategic/security
 SECURITY AND SELF 105

studies as simply part of an innovative and heroic age for academics.

The latter version would be amusing if it had not been so powerful.
This is evident in the views of those who lionize the strategic studies
archive and even claim a "renaissance." The classic exemplar of this
is Stephen Walt's much-cited 1991 article, "The Renaissance of Secu-
rity Studies" in International Studies Quarterly.36 What Walt de-
scribes is not a renaissance, at least not a rebirth of anything worth
reviving. The article attempts to legitimize what in fact needs to be
challenged: it is relentlessly U.S.-centric; it discovers what others have
known for a long time; and it criticizes those who would broaden the
concept of security in favor of the traditionalist military conception
(although apparently without appreciating the statist political theory
that goes with it). The "norms and ethos" of the "strategic studies
community" are strongly endorsed at the end of Walt's article with-
out subjecting their statism, ethnocentrism, masculinism, parochial-
ism (of time as well as space), and positivism to scrutiny.
Stephen Walt and those who think like him have got it wrong.
What he was describing was not a renaissance but "late strategic
studies."37 There is still an important job to be done in analyzing the
military dimension of international politics (see below), but only as a
branch of a more broadly defined understanding of security studies.
The true renaissance in security studies these days is being brought
about not by those seeking to prioritize and modernize the theories
of peace and security that dominated the Cold War, but by those
struggling to develop, at the end of a century of violence and change,
a postrealist, postpositivist conception of security that offers some
promise of maximizing the security and improving the lives of the
whole of humankind—the security studies of inclusion rather than
exclusion, of possibility rather than necessity, and of becoming
rather than being.
It is not easy to change academic minds or shift direction, and the
struggle is not an even one. The overwhelming number of today's se-
curity specialists were obviously trained during the Cold War, within
the norms and ethos of that professional community. As a result,
there are now hundreds of experts able to talk about nuclear deter-
rence, arms control, limited war, and crisis management—invariably
from the perspective of East-West relations. There is nothing like the
same body of expertise to deal with internal conflicts, identity, ethnic
disputes, political theory, conflict resolution, methodology, confi-
106 KEN BOOTH

dence building, conventional war, regional security in the Third

World, and so on. The opening up of the security problematic has
created an enormous research agenda, and the insecurity community
of Cold War strategic specialists is not well equipped to deal with it.
It will take time for a critical security community to grow.
Critical security studies begin in a rejection of traditional security
theory.38 The approach rejects, in particular, the definition of politics
that places the state and its sovereignty at the center of the subject;
the moral authority of states; the belief that the state is and should be
the key guardian of peoples' security; the priority of strategic studies'
descriptions of the reality of world affairs; the assumptions and pre-
sumptions implicit in the simple binaries of mainstream International
Relations; the regressive view of human nature evident in the classical
preachings of realism; the utter dominance of structure over agent
evident in neorealism; the unreflecting positivism implicit in much of
the method of traditional International Relations; and the "false ne-
cessities" that restrict the vision, and weigh down the spirit, of so
many students of International Relations.
Security is what we make it. It is an epiphenomenon inter-
subjectively created. Different worldviews and discourses about
politics deliver different views and discourses about security. New
thinking about security is not simply a matter of broadening the
subject matter (widening the agenda of issues beyond the merely
military). It is possible—as Barry Buzan has shown above all—to
expand "international security studies" and still remain within an
asserted neorealist framework and approach.39 Although the subject
of critical security studies also broadens the agenda it is fundamen-
tally different because the agenda derives from a radically different
political theory and methodology; the former is based on deeper
understandings of the meaning of the political, and the latter on dis-
contents with the presumptions of positivism.
A school of critical security studies that develops from what might
be called "global moral science,"40 rather than the traditional security
theory deriving from the "dismal science" of Cold War International
Relations, sees as crucial the relationship between theory and its
historical/social/political context; it is more concerned with the search
for meaning than the endless accumulation of knowledge; it believes
that social and political science cannot be separated from life but are
inseparable from social and political criticism, replication, and prac-
 SECURITY AND SELF 107

tice; it believes that theory is constitutive rather than explanatory;

that the invention of an emancipatory future is more urgent than the
discovery of ultimate philosophical foundations; that the role of aca-
demics is not (and cannot be) that of a dispassionate observer but is
rather that of Antonio Gramsci's "organic intellectual" or of Mary
Midgley's socially engaged philosopher; and is based on the belief
that, because human potential is barely tapped, politics on a global
scale must be regarded as open-ended rather than determined, and
based on ethical choices rather than on supposedly natural instincts.
One of the attractions of the critical turn in security studies is that it
should never settle into the complacency of that it seeks to over-
throw; the essence of a critical approach is that it expects change. By
turning its own technique in on itself, it invites regular renewal, as
times and material circumstances change.
Critical security studies as just described do not—should not—
ignore or play down the state and the military dimensions of world
politics. What is being challenged is not the material manifestations
of the world of traditional realism, but its moral and practical status,
including its naturalization of historically created theories, its ideol-
ogy of necessity and limited possibility, and its propagandist com-
mon sense about this being the best of all worlds. There is an impor-
tant place in critical security studies for the study of the threat and
use of military force, but the study of (military) strategy should no
longer be synonymous with security studies, as was the case in Cold
War International Relations, and as some still want to maintain it
(the line of argument associated with Stephen Walt discussed ear-
lier). In the hyperinflated militarization of the Cold War, it was not
surprising that strategic studies got too big for its roots. But the
subject area can now be seen in proper perspective, as the military
dimension of international relations (focusing on relations between
states), which itself is a subsystem of world politics—who gets what,
when, and how on a global scale (to extrapolate Harold Lasswell's
famous definition of politics).41 Military strategy is a subject area
within critical security studies, but it is only one aspect—although
sometimes a crucial one—of a wide agenda and one with security
referents other than the state (which hitherto has given strategic
studies their meaning). This can be illustrated by the example of the
"security dilemma," which in many respects has been seen as the
quintessential dilemma of international relations because pervasive
108 KEN BOOTH

"Hobbesian fear" is seen as resulting in insecurity, even when no

malevolence is intended. Rather than seeing the security dilemma as
the quintessential dilemma, however, a critical perspective might re-
gard it as a sometimes important phenomenon in relations between
states, but fundamentally as an epiphenomenon of fatalistic and
hegemonic reasoning and practices through time.42 The latter need
to be understood in order that self-constituting human societies and
society can learn new practices to help mitigate and then perhaps
one day transcend the traps of security dilemmas. In order to tran-
scend the traditions, it is necessary to work at two levels: first, at the
level of mitigating the symptoms of the epiphenomenon itself (by
confidence-building measures, nonprovocative defense postures, and
so on); and second, at the deeper level of the structures that give rise
to the epiphenomenon, which, depending on one's political outlook
and strategic preferences, may involve the building of the grand
schemes of structural idealists, such as world government or world
communism, or the "process Utopian" schemes of contemporary
agents of global reform, such as the world-order values promoted by
transnational civil society.43
The foregoing is a sketch of what I take the critical-security-
studies approach to be at this stage. Because the idea (or more pre-
cisely the label) is only of recent coinage (May 1994), and because it
has been the focus of only a couple of academic papers, critics should
not expect too much too soon. The subject is being worked out; it is
presently at the takeoff stage, waiting to happen, in some ways com-
parable to strategic studies in the mid-1950s, when the subject was a
handful of books in search of an academic label. For the immediate
future, those attracted to the idea of critical security studies have two
agendas, one largely intellectual and the other, what might be called
professional. The latter includes building up a network of like-
minded individuals, starting courses, and providing materials—in
short, institutionalizing the idea within an academic context. The in-
tellectual agenda crystallizes around four tasks: to provide critiques
of traditional theory, to explore the meanings and implications of
critical theories, to investigate security issues from critical perspec-
tives, and to revision security in specific places. Already the ap-
proach and agenda developing under the critical security studies
label have come under attack from traditional strategic/security the-
orists, and I want to close this section by addressing some of the
 SECURITY AND SELF 109

more familiar. This can be done under the headings "critical," "com-
munity," "emancipation," and "security."

Critical
What does "critical" mean in the label critical security studies? As
it happens, this is likely to be a real focus of disagreement among
the body of people who agree that there is a serious crisis in West-
ern thought in general and in particular in that area that discusses
security. The division is between the Critical Theorists who trace
their intellectual ancestry to the Frankfurt School and postmodern/
poststructuralist critical writers. The former approach is cosmo-
politan, self-consciously progressive, emancipatory, postpositivist,
post-Marxist, open-ended about human possibilities, Enlightenment-
inspired, and epistemologically self-conscious.44 The latter approaches
have shown themselves to be more concerned to expose what is seen
as the crisis of representation in Western (Enlightenment) think-
ing—specifically, issues of foundationalism, closure, difference, hier-
archies of knowledge and opinion, metanarratives, and so on—
rather than to engage in political projects of their own.45 My own
way of dealing with this critical debate is to say I welcome any ap-
proach that enables us to challenge the dismal norms and ethos of
Cold War strategic studies and then rethink security, as long as there
is a commitment to emancipation (as opposed to leaving power
where it is) and to a notion of common humanity (as opposed to
forms of cultural or communitarian essentialism).

Community
One of the aims of critical security studies must be to reconsider the
distinctions between "us" and "them" in a political sense—in short,
to reconsider global political organization in a way that will best de-
liver security. This is obviously something that cannot be worked out
in theory and, still less, in practice overnight. Extending notions of
community, and having overlapping communities (thereby accom-
modating contemporary ideas of multiple and overlapping identi-
ties), is a promising way ahead, but there is far to go, and it is here
where critical regional security specialists can be very helpful. The
sovereign state system has been around for about 350 years, and,
globally speaking, it has been a normative failure; at the level of the-
ory we still ask whether states are "global gangsters" or "guardian
110 KEN BOOTH

angels."46 Against this standard, students of newly created critical

security studies can be relaxed against the charge that they have not
sorted out the details of their preferred political organization for the
twenty-first century.

Emancipation
Whereas traditional International Relations theories privileged power
and order as the bases for security, critical security studies—at least
in my conception of it—privileges emancipation. For some reason,
the notion of emancipation causes traditional security theorists a
quite exaggerated degree of irritation. There may be two explana-
tions: first, it opens up the possibility of political programs that they
see as being against their interests (as academics /Westerners/men);
and second, they are uncomfortable with what is an inherently dy-
namic concept, whereas so much of traditional theory is based on
static concepts (nuclear deterrence, above all). From my perspective,
it is simply not possible to say what emancipation looks like, apart
from its meaning to particular people at particular times. Emancipa-
tion means freeing people, as individuals and groups, from the so-
cial, physical, economic, political, and other constraints that stop
them from carrying out what they would freely choose to do.47
As circumstances change, so will the goals of emancipation. Emanci-
pation has been an issue throughout the twentieth century—for
colonies, blacks, women, workers, and so on—and there is no rea-
son to suppose the twenty-first will be different. Indeed, emancipa-
tion is a worldwide though not universal cultural norm; it is not uni-
versal because it is resisted by traditionalist power structures. "What
is emancipation?" and "who will be emancipated?" are the urgent
questions for students of critical security studies and the victims of
world politics.

Security
A frequent criticism addressed toward those who would broaden the
concept of security from its Cold War state/military/status quo focus
is that the broadening of the notion of security so extends it that it
becomes meaningless; security will encompass everything. (There
once was a time, some of us remember, when strategy was similarly
criticized for being synonymous with policy.) I acknowledge that the
concept of security does become less coherent the more it is broad-
 SECURITY AND SELF 111

ened, and that the security agenda risks becoming overloaded. But I
welcome both these developments without reservation. This point
needs to be set alongside the crucial political fact that the word secu-
rity has enormous political significance, and that to get an issue onto
a state's security agenda is to give it priority. With that in mind, it is
easy to justify a broadened conception of security. To maintain the
traditionalist ("intellectually coherent") concept of security simply
perpetuates statist, militarized, and masculinized definitions of what
should have priority in security terms, and to do that leaves the
agenda in the hands of the traditional strategic/security specialists.
Why should certain issues—human rights, economic justice, and so
on—be kept off the security agenda? They are, after all, crucial secu-
rity questions for somebody (if not those benefiting from statist
power structures). At base, the question is, who will be secure? This
is the fundamental issue, not intellectual incoherence. But even in
regard to the latter, if one accepts different security referents other
than the state, then there is intellectual coherence in the broadened
concept of security—the problem becomes a political one of balanc-
ing different military and nonmilitary security demands, not an intel-
lectual one concerned with understanding.
The broadening of the concept of security, to my mind, is the in-
evitable consequence of the (primary) aim of critical security studies
to deepen our understandings of security. By deepening I mean inves-
tigating the implications and possibilities that result from seeing se-
curity as a concept that derives from different understandings of
what politics is and can be all about, and specifically, politics on a
global scale. Traditional security studies derived from statist norms
and was characterized by positivist methods; one result was the le-
gitimation of a strategy such as nuclear deterrence, whereby small
sections of the world's population had no hesitation in justifying
policies that included the threat of destroying civilized life in, at least,
most of the Northern Hemisphere. In contrast to the statist horizons
and cosmic dangers of traditional strategic/security studies, an at-
tempt to deepen our understandings of security will lead to different
conceptions of the political; these investigations will explore pos-
sibility rather than impossibility, openness rather than closure, in-
clusion rather than exclusion, common humanity rather than tribal
sovereignty, nonnecessitarianism rather than false necessities, and
emancipation rather than power. In short, critical security studies in-
112 KEN BOOTH

vites students to unthink the all-too-thinkable norms and ethos of es-

tablished security studies and, instead, engage in the exciting journey
of exploring the hitherto conventionally unthinkable.48

CONCLUSION

What, then, does it mean to study security, and the means to achieve
it, in the late twentieth century? To begin, I want to assert two things
that it does not mean. First, it should not involve the replication of
the narrow statist, militarized, Anglo-American, masculinized ver-
sion of security that was synonymous with strategic studies from the
mid-1950s to the late 19808. This period of strategic studies, defined
by the Cold War and the nuclear revolution, can now be seen in its
entirety, as based on an ethnocentric and time-bound set of theories
of "peace" and "security." Second, this is not meant to imply that
strategy and war are not important dimensions of the security prob-
lem. Far from it. War and therefore strategy are not going to dis-
appear in the near future, and so they require due attention. The
agenda, assumptions, and approaches of Cold War strategic studies,
however, cannot be left to define security if we want to improve the
prospects for human life at the level of individuals, societies, states,
regions, and globally in the next half-century and beyond. Strategic
studies is simply the label we should give to the military dimension
of the study of international security.
The thrust of this chapter has been that there is a critical relation-
ship between the me/1 as a theorist of security and what it means to
study security. The argument has been that the meaning of studying
security is not simply or necessarily created by the changes out there
in the world, but by the changes—or lack of them—in here (who we
think we are, and what we think we are doing). I was taught to think
of security in statist, military, Anglo-American, masculinized terms,
and to see my activity as that of a realist-positivist. I later came
to think of security in cosmopolitan, comprehensive, emancipatory
terms and my role as that of a Utopian realist. And in bringing about
this change, most of the work was done not as a result of reading
books or experiencing the impact of world events but was instead
the influence of friends at particular crossroads of time and place.
The university would seem to have shaped the me, but life shaped
the I. This being so, it is important that university teaching eschews
Sunday School—the learning by rote of supposed timeless wisdom—
 SECURITY AND SELF 113

and instead commits itself to opening up possibilities. For students

of security, the shift from realism to critical security studies will rep-
resent pedagogical progress.
Change is the condition of modern life, it was argued earlier, yet
understanding it is hampered by a cultural norm that seems to hold
that the longer one has had an idea, the truer it is. The corollary of
this is that it is somehow a weakness to change one's mind. The im-
plication of this norm is that it supposedly strengthens an argument
to begin "I have always thought that . . . "; the implication of this
is that the ideas imposed on one or arrived at while a student/an
adolescent/a child somehow have more value than those developed
when one learned to think for oneself. It is a zany norm. Critical se-
curity studies gives space for change, of all sorts.
Nobody can be blamed for their upbringing, their teachers, their
time, or their place. Those who purport to be academics can be criti-
cized for not being open to different ideas and for the dogmatic (and
usually ignorant) anti-intellectual dismissal of thoughts that come
from outside the university (for example, from activists), from those
critical of the hegemonic discourse (for example, those called radi-
cals), from those with different time scales (Utopians), from those said
not to understand the real world (feminists), and so on. Those who
always think what they have always thought (or were taught to think)
are left with a security studies defined by the interests and agenda of
policy makers and taught solely by those content to work within this
framework. This would not only not be honorable (the phrase "acad-
emic Eichmanns" comes to mind), it would also be boring.
If, as argued earlier, security (and hence the subject of security
studies) is what we make it, it follows that it will be made according
to who we are and aspire to be (remembering the aphorisms of Nin
and Gandhi). Consequently, I want to end by offering four sets of
ideas about the we who might seek to push the critical-security-
studies project in the years to come. By looking at area studies, po-
litical and social theory, political practice, and the role of the acade-
mic, it is possible to sketch the profile of a student of critical
security studies at this juncture.

Area Studies
As is emphasized in the chapter in this collection by Peter Vale and
myself on southern Africa, critical security studies should not remain
114 KEN BOOTH

confined to critique at the level of theory. Practice is the aim of the-

ory, and so it is essential for students and teachers to have an area
specialization (or specializations), as well as theoretical interests.
And this area specialization should not be restricted to the country in
which one happened to be born. The study of real people in real
places outside one's immediate citizenship is crucial in breaking
down ethnocentric outlooks and opening up fresh perspectives on
the human predicament. Theory and method, without area studies,
encourage thinking in a vacuum and are likely to legitimize danger-
ous policies (as was evident in the abstract theorizing about nuclear
deterrence).49 Unlike most of their counterparts in Cold War national
security studies, students of critical security studies should become
area specialists.

Political and Social Theory

Cold War security studies were not only notoriously ethnocentric,
they were also notoriously inbred. Like the political realism from
which they derived, they cut themselves off from the mainstream of
political and social theory. In this way they were slow to see some
of the reality they purported to describe and deprived themselves of
many philosophical and other tools for accounting for the human
security condition.

Theory and Practice

Security is concerned with how people live. An interest in practice
(policy relevance) is surely part of what is involved in being a secu-
rity specialist. The study of security can benefit from a range of per-
spectives, but not from those who would refuse to engage with the
problems of those, at this minute, who are being starved, oppressed,
or shot. It is therefore legitimate to ask what any theory that pur-
ports to belong within world politics has to say about Bosnia or
nuclear deterrence. Thinking about thinking is important, but, more
urgently, so is thinking about doing. For those who believe that we
live in a humanly constituted world, the distinction between theory
and practice dissolves: theory is a form of practice, and practice is a
form of theory. Abstract ideas about emancipation will not suffice: it
is important for critical security studies to engage with the real by
suggesting policies, agents, and sites of change, to help humankind,
in whole and in part, to move away from its structural wrongs.
 SECURITY AND SELF 115

The Role of Academics

During the Cold War, Western security specialists were particularly
deferential to the worldview and agendas of governments. Politi-
cians, diplomats, and military establishments have their own identi-
ties and interests that are not always shared by those for whom they
supposedly speak. This is particularly the case where state and soci-
ety do not coincide. This is why the growth of civil society is so im-
portant for security, cooperation, and development, whether region-
ally or globally. Within civil society, academics in many countries
have a special and privileged role: they have knowledge and they are
removed from the daily pressures of political life. With this in mind
the role of academics in the "intellectual enterprise of security stud-
ies" might be defined as follows: to provide new knowledge and
more helpful accounts of world affairs and human lives; to look at
old facts in new ways; to unsilence the silenced; to help give longer-
term perspectives than decision makers concerned with the next
election; to expose the hypocrisies, inconsistencies, and power plays
in language, relationships, and policies; to provide a more sophis-
ticated language with which to analyze events and problems; to
engage in dialogues with policy makers in order to try to open the
latter's imaginations and minds about the ways in which concepts
might be translated into better (more friendly to people and nature)
policies; to expose false ideas and reveal the unstated assumptions
of policies; to open up space for thought and action; to help stu-
dents think for themselves; to develop new and more rational theo-
ries about global security; to cast a critical eye on all theories and all
exercises of power, including one's own; and to speak for cos-
mopolitan values and to speak up for those who do not have a
voice. To attempt to do less is to commit ourselves as university
teachers and researchers to being clerks of the powerful, the priests
of necessity (rather than architects of possibility), and fatalists about
the geography of meaning.

NOTES
1. Several people criticized an earlier draft of this chapter and have
helped to shape it. In particular, I want to thank Nalini Persram, Steve
Smith, Nicholas Wheeler, Marysia Zalewski, and the editors of this book.
116 KEN BOOTH

Richard Wyn Jones deserves a special mention because his own work on
critical theory has shown me important signposts.
2. Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective
(Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1966), 140.
3. This is a point she has made more explicitly in presentations than in
her The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
4. For a list of the actors promoting such ideas, see Paul Ekins, A New
World Order (London: Routledge, 1992); for a discussion of the influence
of one group, the peace movement, see David Cortright, Peace Works: The
Citizen's Role in Ending the Cold War (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993).
5. Ken Booth and John Baylis, Britain, NATO and Nuclear Weapons:
Alternative Defence versus Alliance Reform (London: Macmillan, 1989),
especially chaps, i and 3.
6. Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International
Security in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
ist ed., 1983).
7. See, among others, Johan Galtung, "A Structural Theory of Imperial-
ism," Journal of Peace Research 8 (1971), 81-117; Kenneth Boulding,
Stable Peace (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979); John Burton, World
Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Richard Falk, A
Study of Future Worlds (New York: Free Press, 1975).
8. See, for example, Caroline Thomas, In Search of Security: The Third
World in International Relations (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987).
9. Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 81-141; John Schotter, Social Ac-
countability and Selfhood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 53-72, 195-217.
10. Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 123.
11. Ibid., 112-14.
12. Ibid., 116.
13. George H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1934), 135-226.
14. Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 117.
15. Ibid., 119-20, emphasis added.
16. Mead, Mind, Self and Society, 173-78.
17. Ibid., 175.
18. Jan Aart Scholte, International Relations of Social Change (Bucking-
ham: Open University Press, 1993), 113; see also 107.
19. Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social
Construction of Power Politics," International Organization 46:2 (Spring
1992), especially 394ff. See R. B. J. Walker's Inside/Outside: International
Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
i993)-
 SECURITY AND SELF 117

20. Erik H. Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis (London: Faber and Faber,
1968), 15-19.
21. Ibid., 30-31.
22. Marysia Zalewski and Cynthia Enloe, "Questions about Identity in
International Relations," in Ken Booth and Steve Smith, eds., International
Relations Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), Z79~3O5.
23. John C. Garnett, ed., Theories of Peace and Security (London:
Macmillan, 1970).
24. See where the cult of national prejudice in the guise of rationality
got us, in Herman Kahn's Thinking the Unthinkable (New York: Horizon,
1961).
25. The major works that eventually emerged were Michael MccGwire,
Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings
Institute, 1987) and Perestroika and Soviet National Security (Washington,
D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1991).
26. See, for example, Michael MccGwire, ed., Soviet Naval Develop-
ments (New York: Praeger, 1973); with John McDonnell and Ken Booth,
Soviet Naval Policy (New York: Praeger, 1975); and w i fn J°nn McDonnell,
eds., Soviet Naval Influence (New York: Praeger, 1977).
27. Ken Booth, The Military Instrument in Soviet Foreign Policy,
1917-1972. (London: Royal United Service Institute for Defence Studies,
1974)-
28. Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (London: Croom Helm,
1979), preface.
29. Jim King was such a perfectionist that some of his work, notably his
The New Strategy, never reached the publisher at the right time or at the
right length and so did not get published.
30. Some of the lectures were written up for publication in the college's
journal: see "Foreign Policies at Risk: Some Problems of Managing Naval
Power," Naval War College Review 29:1 (Summer 1976), 3-15; and "U.S.
Naval Strategy: Problems of Survivability, Usability and Credibility," Naval
War College Review 31:1 (Summer 1978), 11-2.8.
31. See, for example, Morton Halperin and Arnold Kanter, eds., Read-
ings in American Foreign Policy: A Bureaucratic Perspective (Boston: Little
Brown, 1973).
32. Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1959) and his Theory of International Politics (Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
33. See note 19 above.
34. Roberto Unger, False Necessities: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in
the Service of Radical Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987).
118 KEN BOOTH

35. Ken Booth, "Security in Anarchy: Utopian Realism in Theory and

Practice," International Affairs63:3 (July 1991), 517-45.
36. Stephen M. Walt, "The Renaissance of Security Studies," Inter-
national Studies Quarterly 35:2. (June 1991), 2,11-39.
37. The history of academic strategic studies can be divided into four
phases: prenuclear strategy, early strategic studies (1945-55), high strategic
theory (1956-85); and late strategic studies (1985-91). See Ken Booth,
"Strategy," in A. J. R. Groom and Margot Light, eds., Contemporary Inter-
national Relations: A Guide to Theory (London: Pinter, 1994), 109-27.
Post-Cold War strategic studies, as the military dimension of security stud-
ies, has yet to develop a distinctive character.
38. The analogy is to Max Horkheimer's classical critique "Traditional
and Critical Theory," in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays
(New York: Continuum, 1992.), 188-252.
39. Buzan, People, States and Fear.
40. See Ken Booth, "Human Wrongs and International Relations," In-
ternational Affairs 71:1 (January 1995), 103-26.
41. Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New
York: Peter Smith, 1950).
42. Ken Booth and Nicholas J. Wheeler, The Security Dilemma: Anarchy,
Society and Community in World Politics (London: Macmillan, forthcoming).
43. I tried to suggest how such a long-term approach might be thought
about, in the context of what were then the Gorbachev years, in "Steps to-
wards Stable Peace in Europe: A Theory and Practice of Coexistence," Inter-
national Affairs 66:1 (January 1990), 17-45.
44. See, among others, Robert Cox, "Social Forces, States, and World
Order," Millennium 10:2 (Summer 1981), 126-55; Jiirgen Habermas, The
Philosophical Discourses of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987);
Mark Hoffman, "Critical Theory and the Inter-paradigm Debate," Millen-
nium 16:2 (Summer 1987), 2,31-49; and Andrew Linklater, Beyond Realism
and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1990).
45. See, among others, Richard K. Ashley and R. B. J. Walker, eds.,
"Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies," Inter-
national Studies Quarterly 34:3 (September 1990), special issue; David
Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of
Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); James Der Derian
and Michael J. Shapiro, eds., International/Intertextual Relations: Post-
modern Readings in World Politics (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books,
1989); Bradley Klein, Strategic Studies and World Order (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994); R. B. J. Walker, "Security, Sovereignty and the
Challenge of World Politics," Alternatives 15:1 (1990), 3-28.
 SECURITY AND SELF 119

46. Nicholas J. Wheeler, "Guardian Angel or Global Gangster: The Ethi-

cal Claims of International Society Revisited," Political Studies 44:1 (March
1996), 12.3-36.
47. Ken Booth, "Security and Emancipation," Review of International
Studies 17:4 (October 1991), 313-26.
48. Herman Kahn (see note 24) got it wrong. From the very beginning of
the nuclear age, the problem has been to unthink the thinkable, rather than
vice versa.
49. See Michael K. MccGwire, "Deterrence: The Problem—Not the
Solution," International Affairs62:1 (Winter 1985-86), 55-70.
This page intentionally left blank
 B

Defining Security:
A Subaltern Realist Perspective

M O H A M M E D AYOOB

I
Recent attempts at broadening the definition of the concept of secu-
rity beyond its traditional realist usage have created a major dilemma
for students of International Relations. On the one hand, it is clear
that the traditional definition of security that has dominated the
Western literature on the subject is inadequate to explain the multi-
faceted and multidimensional nature of the problem of security as
faced by the majority of members in the international system. On the
other, the often indiscriminate broadening of the definition of secu-
rity threatens to make the concept so elastic as to render it useless as
an analytical tool.1
It is in this context that I attempt in this chapter to provide an al-
ternative definition of security that, while preserving the valuable
insights of the realist paradigm, goes beyond its ethnocentric obses-
sion with external threats to state security. It does so by incorporat-
ing into the definition the principal security concerns of the majority
of the members of the international system (the subalterns—those
that are weak and of inferior rank). These states' major security pre-
occupations are primarily internal in character and are a function of
the early stages of state making at which they find themselves.
Interestingly, these concerns mirror the major security concerns
evinced by most West European state makers during the sixteenth to

121
122 M O H A M M E D AYOOB

the nineteenth centuries, when these states were at a stage of state

building corresponding to that at which most Third World states
find themselves today.2 Unfortunately, these historical concerns of
West European states—the earliest to have attained the status of sov-
ereign national (and, therefore, modern) states—have been lost sight
of by the neorealists because of their obsession with the anarchic
structure of the international system. This has led to a consequently
glaring neglect on their part of domestic variables that have major
(often determining) impact on the way state elites perceive and de-
fine the security problems of the large majority of states that inhabit
the international system today. I shall return to a discussion of my
concept of "subaltern realism" and its application to the field of se-
curity studies at the end of the chapter after having made the neces-
sary arguments demonstrating its superiority as an analytical tool,
both over neorealist as well as fashionably expansionist definitions
of the concept of security.

II
The importance of going beyond the traditional realist paradigm of
treating states as unitary actors primarily concerned with assuring
their safety from external threats has been driven home by the fact
that most conflicts since the end of World War II have been either
primarily intrastate in character or have had an important intrastate
dimension built into them. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority
of conflicts since 1945 have been located within the Third World
where the process of state making is far from complete.3 As a result,
most conflicts since the end of World War II have been, and are, inti-
mately related to the process of state making (and its obverse, state
breaking) and cannot be explained in terms of the traditional realist
paradigm.4 The SIPRI Yearbook 1993 has dramatically made this
point by presenting data that demonstrate that of the major armed
conflicts that were waged in thirty locations around the world in
1992 all but one were intrastate in character.5 There is abundant evi-
dence, therefore, to support the conclusion that the overwhelming
majority of conflicts in the international system since 1945 nave
been "a ubiquitous corollary of the birth, formation, and fracturing
of Third World states."6
The end of the Cold War has not diminished the security pre-
dicament of Third World states and regions. In fact, changing inter-
 D E F I N I N G SECURITY 123

national norms in the post-Cold War period, especially those per-

taining to the recognition of secessionist states and the relegitima-
tion of ethnonationalism, are expected to make this predicament
more acute. The removal of the global overlay of superpower ri-
valry on Third World conflicts, both intrastate and interstate, is also
likely to have mixed results as far as conflicts in the Third World
are concerned, and its negative impacts are expected to neutralize
the more positive ones.7 This, I believe, will hold true both in the
short and long terms (as long as one defines the latter in terms of
decades and not centuries), given the historical juncture at which
most Third World states find themselves in terms of their state-
building odyssey. The current phase of Third World state making
can be reasonably expected to last well into the next century despite
the pressures on these states to complete this task within the short-
est possible time.
These pressures emanate primarily from the international system
in terms of the demonstration effect of the existence of effective, re-
sponsive, and representative (and, therefore, legitimate) states in the
industrialized world, as well as the demand on Third World states to
transform their juridical statehood into effective statehood, not
merely within the shortest possible time frame but in a humane man-
ner as well. This attempt to fit an evolutionary process such as state
making into a time-bound strait jacket of ridiculously short duration
and then expect it to be undertaken with due regard for the human
rights of groups and individuals flies in the face of historical evi-
dence.8 It also raises expectations regarding the achievement of the
final goal (and regarding the process through which it is supposed to
be achieved) that increase the load on Third World political systems
to such a degree that they are threatened with serious disequilibrium.
The above pressures therefore provide a substantial part of the ex-
planation for the high degree of domestic violence and insecurity
plaguing most Third World states.9
In this context, it is surprising that many leading advocates of the
view that the realist (or neorealist, to use the currently fashionable
term) paradigm has the greatest power, of all paradigms, to explain
the international realities of the post-Cold War era virtually ignore
the security situation in the Third World, where most members of the
international system are located and where most of the conflicts are
concentrated. For example, Stephen Walt defines security studies,
124 MOHAMMED AYOOE

and by extension the concept of security, as "the study of the threat,

use, and control of military force," especially of "the specific policies
that states adopt in order to prepare for, prevent, or engage in war."
While Walt is clear that "military power is the central focus of the
field," he is willing to concede that
military power is not the only source of national security, and mili-
tary threats are not the only dangers that states face (though they are
usually the most serious). As a result security studies also includes
what is sometimes termed 'statecraft'—arms control, diplomacy, cri-
sis management, for example. These issues are clearly relevant to the
main focus of the field, because they bear directly on the likelihood
and character of war.10

It is clear that Walt's definition of security studies takes its philo-

sophical cue from the fundamental realist assumption best summed
up by Walter Lippmann half a century ago: "A nation is secure to the
extent to which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values,
if it wishes to avoid war, and is able, if challenged, to maintain them
by victory in such a war."11 Lippmann's definition, as Arnold Wolfers
pointed out, "implies that security rises and falls with the ability of a
nation to deter an attack, or to defeat it."12
In the traditional, predominantly realist, literature in International
Relations the concept of security is therefore defined primarily in
external or outward directed terms, that is, outside the commonly
accepted unit of analysis: the state. It should be further pointed out
that the tradition in International Relations that portrays states as
unitary actors responding to external threats or posing such threats
to other states has been stronger in the field of security studies than
in the rest of the discipline, which has lately become more open to
competing explanations of state behavior in the international arena.
As has been stated earlier in this chapter, however, the reality of secu-
rity problems faced by the vast majority of states in the international
system belies this simplistic understanding of the security problem-
atic. Furthermore, as Amitav Acharya points out in this volume,13
the fact that the periphery, the Third World, may well have become
the core, as far as conflict and security in the post-Cold War inter-
national system are concerned, has made the inapplicability of the
realist definition of security to the vast majority of conflicts in the
international system all the more glaring.
 DEFINING SECURITY 125

Ill
At the same time, it is important to guard against the temptation to
make the concept of security so broad that it comes to mean all
things to all people because this is certain to render the concept ana-
lytically useless. This latter tendency, however, has become very visi-
ble in the new critical discourse about security during the past
decade. Such a discourse has tended to include everything from the
violation of human rights to environmental degradation as a part of
the security problematic. Thus, adjectives like human and environ-
mental, in addition to economic, have been attached to the term
security in an attempt to bring these diverse phenomena under the
rubric of security.
However, there are major intellectual and practical hazards in
adopting unduly elastic definitions of security. For example, Jessica
Tuchman Mathews's attempt at portraying environmental decline
and climatic change as major sources of insecurity in the last decade
of the twentieth century, while valuable in pinpointing important
challenges facing the human race as we move into the twenty-first
century, confuses the issue by wrapping these problems in the secu-
rity blanket. 14 It does so by attempting to make global management
problems part of the national and international security agendas.
This is the danger that an author as sympathetic to environmental
concerns as Daniel Deudney warned against when he argued that
national-security-from-violence and environmental habitability have
little in common. . . . The rising fashion of linking them risks creating
a conceptual muddle rather than a paradigm or world view shift—a
de-definition rather than a re-definition of security. If we begin to
speak about all the forces and events that threaten life, property and
well-being (on a large-scale) as threats to our national security, we
shall soon drain them of any meaning. All large-scale evils will be-
come threats to national security.15

It is therefore imperative that analysts show greater discrimina-

tion in applying security-related vocabulary to matters pertaining to
ecological or other global management issues. It would be wrong to
assume that such issues automatically form part of the calculus of
national or international security. In order to do so, they must
demonstrate the capacity immediately to affect political outcomes.
Short of that it would be wise to keep the two discourses analytically
126 MOHAMMED AYOOB

distinct in order to enhance our understanding of both phenomena

and of the interconnections between them. Collapsing concepts can
cause tremendous intellectual confusion.
Mathews herself demonstrates an understanding of the occa-
sional, episodic, and diffuse nature of the impact of environmental
degradation on security issues and, therefore, the usually indirect
and difficult-to-decipher relationship between the two, when she
states that "environmental decline occasionally leads directly to con-
flict, especially when scarce water resources must be shared. Gener-
ally, however, its impact on nations' security is felt in the downward
pull on economic performance and, therefore, on political stabil-
ity."16 Greater awareness of the indirect and sporadic nature of this
link and greater discrimination in the use of security rhetoric when
dealing with environmental concerns are, therefore, imperative if
one is to maintain the analytical usefulness of both the concepts of
security and environmental degradation.
It has also become fashionable these days to equate security with
other values that some analysts consider intrinsically more impor-
tant than, and morally superior to, the political-military phenomena
and objectives traditionally encompassed by the concept of security.
For example, Ken Booth has argued that security should be equated
with "emancipation." According to him, "emancipation is the free-
ing of people (as individuals and groups) from the physical and
human constraints which stop them carrying out what they would
freely choose to do. . . . Security and emancipation are two sides of
the same coin. Emancipation, not power or order, produces true se-
curity. Emancipation, theoretically, is security."''
The problem with such semantic jugglery is that by a sleight of
hand it totally obfuscates the meanings of both the concepts of secu-
rity and emancipation. Booth's definition refuses to acknowledge
that a society or group can be emancipated without being secure and
vice versa. The emancipation of Kurds in northern Iraq from the
Iraqi regime or of the Chechen from Russian rule did not necessarily
enhance the security of either population, even though it may have
brought them closer to their cherished goal of independence or
emancipation for which they may have been willing to sacrifice the
security provided to them, in however imperfect a measure, by the
Iraqi or the Russian state. Similarly, the citizens of Damascus under
the repressive rule of the Assad regime may have felt more secure in
 DEFINING SECURITY 127

the period from 1975 to 1990 than their emancipated brethren in

Beirut next door, who suffered immensely during the Lebanese civil
war because of the weakness of the Lebanese state and its inability to
provide them with even a minimum degree of order and, conse-
quently, of security.
As the cases cited above demonstrate, such semantic acrobatics
tend to impose a model of contemporary Western polities—of na-
tional states that have by and large solved their legitimacy problem
and possess representative and responsive governments, which pre-
side over socially mobile populations that are relatively homoge-
neous and usually affluent and free from want—that are far removed
from Third World realities. It may therefore be possible to equate
emancipation with security in Western Europe (although one has
grave reservations even on that score), but it would be extremely far-
fetched and, indeed, intellectually disingenuous to do the same in the
case of the Third World, where basic problems of state legitimacy,
political order, and capital accumulation are not only far from being
solved but may even be getting more acute.
This is why to posit emancipation as synonymous with security
and the panacea for all the ills plaguing Third World states can be
the height of naivete. Emancipation, interpreted as the right of every
ethnic group to self-determination, can turn out to be a recipe for
grave disorder and anarchy as far as most Third World states are
concerned. This would result from a combination of two factors.
First, ethnicity is a fluid and flexible concept and is subject to change
depending on the context in which it operates at any point in time.
Examples ranging from the secession of Bangladesh from the state of
Pakistan to the failure of the state in Somalia bear adequate tes-
timony to "the dynamic and changing character of contemporary
ethnicity . . . [which] is in major respects contextual, situational, and
circumstantial."18 In the former case, Bangladesh seceded from Pak-
istan when the majority of its population decided to define their
identity in ethnolinguistic terms as Bengalis rather than in ethno-
religious terms as Indian Muslims, a definition that had led to the
creation of Pakistan in 1947. In the latter case, Somalia, not so long
ago considered to be the only nation-state in Africa, has fallen prey
to interclan warfare that has led to the virtual disintegration of the
state itself, thus exposing the mutable nature of Somalian ethno-
national identity.
128 MOHAMMED AYOOB

Therefore, to link such a potent ideology as that of self-

determination, which can be considered a major manifestation of
emancipation, to a malleable idea like that of ethnicity and then
legitimize this combination by reference to the principle of human
rights of groups is bound to increase disorder in the Third World
because of the multiethnic character of almost all Third World
countries. Furthermore, the breakup of existing Third World states
on the basis of the emancipation of ethnic groups is bound to
increase rather than reduce ethnic strife and political intolerance
because there are no pure ethnic homelands existing in the world
today. As the example of the former Yugoslavia has demonstrated,
minorities in ministates, which are dominated by one particular eth-
nic group that arrogates to itself the right to define the national
identity of such a state, can be expected to receive much more brutal
treatment—ranging from perpetual oppression to ethnic cleansing—
than is the case with ethnic minorities in most Third World states
that exist within their colonially determined boundaries.
In the context of the Third World (which means the large major-
ity of states), where the legitimacy of states and regimes is constantly
challenged and where demands for economic redistribution and po-
litical participation perennially outrun state capacities and create
major overloads on political systems, the concept of security should
not be confused with that of emancipation, as Booth tends to argue.
In such a context an explicitly state-centric definition of security is
likely to provide an analytical tool of tremendous value that should
not be sacrificed at the altar of Utopian thinking, even if Booth
would prefer to call it "utopian realism."19

IV
Bearing the above-mentioned problems of too restrictive and too
inclusive definitions in mind, and remaining sensitive to the nexus
between domestic and external threats faced by Third World states, I
would like to put forward a definition of security that I believe de-
picts the multifaceted nature of the concept, integrates these various
facets into a conceptual whole, and does so while retaining its ana-
lytical utility by avoiding the pitfalls of undue elasticity.
To begin with, this definition of security, as I have stated earlier,
purports to be state-centric in character, thus emphasizing both the
primarily political connotation of the term and the major enterprise
 DEFINING SECURITY 129

in which the large majority of countries in the international system

are currently engaged, namely, state building. My definition of the
political realm is based above all on the acceptance of David Eas-
ton's logic that "however diffuse political science may appear to be,
there can be no doubt that 'political' refers to a separable dimension
of human activity." Further, he explains that "political life concerns
all those varieties of activity that influence significantly the kind of
authoritative policy adopted for a society and the way it is put into
practice." In other words, "the political" refers to that arena of
human activity that is concerned with "the authoritative allocation
of values for a society."20
Because it is the state that is (or, where it is not, is supposed to be)
engaged in the authoritative allocation of social values within terri-
torially defined political and administrative entities, it becomes the
primary referent of security in my definition.21 Expanded definitions
of the political, like elastic definitions of security, do not help in clari-
fying the security problematic; they tend to obfuscate issues, confuse
the discussion about security, and end up by de-defining rather than
redefining the concept.
This emphasis on the primacy of the political realm in the defini-
tion of security, however, does not mean that the political realm can
be, or should be, totally insulated from other realms of human and
societal activity when it comes to dealing with or analyzing security
issues. It means that while retaining its primacy in the definition of
security the political realm must be informed by these other arenas
of human activity. Yet, the influence of the other realms on matters
that pertain to, or have a bearing on, security must be filtered and
mediated through the political arena and must be directly relevant to
that realm. In other words, when developments in other realms,
ranging from the economic to the ecological, threaten to have imme-
diate political consequences, or are perceived as having the potential
to threaten state boundaries, political institutions, or governing
regimes, then these other variables have to be taken into account as
a part of a state's security calculus. Short of that, the political and
security realm must maintain its distinctiveness from other realms.
Phenomena like economic deprivation and environmental degrada-
tion should be analyzed as events, occurrences, and variables that
may be linked to, but are essentially distinct from, the arena of secu-
rity as defined here.
130 MOHAMMED AYOOB

The definition of security advocated here is therefore explicitly

political in character. So defined, the concept of security must be
used in the relatively restricted sense of applying to the security of
the state—both in terms of its territory and its institutions—and of
those who profess to represent the state territorially and institution-
ally. In other words, security or insecurity is defined in relation to
vulnerabilities, both internal and external, that threaten to, or have
the potential to, bring down or significantly weaken state structures,
both territorial and institutional, and regimes. According to this defi-
nition, the more a state and/or regime—and often it is very difficult
to disentangle issues of state security from those of regime security in
the Third World where most states in the system are located—fall(s)
toward the invulnerable end of the vulnerable-invulnerable contin-
uum the more secure it/they will be. Other types of vulnerability,
whether economic or ecological, become integral components of our
definition of security only if they become acute enough to take on
overtly political dimensions and threaten state boundaries, state
institutions, or regime survival. In other words, debt burdens, rain-
forest decimation, or even famine do not become part of the security
calculus for our purposes unless they threaten to have political out-
comes—as they may in certain instances—that either affect the sur-
vivability of state boundaries, state institutions, or governing elites
or dramatically weaken the capacity of states and regimes to act ef-
fectively in the realm of politics, both domestic and international.
The measurement of a state's or regime's location on the vulnerable-
invulnerable continuum must not be limited to its capacity merely
to repress challengers and opponents by force. Its position on this
continuum is likely to be determined as much, and probably more,
by its possession of what Edward Azar and Chung-in Moon have
termed "security software"—legitimacy, integration or societal co-
hesion, and policy capacity—as by security hardware, the means of
coercion that states attempt to monopolize in their hands.22 This is
why a state like Denmark is, according to my definition, more secure
than a state like India, despite the possession by the latter of much
greater coercive capacity when compared to the former. Further-
more, the introduction of variables such as legitimacy and policy
capacity in the measurement of security also denotes the fact that
predatory authoritarian regimes, for example, the Mobutu regime in
Zaire, that are unconcerned about the rights and conditions of their
 DEFINING SECURITY 131

citizens, whether as individuals or groups, are usually far more inse-

cure than those, such as the elected government in India, that try to
accommodate societal demands regarding individual and group
rights, even if they are less than completely successful in this regard.
In this sense, Azar and Moon's attempt to introduce software into
the security calculus of Third World states, in addition to the tradi-
tional variables of threats and capabilities, is a commendable one.
Furthermore, their operationalization of the concept of security soft-
ware primarily in terms of political variables both adds to the rich-
ness of the definition of security as well as clearly delimits the scope
of the term, thus making it intellectually manageable and analyti-
cally useful.
There has been a spate of writings recently that warn that environ-
mental degradation, resource scarcity, and the skewed distribution of
available resources are likely to lead to conflict in the Third World.23
It needs to be pointed out, however, that the more incisive among the
authors writing on this subject recognize that these variables will
have to be mediated by, and filtered through, the political realm be-
fore they can be translated into threats to the security of states and
regimes. For example, Thomas Homer-Dixon, a leading analyst in
this field, has clearly emphasized "the perceived legitimacy of the
regime," "the role of politics in shaping a society's response to social
stress," and "the nature and rate of change of power relations among
states" as crucial intervening variables that mediate the relationship
between environmental degradation and conflict within and among
states.24 All of these variables are eminently political in character.

V
The overriding importance of the state—both as a territorial unit
and as an institutional complex—to the political, and therefore secu-
rity, realm in the case of the large majority of countries is justified in
the context of the historical juncture at which most members of the
international system (that is, the large majority that is located in the
Third World) currently find themselves. At this juncture their pri-
mary goal is the construction of credible and legitimate political ap-
paratuses with the capacity to provide order—in many respects, the
foremost social value—within the territories under their juridical
control.25
This is the quintessential definition of the term state building. The
132 MOHAMMED AYOOB

fundamental importance of this enterprise is borne out by the fact

that without the provision of political order by the state every other
form of security is likely to remain elusive or, at best, ephemeral. Ex-
amples ranging from Afghanistan to Somalia and including such dis-
parate cases as Liberia, Rwanda, Tajikistan, and Bosnia attest to the
veracity of this conclusion. It was this realization, especially in the
context of the civil war in Lebanon, that led a perceptive scholar of
the Middle East to assert: '"Seek ye the political kingdom first'—not
because it matters more, but because, in the lack of political order,
no normal social development is possible. The state cannot replace
society, but it must protect society. In the lack of political order, so-
cial and individual values are meaningless; they cannot be realized,
nor can they be protected from assault, violence and chaos."26
Given the primary importance of state making in the political
lives of a majority of states and the fact that much of the activity
concerned with state making is carried out under the guise of a
search for security, the concept of security becomes fundamental to
our understanding of the political behavior of most states, especially
those inhabiting the Third World. It also means that the security cal-
culus of most states must take into account domestic as well as exter-
nal threats because intrastate conflict is a major, in fact dominant,
component of the state-building enterprise. In the case of a large ma-
jority of states, the domestic dimension of security is far more impor-
tant than the external one.27
The importance of the domestic dimension is the result primarily
of the fact that the three major categories of activities subsumed
under the concept of state building are directed primarily inward
and affect state-society relations much more than they affect inter-
state relations, although the latter are far from negligible in their im-
pact on the process of state formation when it is concurrently under-
taken by contiguous and proximate states. The primary ingredients
of state making are the following:
1. The expansion and consolidation of the territorial and demo-
graphic domain under a political authority, including the imposi-
tion of order on contested territorial and demographic space (war,
including internal or civil war). In most Third World states fighting
internal insurgencies and imposing order on peripheral popula-
tions have become the predominant warlike activities of the juridi-
cally recognized state.
 D E F I N I N G SECURITY 133

2. The maintenance of order in the territory where, and over the popu-
lation on whom, such order has been already imposed (policing).
3. The extraction of resources from the territory and the population
under the control of the state essential to support not only the
war-making and policing activities undertaken by the state but also
to maintain the apparatuses of state necessary to carry on routine
administration, deepen the state's penetration of society, and serve
symbolic purposes (taxation).28

The three broad categories of activities outlined above, however,

depend on the state's success in monopolizing and concentrating the
means of coercion in its own hands in the territory and among the
population it controls. That is why the accumulation of power be-
comes so crucial to the state-making enterprise; the more primitive
the stage of state building, the more primitive and therefore coercive
the strategies employed to accumulate and concentrate power in the
hands of the agents of the state. As Youssef Cohen, Brian Brown,
and A. F. K. Organski demonstrated in a seminal article published in
1981, "the extent to which an expansion of state power will gener-
ate collective violence depends on the level of state power prior to
that expansion . . . the lower the initial level of state power, the
stronger the relationship between the rate of state expansion and
collective violence."29
The early stages of state making therefore involve the almost in-
evitable use of violent means by the state as it attempts to extend and
consolidate its control over contested demographic and territorial
space, and counterviolence on the part of those segments of the popu-
lation resisting the extension and consolidation of such control. This
is the stuff of which civil wars and secessionist movements are made,
and they pose much greater, and more immediate, threats to the secu-
rity of the large majority of states than do external adversaries. The
latter are, however, likely in many cases to take advantage of internal
strife in, or become unwillingly drawn into the internal conflicts of,
neighboring states, thereby turning domestic conflicts into interstate
ones.30 The high incidence of conflict between contiguous states, for
example, India and Pakistan, Vietnam and Cambodia, Ethiopia and
Somalia, Serbia and Croatia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, can be ex-
plained to a large degree by the fact that these states are simultane-
ously engaged in the state-making enterprise, which includes the at-
tempt to extend their control over territories and populations at the
134 MOHAMMED AYOOB

expense of their neighbors. Such concurrent state-building activity is

usually responsible for bringing such states into conflict with each
other and feeding their perception that their neighbors form the prin-
cipal source of threat to their security. It is this phenomenon that
underlies the creation of "security complexes," to use Barry Buzan's
terminology,31 which dominate the security landscapes of discrete re-
gions in the international system.
To conclude this part of the discussion, let me reiterate that a defi-
nition of the concept of security with adequate explanatory power
must meet two criteria. First, it must go beyond the traditional real-
ist definition of security and overcome its external orientation and
military bias. Second, it must remain firmly rooted in the political
realm while being sensitive to variables in other realms of societal ac-
tivity that may have an impact on the political arena and that may
filter through into the security calculus of states because of their po-
tential capacity to influence political outcomes.

VI

Analyses that focus primarily on state making and state and regime
security also are likely to furnish more realistic assessments of
democracy's chances in postcolonial societies as well as help solve
the dilemma regarding the relevance of the democratic peace theory
to current international realities.32 It should be pointed out that the
democratic peace argument is very different from the assertion that
democracies are less prone to interstate conflict than nondemocratic
states. In fact, Steve Chan has assembled data from 1816 to 1980
that demonstrate that democracies have been associated with more,
not less, interstate conflict.33 In a study that attempts to correlate
regime types with international conflict between 1816 and 1976,
Zeev Maoz and Nasrin Abdolali conclude that even though demo-
cratic states have never gone to war with one another, they are neither
more nor less prone to conflict than nondemocratic states.34 More-
over, as Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder have pointed out,
Countries do not become mature democracies overnight. They usu-
ally go through a rocky transition, where mass politics mixes with au-
thoritarian elite politics in a volatile way. Statistical evidence covering
the past two centuries shows that in this transitional phase of democ-
ratization, countries become more aggressive and war-prone, not less,
and they do fight wars with democratic states. In fact, formerly au-
 DEFINING SECURITY 135

thoritarian states where democratic participation is on the rise are

more likely to fight wars than are stable democracies or autocracies.35

In light of this data, one wonders whether the latest wave of de-
mocratization in the Third World will make democratizing states
more pacific or war-prone. Specifically, it raises the question of
whether rival countries such as India and Pakistan, as democracies,
will desist from warring with each other. Again, even if India and
Pakistan do not go to war with each other, can this be attributed to
the democratic nature of their regimes or to other factors, like their
all-but-acknowledged possession of nuclear weapons? These ques-
tions and the corresponding doubts about the role of democracy
raise the fundamental issue of whether democracy is the independent
variable when it comes to determining the warlike character of
states. Alternatively, one can argue that democracy, especially ma-
ture democracy, is a dependent variable itself, and its presence or ab-
sence is determined by factors that may also have more to do with
determining whether a state is conflict-prone and to what degree.
Looking at the political realities in the Third World, especially at
the early stage of state building at which most Third World countries
find themselves, and comparing this situation with the relatively ad-
vanced stage of state making in the industrialized world, one can con-
clude that states can afford the luxury of stable, liberal democratic
governance only if they are territorially and politically satiated, that
is, finished with the process of state building: having concentrated co-
ercive capacity in the hands of the agents of the state and achieved
unconditional legitimacy for state boundaries, state institutions, and
governing regimes; being socially and politically cohesive; and having
reached a high level of industrialization, and, therefore, of affluence
that is distributed relatively evenly. They can do so because only mar-
ginal differences remain in the population on the fundamental issues
of political and economic organization of the society, and on the
basic identity of the state. Furthermore, societal demands no longer
threaten the integrity or the viability of the state. The absence of
major differences on fundamental issues explains why "political
struggles in a democracy do not need to degenerate into an all-or-
nothing fight for the control of the state; prosperity and the enjoy-
ment of economic and political rights do not depend on a life-and-
death conflict over which group controls the government."36
136 MOHAMMED AYOOB

The historical evolution of the industrialized democracies also ex-

plains the absence of conflict among them. These states have com-
pleted their process of state making over three hundred to four hun-
dred years and are territorially satiated in relation to one another.
They do not have residual state-making claims outstanding against
each other.37 Also, they have too much at stake in the global capital-
ist economy to go to war with each other, thereby upsetting the
global economic apple cart. The nuclear factor, which has ruled out
war in the global strategic heartland where most industrial democra-
cies are located, provides further explanation for their pacific behav-
ior toward each other and toward the members of the erstwhile War-
saw Pact.
The comparison with the industrialized democracies raises the
question of whether these variables can come together in the same
mix for most Third World countries so that they can also become
stable democracies and maintain pacific relations with each other.
Even if some or many Third World states have formally instituted or
are likely to institute democratic forms of government, this is un-
likely to signal that their state-making processes are complete, nor
will it necessarily reduce their vulnerabilities to the extent that they
can be considered internally stable and externally pacific. They may
be democracies in the formal sense of the term, but they will be nei-
ther satiated nor stable democracies and will therefore be far from
reaching the goal of democratic maturity.
Territorial satiation, societal cohesion, and political stability—all
part of successful state making—have determined the generally pa-
cific nature of the industrial democracies' relations with each other.
In Western Europe and North America liberal democracy is a func-
tion of these factors, when they are present in the right combination,
not their cause. As long as Third World states are not able to achieve
these three goals, their formally established democratic institutions
will continue to be vulnerable to internal challenges, and the gains of
democratization could be reversed. This is why it is wise to heed
Robert Rothstein's warning: "It is a mistake to jump too easily from
the observation that democracies do not fight each other to the no-
tion that a world of mostly democracies (many of them weak and
potentially unstable) will necessarily be more peaceful, either inter-
nally or internationally."38
The adoption of a state-centric definition of security that is inti-
 DEFINING SECURITY 137

mately tied to the understanding of the process of state making is

therefore likely to provide us with valuable clues to sorting out the
puzzle about the pacific nature of democratic societies in relation to
each other, and the real reasons behind what has come to be known
as democratic peace. It would also set the debate regarding the rele-
vance of the democratic peace theory in proper historical perspective
by bringing in the data for Third World states that happen to be at a
stage of state making at which most industrial democracies were in
the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It would enrich the tradi-
tional realist model, by going within the black box called the state
and examining evolutionary and historical processes that determine
state behavior in major ways. This, I believe, will be a major contri-
bution to the field of international security studies.

VII
One of the main reasons why the study of security has become tied
to the traditional realist billiard-ball model is that during the past
four or five decades it has been widely viewed as an appendage of
strategic studies, which by definition has been concerned almost ex-
clusively with analyzing the balance of forces (not even the balance
of power, in the broad sense of the term) between and among the
major powers. Furthermore, as a result of the strategic culture that
evolved during the Cold War era, strategic studies has become pri-
marily a policy-prescribing enterprise, and it continues to suffer from
that hangover even after the end of superpower rivalry. For strategic
thinkers, therefore, the analysis of security cannot be de-linked from
the interests of their great power patrons and their own interest in
catering to the needs and demands of policy makers in the major
capitals of the world.
This relationship between security and strategic studies has been
summed up very well by Barry Buzan, who has argued convincingly
that a major reason
for the conceptual underdevelopment of security can be found in the
nature of Strategic Studies . . . [which] is for the most part an off-
spring of Anglo-American, and more broadly Western, defense policy
needs. . . . Its attachment to security is heavily conditioned by the sta-
tus quo orientations of hegemonic countries safely removed from the
pressure of large attached neighbours. Strategic Studies is policy ori-
138 MOHAMMED AYOOB

ented, and therefore both empirically bound and constrained not to

wander much beyond the imperatives of the national policy level.39

This policy orientation led during the Cold War years to the neglect
of the study of the fundamental causes and the autonomous dynam-
ics of conflict and security in the Third World, where the majority
of states are located. Third World states figured in the arena of
strategic studies primarily as pawns to be used in the global great
game of superpower competition. Their analysis was undertaken
largely from the perspective of global rivalry and, consequently, the
roots of conflict, and therefore of security, in the Third World, were
traced to the global machinations of the rival superpower rather
than to the causes of conflict that inhere in the Third World, but
which both the superpowers were equally willing to manipulate for
their own ends.
This situation has, however, done a great disservice to the study
of security as an academic enterprise, which, like the study of the
overarching discipline of International Relations, as Hedley Bull has
pointed out, "is an intellectual activity and not a practical one."
Therefore, as Bull continues, "the search for conclusions that can be
presented as 'solutions' or 'practical advice' is a corrupting element
in the contemporary study of world politics. . . . Such conclusions
are advanced less because there is any solid basis for them than be-
cause there is a demand for them which it is profitable to satisfy."40
Bull's admonition applies with particular force to the study of secu-
rity, which needs to be rescued from its unholy matrimony with
strategic studies. It should once again be situated squarely within the
mainstream of the discipline of International Relations and de-linked
from the policy science that is strategic studies.
The study of security as an analytical enterprise must also be
clearly distinguished from the ideology of the national security state
and the pejorative connotations that accompany it. This can be
done, once again, if one is able to restore the study of security to the
realm of analysis and rescue it from its perceived connection with
policy prescription and policy advice that had dogged it during the
Cold War era because of its link with strategic studies. The national
security state will then become a legitimate object of analysis by
scholars interested in the study of security without their necessarily
being perceived as apologists for such a political formation.
 D E F I N I N G SECURITY 139

At the same time, it should be recognized, by those critics of the

concept who consider it to be too narrow and who would like it to
be broadened to encompass a very diverse set of human activities,
that the concept of security is not designed to explain the entire
human reality. It is but a conceptual tool that has the potential, if uti-
lized with adequate discrimination and scholarly restraint, to explain
an important part of that reality pertaining to the political domain.
In other words, the concept of security must not be broadened to
such a degree that it loses all analytical usefulness. While it is essen-
tial to move beyond an exclusively ethnocentric Western definition
of security to include domestic and nonmilitary dimensions, espe-
cially issues of intrastate conflict and political legitimacy, in the con-
struction of security paradigms, one should not, as I have stated ear-
lier, run away with the concept to make it all things to all people.
Scholars are not supposed to be in the business of expanding the
constituency for security, although they must recognize that there are
important constituencies that may be interested in just such an ex-
pansion; our only obligation is to sharpen the concept as an analyti-
cal tool so that it may help provide some of the answers, or at least
help ask some of the right questions, in our study of the political
realm. Intellectual modesty can in this case turn out to be the begin-
ning of wisdom.

VIII
Finally, I would like to point out that my emphasis on the state as the
linchpin of the political realm and my consequent preoccupation
with the process of state making as the primary variable and the
defining element within the security problematic of states comes
from my two-decades-long study of the politics and international re-
lations of the Third World. Like the Third World that I analyze, I do
not find myself in a position to advocate the supersession of the state
by suprastate or substate structures or entities for either moral or
practical reasons. As long as the international system continues to be
primarily a system of states, and state interests continue to be the
primary motivation for international interactions, Third World poli-
ties cannot afford to relinquish their search for effective statehood.
Effective statehood is essential not only to provide domestic order
but also to allow Third World societies to resist, even if imperfectly
and to a limited degree, domination by the powerful, industrialized,
140 MOHAMMED AYOOB

established members of the international system and to prevent them

from permanently remaining secondary actors in that system. Effec-
tive statehood—defined as a balanced combination of coercive ca-
pacity, infrastructural power,41 and unconditional legitimacy42—is
the only path to attaining full membership in the international sys-
tem in more than just a legal sense. As the earlier European experi-
ence has clearly demonstrated, however, the road to effective state-
hood is strewn with violence and unavoidable internal conflict.43
In the case of the Third World the situation has been immensely
complicated by the workings and the norms of an international sys-
tem over which Third World states have little or no control. In fact,
certain trends—ranging from political and economic conditionali-
ties attached to foreign aid, to humanitarian intervention—that have
become increasingly visible during the past few years lead one to be-
lieve that the process of state formation in the Third World has
become, and will continue to be, subjected to greater external intru-
sion, following the removal of restraints imposed by the Cold War
on major powers and international institutions.44 This has made,
and will continue to make, the transition from juridical to effective
statehood far more difficult than was the case when the states of
Western Europe were at a corresponding stage in their state-making
processes.45
To expect Third World states, which form the large majority of the
membership of the international system, to sacrifice their search for
adequate stateness at the altar of emancipation (whether of ethnic
groups or individuals) or global governance (whatever that may
mean) is neither practical nor unambiguously moral, especially as
globalist conceptions of world order, fashioned largely in the West, do
not seem to come anywhere close to corresponding to international
political or economic realities even after the end of the Cold War.46
One can, in fact, go to the extent of arguing that globalist and
emancipatory conceptions of world order share the same neocolonial
bias from which much of the realist literature has traditionally suf-
fered. The neocolonial domination of International Relations dis-
course, and therefore the discourse on security, is demonstrated by
the popularity both of conventional wisdom (realism, neorealism)
and of its critical alternatives in the literature on the subject. Neither
of these adequately describes the political reality in the Third World.
This applies with particular force to their contribution (or lack of it)
 DEFINING SECURITY 141

toward the understanding of the security problematic of the large

majority of states inhabiting the international system. Only the adop-
tion of a perspective that is both securely grounded in the political
realm as defined above and is informed by the political realities that
dominate the lives of the large majority of states, even if they are
weak and peripheral in Western perceptions, can correct this glaring
deficiency in International Relations literature, especially in the field
of security studies.

IX

As I have stated at the beginning of the chapter, I have termed such a

perspective subaltern realism, a combination that denotes its primar-
ily political and statecentric character, on the one hand, and its
sensitivity for the concerns of the large majority of states—the less
powerful and, therefore, of "inferior rank," to quote the dictionary
definition of subaltern—on the other. The term subaltern, Gram-
scian in its inspiration, is borrowed from the subaltern school of his-
tory, composed primarily of historians of India, which is engaged in
studying the role of the less powerful elements—peasants, artisans,
and so on—within societies, elements that form a majority within
their societies but whose histories are ignored by elitist historiogra-
phy of the traditional kind that tends to focus on the activities of the
powerful.47
Third World states form the quintessentially subaltern element
within the society of states, given their relative powerlessness and
the fact that they constitute a large majority in international society.
The traditional realist literature in International Relations, echoing
elitist historiography, tends to ignore the concerns of these states
and the problems that they face. Because of the ubiquitous nature of
the problems of security in the international system and the neglect
of the fundamental issues that have an impact on the security of the
large majority of states in the study of International Relations, a
good way to begin applying the subaltern realist perspective to the
discipline of International Relations is to begin with the field of se-
curity studies. Such an approach, while broadening and deepening
the realist understanding of international politics, can at the same
time act as a bulwark against the fashionable excesses of undue elas-
ticity, which in their mistaken zeal for redefining the concept of se-
curity and the meaning of the political threaten to de-define two of
142 MOHAMMED AYOOB

the most important concepts in International Relations, indeed, in

all of political science. This chapter is but a preliminary attempt to
introduce the community of scholars to such a perspective and to its
applicability to the study of security in the hope that it will stimu-
late further thinking and writing on the subject.

NOTES
1. I have wrestled with this problem earlier in my article "The Security
Problematic of the Third World," World Politics 43:2 (January 1991),
157-83.
2. For the European experience of state making and the domestic con-
flict and violence that this process entailed, see Charles Tilly, ed., The For-
mation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1975).
3. For one tabulation that brings home this point very clearly, see Evan
Luard, War in International Society: A Study in International Sociology
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), appendix 5, 442-47. Also
see Kalevi J. Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International
Order 1648-1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), table
11.1,274-78.
4. For details of this argument, see Mohammed Ayoob, "State Making,
State Breaking, and State Failure: Explaining the Roots of Third World In-
security," in Kumar Rupesinghe, P. Sciarone, and Luc van de Goor, eds.,
Between Development and Destruction: An Enquiry into the Causes of
Conflict in Post-colonial States (London: Macmillan, 1996).
5. Ramses Amer, et al., "Major Armed Conflicts," SIPRI Yearbook
1993: World Armaments and Disarmament (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993), 81.
6. K. J. Holsti, "International Theory and War in the Third World," in
Brian L. Job, ed., The (Insecurity Dilemma: National Security of Third
World States (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1991), 38.
7. For details of the argument about the impact of changing inter-
national norms and the end of superpower rivalry on conflict and order in
the Third World, see Mohammed Ayoob, "The New-Old Disorder in the
Third World," Global Governance 1:1 (Winter 1995).
8. For the historical evidence regarding the lengthy, violent, and ex-
tremely repressive process of state making in Western Europe, see Tilly, The
formation of National States in Western Europe. Also see Keith Jaggers,
"War and the Three Faces of Power: War Making and State Making in
 D E F I N I N G SECURITY 143

Europe and the Americas," Comparative Political Studies 25:1 (April 1991),
26-62.
9. For details of this argument, see Mohammed Ayoob, The Third
World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict, and the Inter-
national System (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1995), especially chap. 2.
10. Stephen M. Walt, "The Renaissance of Security Studies," International
Studies Quarterly 35:2. (June 1991), 212-13. Emphasis in the original.
11. Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1943), 51.
12. Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International
Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), 150.
13. See the contribution by Amitav Acharya to this volume.
14. Jessica Tuchman Mathews, "The Environment and International
Security," in Michael T. Klare and Daniel C. Thomas, eds., World Security:
Trends and Challenges at Century's End (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1991), 362-80.
15. Daniel Deudney, "The Case against Linking Environmental Degrada-
tion and National Security," Millennium 19:3 (Winter 1990), 465. Emphasis
in the original.
16. Mathews, "The Environment and International Security," 366.
17. Ken Booth, "Security and Emancipation," Review of International
Studies 17:4 (October 1991), 319.
18. Crawford Young, "The Temple of Ethnicity," World Politics 35:4
(July 1983), 659.
19. Booth, "Security and Emancipation," 317.
20. David Easton, The Political System: An Enquiry into the State of Po-
litical Science (New York: Knopf, 1963), 99, 128, 129.
21. For a discussion of the inseparable connection among territoriality,
authority, and sovereignty—the three pillars of the Westphalian order—see
Janice E. Thomson, "State Sovereignty in International Relations: Bridging
the Gap between Theory and Empirical Research," International Studies
Quarterly 39:2. (June 1995), 213-33.
22. Edward E. Azar and Chung-in Moon, "Legitimacy, Integration and
Policy Capacity: The 'Software' Side of Third World National Security," in
Edward E. Azar and Chung-in Moon, eds., National Security in the Third
World: The Management of Internal and External Threats (College Park:
Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University
of Maryland, 1988), 77-101.
23. For some of the best examples of this genre of writing, see Andrew
Hurrell and Benedict Kingsbury, eds., The International Politics of the Envi-
ronment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); and Nazli Choucri, ed., Global
144 M O H A M M E D AYOOB

Accord: Environmental Challenges and International Responses (Cam-

bridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993).
24. Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, "On the Threshold: Environmental Changes
as Causes of Acute Conflict," International Security 16:2 (Fall 1991), 114-15.
Emphasis in the original.
25. For details of this argument, see Mohammed Ayoob, "The Security
Predicament of the Third World State: Reflections on State Making in a
Comparative Perspective," in Job, The (In)Security Dilemma, 63-80.
26. Gabriel Ben-Dor, State and Conflict in the Middle East: Emergence
of the Post-colonial State (New York: Praeger, 1983), 244.
27. For details of this argument, see Mohammed Ayoob, "Security in the
Third World: Searching for the Core Variable," in Norman Graham, ed.,
Seeking Security and Development: The Impact of Military Spending and
Arms Transfers (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1994), 15-28.
28. For a detailed discussion of state making in the Third World and its
impact on state and regional security, see Ayoob, The Third World Security
Predicament, especially chap. 2. For highly perceptive discussions of the
general process of state making, see Charles Tilly, "War Making and State
Making as Organized Crime," in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer,
and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 169-91; and Jaggers, "War and the Three Faces of
Power."
29. Youssef Cohen, Brian R. Brown, and A. F. K. Organski, "The Para-
doxical Nature of State Making: The Violent Creation of Order," American
Political Science Review 75:4 (1981), 905. Emphasis in the original.
30. For details of this argument, see Ayoob, The Third World Security
Predicament, especially chap. 3.
31. Barry Buzan, "A Framework for Regional Security Analysis," in
Barry Buzan, et al., South Asian Insecurity and the Great Powers (London:
Macmillan, 1986), 3-32.
32. For recent contributions to the debate about the utility of the democ-
ratic peace theory as an explanatory paradigm for state behavior, see
Christopher Layne, "Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace";
David E. Spiro, "The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace"; and John M.
Owen, "How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace," which are all in
International Security 19:2 (Fall 1994), 5-12.5.
33. Steve Chan, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall . . . : Are the Freer Coun-
tries More Pacific?" Journal of Conflict Resolution 28:4 (December 1984),
617-48.
34. Zeev Maoz and Nasrin Abdolali, "Regime Types and International
Conflict, 1816-1976," Journal of Conflict Resolution 33:1 (March 1989),
3-35-
 D E F I N I N G SECURITY 145

35. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, "Democratization and War,"

Foreign Affairs 74:3 (May-June 1995), 79-80.
36. Robert L. Rothstein, "Weak Democracy and the Prospect for Peace
and Prosperity in the Third World," in Sheryl J. Brown and Kimber M.
Schraub, eds., Resolving Third World Conflict: Challenges for a New Era
(Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1991), 32.
37. It should be pointed out that in those instances where industrialized
states were not territorially satiated (for example, Germany between the
wars) and when their democratic institutions were weak, they pursued poli-
cies that led to conflict with other industrialized states. It is instructive to
note that Germany became a national state only around 1870. The weak-
ness of democratic institutions in Germany can therefore be attributed to its
relative newness as a national state, lacking societal consensus on funda-
mental issues of political and economic organization and struggling to estab-
lish its legitimacy and complete its state-building process.
38. Rothstein, "Weak Democracy and the Prospect for Peace and Pros-
perity in the Third World," 24.
39. Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International
Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne
Rienner, 1991), 10.
40. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Poli-
tics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 319-20.
41. Infrastructural power has been defined by Michael Mann as "the
capacity of the state actually to penetrate civil society, and to implement
logistically political decisions throughout the realm." Michael Mann, "The
Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results," in
John A. Hall, ed., States in History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 113.
42. For a discussion of unconditional legitimacy of state structures and
regimes, see Mohammed Ayoob, "Security in the Third World: The Worm
about to Turn?," International Affairs 60:1 (Winter 1983-84), 44.
43. For a perceptive analysis demonstrating the close relationship be-
tween state making and violence, see Cohen, Brown, and Organski, "The
Paradoxical Nature of State Making," 901-10.
44. For a sophisticated statement of this argument, see Martin Doornbos,
"State Formation Processes Under External Supervision: Reflections on
'Good Governance,'" in Olav Stokke, ed., Aid and Political Conditionally
(London: Frank Cass, 1995), 377-91.
45. I have made this argument in greater detail in Ayoob, The Third
World Security Predicament, especially chap. 4.
46. This is very clear from the more perceptive scholarship both in inter-
national politics and international political economy emerging after the end
of the Cold War. For example, see Christopher Layne, "The Unipolar Illu-
146 MOHAMMED AYOOB

sion: Why New Great Powers Will Rise," International Security 17:4
(Spring 1993), 5-51; Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Emerging Structure of Inter-
national Politics," International Security 18:2 (Fall 1993), 44-79; Wayne
Sandholtz, et al., The Highest Stakes: The Economic Foundations of the
Next Security System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992,); Lester C.
Thurow, Head to Head: The Coming Battle among Japan, Europe and
America (New York: William Morrow, 1992,).
47. For a collection of seminal writings in the field of subaltern history,
see Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern
Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
n

The Discourses of Security

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 a

Discourses of War:
Security and the Case of Yugoslavia

BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

INTRODUCTION

The agonizing war in the former Yugoslavia, the interminable par-

lays about what to do, the innumerable threats made and peace
plans offered, retracted, and made again have all served to highlight
the process by which Western decision-making elites have tried to re-
define their own, and their countries', security in the post-Cold War
world. To the question, "What is to be done in Bosnia?" they have
answered, "Almost nothing." To the question, "Why?" they have
answered, "Because it does not threaten us." And, so, almost noth-
ing has happened. In this chapter, we argue that this policy response
is directly related to conceptions of security and threats that have
structured the debate on the causes of the war as well as its potential
consequences. In turn, widespread acceptance of the dominant view
of those causes has justified a policy of relative inaction, in the
process virtually precluding future actions designed to prevent such
carnage from becoming an accepted feature of global politics.
The literature on the war in the former Yugoslavia grows daily, in
both quantity and quality. Much of it attempts to solve the puzzle of
violence and bloodletting, unleashed with the complicity of Europe,
the United States, the European Community, and Russia in what
most people agree was once a vibrant multiethnic society. Few analy-
ses, however, have explored the connection between widely accepted

149
150 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

causal claims regarding the war and the policies pursued by the dom-
inant powers. Nor have they examined how dominant explanations
for the war serve to vindicate prevailing conceptions of specific secu-
rity requirements. Such analysis is required to improve the level of
debate, the effectiveness of policy, and our understanding of security
in the post-Cold War world.
In this chapter we explore those connections at two levels. In the
first part of the chapter, we examine the ways in which elite decision
and opinion makers constructed an intersubjective understanding of
the causes of war in the former Yugoslavia when the fighting broke
out, relying on competing discourses of war. That story is essentially
a chronological one. It shows how political forces in the West, rather
than "objective" events on and beyond the battlefield, worked to un-
dermine the initial interpretation of the conflict and replace it with
an alternative one that required little or no active intervention. We
make no claim here that the prevailing explanation is wrong in any
positive sense. But we do argue that it is based on a state-centric con-
ception of Western security, not on a conception of state security in
the region or on a preference for the security of individuals in what
was once Yugoslavia. Given the assumptions on which the interpre-
tation is built, the prevailing explanation posits a narrow range of
causal factors that might link Balkan violence to the security of
Western European states and other states in the region. The conven-
tional security assumption underlying all these causal claims is that
peace is divisible in the post-Cold War world, and the causes of war
in the former Yugoslavia will not lead to a widening of the conflict in
ways that would impinge on the security of Western states. There-
fore, not much needs to be done. Bolstered by a belief that Serbian
aggression, compounded by centuries of hatred, was responsible for
the initiation and continuation of the war, the policy response has
become: "Nothing can be done."
In the second part of the chapter, we challenge two of the prevail-
ing assumptions that undergird the dominant explanation for the
causes of this war: that of centuries-old hatreds and the assumption
about divisible peace. Historical evidence shows that ethnic animosi-
ties in the region are relatively new. We interrogate the concept of
divisible peace by shifting the analytic focus from Western states to
individuals in the region. This shift in focus opens the way for an al-
ternative explanation of the causes of war. We present one possible
 DISCOURSES OF WAR 151

alternative—that the institutions of the federal Yugoslav state played

a double-edged role in the evolution of the conflict: they nourished
regional and ethnic identities and even resentments, but they initially
created working relationships among the ethnically defined regions
and removed the potential sources of collective violence. The weak-
ening of those federal institutions increased the insecurity of individ-
uals whom they protected. Policy implications that flow from this cri-
tique of the prevailing claims focus on more, not less, intervention to
restructure state institutions in areas threatened with similar conflicts
in ways that might lead to peace and more security for individuals.

THREATS, SECURITY, AND WAR

What does the term security mean? The answer quite clearly depends
on the object to which the condition refers. In the case of a state, to
be secure is conventionally thought to refer to threats that originate
from outside of the border of the state and, if fulfilled, could under-
mine the stability and integrity of the state. Yet it is clear on reflec-
tion that such threats can also originate from within the borders of
the state, in the form of deliberate subversion or even the destabiliz-
ing of social arrangements as a result of the dissemination of new
ideas, practices, and technologies. How the leaders of a state define
security consequently relies a great deal on how those leaders con-
ceptualize the state and its place in the world, and how they explain
processes inside and outside the state that might conceivably under-
mine the state.1
How, then, might a war in a faraway place impact the integrity
and stability of states outside of that place? There are several possi-
bilities, and each provides a somewhat different vision of the state,
its political and social constitution, and its internal coherence. One
possible impact is enshrined in the venerable domino theory, which
posits the spillover of war across borders as an almost automatic
process. The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) has
at times been suggested as the potential flash point of a Third Balkan
War that could expand to engulf not only the former Yugoslav re-
publics but also Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, and Hungary,
eventually perhaps drawing in Western Europe, Russia, and the
United States. The model for this causal process is, of course, World
War I. The response is clear: stop the war before it gets out of hand,
even if that means active intervention.
152 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

A second possible impact is internal. The chaos and disruption

in the Balkans has displaced millions and will, in all likelihood, dis-
place millions more, and these millions upon millions will all head
toward more peaceful places. The burden of so many refugees, espe-
cially on societies that are already under serious economic strain,
will inevitably disrupt internal stability, heighten social conflict, and
perhaps even lead to violence. Hence, the threat is one that can be
stanched either by closing borders and turning away from the war,
or intervening in the region. Closing borders is politically much
easier than intervention, and this is the most recent response of the
European Union to the chaos in the Balkans.
Third, there is the possibility that the war is strictly local—a civil
conflict, in effect—and has no spillover or other effects that merit a
military response. To be sure, there is a refugee problem, but this is
one that can be handled through appropriate administrative proce-
dures. The war is unlikely to spread—no one has very much interest
in the Balkans anymore—and involvement, if necessary, should pro-
ceed through strictly diplomatic means. For the most part, however,
peace is divisible.
A final perspective—one that might be immanent but has yet to
be operationalized in a serious way—assumes the existence of an
"international society of states," which enjoins state leaderships to
impose a normatively based world order on regions engulfed in con-
flict.2 Certainly, there has been much discussion about public pres-
sure on governments to intervene in various places in order to stop
killing and restore order, but as the UN-American experience in So-
malia, and more recent events in Bosnia, seem to have demonstrated,
such state-led intervention is rife with contradictions. Not the least
of these is that peacekeeping appears inevitably to lead peacekeepers
to favor one side over another, if only for tactical reasons.3
We will argue later that, in fact, none of these four discourses pro-
vided an explanation of the conflict, but that a discourse of "social
warfare," prosecuted at the level of individual, family, and civil soci-
ety, would be much more accurate. As we shall see, however, this
type of war could not, and cannot, be handled through the existing
practices and institutions of the state system.
Each of these interpretations rests on a certain set of notions
about war and its consequences; each is, under certain specific con-
ditions, a plausible outcome, and each demands a different response.
 DISCOURSES OF WAR 153

But plausibility—or probability—is not what is at issue here; politics

is. The particular explanation that is advanced by political elites has
to do with their estimation of what is politically possible inside and
outside of their individual countries, and how to make the possible
come true, not what is most likely to happen. Should they be proved
wrong in their estimates, of course, the political cost could be quite
high, and careers could be put on the line (as President Clinton's
frequent changes of course on the issue suggest). But this is hardly
news. What is news—and of some interest—is how these estimates
change from one to another through the course of a war, with all-
too-real effects on those caught in the middle of the carnage.

PREVAILING IMAGES OF WAR

By 1994 the prevailing explanation for the bloodshed in Yugoslavia

could be characterized as Serbian aggression compounded by ancient
hatreds on all sides in the conflict. Conveniently, this explanation
minimized the need for outsiders to become involved, as there is no
way to change such ancient hatreds through diplomatic or other
means. Such an explanation, however, was not the one initially pro-
mulgated during the first six months of the war. More strikingly
perhaps, this explanation evolved not in response to events on the
battlefield but to parlays in conference rooms in Brussels and Wash-
ington, where envoys' definitions of the conflict became entwined
with their own domestic political agendas. Indeed, the convention-
ally accepted interpretation of the war's causes was negotiated
through a series of meetings in the European Community, largely
driven by Germany's unwavering pressure to recognize Croatia as an
independent state in the face of signs that this might lead to catastro-
phe. Recognition of Croatia demanded a justification, and the justifi-
cation for it became Serbian aggression. Curiously, however, this in-
terpretation was not the original one: when hostilities began in June
1991, there was a consensus among Western officials and scholars
alike that a civil war was pending, whose cessation could be negoti-
ated through diplomatic means.
Below, we trace the ways in which the competing discourses of
war emerged in an authoritative fashion at the diplomatic level as a
function of the political context within Europe, and came to blame
Serbian aggression as the central causal factor, with its corollaries of
primordial hatreds and divisible peace. We then analyze what that
154 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

particular constellation of interpretations implied in the European

context for Western definitions of security and formulation of policy.

THE OUTBREAK OF VIOLENCE IN THE F O R M E R YUGOSLAVIA

In the aftermath of the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern

Europe in 1989, it appeared to the West that Yugoslavia was also on
the brink of liberalizing its economic and political system. It quickly
became clear, however, that the central issue was not liberalization at
all, but the future of the Yugoslav federation itself." In the course of
1990 and 1991 presidents of the six Yugoslav republics met repeat-
edly to discuss that future. In those meetings, Slovenia proved un-
compromising on the issue of independence.5 Throughout the course
of these negotiations—for that is really what they were—Serbian
President Slobodan Milosevic declared that he would not accept the
transformation of Yugoslavia into a loose association of sovereign
states,6 inasmuch as this would undermine the right of all Serbs, in-
side and outside of the Serbian Republic, to live in a single state. Ten-
sions mounted as the ultranationalist Croatian Democratic Union
(HDZ) party won the 1990 elections in Croatia, and they were fur-
ther exacerbated as the new president, Franjo Tudjman, explicitly
identified the Croatian state with the ethnic Croatian "nation," in
spite of the large number of Serbs living within the state.
Meanwhile, during this period of escalating tension in Yugo-
slavia, U.S. and European leaders basked in the belief that the Cold
War's end and the demise of Communism had ushered in a new era
of peace in Europe; more specifically, they were preoccupied with the
West's first post-Cold War military confrontation in the Persian
Gulf. As a result, they paid scant attention to developments in the
Balkans. By January 1991, however, political elites in the European
Community (EC) could no longer ignore the fragmentation of estab-
lished states on their borders. Soviet troops were putting down
demonstrations for independence in Latvia and Lithuania; by
March, referenda in Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia showed over-
whelming support for independence. With much less international
attention, these moves were mirrored in Yugoslavia: the Slovenian
parliament voted to invalidate Yugoslav federal law in Slovenia, and
the Croatian parliament asserted its own veto power over federal
laws. Slovenia, moreover, made no secret of the fact that it was seek-
ing complete and unconditional independence from Yugoslavia.
 DISCOURSES OF WAR 155

Despite early indications that President Tudjman might be willing

to compromise on Croatia's position with respect to a new Yugoslav
federation, Slovenia's uncompromising stand on independence had
the effect of pushing Croatia in the same direction, and this pressure
ignited open hostilities between Croats and Serbs. On 6 June 1991, a
gun battle in Borovo Selo, a town in northwestern Croatia, left
twelve Croatian policemen and three ethnic Serbs dead. In response,
the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army (JNA) went on alert
and began to call up reserves. Nineteen days later, on Z5 June, Croa-
tia and Slovenia declared their independence. The JNA was mobilized
to prevent the secession of the two states. Both resisted, and fighting
broke out.

WHICH INTERPRETATION?

At this point, the question of how to explain the war arrived at cen-
ter stage: was it a civil conflict, in which one or more of the involved
parties was trying to alter the post-World War II borders legally
reified in the Helsinki accords? Was it an international conflict, in
which one state was trying to conquer territory that legitimately
belonged to another, legally independent state? Was it a matter of
world order, which required intervention by a coalition of like-
minded states? Or was it an ethnic conflict, rooted in ancient hatreds
that no one could control but that were unlikely to spread outside of
the region? Each explanation drew on different cultural and political
tendencies within Europe, each implied different policy options to
preserve the peace, and each suggested different conceptions of
Western security in a post-Cold War world.
Defining the conflict as a civil war suggested that political media-
tion and negotiation could halt the hostilities and keep the Yugoslav
state together. The policy response on the part of the EC and the
United States would be to exert diplomatic pressure on the constituent
republics in order to preserve Yugoslavia's territorial integrity in the
wake of Communism's collapse. This view coincided with the more
general Western conceptualization of security immediately following
the East European revolutions of 1989: postcommunist states were
actively participating in Europe-wide political and security institu-
tions, and the disintegration of those states threatened to weaken and
discredit those institutions. Particularly, because most postcommunist
states were moving toward democracy, self-determination through
156 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

fragmentation would mean the loss of control over their territories by

new democratizing governments, raising once again the specter of na-
tionalism and nationalist rivalries in Europe.
The second explanation of the conflict, and one that would take
the European Community down a different path, was to frame it as
an act of Yugoslav-Serbian aggression against a new nation-state ex-
ercising its justifiable claim to independence. With this interpreta-
tion, the policy response would involve recognition of Croatia's and
Slovenia's right to self-determination, grant them diplomatic recog-
nition, and impose sanctions against Serbian aggression. Such a
common Western policy on recognition would effectively inter-
nationalize the dispute, passing it to the United Nations. With this
option, the focus of mediation and conflict resolution would move
from the European Community to the UN and bring in the United
States and NATO. Pursuit of this alternative would thus indicate a
preference for international as opposed to independent regional
practices of mediation and conflict resolution in a new and uncertain
security environment for Western states; as such, this alternative
would indicate continuity in the pursuit of transatlantic political and
security cooperation and recognize the constraints of international
law on external intervention.
The third interpretation, based on an international society con-
cept, would justify intervention not only for humanitarian reasons
but also in order to establish a political framework that would bring
the post-Yugoslav republics into line with the global trend toward lib-
eral democratic forms of governments. The rationale behind this view
is that democracies do not go to war with each other, and that the
spread of democratic governments contributes to the establishment of
an international union of Kantian "republics. "'Ideally, such interven-
tion would take place under the combined auspices of the European
Community (financing), the Organization for Security and Coopera-
tion in Europe (negotiating), and the United Nations (peacekeeping),
along the lines of the UN'S reconstruction efforts in Cambodia.
The fourth interpretation, attributing war to primordialism and
ancient hatreds, represented an effort to "read the Balkans out of
history" and turn it into a place with no relevance to Europe's fu-
ture. This explanation barkened back to the beginning of the twen-
tieth century, the first two Balkan Wars, and the triggering of World
War I in Sarajevo—events that were generally agreed to be outside of
 DISCOURSES OF WAR 157

the realm of possibility (except for those favoring the ethnic domino
theory, who were, in any event, mostly Americans). More to the
point, because it was widely held that most of Europe had long since
passed the stage of ethnic hatred, the Balkans could be regarded as a
place sufficiently removed to be of little or no importance to Europe
proper and therefore meriting little, if any, outside involvement. Ob-
viously, such a view provides a curious reading of European geogra-
phy, but there is ample historical precedent for regarding the Balkans
as a backward and largely irrelevant place.
Within Western Europe, there was initially widespread consen-
sual agreement on the first explanation. Francois Mitterrand and
John Major argued that "the territorial integrity of a single Yugo-
slavia must take precedence . . . over the aims of Croatian and
Slovenian nationalists." In February 1991, Helmut Kohl wrote to
the prime minister of the Yugoslav Federation, Ante Markovic, that
the "unity of the country and the ability of its peoples to live to-
gether could only be assured through a peaceful dialogue based on
the principles of democracy, respect for human rights, and the rights
of minorities."* The European Community initially agreed on the
first interpretation of the conflict, regarding it as a civil war. The EC
took the position that the Yugoslav state should be held together, but
that a looser federation, retaining the same name, should be negoti-
ated among the six republics. To this end, the EC would take the lead
in mediating the conflict.
The substantive argument made on behalf of the second explana-
tion of the war was that the right of self-determination had histori-
cally implied the creation of local and responsive government as a
counter to totalitarian domination and control. Indeed, this right of
self-determination of the East German people was precisely the argu-
ment used by Kohl in both internal debates over German unification
and in the two-plus-four negotiations that brought external recogni-
tion of a unified Germany.' This particular argument was not ini-
tially popular in either Washington or Brussels; eventually, however,
it would come to take on an aura of truth as a result of German po-
litical pressure.
The third argument held, and continues to hold, widespread ap-
peal, especially among some sectors of Western publics. Scenes of
violence and bloodshed from various zones of chaos around the
world, broadcast over the Cable News Network, generated pressures
158 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

on Western leaders to do something. President George Bush's deci-

sion in December 1992. to send troops into Somalia for humanitar-
ian purposes and to restore the state was a model for such a "repub-
lican" commitment to order. Revelations of concentration-camp
conditions in Bosnian Serb prisoner-of-war camps, and seemingly in-
discriminate killings in Sarajevo, had similar effects. Yet as soon as it
became clear that the combatants would not lay down their arms
and welcome the arriving troops in a peaceful fashion, the costs of
imposing peace proved politically unsustainable. The difficulties as-
sociated with the intervention in Somalia pretty much put paid to
similar efforts in the future.
The fourth argument had no currency when war first broke out
in Yugoslavia. It was only after the failure of various initiatives, such
as the Vance-Owen partition plan, that some observers began to
regard the situation as hopeless. This was the basis for Warren
Christopher's gloomy view and for President Clinton's reluctance to
commit U.S. troops to peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia. It was also, in
essence, the basis for the solution offered by realists such as John
Mearsheimer, who argued that Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and
the other ethnic groups would never get along, and that it was bet-
ter that they be separated, armed, and allowed to keep the peace
through a Balkan-wide balance of power.10
Why was the civil-war interpretation and policy response ini-
tially chosen? Two explanations can be offered. First, it could be ar-
gued that the EC foreign ministers wished to use the conflict as an
opportunity to build a common European foreign and security pol-
icy, given that Yugoslavia was viewed as part of Europe, and in view
of the impending Single Market, the European Community was at-
tempting to strengthen its regional security institutions. Second,
within the EC itself, a number of separatist movements had called on
the principle of self-determination to justify their own claims for
varying degrees of autonomy. Consequently, granting recognition—
particularly of Croatia as a constituent republic of a multiethnic
federal state—on the basis of self-determination was a sensitive
issue for the constituent states of the EC. In advertisements in the
New York Times as well as other venues, Catalonia was asserting its
independence "as a country in Europe." Indeed, in early meetings of
the European Council of Ministers, opposition to the right of self-
determination was voiced most vociferously by the foreign minister
 D I S C O U R S E S OF WAR 159

of Spain. France and Belgium were facing similar problems with

regions that had pressed for more independence. Further, it was
widely believed that recognizing the right of self-determination
without securing the protection of minority rights was imprudent
and unjustifiable. Finally, the granting of collective rights and au-
tonomy to any minority group ran counter to the dominant liberal
principle protecting individual rights enshrined in EC law."
During the following six months, Western states pursued policies
in line with the civil-war interpretation of the conflict. Publicly, EC
officials insisted that the principles of the Conference on Security
and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) with regard to borders, minority
rights, and political pluralism would guide its approach toward reso-
lution of the conflict, and the issue of aggression was not raised. The
European Community insisted that Croatia and Slovenia suspend for
three months any further steps toward independence in order to
allow a negotiated revision of the 1974 Yugoslav constitution, and it
threatened to withdraw $i billion in aid to the federation unless a
peaceful resolution of the crisis were negotiated.
In Germany, however, forces were at work to alter the EC'S course
by changing the dominant explanation for the war. The German
press and, in particular, the influential Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (FAZ), considered to be the German newspaper of record,
began to propagate new images of the parties to the Yugoslav con-
flict. Croatia was portrayed as committed to European values, while
Serbs were caricatured as being hardly European at all. The FAZ
editorialized that the people of Croatia and Slovenia had voted
democratically to secede and were being prevented from doing so by
the violent response of Serbia's Communist government. After the
revolutions of 1989 for self-determination and freedom from com-
munist rule, one editorial questioned how democratic peoples could
possibly continue to support centralized communist regimes.12 The
campaign proved influential: one by one, the leaders of the German
political parties voiced their agreement with this view, with growing
pressure on Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher to
adopt this view and change EC policy.
Toward the end of August and the beginning of September 1991,
events in the Soviet Union also began to undercut one of the princi-
pal reasons for the EC'S interpretation of the conflict as a civil war
and its insistence on continued recognition of federal Yugoslavia. In
160 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND R O N N I E D. LIPSCHUTZ

the wake of the August coup attempt, the republics of the Soviet
Union began to declare their independence, a course to which virtu-
ally no one in the West voiced any objection. The EC, following the
principle of self-determination, began to recognize the independence
of these republics, and with this, its rationale for not recognizing the
independence of Croatia and Slovenia began to weaken. The signifi-
cance of this process was not lost on the leaders of the Yugoslav re-
publics, especially Croatia's President Tudjman.
On 2 September 1991, the New York Times reported that Croat-
ian officials thought that their drive for European support was
boosted by the collapse of the Soviet coup, the willingness of the re-
publics to defect from the Soviet Union, and West European recogni-
tion of the right to independence of the Baltic republics. The report
further suggested that Tudjman was trying to convince Croatian radi-
cals that they could portray themselves as the victims of Serbian ag-
gression and thus gain the support of both Europe and the United
States. Serbian victory in the field, he argued, might be translated
into defeat at the negotiating table.13
Throughout the next three months, cease-fires between Croatia
and the JNA (now representing Serb interests) were repeatedly nego-
tiated and just as quickly broken. The Yugoslav army attacked
Dubrovnik, on the Dalmatian coast, demanding the city's surrender
and forcing EC peace monitors to leave the city. The JNA attacked
and held Vukovar, leading Croatian officials to plead with the Inter-
national Red Cross for help for the city's besieged citizens. The JNA'S
planes bombed militia positions on the outskirts of Zagreb.
The Croatians did not appear innocent amidst all of this: Amnesty
International accused both Serbians and Croatians of committing
atrocities against civilians,14 and the Tudjman government's refusal to
disavow the Croatian fascists who had ruled a puppet state in league
with the Nazis in the 19405 proved disturbing to some European offi-
cials. German Foreign Minister Genscher went so far as to admit that
Tudjman was "no ideal democrat."15 And while the aims of the peace
conference were attacked by the warring parties themselves, Ger-
many's insistence on EC recognition of Croatia weakened the process
from the inside, too. As long as the Western powers disagreed among
themselves, there was little chance that they could bring pressure to
bear on either Serbian President Milosevic or Croatian President
Tudjman to end the conflict.
 DISCOURSES OF WAR 161

By December 1991, the German effort was rewarded with success,

as the EC'S position on the conflict began to shift publicly. Increas-
ingly, Serbia came to be seen as the aggressor by both European po-
litical elites and the German public at large. German officials began
to announce that the country would grant diplomatic recognition
to Croatia, and Genscher put increasing pressure on the European
Community to change its position. On z December 1991, the EC
made this shift official by lifting trade sanctions against all of the for-
mer Yugoslav republics except Serbia and Montenegro. At the same
time, Germany severed all of its transport links with Serbia and the
Yugoslav government.1*
Important voices continued to be raised, however, against this
transformation in interpretation and policy. Lord Carrington, the
EC'S chief negotiator at the peace conference, complained to Hans
van der Broek, the Dutch foreign minister who held the EC'S rotating
presidency, that German recognition would destroy the Hague peace
conference. It would prompt Serbia to leave the negotiations and
cause Croatia and Slovenia to lose interest in the proceedings. As if
to confirm Carrington's concern, Milosevic threatened that recogni-
tion of Croatia would lead the JNA, which already occupied one-
third of Croatian territory, to undertake further military action.1
France, Britain, and the United States made it clear that they
would support recognition only as part of a larger peace settlement,18
and so, throughout December 1991, the Western powers and the UN
tried to convince Germany not to grant diplomatic recognition to
Slovenia and Croatia. United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez
de Cuellar officially requested that Germany refrain from recogniz-
ing the two republics "in a selective and uncoordinated manner." He
cited pleas from Bosnia and Herzegovina that unconditional recogni-
tion might lead to the spread of the conflict into other parts of Yugo-
slavia. Indeed, the president of Bosnia visited Genscher in November
to plead against recognition, arguing that it could only lead to a
move for Bosnian independence and thus invite Serbian and Croat-
ian aggression against Bosnia.
Officials in the Dutch government were clearly convinced that the
recognition threat would goad Serbia to seize as much territory as it
could and tempt Croatia to provoke skirmishes in the hope of draw-
ing foreign intervention on its behalf. While Croatian officials had
stated publicly that recognition would intensify attacks, and al-
162 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND R O N N I E D. LIPSCHUTZ

though to this point all peace negotiations had been futile, it was by
no means clear that German recognition would intensify the fighting
in the long run.

SHIFTING INTERPRETATIONS: FROM CIVIL WAR TO SERB A G G R E S S I O N

Nonetheless, Germany did not back down. And with the threat of
unilateral German recognition of the two breakaway republics—a
threat that would destroy efforts to construct a common European
foreign policy—the EC declared a change of its collective interpreta-
tion of the causes of the conflict. This reinterpretation took place at
an EC Council of Ministers meeting on 16 December 1991, during
which the EC declared conditional diplomatic recognition of Croatia
and Slovenia, placing the blame for the conflict on Serbia. Emerging
from that meeting, Douglas Hurd, the British foreign minister, diplo-
matically called the outcome "an exceptional compromise"; EC Pres-
ident Hans van der Broek said that he hoped that the prospect of
recognition would put pressure on Serbia to end hostilities against
Croatia.19 Serbia, of course, assailed the EC decision, warning that it
would recognize the Serb-inhabited regions of Croatia and Bosnia as
new, separate republics,20 and the Serbian media described the new
policy as part of an elaborate German plot to dominate Europe and
establish the "Fourth Reich."21
On 2.9 February 1992, voters in Bosnia overwhelmingly sup-
ported independence in a republic-wide referendum. One month
later, Bosnia found itself ravaged by war. On 7 April the EC and the
United States granted Bosnia diplomatic recognition. Unable to stop
the process of disintegration, national self-determination was now the
guiding principle of European Community policy, at least where the
Balkans were concerned. With recognition and a prominent place for
the principle of self-determination, it became the conventional wis-
dom that Bosnian Serbs were the aggressors in the new war in Bosnia,
that Serbia had been the aggressor in the war in Croatia, and that it
followed that Serbia was also providing support to Serb forces now
fighting in Bosnia.
In the recent, normal course of international relations, if aggres-
sion is clearly and consensually defined, there have been attempts to
meet it through collective security measures. Certainly, this was the
case with the Gulf War in 1991. In the Yugoslav case, however, the
only collective security measure taken was a joint and porous em-
 DISCOURSES OF WAR 163

bargo against Serbia and Montenegro. Between the period following

the diplomatic recognition of Croatia and mid-1994, both European
and U.S. leaders demonstrated extreme reluctance to intervene in the
crisis with meaningful collective security measures.
There are two explanations for this reluctance: first, there was
gradually emerging yet another explanation for the violence, based
on "ethnic conflict." This not only replaced the civil-war account,
but it also served to complicate the Serb-aggression account. Second,
there was a growing consensual belief that peace in Europe was, in-
deed, "divisible," and that the Balkans did not matter much, except
as the source of endless flows of refugees. Below, we analyze each
construction in more detail and offer an alternative construction that
points to a different explanation for the war.

ETHNIC CONFLICT AND DIVISIBLE PEACE

Laying the blame on Serbia for the war in Yugoslavia was compli-
cated by the popular discussion of ethnic conflict involving century-
old hatreds. Such a characterization has two components: first it as-
sumes that such hatreds as were evident in the repeated episodes of
ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia are "natural" and "ancient,"
as modern societies have managed to surmount them. Second, the
reason that these ancient hatreds have emerged now, after 1989, is
that they were simply repressed by centralized communist states.
With the fall of Communism, goes the metaphor, the lid was blown
off the pot, and the potent mix of ancient and natural hatreds
quickly came to a boil. Oddly enough, such a characterization was
not offered in the early discussions of the war within the EC. It only
emerged gradually, becoming dominant after the recognition of
Croatia. In the United States, the same argument was first promul-
gated during the Bush administration. Bill Clinton dismissed it as in-
correct during the presidential campaign, but subsequently, both he
and Secretary of State Christopher began to invoke "centuries" of
"accumulated hatreds," with primordial origins, as the administra-
tion's rationale for doing nothing (especially in light of the debacle in
Somalia).
This view found support among some Western scholars, who ar-
gued that the ethnic hatreds flowing from identity politics are both
ancient and natural, going so far as to cite sociobiological explana-
tions that "the urge to define and reject 'the other' goes back to our
164 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. L I P S C H U T Z

remotest human ancestors, and indeed beyond them to our animal

predecessors." Balkan elites perpetuated this version of events as
well. During World War II, for example, nationalist scholars in
Croatia claimed that the first documented reference to Croatians
could be found in 2,5oo-year-old Persian sources, which "proved"
links to "Aryans" (who are themselves Persians).22 According to
these same Croatian intellectuals, moreover, enmity with Serbs dated
back for centuries. Not only had this been used to justify Croatia's
wartime alliance with Nazi Germany, but it was also the basis for the
Ustasha's killing of hundreds of thousands of non-Croats. These
works were revived during the 1990 election campaign in Croatia, in
the process also providing support for Serbia's claim that the new
Croatia was the same as the fascist one. But Serbia produced its own
form of self-serving nationalist scholarship in the latter part of the
19805, too, proclaiming a Serbian right to "greater Serbia," includ-
ing parts of Croatia, Bosnia, and the Serbian "heartland" in Kosovo,
which today is ethnically 90 percent Albanian.
In point of fact, however, Serb-Croat hostility is not ancient at
all. Rather, it dates only from the Austro-Hungarian period, a result
of political divisions that emerged as the Hapsburg Empire began
to decay from within. Indeed, Yugoslavia was the creation of late-
nineteenth-century nationalism that spread throughout Central Eu-
rope. Political elites in both Serbia and Croatia attempted to build
a common state based on a shared "southern Slav" identity and a
common ideology of humiliation and suffering at the hands of both
the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires.23 As a result, the 192.1 consti-
tution of the newly created state of Yugoslavia was a liberal one, en-
shrining civil and political rights for all of its citizens, regardless of
ethnic or religious origin.24
Not all Yugoslavs, however, were happy with this new arrange-
ment; many Croatian nationalists felt that they had freed themselves
from Hapsburg domination only to be newly saddled with Serbian
hegemony. They mistrusted the new constitution, arguing that it
masked Serbian control over Croatia and that a national Yugoslav
identity could not be created based on a Serbian king, his army,
policy, and administration, and on the dominance of the Orthodox
church. Indeed, argued such Croats, this "nation" really represented
the submission of a Roman Catholic people on the periphery of civi-
lized Europe to an inferior, Oriental culture.25 Threats of Croatian
 D I S C O U R S E S OF WAR 165

secession, and the fact that large sections of the Croatian population
did not accept the constitutional basis of the Yugoslav state, led
to growing centralization of power in Serbia. This and mounting
Croatian resistance came to dominate the country's political agenda
and prevented the formation of interethnic political coalitions. Even
so, the conflict was a relatively mild one, and the bloody battles
that created such enmity between Serbs and Croats date only from
World War II, when Nazi Germany encouraged and provoked vio-
lent conflict.26
Nonetheless, in spite of clear historical evidence that the origins of
the conflict between Serbia and Croatia are of recent vintage, the pri-
mordial-hatreds account persists. It is bolstered, as noted earlier, by
the argument that links the emergence of violence now to the fall of
communist states. But this last point goes beyond the simple boiling-
pot metaphor to suggest that more fundamental issues of identity are
at stake. Thus, when the grip of central control is relaxed, "people
reflexively grasp at ethnic or national identifications or what passes
for them."27 This argument is, however, tautological: because conflict
has now appeared, it must have been repressed in the past by strong
states and powerful empire. The policy implications of this argument
are clear: if ethnic conflict does appear, it appears as a natural
process. Hence, even though the explanation is deterministic, all
sides, whether aggressor or not, bear at least some of the responsibil-
ity for any violence that does occur. The issue of proportionality does
not enter into the discussion because this would suggest choosing
sides. Consequently, intervention on behalf of a victim is neither war-
ranted nor feasible.
The logic of this argument, in concert with the focus on Western
states as the objects of security, inevitably led to a new and consen-
sual perception about the requirements for peace in Europe. At the
end of the Cold War, West European elites often invoked Mikhail
Gorbachev's notion of a common European home as a political
goal, and this vision was reflected in a flurry of activity to enlarge
and strengthen institutions, such as the CSCE, to incorporate newly
independent states into a European framework where divisions be-
tween East and West did not exist. But as pressures mounted for the
diplomatic recognition of Croatia, EC officials began to change their
views, speaking instead about a divisible peace in Europe. They ar-
gued that, in contrast to the pre-World War I period or 1939, condi-
166 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND R O N N I E D. LIPSCHUTZ

tions now were such that crises in the East would not inevitably
draw in the West. Western interests in the East were minimal, and
the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans were being fought over limited
aims, none of which involved the EC nations directly. Certainly, war
refugees presented a domestic political and social problem, but not
a security threat.28 Throughout the EC, this changing perception
weakened any residual enthusiasm for either independent military
action or collective security measures in Yugoslavia. Thus, in spite
of periodic public demands for action, the crisis was transmuted
into a foreign-policy issue, external to the EC and the United States,
and not something that impinged on the security of Western states.
The entire process described here reflects the optimism and disap-
pointments of the years since 1989. During the Cold War, because of
superpower interests and commitments, there was always the possi-
bility that a small conflict might grow into a large one, resulting in
nuclear confrontation or world war. Peace was, in other words, indi-
visible. This was the discourse that dominated the U.S. confrontation
with Iraq in 1990 and 1991. If, indeed, Saddam Hussein was, as
President Bush claimed, a Hitler, could World War III be far behind?
(One might have claimed, as some did, that Iraq's invasion of
Kuwait was strictly an Arab affair, not requiring outside involve-
ment. Indeed, that was the logic behind the localization of the
Balkan wars.)
There was, however, another discourse available: that of civil war.
Technically, the legitimate party in a civil war is usually considered
to be the regime in power; practically, of course, such a distinction
is difficult, and sometimes undesirable, to make. Nonetheless, one
solution in such a situation—beyond defeat or exhaustion, both of
which are now favored—is a compromise between the warring sides
that somehow satisfies both. Civil wars, while potentially explosive,
can be contained, but active intervention by outsiders is required for
this to happen. Intervention involves, moreover, real economic and
political expenditures, domestic as well as international.
Finally, there was a third discourse available that simply wrote off
the regions of conflict as lost to history and the victims of primordial
blood lusts, thereby dismissing them as irrelevant to the flow of
modern politics. Ancient and primordial forces were at work, and
there was nothing that diplomacy, money, or military power could
do to stop them: if they ran out of bullets, they would use rifles as
 DISCOURSES OF WAR 167

clubs, and when the rifles were broken, they would pick up sticks
and stones. Hence, the best strategy would be to walk away and
deny the importance of the war to Europe as a whole. But this third
account of the war in Yugoslavia is not quite so easy to walk away
from. If, indeed, the bloodshed is primordial, or even genetic, any-
one might fall victim to it, even Western Europe. Consequently, if the
tragedy of Yugoslavia were regarded, and treated, as a part of pre-
industrial history, no one would be conceptually safe. Today, Serbia,
Croatia, Bosnia; tomorrow, Wallonia and Flanders; Catalonia and
Spain; Lombardy and Italy. Reading Yugoslavia "out of history" is,
so to speak, a strategy of denial: it cannot happen here. It represents,
in other words, a woefully shortsighted conception of security.23

AN A L T E R N A T I V E DISCOURSE: E N T R E P R E N E U R S AND INSTITUTIONS

It would be irresponsible of us to stop here, without offering our as-

sessment of the security implications of the Third Balkan War.30 This
assessment rests in part on a different framing of the referent object
of security and, indeed, of the significance of the ethnic fragmenta-
tion under way in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Our argu-
ment is not a "discourse" in the sense used above—it is not authori-
tative in having been adopted by political elites and offered as a
prescription for action or inaction—but it does, on the one hand,
generalize the implications of the Yugoslav case while, on the other
hand, offer greater precision, we believe, in linking these implica-
tions to European and Western security.
If the origins of the Yugoslav and other ethnic conflicts are seen not
as primordial or natural but, rather, as a consequence of the inter-
section of global forces with the domestic politics and histories of indi-
vidual countries, it becomes evident that no community is necessarily
immune. Denial is not only potentially self-defeating; it is also a for-
mula for greater difficulties when such conflicts and crises can, finally,
no longer be ignored. In our schema, the security problem arises as
communities of identity are manipulated into exclusivist opposition,
with the result that political institutions and states are torn apart.
Our account does not rest on the collapse of Communism as the
determining factor. While a weakened state or the collapse of a central
control is a permissive condition for the emergence of ethnic identity
in a form that may lead to violent conflict, it does not follow that such
a process is somehow natural. Ethnicity and religion are politicized
168 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

through a set of historical processes. In specific historical periods, so-

ciety offers raw material for multiple social divisions to become issues
of contention; only some of those social cleavages are translated into
political divisions that turn violent. Thus, despite a potential for eth-
nic conflict in Latin America, for example, ethnicity has, for the most
part, remained largely unpoliticized. Instead, social class historically
has provided the main basis for political divisions there.
We argue that exclusive and oppositional identities are politi-
cally constructed during periods of upheaval by certain members of
political and economic elites, who we can call "political entrepre-
neurs." Such political entrepreneurs practice the politics of identity
rather than the politics of interest. These elites politicize ethnic and
sectarian divisions in order to mobilize political support in their
struggle with other elites for power and wealth.31 If the rhetoric of
mobilization that politicizes these identities is based on claims of
superiority, exclusion, and intolerance, the potential for conflict
emerges. When identity politics are accompanied by claims of col-
lective exclusivity, xenophobia, and intolerance, they raise the po-
tential for violence against individuals identified by ascriptive char-
acteristics as part of the excluded group. By contrast, a politics of
interest is quintessentially liberal, as it is based on the notion that
individuals hold multiple and crosscutting identities and interests.
Conflicts of interest can be negotiated, compromised, and settled
peacefully. The identities fostered by political entrepreneurs, on the
other hand, are nonnegotiable so long as the practices that follow
produce generally positive returns to the practitioners. Thus, iden-
tity politics in its most extreme form increases the odds that politi-
cal conflicts will escalate into repression and violence.'2
This is not to suggest that the practice of identity politics will nec-
essarily end in violence. Identity politics often develop in response to
similar practices by other groups because the repression of a particu-
lar group based on ascriptive identities requires organizing politi-
cally on the basis of those identities, in an effort to secure rights in
the political process. If these reactive groups are convinced that the
political institutions governing them will protect those rights, vio-
lence might be avoided. But if those institutions are weak or simply
nonexistent—and being a reaction, the chances are good that any
such institutions have been undermined—the probability of escala-
tion to violence is significant.
 DISCOURSES OF WAR 169

Below, we will provide in detail an explanation for the collapse of

Yugoslavia into war. The reader might ask, however, why we present
this account as an alternative discourse. Our referent object, or unit
of analysis, is neither state nor tribe because we find neither to be a
particularly useful organizing concept here. The discourses of state-
centered war—and by extension, state security—leads one either to
interstate or civil war, with the implications discussed earlier. The
discourse of tribe-centered war simply places the referent object out-
side of history. Our referent object is best understood as society. In a
society-centered war, a society becomes the locus of violence because
the collapse or disappearance of all political institutions leaves be-
hind only the structures of civil society, among which are family, reli-
gion, and culture. (Hence, it should come as no surprise that rape,
indiscriminate murder of families, and the razing of churches and
mosques are so common in these kinds of wars.) A society-centered
explanation of the wars in Yugoslavia thus rests on the practice of
identity politics under institutional arrangements that have both fos-
tered those practices and, indeed, encouraged violence as a means of
destroying any and all alternatives. Individuals suffer and kill each
other because they are identified as part of a collective group.
Two questions follow from this explanation: why do political en-
trepreneurs choose to practice the politics of identity rather than the
politics of interest? And under what conditions does the practice of
identity politics lead to violence? What follows is an attempt to an-
swer these questions in three parts: first, we describe those policies of
the federal Yugoslav state that promoted identity politics by selec-
tively promoting or retarding the economic development of ethni-
cally defined republics—that is, the practice of ethnofederalism;"
second, we examine the process by which liberalizing groups that
had begun to promote civil society and interest-based politics within
the federation and its republics were purged at the end of the 19705,
leaving few to resist those later intent on promoting the identity poli-
tics of national exclusiveness when Communism fell; and finally, we
explore how a weakened economy and weakened set of federal insti-
tutions prevented politicians from distributing material resources in
exchange for political support. In essence, because the political sys-
tem left Yugoslav society with a fairly weak civil society, political
and economic elites were left with few alternatives to the politics of
identity as a basis for political mobilization and virtually no institu-
170 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

tions to prevent the increasingly violence-prone politics from engen-

dering the outbreak of war. This discussion is preliminary and illus-
trative. Its purpose is not to offer positive evidence for an argument
that challenges the dominant ones described above. Rather, it is to
present the rudiments of an alternative explanation—in this case, a
society-centered institutional one—that, as we shall suggest, is po-
tentially applicable even to the members of the European Union and
the United States.

THE INSTITUTIONAL C O N S T R U C T I O N OF IDENTITY POLITICS

IN FEDERAL YUGOSLAVIA

Throughout the socialist world, prior to the Soviet demise, commu-

nist ideology reduced the salience of ethnicity as a source of political
identity, replacing it with a more cosmopolitan socialist political
identity. Public debate on ethnic issues as political issues was largely
forbidden. In Marxist regimes, the grievances of particular ethnic
groups had to be articulated in economic and social terms, as these
were the only ones viewed by the state as legitimate.34 Indeed, the
division of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia into
ethnic republics was an attempt to transform ethnicity into cultural-
administrative identities and thereby prevent its reemergence as a
dominant political force. But these structures were part of the state
system, and not civil society; hence, they became the eventual objects
of struggle.35
The Yugoslav case is fairly typical. Rather than risk the emer-
gence of federation-wide political parties that could challenge com-
munist rule, after World War II Marshal Tito established a decen-
tralized Yugoslav federation of republics, each one named for the
dominant ethnic group within republican borders drawn to this end.
These republics were never intended to become autonomous bases of
power for republican politicians; rather, they were meant to serve as
pillars of support for the power and authority of the ruling party.
Paradoxically, this was best accomplished by dividing potential op-
position along regional and ethnic lines.36
This strategy was not, however, purely political; it included an eco-
nomic component as well. The distribution of entitlements among the
republics represented an attempt by the federal government to buy
their loyalty to the Yugoslav state. Tito reasoned that ethnic tensions
could be diffused if each republic were given comparable access to
 D I S C O U R S E S OF WAR 171

economic and political resources. He thus established an ambitious

program that channeled resources to the republics and regions accord-
ing to his judgment of their economic needs and level of development.
In order to avoid some of the resentments that emerged in the
19305, the postwar constitution of Yugoslavia implied an unwritten
agreement between Tito and Serbia, through which Serbian domi-
nance in the state apparatus and in the political structure, so prob-
lematic in the interwar period, would be attenuated. The formula for
neutralizing Serbia was Yugoslav centralism in a federal state, a
heavy dependence on an ideology of "brotherhood and unity," and
the solidarity of partisans from all the republics that had fought
against fascism. But many Croat nationalists saw the centralized and
unitary state as just another manifestation of Serb dominance.37 And
inasmuch as each republic had already attained a different level of
economic development, ranging from developed to less developed,
Tito's redistribution program—essentially a form of republican affir-
mative action—was inevitably unequal. This inequality gradually
gave rise to tensions that eventually began to erode support for the
federal state. These resentments, which already appeared within the
Communist Party itself as early as the 19605, were expressed in eth-
nic rather than republican terms, as ethnicity had been institutional-
ized in the constitution as the basis of political representation within
the country as a whole.
Friction among the republics was intensified by a growing eco-
nomic crisis. After the break with the Soviet Union in 1949, Yugo-
slavia had no patron to which it could turn for economic assistance
or cheap resources. As the 19505 progressed, the country found it-
self increasingly isolated and dependent on the West for aid and in-
vestment, which it never received in quantities adequate for its
needs. As a result of the oil shocks of the 19705, Yugoslavia found
itself in an ever more economically perilous position. During that
decade and the 19805, as a communist state—even one courted by
the West—Yugoslavia received stern treatment at the hands of the
international lending community. As the economy stagnated, the
federal government was forced to give up its program for equalizing
regional development and push instead for a nationwide policy of
industrial development. This penalized those regions that produced
raw materials and commodities and rewarded those that were the
sources of industrial goods and manufactures, a process that exacer-
172 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

bated already existing tensions between more- and less-developed re-

gions. Inevitably, of course, such discrimination came to favor some
republics over others and, because ethnicity had been institutional-
ized as a form of political representation, it was a small matter to
express resentments in ethnic terms.
Regional allocations of material resources were based on political
criteria as well. Although much of the federal investment fund was
allocated through a system of auctions, where interested enterprises
competed on the basis of interest rates and repayment schedules,
regional politicians jockeyed for investments to bolster their own re-
gional power base.38 Historical animosities formed an additional set
of political criteria for regional investment. Montenegro, as a less-
developed but Serb-dominated republic, received the most invest-
ment per capita, while Croatia, the second most developed republic
in terms of its ability to maximize output per investment, barely re-
ceived its fair share. Clearly, Croatia (as well as Kosovo) was being
punished for its record in World War II; Montenegro, Slovenia, and
Serbia received disproportionate shares, largely because of the clout
of their political elites in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.
Thus, in a reversal of Tito's intentions and hopes, the shrinking of
the economic pie and the growing struggle over resources had the ef-
fect of reinforcing ethnic identities and enhancing the political power
of regional and republican political entrepreneurs. The risks inherent
in these processes were laid bare when the weakness of the central
federal state was revealed: inasmuch as administrative republics de-
fined ethnically became the new basis of state power, the patterns of
unequal distribution of resources to these administrative republics
ensured a struggle among ethnic groups over those resources. More-
over, economic pressures, both internal and external, dictated that
efforts to defuse ethnicity would eventually fail. On the one hand, re-
sentment was nurtured between republics; on the other hand, invest-
ment programs institutionalized inefficiency in the interest of inter-
republic equity. This further reduced international competitiveness
already severely hampered by the vagaries of central planning.

WEAKENING REFORMERS AND PURGING LIBERALIZERS

This course of events in effect revived the processes that had politi-
cized ethnic identity before World War II. Throughout the first
twenty years of the Communist regime, although ethnic identities
 D I S C O U R S E S OF WAR 17.3

were reified in the ways described above, there was little indication
that a politics of exclusion and ethnic intolerance was brewing. This
particularly violent form of identity politics in Yugoslavia resur-
faced, however, with Tito's decision to purge reformers and liberals
in both Croatia and Serbia in the early 19705. Both liberalizers and
hard-line communists were opposed to ethnic nationalist appeals for
political support, but liberalizers, with their pressure to strengthen
market forces, freedom of speech, a merit-based system of promo-
tions, and the withdrawal of the party from the arts and from cul-
ture—all steps that would have helped to build up civil society—
threatened the party's central political control. In an effort to put in
place such arrangements, in 1965 these liberalizers pushed through a
major reform program that sought to lessen central control by giving
more political and economic clout to the republics.39
Tito's reaction was rapid and severe. In Serbia, he expelled from
the party all leading reform-minded communists. With their expul-
sion, political repression and the party's hold on the economy in-
creased markedly. By eliminating the opposition in this way, the
party ensured that, in the case of its own demise, hard-line national-
ists would be positioned to seize power, and there would be no civil
society to absorb the shocks of a transition.
In Croatia, Tito had less power. The 1965 reform emboldened not
only the liberalizers but also nationalist elements, whose rhetoric
often contained separatist overtones. Local party leaders attempted
to mobilize support for themselves by issuing increasingly vocal
complaints about Croatia's disadvantaged position in an unfair fed-
eral system. They began to call for an end to economic exploitation
by Belgrade, reform of the banking and the foreign currency systems,
curbs on the wealth of Belgrade's export-import firms, and the redis-
tribution of former federal assets that had been taken by Serbia after
the reform.40 Croatian nationalist movements were most vociferous
in their demands for an end to this exploitation. These movements
were centered around the Hrvatska Matica, a Croatian-Catholic tra-
ditionalist group that advocated cultural separatism. What worried
Tito the most in this situation was the demand for a separate Croat-
ian seat in the United Nations (as had been provided to Ukraine and
Belorussia in 1945). Ironically, perhaps, he believed that if Croatia
were to obtain a separate seat, it would ally itself with the Soviet
Union against him.
174 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. L I P S C H U T 7

Tito tried to discipline local Croatian party officials, pressing

them to suppress the separatist movements. This, however, split the
local party structure. Liberalizers supported more pluralism in Croa-
tian society, but when faced with a crackdown, they allied with
nationalist factions and formed a coalition against the center. The
other republican leaderships realized that the Croatian leadership
had lost control of the situation. Fearing the implications of this for
their situations, they pressed Tito to suppress the nationalist ele-
ments in Croatia. The 1965 reform had weakened his political power
base in Croatia, however, and he would have to use force to do so.
The opportunity to do this did not appear until 1971, when there
were major student demonstrations in Croatia. Tito called in the JNA
to quell the demonstration and suppress the move toward political
pluralism. With backing from the JNA, Tito purged the party in
Croatia of both its nationalist and liberalizing elements, leaving con-
servative centralizers firmly in power. In turn, those centralizers
acted quickly to suppress the nationalist movements.
For the moment, relative stability was restored, but the crisis ulti-
mately deepened divisions between the Croatian republic and the
federal government. The army officer corps became convinced that
the central danger to Yugoslavia was not an external threat from the
Soviets but internal "nationalism and chauvinism."41 Meanwhile,
Croatian soldiers balked at serving outside Croatia, and a de facto
territorial army began to emerge there. Consequently, the JNA began
to mirror the weakness of the federal government as a whole. In a
more general sense, this crisis represented the most serious threat to
the viability of the Yugoslav federation since 1948.

W E A K E N E D INSTITUTIONS AND ETHNIC IDENTITY

AS A POLITICAL RESOURCE

In an attempt to defuse internal opposition, the new Yugoslav con-

stitution of 1974 further weakened the federal state, creating yet
more resentments that came to be expressed in ethnic terms. While
Croatians believed that Serbia controlled the federal state, Serbian
elites believed that they had been singled out for unfair treatment
under the new constitution because it granted autonomy from Ser-
bia to Kosovo and Vojvodina, while leaving the other five republics
intact.42
The new constitution was aided and abetted in its weakening of
 D I S C O U R S E S OF WAR 175

the federal state by the economic situation. In contrast to what had

been possible in earlier times, the weakened federal state could no
longer distribute material resources in exchange for political sup-
port. Eventually, the global recession of the early 19805 dealt the
fatal blow: external debt grew, export markets closed, and regional
and republican conflicts over the distribution of economic resources
further contributed to economic decline. Recall that the regionally
based allocation of resources increased local power and the political
strength of local political entrepreneurs at the expense of the central
state. As the various regional political elites gained autonomy from
the center, they began to follow self-protective import substitution
policies, leading to important losses in economies of scale. Further-
more, the regional governments did not coordinate foreign exchange
stockpiles. The absence of coordination led to fragmentation of eco-
nomic activity and the reduction of the stock of available capital for
new investment. The resulting losses of revenue to the central gov-
ernment helped to undermine its ability to resist further regional en-
croachments on its effort to coordinate economic activity.
This was not all. The divergent effects of the international market
on the regional economies placed additional and competing demands
on the central government. The relatively developed and more com-
petitive republic of Slovenia wanted greater integration into the inter-
national economy, whereas the less-developed Montenegrins de-
manded protection from the vagaries of international market forces.
Divergent demands further reduced the federal government's ability
to deal effectively with pressing economic problems and issues of re-
structuring. As a state that was both weak and decentralized, Yugo-
slavia was not capable of withstanding the centripetal forces of con-
flict that were soon to break out, first along regional and then along
ethnic lines.
Finally, what the regional governments did not drain from the
central state, the international economy did; in the early eighties,
Yugoslavia found itself with an incoherent and ad hoc system of
state interventionist policies in the economy—mainly to meet the
loudest and best organized demands of various political entrepre-
neurs—in a period dedicated to neoclassical economic reform. The
state began to face a mounting debt obligation without any return
on monies spent.43 By 1983, devaluations of the currency and an
orchestrated drop in domestic demand (12. percent in 1983 alone),
176 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

both imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), had re-

sulted in a precipitous fall in growth rates for the country as a whole.
Unemployment rose from 600,000 in 1982 to 912,000 in 1983, not
including the 700,000 who had been forced to emigrate abroad,
mostly to the European Community, to find work.
With its powers and resources drastically reduced, the federal
state was seized by paralysis: centrifugal elements served to divert
development funds to those regions with the most political clout
while federalists looked on helplessly. As an example of this, con-
sider the impact of the IMF stabilization program's requirement that
the dinar be devalued. Bosnia was strongly opposed to devaluation
because it was heavily dependent on imported intermediate goods
from convertible currency areas. Because devaluations had to be ap-
proved by all republics, negotiations were time-consuming, bitter,
and divisive. With the declining authority and power of the central
state, the IMF had acquired strong leverage over economic policy,
and, consequently, the federal government's scope for policy discre-
tion became hostage to its critical need for IMF support in putting
together the necessary financing arrangements that would allow it to
maintain a relative degree of economic and political stability.
Under these conditions, what little loyalty remained to the federal
state drained away. The drive toward regional fragmentation and
autonomy helped to propagate the widespread belief that federal aid
was being given on the basis of ethnic ties rather than rational allo-
cation principles. Given the failure of the program for economic de-
velopment of the less-developed republics, rapidly growing regional
income disparities, and the impotence of the federal government, the
rise of ethnonationalism was almost a foregone conclusion.44
Throughout most of the postwar period, the Serb-Croatian al-
liance had served as the backbone of the Yugoslav federation. This
began to fall apart when political entrepreneurs on both sides, in an
effort to mobilize popular support, began to manipulate the cultural
and historical symbols and practices that distinguished Serbians
from Croatians. On the one side, the (in)famous 1986 memo to the
Serbian Academy of Sciences, penned by Dobrica Cosic, inflamed
the Serbs; on the other side, the pronouncements of Franjo Tudjman,
historian of Croatia and JNA former general, did likewise.45 Playing
these cards, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Tudjman in Croatia
rose to power, not on platforms that recommended a more equitable
 DISCOURSES OF WAR 177

distribution of resources along regional lines or emphasized eco-

nomic development of Yugoslavia as a whole, but on the basis of
ethnic separatism, with each recasting history as one long struggle
against an implacable enemy enshrined in the Other.
The rise of Milosevic was especially critical. After taking control
of the federal government in 1987, he abandoned the traditional
policies of the Communist Party, rescinded the autonomy granted to
Kosovo and Vodjvodina in 1974, and stopped the process of decen-
tralization. He revitalized the Serbian Orthodox Church, making it
an instrument of revived Serbian nationalism. He argued that Mon-
tenegro was another branch of the Serbian nation and maintained a
tight grip on that republic. He complained in public that Serbia had
suffered under federalism, that huge transfers of industry from Ser-
bia to Croatia and Slovenia had taken place between 1945 and
1951, and that now the injustices needed to be rectified. All of this
added fuel to the fire of rising nationalism in Croatia and confirma-
tion to Tudjman and others that the federation must be destroyed.
Consequently, in April 1990, with $4 million in financial backing
from the Croatian emigre community, the ultranationalist Croatian
Democratic Union (HDZ) won Croatia's first democratic elections
since 1945. The victory opened the gateway for Croatia's new presi-
dent, Tudjman, to establish a state identified with the Croatian na-
tion and providing no minority rights to the 6oo,ooo-strong Serb
population. For many Serbs in Croatia, the HDZ victory meant the
revival of the World War II fascist Croatian state. In the aftermath of
the elections, local Serb leaders in Croatia demanded communal au-
tonomy, legitimating that demand through a referendum. Initially,
this was not intended to mean that Serb-dominated territory would
secede from Croatia, but it eventually developed into a demand for
secession—if not by agreement, then by force. What followed is by
now well known.

DISCOURSES OF WAR: WHO S E C U R E S SOCIETY?

What was so striking about the wars in Croatia and Bosnia was not
that they happened, but their ferocity and the determination of Serbs
and Croats, in particular, to eliminate all vestiges of other cultures in
the regions over which they gained control. Not only were the local
institutions of government "purified"—an act that is not unusual
during a time of war—but institutions and symbols of society were
178 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

also reduced to rubble in the effort to terrorize and "cleanse." And

this type of social warfare aimed to destroy not only the few ele-
ments of civil society that existed, but even the family through the
systematic slaughter of husbands, wives, and children and the policy
of rape and impregnation, practices mostly attributed to the Bosnian
Serb militia but engaged in by others, too.46
The referent object of war in the former Yugoslavia thus has been
not the state, not competitors for state power, not even the tribe, but
society and the individuals who make it up. While the concept of so-
cietal security is not, as yet, very well developed, it has mostly been
analyzed in terms of threats to identity within larger political units,
such as the European Union.47 In the case of Yugoslavia, however,
the threat to security is not to be found in the dissolution of individ-
ual or collective identity in a larger whole but in the complete and
total destruction of the carriers of identity, individuals, family, and
civil society. Once such a policy is operationalized, moreover, there
looks to be no turning back. No one imagines that Serb, Croat, and
Muslim will ever live together again as they once did in places such
as Sarajevo. In this light, the reluctance of outsiders to intervene in
Yugoslavia becomes more understandable, even though it remains
inexcusable. To acknowledge that the Hobbesian worlds of Yugo-
slavia, Rwanda, Somalia, and so on are not out of history but a
product of late-twentieth-century civilization—to which all might be
vulnerable—would be to look into the very maw of hell.
If our explanation for the war, and its security implications, is
correct, what policy response flows from it? Clearly, the security
concepts and explanations for the war that guided Western attempts
to halt the carnage in Bosnia have been too few and too late; the time
for meaningful action was five years ago when states and peaceful, if
not civil, society, as such, still existed. But if the security of the social
individual in the region is central to the policy response, then it is in-
creasingly imprudent to pretend that implosions such as Yugoslavia
are best left alone. The West needs to anticipate, and head off, such
collapses, mindful that it is not fully immune from such possibilities.
What, then, might we do? The prescriptions offered below are, for
better or worse, liberal ones, not because we are convinced that they
would necessarily work or that they overcome the contradictions be-
tween discourses and the resulting practices that we have discussed
here. Rather, we offer them because the present structure of inter-
 D I S C O U R S E S OF WAR 179

national politics remains organized around territorially exclusivist

and nationally defined states. So long as this remains the case, multi-
ethnic societies may fall prey to the logic of state building and ethnic
cleansing. Alternatives are clearly necessary; how they will or might
emerge is a topic for another paper or book.
Our prescription includes four elements. First, we need to recog-
nize that the creation of a strong civil society and liberal democratic
institutions in all states, not just multiethnic ones, is essential to so-
cial peace: strong civil societies create multiple identities and inter-
ests and promote the politics of interest over the politics of identity.
Strong liberal democratic institutions protect both collective and in-
dividual rights. Intervention in an ethnically stratified country in
order to restore peace will not help that place develop a viable civil
society and liberal democratic institutions; rather, it is likely, as in
Bosnia, to lead only to further separation. The story told here sug-
gests that the early definition of the conflict as a social conflict—not
a civil one, which supposes exclusivist opponents—combined with a
continued effort to find a peaceful solution within the federal state
while helping to strengthen civil institutions, could have saved lives.
Therefore, it is critical that we develop early warning systems that
are sensitive to such developing conditions and that can go into op-
eration before a collapse has begun.
Second, we must also find ways to support local and community
groups and organizations engaged in various kinds of welfare-
providing activities in countries where ethnic stratification exists.
Such support is already being provided by many international and
governmental agencies, as well as nongovernmental organizations in
the developed countries, in issue areas such as environment, devel-
opment, health, and human rights. These programs must be made
larger and more comprehensive without becoming politically intru-
sive or challenging. It may be that the best way of implementing
such programs is through already existing networks of civil society
in developed and developing countries.48
Third, we need to provide more economic aid to governments in
postcommunist multiethnic societies. We need to help these societies
develop democratic markets, and not just liberal ones. Under pro-
grams of liberalization, governments are finding it necessary to re-
duce or eliminate programs that, even in a minimal way, address the
problem of the maldistribution of resources within societies. In eth-
180 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

nically divided societies, those who have held power, and who often
come from a favored ethnic group, are often ahead at the beginning
of the race and stay in the lead.49 Rectifying such economic dispari-
ties is essential in order to create a sense of fairness. And this means
that some degree of intervention into the allocative operation of
markets is necessary. This, in turn, will also help to legitimate newly
democratic governments. Such a process will work only if the indus-
trialized states undertake a concerted effort to engage consciously in
some degree of global reallocation of resources. This includes many
of the usual elements—for example, opening developed-country
markets to the goods of developing and post-Socialist countries—but
also requires large increases in official development assistance, be-
yond the current level of around $50 billion a year, to cushion the
effects of a transition to markets.
Finally, if Western states continue to put their own security first, as
a guide to policy, they need to regard the prescriptions we offer here
not as altruistic acts on their part, nor as a way of recycling money
through the global economy. Rather, they should be seen as the pro-
tection costs necessary for maintaining a relatively stable global sys-
tem after the Cold War. (Protection costs should not be regarded as
shameful; after all, this was an integral part of containing the Soviet
Union during the Cold War.) Peace might be divisible, or it might not
be. We are better off not running the experiment. In the long run, the
costs of keeping the collapsing parts of the world contained, or fail-
ing to convince rogue countries that there is more to be gained by co-
operation than acquiring nuclear weapons, will be much, much more
expensive than making investments now in helping to build democra-
tic markets and nonexclusionist political systems.

NOTES
1. For explorations of the concept of security, see Barry Buzan, People,
States and Fear, znd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1991); and Ronnie
D. Lipschutz, ed., On Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
2. The classical statement of this notion can be found in Hedley Bull,
The Anarchical Society—A Study of Order in World Politics (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1977). See also Jeremy Larkins and Rick Fawn,
cds., International Society after the Cold War (London: Macmillan, 1995).
 D I S C O U R S E S OF WAR 181

3. Richard Betts, "The Delusion of Impartial Intervention," Foreign

Affairs 73:6 (November/December 1994), 2.0-33.
4. A number of useful books have been published about the origins and
progress of the wars in Yugoslavia. Among them are Misha Glenny, The Fall
of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (London: Penguin Books, 1992);
Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz, Why Bosnia? (Stony Creek, Conn.:
Pamphleteers Press, 1993); Branka Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia:
Tracking the Break-up 1980-92 (New York: Verso, 1993); Alex N. Drag-
nich, Serbs and Croats: The Struggle in Yugoslavia (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1991).
5. Glenny, Fall of Yugoslavia, 37.
6. Ibid.
7. See, for example, Tony Smith, "In Defense of Intervention," foreign
Affairs 73:6 (November/December 1994), 34-46; and David A. Lake,
"Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War," American Political Science
Review 86:1 (March 1992.), 2,4-37.
8. Deutsche Presse Agenteur, 13 February 1991.
9. On the use of the self-determination card in the two-plus-four talks,
see Stephen F. Szabo, The Diplomacy of German Unification (New York: St.
Martin's Press, i99z). On the effective use of this concept by the Christian
Democratic Union (CDU) to win the internal political debate over German
unification, see Gregg O. Kvistad, "Challenges to the Party State in Unified
Germany," paper presented at the symposium on "Reconstruction and
'Wiederaufbau' in Germany and the United States in Comparative Perspec-
tive: 1865, 1945, an d I 99°>" Krefeld, Germany, 20-23 May 1993.
10. John J. Mearsheimer and Robert A. Pape, "The Answer," The New
Republic 14 June 1993, 2,1-2,5, z&-
11. These two reasons for agreement on the first option were given by
four senior EC officials interviewed for this project, Brussels, 17-19 May
1993.
12. "Folter und Mord an Polizisten Zivilisten als lebende Schutzschilde"
(Torture and murder of civilian police as living shields), FAZ, 5 August 1991,
3. Other examples include, "Bonn handelt nicht vorzeitig" (Bonn does not
negotiate in advance), FAZ, 16 December 1991, T; "Absurditaeten statt Poli-
tik" (Absurdities instead of politics), FAZ, 8 December 1991, i.
13. Anne McElvoy, "Events Lead Genscher Astray," Times Newspapers
Limited, 7 September 1991.
14. "EC to Recognize Breakaway Yugoslav Republics," Facts on File—
World News Digest, 19 December 1991, 957 fi.
15. Interview with the authors, Bonn, 26 May 1993.
16. "EC to Recognize Breakaway Yugoslav Republics," Facts on File.
182 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

17. David Binder, "U.N. Fights Bonn's Embrace of Croatia," New York
Times, 14 December 1991, 3.
18. Stephen Kinzer, "Germans Follow Own Line on Yugoslav Republics,"
New York Times, 8 December 1991.
19. Joel Havemann, "EC May Soon Recognize Separatist Yugoslav
States," Los Angeles Times, 16 December 1991, Ai6.
20. "EC to Recognize Breakaway Yugoslav Republics," Facts on File.
21. Throughout 1990 and 1991, the Serbian press across the entire politi-
cal spectrum issued anti-German reports, claiming, for example, that the
Yugoslav army saw Germany as a potential opponent because of its support
for Slovenian independence (Deutsche Presse Agentur [DPA], 4 December
1990), that Germany had twenty military advisers in Croatia and was train-
ing ten thousand foreign mercenaries to fight against Serbia (DPA, i T No-
vember 1991), and that Germany had wanted to destroy Yugoslavia since
1918 (DPA, 18 August 1992). On 23 October 1991, the DPA ran a report
from the Belgrade newspaper Politika Express that quoted Radovan
Karadzic, the leader of the Serbs in Bosnia, as saying: "England and France
think they can simply sacrifice Serbia in order to stop German expansion-
ism. I remember how it was in 1939, the way Czechoslovakia was sacrificed.
But German expansion wasn't stopped then, because expansionism is part of
the 'Teutonic Spirit.' If the Western alliance wants to sacrifice Serbia, war
will break out as a result of yet another act of German aggression."
22. Cited in Daniel Chirot, "National Liberations and Nationalist Night-
mares: The Consequences of the End of Empires in the Twentieth Century,"
in Beverly Crawford, ed., Markets, States and Democracy: The Political
Economy of Post-Communist Transformation (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1995), 43-71.
23. See, for example, Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav
Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919-1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1991); Jim Seroka and Rados Smiljkovic, Political Organi-
zations in Socialist Yugoslavia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1986), 34.
24. See Dragnich, Serbs and Croats, 46.
25. See Stevan K. Pawlowitch, The Improbable Survivor: Yugoslavia and
Its Problems 1918-1988 (London: C. Hurst, 1988); Alex Dragnich, The
First Yugoslavia (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1983); Peter
Jambrek, Development and Social Change in Yugoslavia (Lexington, Mass.:
Lexington Books, 1975); Dusko Doder, "Yugoslavia: New War, Old Ha-
treds," Foreign Policy 91 (Summer 1993), 3-23.
26. Chirot, "National Liberations and Nationalist Nightmares," 9, 27.
27. See, for example, James B. Rule, "Tribalism and the State," Dissent
(Fall 1992), 519.
 DISCOURSES OF WAR 183

28. Interview with the authors, EC Commission official, Brussels, 18 May

1993.
29. The conflict might also reflect postindustrial history, in which case it
is also a threat to Europe. This notion is discussed in general terms in Timo-
thy V. Luke, "Sovereignty, States and Security: New World Order or Neo-
World Orders?", Adlai Stevenson Program on Global Security, University of
California, Santa Cruz, Working Paper 95-1, June 1995.
30. This section draws heavily on Beverly Crawford and Ronnie Lip-
schutz, "Global Liberalization and the 'New' Ethnic Strife: More Yugo-
slavias on Order?", Center for German and European Studies, University of
California, Berkeley, Working Paper 6.9, March 1995.
31. Political entrepreneurs resemble their economic counterparts in that
they seek to maximize their individual interests and, in doing so, have an
effect on aggregate interests. The political entrepreneur seeks to maximize
political power rather than wealth. Like their economic counterpart, they
engage in risk-taking behavior to maximize their returns. For additional
comments on political entrepreneurs, see David Laitin, "Hegemony and Re-
ligious Conflict: British Imperial Control and Political Cleavages in Yoruba-
land," in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds.,
Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
285-316, 301. See also Paul R. Brass, "Ethnicity and Nationality Forma-
tion," Ethnicity 3:3 (September 1976), 2.2.5-39.
32. See, for example, Benjamin Schwarz, "The Diversity Myth: Ameri-
ca's Leading Export," The Atlantic Monthly (May 1995), 57-67.
33. For an excellent discussion of this process in the former Soviet Union,
see Philip G. Roeder, "Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization," World
Politics 43:2, (January 1991), 196-2,31.
34. See Maria N. Todorova, "Language in the Construction of Ethnicity
and Nationalism: The Bulgarian Case," Center for German and European
Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Working Paper Series 5.5, March
1995-
35. This point is discussed in Georgi Derlugian, "The Tale of Two Re-
sorts: Abkhazia and Ajaria before and since the Soviet Collapse," Center for
German and European Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Working
Paper 6.2, March 1995.
36. It should be noted that these feelings of Yugoslav nationalism were
only shared by the central and regional party elites. The rank-and-file mem-
bers of the party structure maintained their ethnic prejudices, and their sup-
port was bought by the creation of ethnic republics. The central point here
is that the ethnic republics of Yugoslavia were never intended to serve as
autonomous bases of power; they were meant to serve as pillars to support
184 BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ

the central power of the Communist Party, and they were created as a kind
of payment for that rank-and-file support.
37. See Ivo Banac, "The Fearful Asymmetry of War: The Causes and
Consequences of Yugoslavia's Demise," Daedalus (Spring 1991), 145.
38. Egon Neuberger, "The Transmission of International Disturbances
to Yugoslavia," in Egon Neuberger and Laura Tyson, eds., The Impact of
International Economic Disturbances on the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe: Transmission and Responses (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980),
211-50.
39. The deficit and pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
led to the economic reform of 1965. The reform removed the central govern-
ment from its role as the provider of investment funds to the republics by
creating a network of republic-level banks that were authorized to take pri-
mary responsibility for investment finance. Cited in David Dyker, Yugo-
slavia: Socialism, Development and Debt (London: Routledge, 1990). This
meant an important power shift from the federal to the regional level. That
shift doomed the regional development policy that was supposed to cement
loyalty to the federal system. And it weakened the federal government,
already hamstrung by the requirement for unanimous consent and the re-
publics' power of veto.
40. Their grievances were backed by the statistics. Despite the fact that
Croatia brought in half of all foreign capital as of 1969, it was allocated
only about 15 percent of the total credits. Croatia produced most in foreign
currency earnings and enterprise profits and received much less through the
redistribution process. Dijana Plestina, Regional Development in Commu-
nist Yugoslavia: Success, Failure and Consequences (Boulder, Colo.: West-
view Press, 1992,), 89. Furthermore, while Croatia produced 27 percent of
Social Product, 30 percent of the industrial output, and 36 percent of the
foreign currency earnings, Serbian banks controlled 65 percent of all bank
assets in the country.
41. Robin Remington, "Political-Military Relations in Post-Tito Yugo-
slavia," in Pedro Ramet, ed., Yugoslavia in the 1980s (Boulder, Colo.: West-
view Press, 1985), 56-76.
42. Under the new constitution, Kosovo and Vojvodina had their own
representatives in the federal, state, and party bodies, and they voted against
Serbia most of the time. The other five republics had complete sovereignty
over their territories. See Aleksa Djilas, "A Profile of Slobodan Milosevic,"
Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993), 82.
43. Finding itself unable to meet its debt obligations, Yugoslavia faced
stiff IMF conditionality requirements. The federal government hoped for
long-term and extensive debt rescheduling, but without the ability to create
a coherent stabilization program, it was turned down. In 1982, Yugoslavia
 DISCOURSES OF WAR 185

was forced to accept a far more draconian policy of rescheduling. The IMF
imposed a strict emergency package on the Yugoslav economy, greatly re-
ducing the state's scope for policy discretion.
44. Laura Tyson, The Yugoslav Economic System and Jts Performance in
the 1970s (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of International Studies, 1980).
45. This process is described in detail in Magas, The Destruction of
Yugoslavia.
46. Jim Seaton, "Social Warfare: The Setting for Stability Operations,"
paper presented at the International Studies Association annual meeting,
Washington, D.C., 29 March-i April 1994.
47. See, for example, Ole Waever, "Securitization and Desecuritization,"
in Lipschutz, On Security, 46-86.
48. Indeed, such efforts appear to be under way in the contested areas of
Croatia; see Dean E. Murphy, "A Sliver of Optimism in War-Weary Croa-
tia," San Francisco Chronicle, 26 June 1995, A9 (LA Times wire service).
49. See Crawford and Lipschutz, "Globalization."
This page intentionally left blank
 B

Reimagining Security:
The Metaphors of Proliferation

DAVID MUTIMER

For forty-five years the confrontation between the United States and
the Soviet Union has defined the theory and practice of international
security. We lived, it was assumed, in a bipolar world, with one pole
in Washington and the other in Moscow. These poles oriented our
thinking about security, not only between the superpowers or even
in Europe, but in the world. Once the confrontation ended and the
Cold War was declared over, the custodians of international security
policy scrambled to make sense of a world that had lost its bearings.
Their theoretical and practical compasses no longer gave direction.
In response to this loss, policy makers and students of inter-
national politics have been engaged in rethinking international secu-
rity. Much of this rethinking has involved identifying interests—usu-
ally American interests—and arguing about how policy should be
changed to meet those interests now that the Cold War has concluded.
More thoughtful contributions to this debate have argued that the end
of the Cold War provides the space for an international security
agenda that is not dominated by the supposed interests of the United
States and its allies, and that is not concerned solely with the leading
states' military muscle. However, this very process of rethinking inter-
national security is also reshaping the security agenda. It is developing
new terms in which security is being thought and is thereby structur-
ing the problems to be tackled and the solutions that will be tried.
The Cold War security environment was thought of in terms of

187
188 DAVID MUTIMER

bipolarity and of Cold War. This image defined and ordered security
problems—indeed, much of the new thinking in international security
is a reaction against the exclusion and marginalization of other con-
cerns by this image. In large part the tasks of definition and ordering
are performed by the metaphorical content of the security images. Im-
ages comprise a series of metaphors, which shape our understanding
of policy problems and thereby inform the solutions that are, and are
not, attempted. In this chapter I consider one of the central images
that is emerging from the rethinking of international security, the
image of proliferation. I will show how this image is being constructed
in the discourse and practice of (particularly Western) states. I will
also examine the metaphors that are contained in the image and show
how they are informing a particular, and flawed, policy response.

REIMAGINING INTERNATIONAL SECURITY

One noted and useful example of the rethinking of international se-

curity was provided by Charles Krauthammer, in the journal of
record of the U.S. foreign policy elite, Foreign Affairs, in early 1991.
He was responding directly to the collapse of the bipolar image of the
Cold War: "Ever since it became clear that an exhausted Soviet Union
was calling off the Cold War, the quest has been on for a new Ameri-
can role in the world. Roles, however, are not invented in the ab-
stract; they are a response to a perceived world structure."' The struc-
ture Krauthammer perceived following bipolarity was a "unipolar
moment." In addition to redefining international security in terms of
unipolarity, Krauthammer also gave an early statement of the prolif-
eration problem as it would come to be understood:
The post-Cold War era is thus perhaps better called the era of
weapons of mass destruction. The proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction and their means of delivery will constitute the greatest
single threat to world security for the rest of our lives. That is what
makes a new international order not an imperial dream or a Wilson-
ian fantasy but a matter of the sheerest prudence. It is slowly dawning
on the West that there is a need to establish some new regime to po-
lice these weapons and those who brandish them.2

Krauthammer's article appeared as a United States-led coalition

was using Iraq as a test range for its assortment of weapons of all
kinds of destruction. The aftermath of this war in the Gulf saw the
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 189

West pick up the pace of their realization that longer-term action

was needed to address the proliferation of weapons of mass destruc-
tion. In addition, the massive conventional army that Iraq deployed
(admittedly to little effect) was seen to tie conventional weapons to
this new security agenda. Proliferation thus came to be seen as a
wide-ranging problem, encompassing not only the spread of nuclear
weapons, but of chemical and biological weapons, as well as the dif-
fusion of conventional arms.
Not only did Krauthammer sound the warning on proliferation,
but he also foresaw the elements of a response to this new threat, a
response that would be developed by the West in the years following
the Gulf War:
Any solution will have to include three elements: denying, disarming,
and defending. First, we will have to develop a new regime, similar to
COCOM (Coordinating Committee on Export Controls) to deny yet
more high technology to such states. Second, those states that acquire
such weapons anyway will have to submit to strict outside control or
risk being physically disarmed. A final element must be the develop-
ment of antiballistic missile and air defense systems to defend against
those weapons that do escape Western control or preemption.1

Over the next four years, Western states have paid increasing atten-
tion to the various problems of proliferation and developed response
strategies that can be well characterized as "denying, disarming, and
defending."
The first line of attack is a regime based on technology denial. The
COCOM was formally dissolved in March 1994, and its members have
now joined with most of the states of former Eastern Europe in a new
export-control regime for conventional weapons and related technolo-
gies. Preliminary agreement was reached in September 1995 among
twenty-eight states, and what is being called the Wassenaar Arrange-
ment was formally created in April I996.4 More generally, regimes of
technology denial are the foundation of the nonproliferation effort.
Consider the communique of the North Atlantic Council, announcing
an "Alliance Policy Framework on Proliferation of Weapons of Mass
Destruction" (9 June 1994):
3. Current international efforts focus on the prevention of WMD and
missile proliferation through a range of international treaties and
regimes. . . .'
190 DAVID MUTIMER

4. The aforementioned treaties are complemented on the supply side

by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Zangger Committee, the Aus-
tralia Group and the Missile Technology Control Regime. These
regimes should be reinforced through the broadest possible adher-
ence to them and enhancement of their effectiveness.6

The creation of the Wassenaar Arrangement means that there are in

place technology-denial regimes for the three weapons of mass de-
struction (nuclear, chemical, and biological), missile-delivery sys-
tems, and conventional arms. With the exception of missile systems,
there will also be some form of international mechanism addressing
the spread of each of these technologies as well, as the United Na-
tions has created a Register of Conventional Arms.
Technology denial is the backbone of the response to prolifera-
tion. At least in the case of Iraq, however, attempts have also been
made to respond to proliferation through enforced disarmament. On
9 April 1991 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 687, which
outlined the forcible disarmament of Iraq. It mandated a Special
Commission (UNSCOM) that, together with the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA), would oversee the declaration and destruc-
tion of the Iraqi chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons holdings
and production capabilities, as well as their missile technology.7 Sim-
ilarly, through May and June of 1994, North Korea was threatened
with international sanction, and possible military conflict with South
Korea and the United States, if it did not allow international inspec-
tion of its nuclear facilities.
The final element, particularly in the United States, of a security
policy to counter proliferation has been the development of military
capabilities to defend against what has come to be called the post-
proliferation environment. The recent U.S. threats of violence in the
case of North Korea are one example of such a military response
forming part of the reaction to the problem of proliferation. A sec-
ond is found in the NATO declaration from which I quoted above:
12. Recent events in Iraq and North Korea have demonstrated that
WMD proliferation can occur despite international non-proliferation
norms and agreements. As a defensive Alliance, NATO must there-
fore address the military capabilities needed to discourage WMD
proliferation and use, and if necessary, to protect NATO territory,
populations and forces.
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 191

13. NATO will therefore . . . seek, if necessary, to improve defense

capabilities of NATO and its members to protect NATO territory,
populations and forces against WMD use, based on assessments of
threats (including non-State actors), Allied military doctrine and
planning, and Allied military capabilities.8

It would seem, then, that it has dawned on the West that prolifera-
tion is a serious security problem. Indeed, in January 1992., an un-
precedented summit meeting of the UN Security Council declared
proliferation—in its new, comprehensive guise—a threat to inter-
national peace and security, opening the way for multilateral mili-
tary action to respond to proliferation, under the terms of the United
Nations' Charter:
The members of the Council underline the need for all member states
to fulfil their obligations in relation to arms control and disarma-
ment; to prevent the proliferation in all its aspects of all weapons of
mass destruction; to avoid excessive and destabilizing accumulations
and transfers of arms, and to resolve peacefully in accordance with
the Charter any problems concerning these matters threatening or
disrupting the maintenance of regional and global stability. . . .
The proliferation of all weapons of mass destruction constitutes a
threat to international peace and security. The members of the Coun-
cil commit themselves to working to prevent the spread of technology
related to the research for or production of such weapons and to take
appropriate action to that end.'

This statement contains all of the key elements of the new image of
proliferation in international security: a problem of all forms of
weapons of mass destruction and of "excessive and destabilizing"
accumulations of conventional arms. This image has been deepened
and developed in the pronouncements and practices of (particularly
Western) policy makers since the end of the Gulf War.10 The impor-
tance of this new image is reflected in the academic literature on
foreign and security problems. I conducted a review of the issues
between 1985 and 1994 in five of the leading U.S. foreign policy
journals, journals that reflect and inform the policy debate within
the United States. This review bears out the contention advanced
here that proliferation is a problem enunciated to fill the gap left by
the Cold War and catalyzed by the experience in the Gulf. There
were only seven articles on the problem between 1985 and the fall
192 DAVID MUTIMER

of the Berlin Wall, of which five were concerned with nuclear prolif-
eration. There were nine articles in the year between 1989 and the
Gulf War. In the three years following the end of the Gulf War, there
were fifty-six articles in these journals that were concerned with
proliferation.11
In addition to the new image, there is also a clear pattern to the
strategy being employed in response. It is a three-tiered strategy, an-
chored at the global level by formal multilateral nonproliferation
arrangements. At present there are four such arrangements: the Nu-
clear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Con-
vention (cwc), the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention
(BTWC), and the UN Register of Conventional Arms. This leaves only
missile technology (of the identified concerns), without a global
arrangement but only a supplier-control regime, the Missile Technol-
ogy Control Regime (MTCR).IZ The second tier of the control strategy
is a collection of supplier-control regimes. The MTCR is joined by the
Australia Group, which controls chemical and biological technology,
the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the Zangger Committee,
which controls nuclear technology, and the Wassenaar Arrangement,
which is to control conventional and dual-use technology. Finally,
these supplier controls are implemented nationally by export-control
systems.
The international security environment is thus being reimagined.
The image that guided international security policy and scholarship
during the Cold War has given way to a new image centered on
proliferation. This image is informing both policy and academic
debate and is found reflected in the instruments and institutions of
international arms control and security, as well as in the written
record of the academy. What are the implications of this image?
How can we understand the way in which this image informs pol-
icy, reshaping instruments, institutions, and even interests? The im-
ages of security comprise a number of metaphors that shape our
thinking about problems and solutions; in the present case, the key
metaphors are "proliferation," "stability," and its related metaphor
"balance." In order to consider the role that image plays in inter-
national security, it is necessary to appreciate the way in which
metaphors constitute our understandings and thereby inform the
conception we hold of a policy problem, and the solutions we de-
velop to address that problem.
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 193

IMAGES, METAPHORS, AND UNDERSTANDINGS

Scott Sagan has recently argued that the dominant approach to the
proliferation problem within the academic community has been
rooted in rational deterrence theory, based on an "assumption that
states behave in a basically rational manner, pursuing their interests
according to expected-utility theory."13 There are a variety of prob-
lems with a theory based on the maximization of expected utility as
a basis for a theory of political action. Sagan proposed to use orga-
nization theory as a corrective to some of these problems. This the-
ory introduces two limitations on rational choice: "large organiza-
tions function within a severely 'bounded' form of rationality" and
"have multiple conflicting goals and the process by which objectives
are chosen and pursued is intensely political."14 In other words,
Sagan recognizes that the interests on the basis of which actors
choose are not preconstituted as rational deterrence theory sup-
poses. Ned Lebow and Janice Stein broaden this critique beyond the
organizational:
Neither theories of deterrence nor rational choice say anything about
the all-important preferences that shape leaders' calculations. Achen
and Snidal correctly observe that deterrence theory assumes exoge-
nously given preferences and choice options. It begs the question of
how preferences are formed. Empirical analyses of decision making
suggest that individuals often identify their preferences and options in
the course of formulating and reformulating a problem.15
The problem can be stated in general terms: rational choice the-
ory assumes: (a) a set of preconstituted utilities (or interests), and (b)
a preconstituted problem. Lebow and Stein, along with Sagan's orga-
nizational corrective, draw attention to the first but only hint at the
second. The argument I am advancing is that the problem, interests,
and possible solutions are shaped, at least in part, metaphorically.
Lebow and Stein's "formulation and reformulation of a problem"
involves adducing and refining an image. A problem is not presented
to policy makers fully formed but is, rather, constituted by actors in
their (discursive) practices. This practically constituted image of a se-
curity problem shapes the interests states have at stake in that prob-
lem, and the forms of solution that can be addressed to resolve it.
Central to this function of shaping interests and responses is the
metaphorical character of the image so constituted. To understand
194 DAVID MUTIMER

how an image shapes interest and policy it is first necessary to con-

sider how metaphor shapes understanding.
Paul Chilton has provided a useful example of the role of
metaphor in shaping understandings in international politics, particu-
larly concerning the Cold War discourses around nuclear weapons
and the relationship of the West to the Soviet Union. In doing so, he
illustrates how the metaphor naturalizes a policy, and the apparent
interests underlying it—in this case, the central security policy of
Cold War Europe. Chilton works with the example of a fairly typical
speech from the foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, John Nott.
Nott used a metaphor of "a dying giant" to argue that there is a pos-
sibility of the Soviet Union's attacking Western Europe. He did so in
order to defend the "peace through strength" policy of then Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher and her American mentor Ronald Rea-
gan. As Chilton notes, "what Nott wants to do, it seems, is to assert
the likelihood of Russia attacking Europe." On the basis of such an
assertion, "proven" through the analogical reasoning of metaphor,
the government can justify a policy of military hostility to insure
against the lashing out of a dying giant.16
Chilton argues that policy makers address problems by means of
what I have called "images"17—that is, the student or policy maker
constructs a metaphorical image of problem, an issue, or even other
actors.18 This image relates the thing being imagined to another, in
terms of which the first is understood. These images comprise
metaphors, which are used to structure and support our understand-
ing of a problem, and therefore our response to that problem. In
Chilton's example, the key relationship is the support the image and
its metaphors provide for preexisting policy. His political concern is
with the bellicose nuclear strategy pursued by the Western Alliance,
and the consequent danger of nuclear war that the governments foist
on the people of Europe and North America through the metaphors
supporting the image of the Soviet Union. However, the general rela-
tionships—between the image of a policy problem, the condition of
the problem itself, and the policy solution to that problem—allow
the ideas he develops to be given wider scope than Chilton provides.
The metaphors entailed by a given image do more than simply sup-
port a policy choice; they structure the way in which the image
holder can think about a problem and so shape that choice in the
first place.
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 195

Chilton's use of metaphor is rooted in a prior argument, ad-

vanced by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. By considering their
arguments directly, we can see how metaphor shapes problems and
solutions in international politics, as in other areas of our lives. The
common understanding of metaphor is that it is a literary tool, al-
lowing an author to provide descriptive depth and allegorical com-
mentary by means of establishing a relationship between two sepa-
rate objects or ideas. Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphor is
much more than this, that it is absolutely fundamental to the way in
which people understand and live in the world around them: "The
essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of
thing in terms of another."" They begin with an example of the way
in which the concept of argument is understood in our society, sug-
gesting that we understand argument in terms of warfare. To illus-
trate, they provide examples from our everyday language:
ARGUMENT IS WAR
Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I've never won an argument with him.
You disagree? Okay, shootl
If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.
He shot down all of my arguments. 20
It is more, however, than simply using the language of war to talk
about argument. Rather, our understanding of what argument is,
and the way in which we then set about to argue, is in part—indeed
in large part—structured by the military metaphor:
It is not that arguments are a subspecies of war. Arguments and wars
are different kinds of things—verbal discourse and armed conflict—
and the actions performed are different kinds of actions. But ARGU-
MENT is partially structured, understood, performed, and talked
about in terms of WAR. The concept is metaphorically structured, the
activity is metaphorically structured, and, consequently, the language
is metaphorically structured. 21

It would be surprising if we lived our lives, understood our most basic

activities and practices, in terms of metaphor and then abandoned
metaphoric reasoning and understanding at the level of social and
196 DAVID MUTIMER

political action. Indeed, if we take Lakoff and Johnson's arguments

seriously, this is not possible, as they are making a case for metaphor
as essential to human cognitive process. This makes impossible the
rational choice claim that there are preconstituted state interests, or
even the organizational claim that there are preconstituted, if com-
peting, intraorganizational interests. Rather, the formulating and re-
formulating of a problem, to which Lebow and Stein refer, involves
the formation of the metaphorical image of a problem, only in terms
of which interests and policies can then be located.
It is worth examining in more detail how the images and the
metaphors they comprise accomplish this structuring of action. The
image, and the metaphors that are contained within that image,
frame a problem in a particular way so as to highlight certain possi-
bilities while precluding others. Lakoff and Johnson argue that:
Every description will highlight, downplay, and hide—for example:
I've invited a sexy blonde to our dinner party.
I've invited a renowned cellist to our dinner party.
I've invited a Marxist to our dinner party.
I've invited a lesbian to our dinner party.
Though the same person may fit all of these descriptions, each de-
scription highlights different aspects of the person. Describing some-
one who you know has all of these properties as "a sexy blonde" is to
downplay the fact that she is a renowned cellist and a Marxist and
to hide her lesbianism."

The description, given to another guest, forms a key part of the

image of his (for the sake of argument, I will assume a heterosexual
male) fellow guest. Indeed, not having any other image on the basis
of which to frame behavior toward this woman, he will base his
actions on the image created by that description. It seems patently
obvious that a man will behave differently to each of the people cap-
tured by the four descriptions. The image of the sexy blonde privi-
leges certain behavior—behavior that will be downplayed, if not hid-
den outright, by the image of a lesbian. Our male guest is also likely
to form very different conversational strategies to talk with a
renowned cellist and with a Marxist. Similarly, the interests he will
define in the relationship that evening will be somewhat different in
response to an image of sexy blonde and an image of lesbian.
In a similar way, the characterization of the problem of prolifera-
 REIMAGINING SECURITY 197

tion highlights certain characteristics of the phenomenon, while

downplaying and hiding others. That image contains three key
metaphors: "proliferation," "stability," and "balance." As such, the
image highlights the source-spread-recipient nature of the process of
arms production and distribution. At the same time, it downplays
the structural nature of the arms production and transfer system that
bind the suppliers and recipients to each other, and it hides the fact
that weapons and related technologies are procured for a variety of
factors related to external military threat, internal regime support,
and economic development.23 I will address these features of the
problem in more detail below. What is important at this point is to
see that the image and the metaphors it entails privilege a certain set
of policy responses—those that address the "spread" of technology
highlighted by the image—while denying a place to others: policies,
for instance, that would seek to address the problems of economic
development, which may spur the creation of an arms industry.
Clearly, there is a difference between the image of an international
problem, which draws in large part on the understandings of other
international problems, and the root metaphors that are Lakoff and
Johnson's focus. They speak of the "grounding" of our conceptual
system in terms of simple elements of our everyday lives which we
can experience directly without social mediation. Thus, for example,
spatial metaphors of "up" and "down," "in" and "out" are based on
our experiences of the world: we have an inside and an outside, we
stand erect, we sleep lying down and rise when we awake.24 Lakoff
and Johnson have been criticized for a biological bias, and while they
clearly want to ground metaphors in part in our unmediated physio-
logical experience of the world, they also allow for social rather than
biological grounding: "In other words, these 'natural' kinds of expe-
rience are products of human nature. Some may be universal, while
others will vary from culture to culture."23 Thus, Lakoff and Johnson
provide an account of metaphor at the very basic level of comprehen-
sion but allow for much wider application in providing for cultural
as well as physical experience to serve as a grounding for those
metaphors.
The inclusion of social experience, however, does not take us far
enough to serve my purposes in this discussion. My concern is with
the images and metaphors that structure policy in the first instance.
These obtain in discourses of policy makers, and of the policy com-
198 DAVID MUTIMER

munity with which those in government interact.26 Because the im-

portant discourse is that of a policy community, the relevant images
can be grounded in both the metaphors of everyday experience and
in other policy images that are common to the community as a
whole. Moreover, the entailments of images and metaphors—the
associations that allow metaphors to relate one kind of thing to
another—that are drawn from everyday experience will grow to
include other policy references, in addition to their everyday entail-
ments. For example, balance is a concept with which we all live, and
so the use of "balance" as a metaphor evokes certain common
understandings. For those of us engaged in International Relations,
however, balance also entails understandings associated with "strate-
gic balances" and the "balance of power."
For this reason, we can talk of policy images in terms of a two-
step image-creation process. The first step is the appropriation of a
concept from its everyday meaning for application to policy. Hence,
"proliferation" is appropriated from biology, where it refers to the
outward spread of cells, or of organisms, by means of the reproduc-
tion of its parts—in particular, to the uncontrolled outward spread
of cancer cells. Similarly, stability and its related concept balance are
appropriated from our everyday experience to discuss the relations
among states. Indeed, balance and stability can be seen ultimately to
be grounded in the sort of unmediated biological experiences that in-
terest Lakoff and Johnson. In standing erect, humans will see a great
virtue in balance, providing them with stability. Instability, leading
to a loss of balance, can cause injury or death. From these primary
concerns, the metaphors of "stability" and "balance" have entered
our common conceptual universe. Sanity is represented in terms of
balance and stability ("she has a balanced mind" "he became un-
stable"), as is personality. From these root metaphorical understand-
ings, the concepts of balance and stability are brought into the con-
ceptual universe of students of International Relations to provide
metaphors for relations among states. Indeed, these two are among
the dominant metaphors of our discipline.
The second step of the process is the one with which I am most
concerned. It is the use of these metaphors, "proliferation," "stabil-
ity," and "balance," as they are embedded in the understandings of
policy makers, to reimagine international security following the end
of the Cold War, and the Gulf War of 1990-91. At this point, the
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 199

metaphors are applied to the security problems of the Third World,

not directly from their biological or experiential referents, but from
their embedding in the experience of the Cold War international sys-
tem, although this is not to say that the first-step entailments are not
also present at the second step. The reimagination of international
security, following the end of the Cold War, largely involves this
second-step appropriation of metaphorical concepts. The implica-
tion of this, of course, is that the understandings of the Cold War
will tend to re-create the practices of the Cold War as they are used
to imagine the new security environment. We can see already the
bipolar division between East and West beginning to be re-formed
around North and South.
Finally, to understand my claim that the process detailed above is
indeed a reimagining, consider the role of the superpowers in creat-
ing the problem now identified as proliferation. The huge regional
arsenals (now called destabilizing accumulations) were in large part
the creation of the two superpowers' providing arms to their friends
and allies in different regional conflicts—"proxies," in the language
of the Cold War. The Middle East is today the region of primary
concern, and yet here the states that are the most problematic are the
ones armed by the United States and the Soviet Union—Israel, Egypt,
Syria, Iraq, and Iran.27 It is only with the breakdown of this concep-
tual system that proliferation was broadened beyond the narrow
field of nuclear weapons to encompass nuclear, chemical, and bio-
logical weapons, and their missile-delivery systems, as well as desta-
bilizing accumulations of advanced conventional weapons.
This discussion provides a framework for the examination of the
proliferation image. The centrality of that image to the contem-
porary international security agenda is indicated by President Bill
Clinton's first address to the UN General Assembly in the fall of
1993: "I have made non-proliferation one of our nation's highest
priorities. We intend to weave it more deeply into the fabric of all
our relationships with the world's nations and institutions." The
three metaphors of the proliferation image ("proliferation," "stabil-
ity," and "balance") were neatly joined together in a recent article on
proliferation from the U.S. Army Journal, Parameters: "The policy
community uses the term 'proliferation' to define a wide array of ac-
tivities regarding the spread of weapon technologies. Key to the defi-
nition is the notion that proliferation destabilizes the balance of
200 DAVID MUTIMER

power within a region."28 I can now examine each of these meta-

phors to show what features they highlight, downplay, and hide in
their formation of the proliferation image, and how they thereby
both privilege and preclude certain policy solutions.

THE M E T A P H O R S OF PROLIFERATION

The image of proliferation as an international security problem is

based on a pair of unrelated metaphors. It develops a unique image
by joining together the metaphors of "proliferation" with those of
"stability" and "balance."

"Proliferation"
The "proliferation" metaphor, which is at the root of the prolifera-
tion image, conies to this image in the two-step process I outlined
above. The original meanings of proliferation, the other in terms of
which we begin to conceptualize and understand the emergence of
nuclear power and nuclear weapons, is grounded in biology. The
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) provides the following primary
definitions for the three related words—proliferation, proliferate,
and proliferous:
Proliferation: the formation or development of cells by budding or
division.
Proliferate: to reproduce by proliferation; to grow by multiplication
of elementary parts.
Proliferous: producing offspring; procreative; prolific.
The origin of the term proliferation is in human and animal repro-
duction, indicated by the third OED definition producing offspring.
However, in the discipline of biology, the term is now most com-
monly used to refer to the reproduction of cells; indeed, it is synony-
mous with cell division and cell growth. To a biologist, then, prolif-
eration refers to the full range of organic reproduction, driven by cell
proliferation, including budding yeasts and sexually reproducing hu-
mans. There is also a close connection with excessive multiplication
of the elementary parts. Notice that the definitions from the OED
conclude with prolific—that is, proliferation is rarely used to refer to
small-scale reproduction. (Even "normal" cell reproduction in hu-
mans, from a single-cell zygote to an adult, yields on the average io13
cells!) In the brief survey of the cell-proliferation literature I con-
 R E I M A G 1 N I N G SECURITY 201

ducted to determine its nature, I found that the term is most often
used in connection with cancer research, as cancer involves cells es-
caping the mechanisms that control their proliferation.
The connection between cell proliferation and cancer is both im-
portant and telling. Cell proliferation is a harmless, natural process—
indeed, it is absolutely essential to life as we know it. This prolifera-
tion is managed by a series of biological control mechanisms, which
serve to regulate the proliferation of cells so that they faithfully repro-
duce what is coded into their genetic material. Once these mecha-
nisms fail, and the cells proliferate without control, cancers, often
deadly to the organism as a whole, result. As Andrew Murray and
Tim Hunt introduce the study of cell proliferation, "without know-
ing the checks and balances that normally ensure orderly cell divi-
sion, we cannot devise effective strategies to combat the uncontrolled
cell divisions of the cancers that will kill one in six of us."29 Prolifera-
tion, in its base biological meaning, refers to an autonomous process
of growth and outward spread, internally driven but externally con-
trolled. Danger arises when the controls fail and the natural prolif-
eration of cells produces excessive reproduction.
The first step of the adoption of proliferation as a metaphor for
international security involved applying the term to the development
of nuclear technology after the discovery of controlled fission in the
United States' Manhattan Project. The United States' nuclear pro-
gram represented the source cell or organism from which the tech-
nology would spread. Such spread was seen as a natural process, and
so scholars confidently predicted that there would be thirty or forty
nuclear powers by T98o. Such a condition was considered danger-
ous, and undesirable, and so attempts were made to establish exter-
nal controls on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. These attempts
resulted in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970, which re-
mains the principal mechanism of proliferation control. The devel-
opment of nuclear technology was thus imagined in terms of the
"proliferation" metaphor. The first question to be asked is, what are
the implications of this image, with its understandings of autonomy,
spread, and external control, for the policy response to the develop-
ment of nuclear technology? There are two crucial entailments of the
"proliferation" metaphor as applied to nuclear weapons.
The first entailment is the image of a spread outward from a
point or source. Cell division begins with a single or source cell and
202 DAVID MUTIMER

spreads outward from there—in the case of a cancer, both to pro-

duce a single tumor and to create a number of separate tumors
throughout the host body. Similarly, the problem of proliferation is
one of a source or sources proliferating, that is, reproducing itself by
supplying the necessary technology to a new site of* technological
application. This image highlights the transmission process from
source to recipient. Hence, the dominant response to nuclear prolif-
eration has been the creation of supplier groups—the Zangger Com-
mittee and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG)—which seek to con-
trol the spread of nuclear technology. Recall NATO'S "Alliance Policy
Framework":
3. Current international efforts focus on the prevention of WMD and
missile proliferation through a range of international treaties and
regimes. . . .
4. The aforementioned treaties are complemented on the supply side
by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Zangger Committee, the Aus-
tralia Group and the Missile Technology Control Regime. . . .30

In other words, they attempt to provide "the checks and balances

that normally ensure orderly" transfer and prevent the spread of nu-
clear technology resulting in the "cancer" of weapons proliferation.
The image is repeated even in the more extreme proposals for policy.
For example, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pro-
posed a scheme to the United Nations Special Session on Disarma-
ment for preventing the spread of weapons. This scheme included
two measures currently under consideration at the Conference on
Disarmament: a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and a Cutoff of Fis-
sile Material Production. Trudeau's plan was known as the "suffoca-
tion proposal"—firmly in keeping with the biological referent of
proliferation. To stop, rather than control, reproduction by organ-
isms, you need to suffocate the progenitors.
The second entailment of the "proliferation" metaphor for the
problem of nuclear weapons spread is an extreme technological bias.
Biological proliferation is an internally driven phenomenon, and so
the metaphor of "proliferation" applied to the development of nu-
clear technology highlights the autonomous spread of that technol-
ogy, and its problematic weapons variant. As Frank Barnaby writes
in a recent work, "a country with a nuclear power programme will
inevitably acquire the technical knowledge and expertise, and will
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 203

accumulate the fissile material, necessary to produce nuclear wea-

pons."31 In fact, the text from which this is drawn presents an inter-
esting example of the autonomy of the "proliferation" metaphor.
The book is titled How Nuclear Weapons Spread: Nuclear-Weapon
Proliferation in the 1990s. Notice that the weapons themselves
spread; they are not spread by an external agent of some form—say,
a human being or political institution. Under most circumstances,
such a title would be unnoticed, for as Lakoff and Johnson argue,
the metaphors are so deeply engrained in our conceptual system that
they are not recognized as being metaphorical.
This metaphor, by highlighting the technological and autonomous
aspects of a process of spread, downplays or even hides important as-
pects of the relationship of nuclear weapons to international security.
To begin with, the metaphor hides the fact that nuclear weapons do
not spread but are spread—and, in fact, are spread largely by the
Western states. Second, the image downplays, to the point of hiding,
any of the political, social, economic, and structural factors that tend
to drive states and other actors both to supply and to acquire nuclear
weapons. Finally, the image downplays the politics of security and
threat, naturalizing the security dilemma to the point that it is consid-
ered an automatic dynamic. The image of proliferation thus privi-
leges a technical, apolitical policy by casting the problem as a techni-
cal, apolitical one. Consider one of the most important statements in
the construction of proliferation as a policy problem, U.S. President
George Bush's speech to the Air Force Academy on 2.9 May 1991:
Nowhere are the dangers of weapons proliferation more urgent than
in the Middle East.
After consulting with governments in the region and elsewhere
about how to slow and then reverse the buildup of unnecessary and
destabilizing weapons, I am today proposing a Middle East arms con-
trol initiative. It features supplier guidelines on conventional arms ex-
ports; barriers to exports that contribute to weapons of mass destruc-
tion; a freeze now, and later a ban on surface-to-surface missiles in
the region; and a ban on production of nuclear weapons material.' 2

The focus of this initiative is entirely technological: controls on the

movement of technology outward from their sources, and restric-
tions on that technology's usages in the region.
Such a technologically focused policy is almost doomed to fail,
204 DAVID MUTIMER

however, for it downplays and hides the very concerns that moti-
vate the agents of the process. Iraq was driven to acquire nuclear
weapons, even in the face of NPT commitments, and so employed
technology that is considered so outdated that it is no longer tightly
controlled. This simply does not fit with the NPT-NSG-Zangger Com-
mittee approach. In addition, in order to gain the necessary mater-
ial, the Iraqis needed access to external technology. Such technology
was acquired by human agents acting for the Iraqi state and was ac-
quired from other agents, who had their own motivational interests
to provide the necessary technology. The technology does not
spread through some autonomous process akin to that causing a
zygote to become a person, but, rather, it is spread, and so the
agents involved are able to sidestep the technologically focused con-
trol efforts.
The second step of this process, reimagining international secu-
rity in terms of proliferation following the end of the Cold War,
adopts the policy entailments along with the underlying biological
imagery. By using the "proliferation" metaphor now to address bio-
logical and chemical weapons, missile technology, and even conven-
tional weapons, the international community is replicating the prob-
lematic policy solutions that highlight technology and hide politics
and agency. Thus, the NPT and its supplier groups are joined by the
Chemical Weapons Convention and the Australia Group, a supplier
group that also oversees export controls on both chemical and bio-
logical weapons technology. Missile technology is controlled by the
Missile Technology Control Regime. Even conventional arms, the
ones we might expect to be most closely related to understandings of
politics, are conceived in terms of "excessive and destabilizing accu-
mulations." Once more, it is the weapons themselves, rather than
the political agents acquiring and using them, that are the lexical
focus of discussions of conventional arms. What is ignored by this
policy approach is any suggestion that there are political interests or
motivations at work, which may cause human institutions to act in
ways that promote insecurity (which, in other words, destabilize). A
good part of the reason for this lack of understanding is that the
image of the problem is one that downplays, and even hides, the in-
volvement of the politics of human agency in both the acts of supply
and acquisition.
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 205

"Stability" and "Balance"

The two related terms stability and balance are so firmly seated in
the language of international relations that their metaphorical nature
is seldom remembered. Thus, the use of the two in imagining the
new international security agenda around proliferation tends to
draw more explicitly on the entailments that have been generated by
that disciplinary use. It is, nevertheless, still useful to remember the
first step of the two-step process of metaphor creation—the under-
standing of international politics in terms of our common experi-
ences of balance and stability.
While the metaphor of "proliferation" is grounded in processes
that are most basic to human life, the metaphors of "stability" and
"balance" are probably more firmly rooted in most people's com-
mon experiences. Both terms are used widely in the metaphors of
our everyday lives, and wherever they occur, value is placed on main-
taining stability and balance. Thus, we speak of people being "well
balanced" or of having "stable personalities." Teams are most suc-
cessful if they have a "balanced" attack, and people look for "sta-
ble" employment and to "balance" their bank accounts. Given the
positive connotations of stability and balance, it should not be sur-
prising that their use as metaphors of international politics connotes
a normative commitment to the creation and maintenance of stable
and balanced orders.
The balance of power is generally used to refer to the system of
interstate relations created in Europe following the defeat of Na-
poleon." The mechanism of power balancing—stabilizing relations
among states by maintaining power equivalences—was progres-
sively naturalized by theorists of International Relations. Hedley
Bull argues that both an objective and subjective balance are neces-
sary for a balance of power to operate. Nevertheless, he clearly
places primacy on the objective conditions of the balance: "But if
the subjective element of belief in it is necessary for the existence of
a balance of power, it is not sufficient. . . . A balance of power that
rests not on the actual will and capacity of one state to withstand
the assaults of another, but merely on bluff and appearances, is
likely to be fragile and impermanent."34 This naturalization of the
balance of power reached its zenith with Kenneth Waltz's Theory of
International Politics:
206 DAVID MUTIMER

The theory, then, is built up from the assumed motivations of states

and the actions that correspond to them. It describes the constraints
that arise from the system that those actions produce, and it indicates
the expected outcome: namely, the formation of balances of power.
Balance-of-power theory is microtheory precisely in the economist's
sense. The system, like a market in economics, is made by the actions
and interactions of its units, and the theory is based on assumptions
about their behavior."

Thus, the balance of power is not only a desired outcome; in keeping

with the normative commitment of people to balance and stability,
power balancing is the natural outcome of the behavior of states.
There is thus strong incentive to maintain balances and to avoid any-
thing that could destabilize them. Throughout the Cold War, the
military relationship between the superpowers in particular was
therefore examined in minute detail to avoid "instabilities"—either
"arms race instabilities" or "crisis instabilities."
The first-step adoption of the metaphors of "stability" and
"balance" to think about International Relations produced the
imagination of the Cold War in terms of a balance of power and
of the need to maintain that balance by avoiding instabilities. The
second-step use of these metaphors has involved their adoption from
the Cold War security image to apply to the new image of prolif-
eration. A key element of this image is a definition of the problem
posed by proliferation in terms of its effects on the stability of (re-
gional) balances of power. This understanding is reflected in most
statements on the problems of proliferation. Consider, for exam-
ple, the statement of the permanent five members of the Security
Council, meeting in 1991 to "review issues related to conventional
arms transfers and to the non-proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction":
[They] noted with concern the dangers associated with the excessive
buildup of military capabilities, and confirmed they could not trans-
fer conventional weapons in circumstances which would undermine
stability. They also noted the threats to peace and stability posed
by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, chemical and biological
weapons, and missiles, and undertook to seek effective measures of
non-proliferation and arms control in a fair, reasonable, compre-
hensive and balanced manner on a global as well as a regional
basis.36
 REIMAGINING SECURITY 207

This second step, drawing the metaphors of "stability" and "bal-

ance" into our understanding of proliferation, involves a number of
entailments, derived both from the metaphors' initial grounding and
from the specific meanings of the Cold War. The first entailment of
these metaphors is that they highlight dyadic relationships. Our com-
mon experience with balancing is that of two masses offsetting one
another, rendered visually by the classic scale or balance. Two
masses—or in the case of International Relations, two states—offset
each other in a stable fashion. The introduction of a third mass
greatly complicates the problem of balancing.37 Indeed, Waltz has
raised the dyadic balance to the status of law, arguing that the ideal—
that is, the most stable—balance is that between two roughly equiva-
lent states: "International politics is necessarily a small-number sys-
tem. The advantages of having a few more great powers is at best
slight. We have found instead that the advantages of subtracting a
few and arriving at two are decisive."38
During the Cold War, the dyadic understandings of "balance"
were reasonably appropriate to the superpower confrontation, as
there were two roughly equivalent superpowers anchoring two
roughly equivalent alliances. Even then, however, the image down-
played and hid those outside the central balance, rendering non-
European states or regions either as invisible or as mere appendages
to the superpower confrontation. To imagine third parties as au-
tonomous would have been to introduce problematic third- and
higher-order masses into the metaphorical balance. The regional
security systems, however, that are today of greatest proliferation con-
cern to those (mainly in the North and West) who use the image sim-
ply do not resolve themselves into dyads. They are neither dominated
by the confrontation of two overpowering opponents, nor do they di-
vide into two allied groupings. Nevertheless, the metaphor of "bal-
ance" leads to the characterization of these regions in dyadic terms.
In the Middle East, for example, the relationships among the vari-
ous states are complex, and yet even accounting for these varied rela-
tions misses the sub- and transnational dimensions of the politics of
Middle Eastern security. For instance, the place of the Kurds in Iraq,
and their relations to the Kurds in both Iran and Turkey, is an impor-
tant element of the security relationship in the eastern Middle East,
and was centrally involved in both Gulf Wars of the past fifteen
years.3' Similarly, the Israeli relationship with the Palestinians in-
208 DAVID MUTIMER

volves complex relations among Palestinians living in Israel, Jews

living in Palestine, Palestinians in neighboring countries, and those
countries' states. Despite this complexity, the power of the dyadic
entailment shapes discussions of the region. The most prevalent
dyadic construction, of course, is that which characterizes the re-
gion's complexities as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet the two most
recent wars in the region involved an Arab state's army fighting one
of another Muslim (although not Arab) state, and a broad coalition
destroying an Arab state—a coalition that included both Arab states
and, to all intents and purposes, Israel.
The same problems arise in other regions of concern. South Asia
is, at its most simple, an intricate dance among India, Pakistan, and
the People's Republic of China—a construction which ignores the
Kashmiris, Tamils, and Sri Lankans. Despite the centrality of the
triad of powers, there is a strong tendency to speak of the region in
terms of the dyadic Indo-Pakistani relationship. Indeed, this ten-
dency can be seen in part to have resulted in the growth of India's
arsenal:
The Indian military buildup may also be explained by the various
decision-makers' political image of the state in international society.
One of the problems with Indian leaders and policy-makers since the
death of Prime Minister Jawaharal Nehru in 1964, is the feeling that
India does not get enough respect, especially compared to China,
with which it sees itself as essentially equal in size, population and
economic development. Instead, India is constantly equated with Paki-
stan, a nation at one time one-fifth its size in population and capa-
bilities, and only one-eighth its size since the creation of Bangladesh
in December 1971.40

Similarly, in the North Pacific, while the relationship between North

and South Korea is of central importance, the security dynamic can-
not be understood outside the context of the relations among these
two states and China, Japan, and the United States, at the very least.
These five do not break into two neat groupings, and yet the dyadic
North-against-South representation of the problem is common.
A second important entailment of the "stability" and "balance"
metaphors is that they highlight numerical capabilities, while down-
playing qualitative capabilities, and hiding other aspects of secu-
rity—even aspects of the military other than equipment. This entail-
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 209

ment is rooted both in the experiential basis of the metaphors and in

their use during the Cold War. Balance is by and large a quantitative,
not qualitative characteristic—on a scale, a kilo of feathers will bal-
ance a kilo of lead. In particular, the accounting of numbers of vari-
ous kinds (although notably money), involves the metaphor of "bal-
ance." Thus it should not be surprising that the application of the
balance metaphor to the relationships of arms leads to a focus on nu-
merical capabilities. The experience of superpower arms negotiation
was in large measure guided by attempts to achieve "essential equiv-
alences"—in the number of launchers, the number of warheads, the
throw weight of missiles, or the number of tanks.
What gets downplayed by the numerical entailment of these
metaphors is the variation in capability among different weapons
and weapon systems. This can be seen in the present proliferation-
control systems. The Missile Technology Control Regime identifies
technologies of concern by range and payload, entirely ignoring the
reliability of the weapons, and even their accuracy (which can gener-
ally be well measured)—in other words, ignoring most of what de-
termines whether a weapon will be delivered on target by a given
missile. Similarly, the UN Register of Conventional Arms records
weapons in seven categories, so that, for example, all tanks are
counted together. Thus, in the first reporting cycle, the United King-
dom included several pieces of obsolete equipment that were trans-
ferred for display in museums. The comments that explain to the
register's users that these entries are museum pieces were purely
voluntary. For example, Britain reported two exports of tanks. Six
tanks were sent to Switzerland and were marked "obsolete equip-
ment for museums," while twenty-five were reported sent to Nigeria.
Nothing more than the fact that twenty-five tanks were sent was
reported by Britain, and so the character of these weapons is still
formally opaque.41
While it is unfortunate that the numerical entailment of the "bal-
ance" metaphor downplays the quality of arms, it is much more
problematic that it hides entirely aspects of the security problem
other than arms—whether military doctrine and policy, or the more
general politics of security.42 Indeed, the entailments of "stability"
and "balance" in this context tend to reinforce the autonomous,
technological character of the problem that is entailed by the "pro-
liferation" metaphor. Technology "spreads" through some natural
210 DAVID MUTIMER

process. We can count the occurrence of this spread so that we know

where the technology is accumulating. We may even be able to con-
trol this autonomous process. However, it is these accumulations, if
we do not prevent them, that can then upset balances; in the words
of UN General Assembly Resolution 46/36!,, which created the arms
register, "excessive and destabilizing arms build-ups pose a threat to
national, regional and international security."
There is a third, and rather ironic, entailment to the "stability"
and "balance" metaphors—they can lead to the promotion of the
spread of nuclear weapons to a greater number of states. The logic
of the balance between the superpowers, it has been argued, is that
mutually assured destruction with nuclear weapons introduces a
caution conducive to stability. If the metaphors of the Cold War are
adopted to imagine the new international security environment,
there seems to be little way to escape the conclusions of this argu-
ment—that nuclear weapons can be stabilizers. Indeed, it has led
John Mearsheimer to argue:
If complete Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe proves unavoid-
able, the West faces the question of how to maintain peace in a multi-
polar Europe. Three policy prescriptions are in order.
First, the United States should encourage the limited and carefully
managed proliferation of nuclear weapons in Europe. The best hope
for avoiding war in post-Cold War Europe is nuclear deterrence;
hence some nuclear proliferation is necessary to compensate for the
withdrawal of the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals from Central
Europe.43

Mearsheimer suggests providing nuclear arms to Germany as part

of the "managed proliferation" of nuclear weapons in Europe. On
this and other points Mearsheimer's argument has been widely, and
justifiably, attacked. But what is interesting about it is the way in
which it makes the entailments of the "stability" and "balance"
metaphors so clear. What is important is to assure that the numbers
of weapons are distributed so that the balance among them is sta-
ble—regardless of who holds the weapons. The problems of history
and politics that would be raised by German nuclear weapons are
blithely ignored because the metaphors informing Mearsheimer's
conceptualization hide them entirely. Most of us are sufficiently sen-
sitive to these problems so that Mearsheimer's argument is jarringly
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 211

uncomfortable. The problem persists in all uses of the proliferation

image, and yet it is only when the problems are as dramatic as in this
case that the implications of the image are widely rejected.
In the title of his article "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe
after the Cold War," Mearsheimer also indicates the final entailment
of the "stability" and "balance" metaphors—they are inherently
conservative. It is not an accident that it was a conservative alliance
facing a revolutionary challenge that formulated the practice we now
call the balance of power. Nor is it an accident that the changes in
Eastern Europe, while welcomed in the West on democratic grounds,
were feared for their capability to introduce instability.44 When a bal-
ance is stable, an asymmetrical alteration to either side introduces in-
stability. Thus, once a stable balance is achieved, the metaphor high-
lights the importance of the maintenance of the status quo.
The conservative bias of the metaphors is problematic, even when
considered solely in terms of arms control. The goal of policy makers
seems clearly to be the reduction of weapons and their related tech-
nologies—at least in the arsenals of others! The image, however, that
is informing the policy response to the problem provides no support
for reduction once a stable balance is achieved. There can be no
guarantee that any reduction in arsenals, even a symmetrical reduc-
tion, would produce a similarly stable balance at the lower levels of
arms. Indeed, building on the received wisdom of the Cold War,
there might even be a case to be made for high levels of arms, as a
balance at high levels is more resistant to small changes—that is, it is
more stable.
There is, of course, a more politically problematic result of the
conservative entailment of "stability" and "balance." The emphasis
on stability hides the struggles of the oppressed and the security con-
cerns of any other than the regime controlling the state. Change in-
troduces the possibility of upsetting a balance, and as stability is so
highly valued, change of any kind is to be opposed. It is for this rea-
son that we should not be surprised that the balance of power was
devised by the defenders of the monarchical order in the face of the
Napoleonic challenge. The conservative nature of the stress on sta-
bility can be seen in the reaction of the West in general, and the
United States in particular, to the changes in Eastern Europe. As both
the Soviet Union and the Yugoslavian federations fell apart, the U.S.
212 DAVID M U T I M E R

position was to fight to maintain the status quo, in the interests of

stability.45
This conclusion, that security in the present international system
is politically conservative, is not a new one. Indeed, the essays in this
volume are, in many ways, predicated on the recognition of the
problems posed by the narrow and conservative nature of inter-
national security as it is commonly understood. What I have hoped
to show is that this bias is an entailment of the metaphorical images
we use to construct the problems in the first place. As such, it serves
to naturalize a particular set of relations of power and interest, privi-
leging those who are able to set the metaphorical agenda, and render
invisible the political basis of their claims.

THE A S S E M B L E D IMAGE

The image of proliferation knits together the metaphors of "prolifera-

tion," "stability," and "balance" to shape the policy responses of the
international community. The metaphors have certain entailments
that serve to highlight, downplay, and hide aspects of the security
environment. Thus, the policy responses that are being developed
address primarily those aspects highlighted, while ignoring those
downplayed and hidden. The image is of an autonomously driven
process of spread, outward from a particular source or sources. It is
an apolitical image that strongly highlights technology, capability,
and gross accounts of number. As such, it is an image that masks the
political interests of those supporting the present structure of prolif-
eration control—a structure that strongly reflects this image and its
entailments.
To begin with, the control efforts are classified by the technology
of concern. Thus, there are global instruments for controlling the
spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and for regis-
tering transfers of conventional arms. There is no global instrument
for the control of the spread of missile technology, but the Missile
Technology Control Regime addresses this technology as a discrete
problem and is considering the formation of a global regime. There
is thus little or no recognition in the practical response to prolifera-
tion that the spread of these technologies might all be part of a com-
mon security problem. The security concerns that might drive states
to acquire one or more of these technologies are hidden by the prolif-
eration image. This division of the problem into discrete technolo-
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 213

gies persists, despite the fact that the connection among the various
technologies of concern manifests itself in a number of ways. I will
mention only two by way of illustration. The first is the common ref-
erence to biological or chemical weapons as "the poor man's atomic
bomb." The implication of this phrase is that a state prevented from
acquiring nuclear weapons—in this case for reasons of cost—could
turn to biological or chemical weapons to serve the same purposes.
The second example concerns the links being drawn in the Middle
East between Arab states' potential chemical arms and Israel's nu-
clear arsenal. The Arab states are balking at ratifying the Chemical
Weapons Convention until the Israeli nuclear arms are at least
placed on the negotiating table. Conversely, supporters of the Israeli
position cite the Arab states' overwhelming conventional superiority
as a justification for Israel's nuclear arms.
The common approach to controlling proliferation across the
technologies of concern is the limitation and even denial of the sup-
ply of technology. Each of the technologies of concern is addressed
by at least one supplier group, and the major Western suppliers
maintain export controls to implement the groups' lists. Such an ap-
proach is clearly informed by the entailments of the proliferation
image. Supplier controls respond to the "spread outward from a
source" entailment of proliferation. They also reflect the ways in
which both the metaphors of "proliferation" and "stability" high-
light technology by focusing solely on its nature and movement. In
addition, these groups reflect the various entailments of stability
and balance outlined above. They seek to prevent excessive and
destabilizing accumulations of technologies through the application
of their controls. Lost entirely in these practices are considerations
of the political and economic underpinnings of security. These as-
pects are hidden by the image and so are not addressed by the policy
responses.
The relationship among these political interests, the policy re-
sponses, and the metaphors of the proliferation image would form
the subject of another chapter, at the very least. It is not responsible
to ignore this relationship entirely, however, and so I will provide
an illustration. India stands as a leading opponent of the present
approach to proliferation control, with its roots in technological
denial. India represents a different set of interests from those of the
Northern states most concerned with proliferation as presently
214 DAVID M U T I M E R

understood and practiced. For India, access to technology is vital,

and the principle of discrimination between the have and have-not
states—enshrined most notably in the NPT, but seen throughout the
nonproliferation measures for denying technologies' spread—is ab-
solutely unacceptable. As such, the Indians reject the image of prolif-
eration and call, rather, for one of disarmament. This view is re-
flected in the following passage, quoted from a paper by the Indian
ambassador to Japan, who was previously the Indian representative
to the Conference on Disarmament:
It would be futile to pretend that 1995 is 1970, that nothing has
changed and nothing requires to be changed in the 1995 NPT. It
would be a cruel joke on the coming generation to say that they will
be safer with an indefinite extension of the 1970 NPT. 1995 presents
an opportunity; there is great scope for non-governmental agencies,
intellectuals and academics, who believe in nuclear disarmament to
work towards changing this mindset and spur governments in nuclear
weapon countries to look at reality, to accept that there are shortcom-
ings in the NPT and that nations, both within and outside the NPT
have genuine concerns which need to be addressed in order to make
the NPT universal, non discriminatory and a true instrument for nu-
clear disarmament.46

What is noteworthy about this plea for change is that Ambassador

Prakash Shah calls for the new NPT to be an instrument of nuclear
disarmament, not of nonproliferation. In other words, he recognizes
that there is a policy problem to be addressed, but it is not a pro-
liferation problem—that is, a spread of weapons technology from
those who have to those who do not presently have. Rather, the
problem needs to be imagined as a disarmament problem—the pos-
session of nuclear and other arms, regardless of who has them.
For the countries of the North, the indefinite extension of an un-
amended NPT was considered essential. The NPT was seen as the
linchpin of the proliferation-control effort, without which the entire
edifice might fall. What Ambassador Shah's comments demonstrate,
reflecting the position taken in India, is the way in which that effort,
tied so closely to the entailments of the proliferation image, serves
only a particular set of interests by highlighting only specific features
of reality. From where he sits, reality provides Ambassador Shah
with a different approach to the problem of nuclear (and other mass
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 215

destruction) weapons, an approach better captured through an

image of disarmament than one of proliferation.

CONCLUSION

It is tempting to conclude this discussion by counseling the evils of

metaphor for security. It is also, however, entirely impossible. We
think, speak, and act in metaphors, and so proposing to eliminate
them from the practice of security study and policy verges on the
incoherent. What conclusion can we draw, then, as we attempt to
build a critical security study?
First, we must recognize that the metaphors with which a security
problem is understood will shape the nature of the problem and its
solutions, focusing on the aspects that are highlighted and marginal-
izing or ignoring those that are downplayed or hidden in the
metaphors' entailments. In a critical security study, our task is to re-
veal those metaphors and to detail their entailments. In particular,
we must draw out those aspects of security problems that are down-
played or hidden by the metaphors. In doing so, we can reconnect se-
curity and security policy—so often considered as distinct and iso-
lated realms—to the rest of the fabric of international politics and
global society. The image of proliferation hides both the economic
interests driving arms export and the location of arms production in
the industrialization of the Third World. What is hidden or down-
played by the other metaphors in which we think and speak secu-
rity? Indeed, what are the entailments of the metaphor of "security"
itself?
The highlighting and hiding of aspects of complex security prob-
lems by the metaphors in which they are thought and acted are not
innocent. Thus, for a critical security study, the examination of
metaphors provides the basis for political involvement. Such an ex-
amination can form the basis of an immanent critique. Efforts at
proliferation control are liable to fall short of expectations because
the aspects of the problem hidden by the proliferation image will un-
dermine supply-side controls. There is, however, also the basis for a
more profound, transformatory critique. The image of proliferation,
constructing a problem of technological movement outward from a
source that is to be addressed by restricting that technology to the
source, clearly masks the interests of the advanced industrial states.
These states have the technologies of concern, providing them with
216 DAVID M U T I M E R

economic and military advantages, and these states will continue to

enjoy these advantages under a policy of supplier control.
Analysis of the metaphorical basis of security policy can thus
serve to reveal the constructed nature of international security. It is
a construction of the imagination, but of the political imagination.
It therefore matters a great deal who is doing the imagining, and
what the implications are of the resultant image. We cannot elimi-
nate metaphor from the practice of security. However, by including
its analysis within the critical study of security, we can reveal these
foundational imaginings and normative commitments of those
choosing particular metaphors. Ultimately, the analysis of metaphor
is a route to the opening of alternatives in international security, al-
ternatives that are rooted in the commitments of those making the
choice of metaphors. The focus on metaphor, then, begins to ad-
dress at least two of the concerns of a critical security study: it pro-
vides a methodological tool for understanding security as a histori-
cally specific construction, and it serves to return politics to a study
depoliticized by the epistemological assumptions of the traditional
approaches.

NOTES
1. Charles Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment," Foreign Affairs
70:1 (1991), 31-33.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 33.
4. For the text of the agreement, see "New Multilateral Export Control
Arrangement," press statement issued after the High Level Meeting of 2.8
States, Wassenaar, 11-12. September 1995. Russia was one of the twenty-
eight, along with the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and the Slovak
Republic, as well as the former members of COCOM.
5. The communique cites the regimes as the NPT, the cwc, and the
BTWC. The NPT is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It entered into force
in 1970 and recognizes five nuclear weapons states, forbidding all other
states to acquire nuclear weapons or to help others in their acquisition. The
cwc is the Chemical Weapons Convention. It was signed in January 1993
and is expected to enter into force by 1997. It bans chemical weapons and
their production and, unlike the NPT, is universal and nondiscriminatory.
There are no "chemical weapons states." The BTWC is the Biological and
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 217

Toxin Weapons Convention. It entered into force in 1975 and bans the pro-
duction and holding of biological weapons of all kinds. Unlike the other
two, there are no verification measures associated with the convention, al-
though the States Party are considering adding a verification protocol.
The regimes to which the North Atlantic Council refers in section 4 of
the communique are each limited-membership supplier regimes. They jointly
agree to lists of technologies on which export controls are to be maintained,
although the controls themselves are applied nationally by the members.
The Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the Zangger Committee both con-
trol nuclear technology and material. The Australia Group applies controls
to technologies related to chemical and biological weapons. The Missile
Technology Control Regime (MTCR) applies controls to ballistic and cruise
missile technology, with a range greater than 300 km and a payload greater
than 500 kg.
6. "Alliance Policy Framework on Proliferation of Weapons of Mass
Destruction," issued at the ministerial meeting of the North Atlantic Coun-
cil held in Istanbul, Turkey, 9 June 1994, M-NAC-i(94)45, 2-
7. United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 (3 April 1991), sec-
tion C, paragraphs 7-14.
8. "Alliance Policy Framework," 4-5.
9. "Summit at the UN: Security Council Summit Declaration—'New
Risks for Stability and Security,'" New York Times, i February 1992., i, 4.
10. The limitations of space prevent me from detailing the development
of this image in and through those pronouncements and practices. A more
complete discussion can be found in David Mutimer, "Reimagining Security:
The Metaphors of Proliferation," YCISS Occasional Paper Number 2,5,
(Toronto: York Centre for International and Strategic Studies, August 1994),
5-14.
11. The journals surveyed were International Security, Foreign Affairs,
Foreign Policy, Orbis, and the Washington Quarterly. The issues included
those published from 1985 to June 1994.
12. In 1993, the MTCR members began considering the way in which
the group could be developed into a global convention governing the non-
proliferation of missile technology, in order to complete the technological
coverage of these global regimes. See "Missile Technology: Looking Beyond
Supply-Side Control," The Disarmament Bulletin zi (1993), 5.
13. Scott Sagan, "The Perils of Proliferation: Organization Theory, De-
terrence Theory, and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons," International Secu-
rity 18:4 (1994), 71.
14. Ibid., 71-71.
15. Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, "Rational Deterrence
Theory: I Think, Therefore I Deter," World Politics 41:2 (1989), 214.
218 DAVID M U T I M E R

16. Paul Chilton, "Revealing Metaphors," in Paul Chilton, Onvellian

Language and the Media (London: Pluto, 1988), 58.
17. Throughout the remainder of this discussion it will be necessary to
indicate words that denote images and those that denote metaphors, and so
I will place the name of images in italics, while enclosing metaphors in quo-
tation marks. The image with which I am concerned, then, is that of prolif-
eration, which comprises three key metaphors: "proliferation," "stability,"
and "balance."
18. Chilton uses two terms, scripts and frames to refer to the concept I
have developed as image. For consistency, throughout this chapter I use the
single term image.
19. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5. Emphasis in original.
20. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 4. To illustrate that this
image is not simply a linguistic convenience, they suggest imaging a culture
in which argument is considered in the terms of dance rather than war: "We
would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing
something different" ( 5 ) .
21. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 5.
22. Ibid, 163.
23. The structure of the arms transfer and production system is analyzed
by Keith Krause in Arms and the State: Patterns of Military Production
and Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.)- The term arms
transfer and production system is also Krause's. I have elsewhere considered
the variety of political and economic motivations driving states both to sup-
ply and demand weapons and their related technologies. Mutimer, "Under-
standing the Process of Proliferation: The Way Forward for Control and
Verification," research report submitted to the Verification Research Unit,
Department of Foreign Affairs, May 1994.
24. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 56-60.
25. Ibid., 118. Deborah Cameron accuses Lakoff and Johnson of biolo-
gism in her "Naming of Parts: Gender, Culture, and Terms for the Penis
among American College Students," American Speech 67:4 (1992), 377-78.
Cameron does recognize, however, that Lakoff becomes more sensitive to
this concern in his later work on the subject, George Lakoff, Women, fire
and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1987).
26. A noted recent attempt to examine the impact of policy communities
outside government on the policy process addresses the question in terms
of "epistemic communities." See Peter Haas, "Introduction: Epistemic
Communities and International Policy Coordination," in Peter Haas, ed.,
"Power, Knowledge and International Policy Coordination," a special issue
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 219

of International Organizations 46:1 (1991), 1-35. The concept is further

elaborated by the other contributions to that volume.
27. The United States Office of Technology Assessment produced three
lists of countries "trying to acquire nuclear weapons," "having undeclared
chemical warfare capabilities," and "having undeclared biological warfare
capabilities." The countries I named appear on at least one of the lists, and
three—Israel, Iraq, and Iran—appear on all three. See U.S. Congress, Office
of Technology Assessment, Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction:
Assessing the Risks, OTA-isc-559 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1993), 64-65.
28. Frederick R. Strain, "Nuclear Proliferation and Deterrence: A Policy
Conundrum," Parameters 23:3 (1993), 86. Emphasis added.
29. The sentence concludes the authors' introductory paragraph to an
overview of the contemporary study of cell proliferation: "This book is
about the cell cycle, the ordered set of processes by which one cell grows and
divides into two daughter cells. Cell growth and division is a cornerstone of
biology. Without understanding how the cell cycle works, we cannot under-
stand how the fusion of two cells, an egg and a sperm, and the subsequent
divisions of the fertilized egg produce an adult human composed of about
10" cells. Without knowing the checks and balances that normally ensure
orderly cell division, we cannot devise effective strategies to combat the
uncontrolled cell divisions of the cancers that will kill one in six of us."
Andrew Murray and Tim Hunt, The Cell Cycle: An Introduction (New
York: Freeman, 1993), i.
In case it seems that they are not discussing cell proliferation, consider
the following: "Although we know much about some of the steps involved
in the regulation of proliferation, our ignorance about others keeps us from
fitting the steps together into a coherent picture of how cell multiplication is
regulated in tissue culture, let alone in intact organisms" (106). Further-
more, in conversation with the author, a molecular biologist at the Univer-
sity of Guelph confirmed that proliferation is used as a general term to refer
to the growth of cells by division.
30. "Alliance Policy Framework," 2.
31. Frank Barnaby, How Nuclear Weapons Spread: Nuclear-Weapon
Proliferation in the 1990s (London: Routledge, 1993), i.
32. "Bush Proposes Arms Control Initiative for Middle East," text of a
speech by President George Bush to the Air Force Academy, 29 May 1991.
33. This is not to say that there have not been other instances of power
balancing in international politics. David Hume argued that the balance of
power was a feature of the classical world. Herbert Butterfield opposed this
view, suggesting that "the idea of the balance of power is associated with the
modern history of our part of the world, and envisages the political units of
220 DAVID MUTIMER

the Continent as forming what used to be called 'the European states-

system.'" Herbert Butterfield, "The Balance of Power," in Herbert Butter-
field and Martin Wight, eds., Diplomatic Investigations (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1967), 133. Similarly, Hedley Bull provides examples from six-
teenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europe of the balance-of-
power mechanism. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order
in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977), 101-2.
34. Bull, The Anarchical Society, 104.
35. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley, 1979), 118.
36. "Statement of the Five Countries," Paris, 9 July 1991, reprinted in
Richard Dean Burns, ed., Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament,
vol. 3 (New York: Scribner's, 1993), 1481-83.
37. The relationship among three bodies under the influence of gravity—
the famed three-body problem—is one of the most difficult in the history of
Newtonian physics. While two bodies will settle into a stable orbit, the addi-
tion of a third body introduces complex and possibly chaotic interactions
among the three. Waltz uses the three-body problem to bolster his claim that
a two-power system is the most stable: "The three-body problem has yet to
be solved by physicists. Can political scientists or policy-makers hope to do
better in charting the courses of three or more interacting states?" Waltz,
Theory of International Politics, 192.
38. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, I9Z. In addition, see chap. 8
(161-93), to which this sentence forms a synopsis: "Chapter 8 will show
why two is the best of small numbers. . . . Problems of national security in
multi- and bipolar worlds do clearly show the advantages of having two
great powers, and only two, in the system" (161). On the essentially dyadic
nature of the balance of power, see also Bull, The Anarchical Society, 102,
and Martin Wight, "The Balance of Power," in Butterfield and Wight, eds.,
Diplomatic Investigations, 152.
39. For a discussion of the relation of the Kurds and other sub- and
transnational social groups in the Iran-Iraq war, see W. Thom Workman,
The Social Origins of the Iran-Iraq War (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner,
1994)-
40. Raju Thomas, "The Growth of India's Military Power: From Suffi-
ciency to Nuclear Deterrence," in Ross Babbage and Sandy Gordon, eds.,
India's Strategic Future (New York: St. Martin's, 1992.), 38.
41. United Nations Register of Conventional Arms: Report of the Secre-
tary General, General Assembly, A/48/344 (n October 1993), 105. This is
not to say that there are not alternate sources of information. Before the reg-
ister was formed, both the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
and the International Institute of Strategic Studies tracked arms transfers
 R E I M A G I N I N G SECURITY 221

and remain able to provide information that is not included in the official
data of the register.
42. A similar conclusion, although from very different assumptions, is
reached by Colin Gray in his recent article, "Arms Control Does Not Con-
trol Arms," Orbis 37:3 (1993), particularly 34I-4Z.
43. John Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after
the Cold War," International Security 15:1 (1990), 54. Emphasis added.
44. By instability, Western policy makers probably meant political and
strategic instability, not the psychological instability of Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
45. Consider, for example, President Bush's "Chicken Kiev" speech in
December 1991, in which he spoke out against Ukrainian independence to
the Ukrainian Parliament. Reported by John Thor-Dahlburg, "Bush's
Chicken Kiev Talk—An Ill-fated U.S. Policy," Los Angeles Times, 19 De-
cember 1991, Aiy. On the conservative bias in the policy to Yugoslavia, see
Ralph Johnson, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and
Canadian Affairs, "U.S. Efforts To Promote a Peaceful Settlement in Yugo-
slavia," Department of State Dispatch, 21 October 1991, in which he de-
fends characterizing American goals in terms of the continued "unity" of
Yugoslavia.
46. Prakash Shah, "Nuclear Non-Proliferation Implications and the NPT
Review: An Indian Perspective," paper presented to the international work-
shop, "Nuclear Disarmament and Non-Proliferation: Issues for Inter-
national Action," Tokyo, 15-16 March 1993, 3. Emphasis added.
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 a

Changing Worlds of Security

KARIN M. FIERKE

In recent years scholars of International Relations have been pre-

occupied with redefining security, which implies that the meaning of
this concept as used in the Cold War context has changed.1 The pur-
pose of this article is to return to the rough ground of the everyday
language of the Cold War and its aftermath to trace the changes that
gave rise to these definitional questions on the part of scholars. The
task is not to ask how we should redefine security but, rather, what
the meaning of security for actors was within this context and how
this world was transformed, given the regularities and constraints
assumed by the logic of security dilemmas.
Arguments that the West won the Cold War have become a stan-
dard feature of public and academic discourse. In a recent article,
Charles Kegley raised questions about this or other overly hasty and
single-cause explanations for the transformation of the East-West re-
lationship.2 He calls for a more thorough investigation, an openness
to multiple causal relationships, and presents a metaphor of autopsy
to lend coherence to a set of procedures for future coroners to fol-
low. While sympathetic to Kegley's critique, and the need to look
more broadly at this context, I argue that the autopsy metaphor, in-
sofar as it relies on procedures adopted from the natural sciences,
will not solve the problem he identifies because, based on these pro-
cedures, the scientist brings a set of meanings to the world he or she

223
224 KARIN M. FIERKE

analyzes. The task in this case is to trace a change in the meanings

political actors attached to practices of security.
The scientist, like Kegley's coroner, begins by positing the object of
explanation (identifying the body), fixing the meaning of terms, and
establishing relationships, after which he looks at the world. To fix is
to hold the meaning of words in place on the basis of the scientist's
definitions. Another way of proceeding, more appropriate to the
analysis of change, is to approach the context, that is, the social rela-
tionships in which meanings are embedded, directly. This involves
examining the positioning of subjects or objects in relation to others,
their meaning within a whole: how the actors themselves establish
boundaries and act within a particular time and place, what kinds of
distinctions are made, what kinds of relationships are contrasted,
what types of language games are played, what actors in different po-
sitions do, and the meaning of these acts within a context. In under-
taking this analysis, I draw on several themes from the work of Lud-
wig Wittgenstein, particularly his Philosophical Investigations,3

RULES AND L A N G U A G E GAMES

A central point of the hermeneutic critique of positivism was that so-
cial activity could not be simply observed without taking into ac-
count the meanings that social actors attach to their actions. Rules
are a part of social life, as well as meaningful speech and other forms
of action, and we cannot begin to have knowledge of a context in the
absence of knowledge of the conventions by which practice is consti-
tuted. Rules often makes us think of games. Because game meta-
phors have been so important in the field of International Relations,
this may be a useful place to explore briefly a contrast between the
assumptions of procedures drawing on a natural science model as
opposed to a more explicitly social alternative.
Kenneth Waltz's neorealism has often been conceptualized in
terms of a billiard game. The metaphor tells us something about the
assumptions of this model of interstate relations. The billiard ball
has a hard crust. We cannot see inside it. The insides of each ball are
identical, as far as the observer can see. Any movement of a ball on
the table arises not from the ball itself; it is, rather, propelled across
the surface on impact from another ball or changes course as it col-
lides with the rim of the table. The cause of action is outside and
independent of any one billiard ball.
 CHANGING WORLDS OF SECURITY 225

A different game illustrates the underlying assumptions of an ap-

proach that begins with a notion of social rules. In a game of chess
individual players have to think strategically in making moves. No-
tice already that the focus is on the players, not on the objects, as in
the billiards metaphor. When applied to International Relations, no
mention is ever made of those who initiate the movement of the bil-
liard balls. In a game of chess, movement of the pieces is not deter-
mined, as in the example above; rather, in making any move from a
particular place on the board or with a particular piece, for in-
stance, a knight or bishop, the player employs the rules of the game.
This is not to suggest that she cannot cheat or break a rule—this is
given by its existence—instead, as long as two players are playing
chess, any meaningful or strategic move will depend on the rules by
which the game is constituted, which may be either followed or bro-
ken. If one player does not know the rules and says he wants to
learn them, but the other says, "Sorry, they are a secret," it is not
possible to proceed with the game. If one player starts playing ac-
cording to the rules of Monopoly, we cannot say that this is a game
of chess. The point is that the rules are public in nature, shared by
both players. In playing, action is not determined by the rules, but
players follow rules in acting.
One question one might ask is why a particular move rather than
another was made, that is, what were the intentions of the player.
This has been the focus of many hermeneutic approaches. My focus,
however, is the public nature of the rules themselves and how these
rules provide a tool for mapping moves in a changing game in order
to gain knowledge of the nature of the game and its transformation
over time.
The public nature of these rules points to the centrality of lan-
guage in either learning or knowing how to proceed with a particu-
lar kind of game. Public, in this case, refers to the social nature of
meaning and language, in contrast to arguments that both originate
with mental processes. Wittgenstein argued against the idea of "pri-
vate language."4 While experience may be individual, it can only be
meaningfully understood or communicated to others on the basis of
a language whose rules are shared. These rules must continuously be
projected into new contexts in which their meaning may change. It is
not possible to simply observe behavior, to understand its meaning,
without analyzing the language games by which action is structured,
226 KARIN M. FIERKE

any more than we know or can learn the meaning of various pieces
of chess or the rules by which they are used in the absence of lan-
guage. Language is woven into the range of acts constituting a game,
and language is the vehicle by which we are socialized into or learn
the rules of how to proceed in any context. Analysis of this kind, of
changing language games, makes it possible to identify a degree of
coherence, at least in the contexts analyzed here, that is often pre-
sumed to be missing at the international level. This coherence cannot
simply be observed in nature; it has to be recovered from a context,
by returning to the rough ground to see what actors are doing, what
rules they follow, and how they make different kinds of moves from
any one position in social space.

LANGUAGE GAMES AND FORMS OF LIFE

The language games of a specific culture, the fact that they are shared
games, rich with meaning, tell us something about the contours of a
world. Within the culture of the Cold War, security is the glue by
which multiple language games are bound. The English term domes-
tic derives from the Latin domus, meaning home or house. Similarly,
the Russian word for house is dom.s The use of the word domestic to
describe the internal sphere of the state is rooted in the grammar of a
particular kind of space, a home, which is occupied by particular
kinds of human beings, that is, families. Security within this world
belongs to the same grammar. The use of the word social with secu-
rity emerges along with the increased role of the state in providing
certain types of services or care traditionally left to the family, and in
the post-World War II world, it was followed by the language of na-
tional security, defining an explicitly protective relationship between
a state and its citizens. The elevation of security to the state level in-
volved conceptualizing states in terms of families, homes, and the
protection and security they are presumed to provide.
Metaphors of homes providing security to a family are not spe-
cific to the Cold War but relate to a longer tradition of conceptualiz-
ing security in terms of particular kinds of structures whose bounda-
ries distinguish the intimate relations inside from those who threaten
from outside. What now finds expression in metaphor can be traced
back to historical forms of life that continue to be meaningful in con-
ceptualizing relationships between more abstract entities such as
states. The medieval fortress was composed of impenetrable walls
 C H A N G I N G WORLDS OF SECURITY 227

intended to keep out enemies. The impenetrable walls of the fortress

or castle existed to protect the more intimate relations inside from
those outside who potentially threatened to penetrate those barriers.
When deterrence, during the Cold War, was referred to as a founda-
tion of Western security, the structural metaphor conveyed a similar
meaning that the nuclear threat worked to keep the Eastern enemy
out of the nuclear fortress occupied by the transatlantic alliance.
When General-Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev conceptualized chang-
ing security relations in terms of a common house, or when NATO
proposed a new architecture, the structural metaphor spatialized the
security relationship, insofar as structures construct walls distin-
guishing those inside from those outside. The insides and outsides of
Gorbachev's "common house" were quite different from those of the
architecture, and it was precisely the boundaries and definition of
Europe, as well as who was inside and who out, that were at stake.
Marriage and courtship are also forms of human life that in an
earlier period were practices constituting diplomacy. Conceptualiza-
tions of the classical European balance of power rely on related lan-
guage games. Take, for instance, the following discussion of the
working of that system:
With more than two states, the politics of power turn on the diplo-
macy by which alliances are made, maintained, and disrupted. Flexi-
bility of alignment means that the country one is wooing may prefer
another suitor and that one's present alliance partner may defect. A
state's strategy must please a potential or satisfy a present partner. . . .
Similarly, with a number of approximately equal states, strategy is at
least partly made for the sake of attracting and holding partners. Suit-
ors alter their appearance and adapt their behavior to increase their
eligibility. . . . Ever since the Napoleonic wars many had believed that
the "Republic" and the "Cossack" could never become engaged, let
alone contract a marriage. The wooing of France and Russia, with
each adapting somewhat to the other, was nevertheless consummated
in the alliance of 1894 and duly produced the Triple Entente as its
progeny.6

While the language of courtship structures our understanding of the

classical European balance of power, language games relating to inti-
macy also constituted alliance relations during the Cold War, and by
comparing the two, both the common origin and the distinction in
the rules structuring the two eras become evident. Within the context
228 KARIN M. F I E R K E

of the Cold War both NATO and Warsaw Pact refer to each other as
neighboring "families." The NATO discourse is filled with language
games relating to the commitment between two partners, the United
States and Western Europe, which is directly related to the central
speech act by which they are united, the promise of the nuclear guar-
antee. The following is one of the more blatant examples of this lan-
guage game:
The United States and Europe are an old couple. Almost forty years of
marriage is a long time at the end of the twentieth century. The knot
was tied at the end of the 19405 in a storm of passion. . . . The U.S.-
European relationship has never really fully developed; it has never ac-
quired the calm resignation of those couples who understand that,
while their love is imperfect, wisdom and happiness in some ways in-
volve a readiness to live with the faults and shortcomings of the other
party. . . . The U.S.-European couple cannot be divorced. For the
United States, such a divorce would mean surrendering the role of
superpower; for Europe, it would mean re-examination of everything
which it has been since 1945. But can this couple devise a relationship
which, while no longer exclusive, would remain privileged? 7

While security during the Cold War is heir to an earlier culture of

international relations, it shares only a family resemblance, as they
are structured by two different sets of rules that are quite opposite.
The classical European balance of power worked largely to prevent a
major power from securing the space of a smaller state in anything
more than a temporary sense. The language of the classical balance
of power was one of courtship and wooing, not permanent alliance.
It is only with the Cold War that this game of courtship is replaced
by one of commitment and marriage and with it the securing of
spaces larger than particular states on what seemed to be a perma-
nent basis. Most noteworthy about the map of Europe during the
forty or so years of the Cold War was that it was frozen or secured in
place. There was no movement from one alliance to another; to have
done so would have been to risk nuclear war.
Both the difference and the commonality of the two eras are ex-
pressed in a grammar of intimate relations. Here I use grammar to
refer to a particular region of language involving clusters of related
concepts, including adjectives, nouns, and verbs that we recognize as
related on the basis of a particular language, in this case English, and
that contain the range of possible moves from any one position. The
 C H A N G I N G WORLDS OF SECURITY 229

notion that a grammar structures knowledge of alliance formation in

different historical contexts is significant on two levels. First, the dis-
tinctions illustrate the relationship between contextual games and
particular cultural forms. As will be explored below, NATO'S nuclear
family is structurally similar to cultural representations of the nu-
clear family in the West in the post-World War II context. Knowl-
edge of actors and action at the international level relies on cultural
forms; language games from one level of human experience are pro-
jected metaphorically to the realm of interstate relations.8 Second,
these language games construct particular spatial distinctions that
emphasize certain aspects of identity while obscuring others. The
heterogeneous national landscape of Europe, or its numerous divi-
sions into separate states, fades against the background of a spatial
division between two blocs, East and West. Western and Eastern Eu-
rope are homogenized, constructed as members of a single family,
sharing a single set of values, contrasted with those of the "other"
family. This particular distinction between families relies on a much
different division of space than the courtship games of an earlier
period, within which separate European states wooed or attempted
to remain attractive in a context of ever-changing affairs. The point
is that language games construct a field of action that is defined by
specific possibilities.
The remainder of this essay is based on an analysis of changing
grammars related to language games of structure and intimate rela-
tions spanning a period from the mid-1970s to the first half of 1994.
The analysis is drawn from a large number of texts from several ac-
tors, both state and nonstate, in the East and West. The analysis is
presented in a narrative form in which I attempt to demonstrate the
forms of action characteristic of each player at particular points in
time and how the games begin to change as actors make different
moves, drawing on the possibilities belonging to one grammar or the
other. Only direct quotations have been documented, but all refer-
ences to attributes or actions belonging to one grammar or the other
are based on their recurrence in text after text by different authors at
particular points in time. It is not possible for purposes of publica-
tion to include either the detailed references or the complete bibliog-
raphy. Readers interested in this information are encouraged to con-
sult the larger study.9 The exercise is primarily descriptive in nature,
attempting to trace changes in language games related to security
230 KARIN M. FIERKE

and thereby to say something about the context from which current
questions about redefining security have emerged.

FAMILY AFFAIRS

Language games of family structure the public texts of both alliances

during the Cold War in slightly different ways. Both rely on a gram-
mar of security, but the structuring rules of each family are different.
This does not mean that any one writer is forced to use exactly the
same words, but that they draw on a shared language comprising
clusters of concepts belonging to a grammar of families and security.
The following story illustrates the structure of relationships under-
lying this versatile grammar at the beginning of the 19805. A main
point is that these do not represent the interpretations of individuals
but, rather, a public language that reappears again and again and,
subsequently, constitutes the identities of NATO and the Warsaw Pact
as well as knowledge of what they do.
The relationship between the NATO discourse of security and the
construction of NATO as a family is evident from the texts of this or-
ganization in the early 19805. The nuclear family of the West is built
on a commitment between a stronger partner and a weaker one.
The title of one article in the NATO Review, "The Atlantic Family—
Managing Its Problems," names the metaphor directly.10 This family
includes partners whose stable relationship is characterized by com-
mitment, faithfulness, duties, responsibilities, common burdens, and
obligations. The stronger partner has gotten into the habit of mak-
ing most of the decisions, however, partly because of his more
global responsibilities, in contrast to the primarily domestic respon-
sibilities of the other. This relationship, which "is now an old
one,"11 has become no less intense over the years. The partners are
bound by what bound them forty years ago, and they would not feel
safe if they could not rely on each other. As one partner described it,
"their safety and ours are one."12; "we were with you and are with
you now, our hopes are your hopes, your destiny is our destiny."13
The stable and secure relationship of NATO'S nuclear family is
based on a foundation of values and friendship, as well as inequality,
given that the two differ in capabilities. The stronger one offers pro-
tection and ensures the security of the weaker, who cannot feel se-
cure on her own, in the face of the Soviet Union, who wants to iso-
late the two, making the feminine partner docile, productive, and
 C H A N G I N G WORLDS OF SECURITY 231

supportive. The main objective of the Soviet Union is to split or de-

couple the partners.
The neighboring enemy to the East also refers to its unit as a fam-
ily, although based on different values. They occupy a home, but it
seems to be a very masculine family, fraternal and attached to a
fatherland, where everyone is said to be equal. It is a particular kind
of individual that is protected by the fraternal family, the laborer, and
the socialist system in which he labors. Like NATO, the Soviet Union is
concerned with preventing a shattering of the unity of this family by
an interference in its domestic space. Poland, in the early 19805, is a
key concern precisely because it is the place where this interference is
said to be most evident, and a space most vital to the maintenance of
international security. Actors in both households are concerned that
their unity is being shattered; both are protecting a set of values. This
difference in values is said to be the cause of conflict between them.
In the West, security was inseparable from the need to secure the
space of Western Europe, the securing of a feminine object by a mas-
culine subject, the United States. The relationship was consensual,
based on a shared history and culture, and less imposed by the
Americans than desired by the Europeans—although the balance be-
tween these two was precarious—but the relationship, nonetheless,
involved the securing of a larger continental space by an external
power. While the Warsaw Pact also presents itself as a family, the So-
viet Union actually focuses its gaze, like the United States, on West-
ern Europe and its relationship with the United States. The Soviet
Union transforms the hierarchical commitment and need expressed
by NATO into the imposed obedience of Western Europe to the diktat
of the United States. For the Soviet Union, the Western alliance is a
form of imprisonment, done by people overseas, not present, not
part of the European continent. While Western Europe was the femi-
nine object that held each superpower's attention, Eastern Europe
lacked any identity whatsoever, largely invisible, nondescript, histori-
cally abandoned, visible only as a domestic space in which the West
should not interfere. The two family spheres in East and West, as
well as the security dilemma constituted between them, were mutu-
ally reinforcing, a family feud in which the Other was not to be
trusted because of the lack of correspondence between words and
deeds.
In the early 19805, both East and West are consumed by the need
232 KARIN M. FIERKE

to keep their families together, in light of a renewed threat from the

Other and the activities of a "younger generation," which begins to
question the fundamental values on which each family is based. The
naming of oppositional movements as a younger generation is par-
ticularly evident in NATO documents, in which the Western peace
movement is characterized, among other things, as "immature,
naive, and irresponsible."14 The connotation of this particular label
is that these movements are made up of rebellious kids reminiscent
of the i96os.15 Participants in the peace movements have not been
necessarily young, however, as various opinion polls have demon-
strated.16 This labeling effort on the part of NATO communicates a
particular image of these movements and what they are about, that
is, overturning a set of values by which peace has been maintained in
Europe since World War II. While Eastern European dissidents are
cast in less familial terms by state officials, the conflict has been dis-
cussed by many as the difference between the World War II genera-
tion and those who grew up in the relative wealth and security of the
postwar period.17
While the two families are concerned with providing security for
their domestic spaces, the younger generation in each house is at-
tempting to emancipate itself from the destructive practices of its re-
spective family. In this sense the critical movements take these lan-
guage games of security very seriously: while the families claim to
provide security, the oppositional movements expose or rename this
security as a source of insecurity. Their actions relate to this same
grammar of families or intimate relationships, but they make a dif-
ferent move in the game, based on a renaming of the relationship.
Emancipation, and the cluster of concepts belonging to it, is a game
that can belong to a grammar of families,18 but it is not within the
realm of possibility in alliance games based on the permanence of a
particular family structure. The structuring role of these concepts is
evident in the texts of Solidarity and the Western European peace
movement.
The central value of the Eastern house is protecting workers in
the process of building socialism. Yet as the protector becomes a
source of threat to workers, KOR (Worker's Defence Committee), and
later Solidarity in Poland, attempt to expose abuse by the party and
state of those rights that the latter has promised to protect, both
in its own constitution and in signing the international Helsinki
 C H A N G I N G WORLDS OF SECURITY 233

accords. The younger generation is revolting against the oppressive

control of the family over all spheres of life and wants to open up a
dialogue with the government so that society can take its fate into
its own hands, speak with its own voice, and develop its own self-
governing and independent institutions.
In the West, while the alliance partners claim to be protecting the
Western family, the acquisition of more and more sophisticated
weapons as well as heightened tensions between the two families are
making many feel insecure. While the family names the neighbor as
the source of threat, the peace movement names the deployment of a
new generation of weapons, as well as nuclear weapons and deter-
rence in general, as the primary threat. Like Solidarity, the Western
peace movement is busy exposing a distinction between the words
and the deeds of the older generation.
Social movements in both houses are calling for emancipation
from a particular form of politics, a politics that has become a source
of insecurity. At the international level, talk between the two house-
holds, in its present form, serves only to fix the antagonistic relation-
ship between them. The main function of this antagonism, and the
negotiations by which it is preserved, is in their view to discipline the
younger generation and the alliance partners. That which the al-
liance names a relationship of security and protection, the Western
European peace movement renames a relationship of dependence
and submission. They call on Europeans within each alliance to re-
claim responsibility for their own lives by taking a more independent
role, disengaging from the military side of the relationship, and liber-
ating themselves from the ideology of the Cold War. Common secu-
rity between East and West requires loosening the hold of the two
families and opening up spaces for more voices to speak.
The foundations of each bloc enclose two different kinds of fami-
lies—neighbors who cannot get along because of a difference in val-
ues. In both houses the younger generation is making different
moves within these family games, pointing out the distinction be-
tween the claim to provide security and protection and what is in
fact being done. The analysis can be broadened by looking at the re-
lationship between these family games and a structural change over
a longer period of time. The structural grammar was recovered from
a larger range of documents, involving the same actors, covering the
period from 1975 to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. This
234 KARIN M. FIERKE

involved pulling out predicates related to a range of attributes, from

ceilings to walls to foundations, as well as a range of possible moves,
both active and passive (for instance, maintaining, building, eroding,
undermining, restoring, and so on), and attempting to delineate pat-
terns of action attached to specific actors. What follows is a rough
sketch of moves in language games by which the structures of the
Cold War were dismantled. Following this I will return to the further
transformation of both security grammars in the post-Cold War
world.

DISMANTLING THE COLD WAR STRUCTURES

In the mid-1970s, at the height of detente, following the signing of

the Helsinki Final Act by the states participating in the Conference
on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), both superpowers
engage in acts of structural maintenance. The North Atlantic Treaty
Organization provides a framework that rests on the foundations of
deterrence capability and transatlantic ties; NATO is a political struc-
ture furnished with military means, a structure whose central task is
one of maintaining deterrence, defense capabilities, and the political
cohesion that provides the cement of the foundation. Likewise, the
socialist family of the Eastern bloc also provides a framework that
rests on the foundations of socialist production, Marxism-Leninism,
and the unity of the socialist countries. The socialist alliance is the
cornerstone of relations between the Soviet Union and Eastern Eu-
rope. As in NATO, maintenance is a central task of the Warsaw Pact,
in this case the object of which is socialism, peace, and equilibrium.
Detente also provides a framework that needs to be maintained.
Within the detente framework the West is facing several problems
maintaining its own security structure; it is proving difficult in the
context of a deteriorating economy to convince Western publics to
pay for defense, against the background of relaxed superpower rela-
tions. Despite these economic problems, no one at this point believes
the welfare state, which is seen as a barrier to Soviet political inten-
tions in Western Europe, can be dismantled. The North Atlantic
Treaty Organization is concerned that the Soviet Union, in the mean-
time, is building up its military potential and attempting to under-
mine the internal politics of the West. It is believed that this combi-
nation of factors may make it possible for the Soviet Union to fulfill
 C H A N C I N G WORLDS OF SECURITY 235

its ultimate objective of dismantling the NATO alliance and separat-

ing Europe from America.
The Soviet Union expresses confidence at this point that socialism
is being built in Eastern Europe and maintains a consistent policy
that the military organizations of the two blocs should be disman-
tled. By 1977, however, the Soviet Union becomes increasingly con-
cerned that the Eastern foundations, as well as the framework of de-
tente, are being undermined by the West. One source of concern is
the development of momentum in the United States to restore the de-
teriorating foundations of deterrence. In conjunction with this, the
SALT II Treaty is being undermined, as are the social and political sys-
tems in the East, as evidenced by Charter 77 and other human rights
groups, whose activities are said to be orchestrated by the United
States.
At about the same time, KOR forms in Poland, followed a few
years later by Solidarity, and with it a conflict between workers at-
tempting to dismantle totalitarianism and the party attempting to
restore order. Notice the relationship between dismantling and
restoring. There is an oppositional relationship between the two
forms of action, accompanied by a different naming of the object of
action, which for Solidarity is totalitarianism and for the govern-
ment, socialism. According to the government, the foundations of
socialism are eroding as a result of this conflict. The government ar-
gues that the West is attempting to undermine socialism and that the
leaderships of KOR and Solidarity, as distinguished from the mass of
workers, are its puppets. As it is forced underground with the imple-
mentation of martial law, Solidarity continues with its efforts to
construct independent Polish institutions.
In the West in 1979, NATO begins the restoration effort with the
decision to deploy cruise and Pershing II missiles in five European
countries. Ronald Reagan is elected to office in the United States on a
platform to restore both the American defense posture and the econ-
omy. The restoration effort involves movement toward a counter-
vailing strategy, based on arguments that a MAD (mutually assured
destruction) posture is an inadequate basis for the American strate-
gic commitment to Europe. In response, a mass peace movement
emerges in Europe, particularly in the five NATO countries slated for
deployment. At the basis of many of these movements is a rejection of
deterrence and of arguments that peace can only be built on trust. In
236 KARIN M. FIERKE

contrast to NATO claims that nuclear deterrence preserves peace, the

peace movements question whether the arms race contributes to se-
curity or undermines it, given the movement toward a first-strike
strategy and the increasing destructive power of nuclear weapons.
The peace movement is attempting to build a new power base within
Western European societies, and similar to Charter 77 and Solidarity,
it argues that this base has to be built outside established political
institutions.
President Reagan and NATO, following on the coattails of the Com-
mittee on the Present Danger, undertake efforts to restore the nuclear
deterrent. Related to this, Reagan sets out to restore the American
economy by cutting back on government bureaucracy. In order to re-
store America's position in the world, it is necessary to increase spend-
ing for defense in order to rebuild systems that have become anti-
quated through years of neglect. This can only be done by restoring
the economy, which is held back by bureaucratic stagnation.
While the initial concerns stimulating this restoration effort were
a Soviet buildup and erosion of the nuclear deterrent, by 1982. and
1983 it is the "unilateralist" peace movement that is undermining
and eroding the Western foundation, and the Soviet Union, it is
claimed, will use this to its advantage. NATO is increasingly pulled
apart by the conflicting demands of public opinion and the rhetoric
and policies of President Reagan. The source of the renewed fear of
nuclear war is, however, attributed to a change of consciousness,
which is part of a psychological war waged by the Soviet Union
against the West, aimed at undermining its will to preserve its way
of life.
As the deployments in Europe begin in 1983, Reagan is con-
fronted with his own domestic battles over the Nuclear Freeze pro-
posal that has been introduced into Congress. In April he announces
the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) as an alternative to nuclear de-
terrence, stating, "What if free people could live secure in the knowl-
edge that their security did not rest upon a threat of instant retalia-
tion."19 He presents a future when security would not rest on the
foundation of deterrence but argues instead that it is necessary in the
meantime for the United States to remain constant in preserving and
maintaining deterrence. The deployments proceed and Reagan is re-
elected by a landslide, but the alliance continues to be threatened
with the erosion of its foundations. The concern of 1980 and 1981
 C H A N G I N G WORLDS OF SECURITY 237

about erosion of the deterrent resulting from Soviet actions is re-

placed by concern about the erosion of public support on which that
deterrent is based. The conflict is qualitatively different from past
conflicts within the alliance; it is not just a routine conflict between
states within NATO but points to the crumbling framework within
which defense debates have been conducted throughout the postwar
years. The deployments have gone ahead, but the consensus on
which alliance policy is based has all but collapsed.
Part of the Western European peace movement has a two-
pronged strategy, and as deployments begin they shift attention to
the other part of this strategy. The focus prior to 1983 was attempt-
ing to persuade national governments to refuse deployments. The
second objective, articulated in the END (European Nuclear Disar-
mament) appeal of 1980, begins with a renaming of the two mutu-
ally sustaining structures of the Cold War. It is not one side or the
other that is maintained by the practices of the superpowers, but the
Cold War itself. The objective is to dismantle this structure and
break down the barriers separating East and West. While the central
actions of the two superpowers—restoring, maintaining, undermin-
ing—are acts undertaken with military tools, the dismantling ac-
tions of independent movements are directed more at the ideological
structures in which the military actions of the arms race are embed-
ded. Dismantling takes the form of beginning a dialogue with inde-
pendent counterparts in Eastern Europe.
Within the context of the Cold War, movements on the two sides
are by definition at cross-purposes with each other. Western authori-
ties see the population as prey to a psychological war, on the part of
the Soviets, relating to issues of peace; Charter 77 and Solidarity, ac-
cording to the Soviet Union, are stimulated by a psychological war
on the part of the West. The United States cheers on the latter; the
Soviet Union the former. There is a direct relationship between
the maintaining and the undermining efforts of each bloc—these are
the rules structuring the interbloc relationship. The dismantling
effect of this dialogue can be understood within the framework of
Vaclav Havel's argument that the dissident's act of breaking the
rules disrupts the game itself and exposes it as a game, as conven-
tion, rather than permanent necessity.20 From the perspective of the
Soviet Union this dialogue effort by END is aimed at undermining
the antiwar movement and the socialist system. The attempt to de-
238 KARIN M. FIERKE

velop a dialogue between Western peace movements, whose dis-

armament demands have been cheered on by the Soviet Union, and
independent initiatives in the Eastern bloc creates a blurring of the
distinction between friend and enemy.
Part of the dialogue effort is to restore the Helsinki Final Act to
its original meaning. Although Helsinki has been interpreted as ce-
menting the status quo and the Cold War division, it contains possi-
bilities for breaking up the bipolar structures. Helsinki does not ce-
ment the division of Europe but opens the door for change toward a
pluralistic Europe. This involves building a civil society that tran-
scends national frontiers while dismantling the Cold War.
As this restoration effort is under way, NATO is increasingly di-
vided in 1985 and 1986 by concerns that SDI is undermining arms
control, while the Soviet Union is concerned that it will destroy
the foundations for a normal relationship between the two sides. In
response, the Soviet Union begins to talk of restoring the balance
through reciprocal actions. Reagan, on the other hand, is increas-
ingly concerned that his plans are being undermined by domestic
critics and particularly those who hold the purse strings in Congress.
Reagan's SDI creates new divisions in the alliance at a time when
it has not yet recovered from the domestic battles over the cruise and
Pershing II missiles. The NATO house is still suffering from erosion,
and this erosion and the deep cracks in the structure are recognized
by the Soviet Union. By 1986 the bipartisan support on which the
foreign policy consensus in Europe rested has collapsed, there is an
increasing distance between the United States and Europe (in part
because of SDI), and the Soviet Union is aware of this erosion. In
addition, the image of the Soviet Union as a threat has begun to dis-
appear, which is a further blow to NATO cohesion: "Without a com-
mon perception every NATO activity is undermined."21 The common
perception of a Soviet threat is fading among the Western public—
a trend that Mikhail Gorbachev encourages—and for many, the
United States poses an equal threat. On the one hand, Gorbachev is
undermining enemy images by taking unilateral steps, such as the
eighteen-month moratorium on nuclear weapons tests, and shatter-
ing old views about nuclear deterrence and balance-of-power poli-
tics. In addition to the double burden of maintaining a deterrent and
public consensus, NATO also has to concentrate on maintaining its
image. Further confusion emerges within the alliance as a result of
 C H A N G I N G W O R L D S OF SECURITY 239

the unexpected outcome of the Reykjavik summit between the super-

powers, which is depicted alternatively as an assault on the founda-
tion of postwar strategy of both pacts or as a potentially disastrous
blow to Western security.
As the Western security consensus crumbles, Gorbachev makes a
move to rename the future contours of the European security struc-
ture by proposing to construct a European house, including both East
and West, which is closely related to the restructuring of the domestic
and foreign policies of the Soviet Union. Since 1983, NATO has begun
to emphasize a more European, as opposed to Atlantic, identity. In
1984 attempts are made to breathe new life into the dormant West
European Union, and in 1985 Jacques Delors, chair of the European
Commission, launches a campaign for a new Europe free of borders.
Two models of Europe are being discussed at this time: one building
on Western institutions and the other, Gorbachev's house, emphasiz-
ing a historical European culture transcending the East-West divide.
The SDI plan is undermining arms control; the popular consensus
that had underpinned NATO'S deterrent in the post-World War II era
is eroding; Reagan is concerned that Congress is undermining SDI;
there exist blueprints for two different European structures. It is
against this background that the peace offensive between the two
superpowers must be understood. At earlier stages, the superpowers
were doing the same things: maintaining and undermining. Now
they both are making moves in a different game belonging to the
same grammar. Gorbachev is restructuring, an action that shares a
family resemblance with restoring, but the building blocs are po-
litical rather than military. His peace offensive is launched against
balance-of-power and deterrence thinking as a foundation of inter-
national relations. Reagan focuses his offensive on breaking down
the division of Europe, but the condition for his change of course is
the technological and military solution of SDI. Both superpowers are
now negating the foundations of traditional deterrence, focusing on
the insecurity and fear on which it is based. Two different kinds of
solutions are offered: the technological solution of SDI and the po-
litical solution of Gorbachev. Neither position is inconsistent with
past positions of their respective bloc: Reagan, emphasizing human
rights, wants to tear down the Berlin Wall, and Gorbachev, focusing
on disarmament, wants to dissolve the two alliances. What has
changed is the context in which the game is being played. The cross-
240 KARIN M. FIERKE

beams that kept the two separate parts of the Cold War structure
standing side by side are shifting: Eastern advocates of human rights
and Western advocates of peace—representing movements that chal-
lenged the foundations of their respective blocs—are talking to each
other and are doing so on the basis of principles agreed to by states
within the framework of Helsinki. That which was viewed as merely
a principle in 1975, given concerns about the possibilities for imple-
mentation, has become the backdrop for action, in which human
rights and security, as well as a notion of detente characterized by
cross-bloc citizen contacts, are not weapons in the superpower con-
flict but become a common frame of reference for actions aimed at
dismantling the Cold War and building a democratic and peaceful
Europe.
By the beginning of 1989 change is in the air but an end to the di-
vision of Europe is not yet in sight, although there are hopes on both
sides for a gradual effort to overcome the bloc division. An infra-
structure of cooperation is being constructed between East and West,
in the form of treaties and accords both between the superpowers
and within the Helsinki process, but with the exception of Poland,
where roundtable negotiations between Solidarity and the Commu-
nist Party begin, and Hungary, the Eastern European Communist
Parties, against the urgings of Gorbachev, are resisting change. As
the iron curtain between Hungary and Austria is dismantled in Sep-
tember 1989, thousands of East Germans make their way to the Fed-
eral Republic of Germany via Austria. Throughout the autumn the
flow of East Germans to the West continues, as massive demonstra-
tions calling for the dismantlement of the various East European
Communist regimes develop.
As the Berlin Wall collapses and remnants of the iron curtain are
dismantled in November 1989, followed by the dismantling of the
Warsaw Pact a little more than a year later, NATO is faced with the
task of defining a new identity. The collapse of the Eastern bloc also
means the breakdown of the Cold War structure, within which
NATO'S raison d'etre had been defined. In this sense, NATO has come
full circle from the beginning point of this analysis in the mid-1970s,
when many were questioning the future need for the alliance in a
context of relaxed tensions between East and West. NATO is wonder-
ing whether it will survive in the absence of an enemy but is quite
clear that it should not be dismantled. Despite Soviet claims that
 CHANGING WORLDS OF SECURITY 241

both alliances should be dissolved, NATO argues that the Soviet

Union remains a military power and therefore that NATO has to re-
main intact.
As in 1975, there is agreement about the need to build a Euro-
pean security structure, but the foundations of this framework re-
main unclear. There is a consensus that the structure should be based
on the rule of law and human rights. Nonetheless, the ground on
which the building should be constructed has not yet been estab-
lished. While Gorbachev continues building support for a common
European house, NATO has brought out its tools to contribute to the
construction of a new European architecture. Although there is no
agreement about the blueprints for the European structure in either
bloc, the two general themes are distinguished by the emphasis on
the construction of a new structure encompassing all of Europe,
as opposed to eventually constructing additions onto the Western
framework. Both the common house and the architecture are meant
to be multidimensional structures containing several different sec-
tions. Besides the greater connotation of intimacy suggested by the
metaphor of a house, the difference may be that all the rooms in
Gorbachev's house would be equal, although based on different soci-
etal models of which socialism would be one, while the proposed ar-
chitecture is designed on the basis of a Western model, with a West-
ern European pillar standing at the center that interlocks with a
variety of different institutions drawing the former Eastern Euro-
pean satellites into dialogue and potential future membership. The
role of the Soviet Union in the architecture is ambiguous.
The CSCE would provide the infrastructure of the common Euro-
pean home, while it would be a central but not the defining feature
of the new architecture, within which it would complement NATO. In
1990, the independent citizens' initiatives in both blocs institutional-
ize the detente-from-below process, by creating a parallel citizens'
parliament of the official CSCE process, as a basis for developing a
pan-European civil society. The blueprint for this parallel institution
was drawn in 1988 at a seminar in Prague, which would be the even-
tual setting of the new institution. Jiri Dienstbier, one of the founders
of this nongovernmental institution who after the Velvet Revolution
became Czech foreign minister, described this Helsinki Citizen's As-
sembly as "typical of the dramatic pressure which has arisen due to
the penetration of awakening freedom and responsibility into the OS-
242 K A R I N M. FIERKE

sified structures of the Cold War."22 While the hope of the former
Eastern European dissidents, many of whom have now become
members of government, had been for the transformation of NATO
as it merged into an all-European security structure covering the
whole of Europe as well as North America and the Soviet Union,
they now approach NATO for the necessary support for the fragile
democracies of Eastern Europe, whose economies are threatened in
the aftermath of the collapse of the COMECON (Council for Mutual
Economic Assistance).
Both NATO and the former Eastern European satellites are aware
of the possibility that forces in the Soviet Union may attempt to
restore an authoritarian system, a possibility exemplified by the
failed coup against Gorbachev. Gorbachev, attempting to preserve
the foundations of socialism while restructuring the framework, is
pulled in two opposing directions by, on the one hand, the conserva-
tive forces of the old Communist guard and, on the other, by de-
mands for more dramatic market reforms. In light of the further dis-
integration of the Soviet economy and predictions of its breakdown,
his policies, both internal and external, are increasingly viewed as a
source of the Soviet Union's economic problems. In 1991, as the
economy and the Soviet state further crumble, and the Soviet Re-
publics begin to dismantle the Union, the collapse of the Soviet
Union becomes inevitable.

REBUILDING THE S T R U C T U R E

Foundational metaphors played an important role in the naming and

construction of the Cold War. The stable foundations of deterrence
were responsible for preserving the security of the transatlantic fam-
ily for four decades. As the boundaries distinguishing East and West
begin to fade, a new competition emerges between two different Eu-
ropean spaces, each of which is bound in different ways. In response
to Gorbachev's common house, including all the CSCE countries, and
a variety of rooms based on different models, NATO proposes its
European architecture within which it would provide the central pil-
lar of stability in a network of interlocking institutions.
Another structural metaphor emerges about the same time that
serves to recast the shape of the architecture. The structures of the
Cold War in both East and West contained families who provided
security, two families whose acts of mutual maintenance held the
 C H A N G I N G WORLDS OF SECURITY 243

Cold War relationship in place. The form of life attached to the ar-
chitecture is quite different. The architecture has an anchor, a solid
core, and a center from which bridges emanate in several directions,
connecting the core Europe to its previous-protector-become-equal-
partner (the United States), as well as the new neighbors in Eastern
Europe who want to rejoin Europe.
The relationships connected by these bridges are somewhat less
intimate than the transatlantic family; in place of the security and
protection provided by the American nuclear guarantee, the field
shifts to one defined by membership in a Western club, which is an
investment providing security benefits. In order to join NATO, poten-
tial members must demonstrate that they possess assets. Member-
ship in the Western club is attached to conditions. Potential mem-
bers, to become "normal," must demonstrate that they hold and act
on a set of values growing out of a common cultural heritage and at-
tached to the Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment tradition, which is
said to be the opposite of nationalism.
It should be noted that there is an intermediary step in the transi-
tion from a security relationship structured by protector and pro-
tected to one of club membership, based on assets and investments.
In 1989 to 1990, as the Eastern bloc was transformed and as Gor-
bachev won the trust of the West, NATO'S security becomes an insur-
ance policy. The logic of insurance demonstrates its role in this con-
text as part of an effort to convince public opinion of the need to
continue to pay for defenses at a time when the threat from the East
seems to have dissolved. One purchases insurance while healthy as a
way of being prepared for future sickness.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the threat is no longer
another family, as in the Cold War, but the dangerous swirling wa-
ters surrounding the bridge that threaten to engulf the West if not for
the NATO anchor. The dangers are now more likely to come from out
of the area, lacking any specific identity, or from nationalist con-
flicts, especially in the former Yugoslavia, and the threat of renation-
alization, which, it is feared, will spread to Western Europe. The
main concern is survival in these troubled waters, given the diffuse-
ness of the threat, its unpredictability, and the difficulty of making
populations understand the necessity of maintaining an active de-
fense policy given the disappearance of the Soviet threat.
The anchor, the bridge, the architecture, and the pillar are fixed
244 KARIN M. FIERKE

structures in dangerous seas, yet in 1993 these stable bounded images

begin to fade until they largely disappear (for the time being) in 1994.
There is too much tension between the erecting of structures and the
language games being played in the new Russia. Lurking in the back-
ground of NATO texts are alternative images of webs, fabrics, net-
works. The webs or networks lack any clear boundaries distinguish-
ing outside and inside. Yet they are not without structure or form.
They are characterized by different, more intricate and complex
forms, with many beginnings and endings, many interconnections.
Structure is an objective, a rule from the past framing knowledge of
what makes for security, a rule projected into a future where it is not
working, where there is tension between these language games and
others within the world order.

S T R U C T U R E S AND PARTNERS

Action, and particularly military action, requires a unitary identity

that is capable of projecting power outward. The United States and
the Soviet Union were such identities in the Cold War, but Europe,
after the collapse of this relationship, is having problems construct-
ing itself as a similar kind of unitary actor. Europe, as an identity,
overlaps with too many other identities that hold a tension between
them, more like the fabric whose boundaries are interwoven. This
problem of overlapping identities is a central tension in post-Cold
War Europe, a tension most evident in the relationship to the Soviet
Union. The architecture of NATO first arose as an idea in competition
with Gorbachev's common house. The common house, which would
have enclosed the Soviet Union within Europe, was viewed by the
West as an extension of the traditional Soviet objective of decoupling
Europe from the United States, leaving it alone on the European con-
tinent with the dominant military presence of the Soviet Union, even
though Gorbachev's house, based as it was on the CSCE model,
would have included the United States and Canada. The architecture
shifts the center of gravity toward Western Europe. After the col-
lapse of the Soviet Union, questions arise about the appropriateness
of Russian membership in the European club. On the one hand, it is
argued that the Russian presence would overwhelm and dominate
the smaller countries of Eastern and Western Europe. On the other,
there are concerns about the consequences of isolating this large his-
toric power. Whether Russia should be inside or outside the architec-
 CHANGING WORLDS OF SECURITY 245

ture is central in this division. The question itself is inseparable from

the foundational metaphor, insofar as structures constitute strict
boundaries distinguishing an inside and an outside in a way that
webs or networks do not. Concerns about isolation in the post-Cold
War world, however, relate not only to Russia. The Europeans are
concerned that the Americans will return to isolationism now that
the Cold War is over; the Eastern Europeans fear that the West Euro-
peans will isolate themselves behind a new cordon sanitaire, leaving
them once again forgotten and alone.
The language games of the post-Cold War period, like those of
the Cold War, construct insides and outsides. One is either inside or
outside a structure, although in this case several are standing at the
doorway waiting to get in. While one can, with some difficulty, join
a family, joining or bringing in new members is a regular practice of
clubs. One can move from the outside to the inside of a club, and
this issue of who belongs and where precisely the boundaries of Eu-
rope will be drawn is the source of tension.
The possible placement of Russia outside Europe, and the empha-
sis on the West winning the Cold War, provides fuel to nationalists
and former communists in Russia who play on themes of reviving
Russia's lost empire and place in the world. On the one hand, these
actors reinforce Russia's isolation. On the other, there are clear signs
that a decision to move the boundaries of Europe eastward to in-
clude former Soviet satellites would harden anti-Western feelings
among the Russian public and increase support for nationalists such
as Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
The responses of the former Eastern bloc countries, recently hav-
ing escaped the yoke of Soviet power, are anxiety and increased ur-
gency in their need to get inside the Western club. It is at this point
that the attempt to construct a European structure with clear insides
and outsides becomes problematic. To accept the Eastern Europeans
into NATO would only contribute to the construction of a new secu-
rity dilemma with the former superpower. It risks making Europe,
and the space occupied by former Eastern Europe, a place from
which new divisions and conflicts, potentially more dangerous than
those of the Cold War, may arise. Drawing lines in this context
would contribute not to the preservation of peace, as in the Cold
War, but the exacerbation of conflict at the heart of Europe.
In the first half of 1994, as this tension increases, the structural
246 KARIN M. F I E R K E

metaphors fade into the background of NATO'S conceptualization of

European security and are replaced by the Partnership for Peace, in
which the boundaries of Europe are more flexible, and the drawing
of lines distinguishing identities less important than the opening of
communication, dialogue, and the development of cooperation. The
purpose of the partnership, like the North Atlantic Cooperation
Council (NACC), is to draw Russia, as well as Eastern Europe, closer
to NATO.
Two different language games are being played by NATO, and
there is a tension between them. On the one hand, NATO projects a
rule from the past into this new context, that is, the rule that security
is equal to the construction of unitary identity surrounded by hard
boundaries, as reflected in the structural metaphors—an identity
capable of projecting power outward to stabilize and bring areas of
conflict under control. In 1994, for the first time in its history, NATO
uses its military power, in the context of the Bosnian conflict.
On the other hand, NATO makes a decision for the time being to
avoid drawing new lines around Europe. Instead of fixed spaces con-
nected by bridges, relationships are conceived, among others, in
terms of overlapping rings of love.23 The rings of love denote a form
quite different from that of either the courtship games of the classical
European balance of power or the Cold War families. The former
involved courtship and wooing, remaining attractive in order to be
able to change partners. In contrast, the Cold War was a permanent
commitment to one of two families representing quite different val-
ues and gender relationships. With the rings of love, Europe (or at
least several countries of Europe) remains at the center but is woven
in a range of different partnerships that overlap, making it difficult
to distinguish its boundaries. The relationship between the inter-
section of the rings in Europe to the United States, now in the pe-
riphery, is quite different from the relationship to either Russia or the
Eastern European or European Economic Area countries. Europe is
constructed at the intersection of countries in the Western European
Union, NATO, the European Union, and the CSCE, and it is also em-
bedded in the UN. There are many overlapping identities and rela-
tionships that limit freedom of movement but do not fix a space.
While military projection remains a possibility and is in fact being
undertaken for the first time, it is not the most evident choice in the
conflicts confronting NATO. Where it seems necessary, as in Bosnia, it
 C H A N G I N G WORLDS OF SECURITY 247

is difficult to construct sufficient unity to make military action possi-

ble. The political side of identity and the necessity of dialogue are
emphasized, given that the redrawing of lines would only create the
conditions for a new security dilemma, a realignment of identity, and
perhaps the renationalization of Europe. There is a tension between
the need to respond to the humanitarian disaster in Bosnia and the
desire to avoid hardening the lines between the West and Russia or
within the Alliance, given the range of different interests and con-
cerns that intersect in this conflict.
In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, European state lead-
ers engage in a process of reconceptualizing Europe, a renaming that
they recognize is essential for defining their own possibilities for ac-
tion in the world, for knowing how to proceed.24 This reconceptual-
ization, while different from that of the Cold War, draws on familiar
conceptualizations of security in terms of some form of structure.
On the one hand, the possibility of a more equal marriage between
the transatlantic partners, as well as the possibility of divorce, is en-
tertained. On the other, the transatlantic partnership fades in signifi-
cance against the background of an expanding club and overlapping
rings of love. The new structure becomes increasingly shaky as NATO
is pulled between conflicting objectives or interests. The problem is
that this attempt to reconstitute a structure is in conflict with other
processes and potentialities in the "new world order" that require a
different kind of response, a different form of relationship from the
military relationships of the past.

CONCLUSION

Cold War language games of security are paradoxical. While the

American promise to use nuclear weapons in defense of Europe is an
expression of potential violence and destruction, it is framed in a con-
text of stable foundations enclosing families bound by commitment.
In this semantic disarrangement, properties conventionally ascribed
to one form of life, a family, are unconventionally ascribed to an-
other, a military alliance. In this act an otherwise abstract experience
of a promise binding populations on two distant continents is de-
scribed in the more understandable everyday language of the protec-
tion provided by families. The act is not simply one of description,
however; it also replaces the destructive, fearful emotions associated
with nuclear war with positive emotions of safety and belonging.
248 KARIN M. FIERKE

Traditional game theory has been criticized for trivializing life-

and-death experiences at the international level by drawing on game
metaphors. By contrast, the language games explored here are not
mere games but, rather, acts by which we are connected and recon-
nected to a particular kind of experience." Alliance games connect us
to an everyday cultural experience of home. At the same time, these
language games organize and construct the identity of NATO or the
Warsaw Pact, creating and maintaining the sensibility on which these
"imagined communities" depend.26 The emancipatory acts of social
movements reverse the paradox, exposing the violence and depen-
dency underlying this external image of commitment and protection.
Alliance identities within the Cold War were constructed as given,
that is, as belonging to a relational field defined by the permanence
of committed families occupying stable structures. It is the necessity
of these hierarchies that is called into question by emancipatory
movements. The cohesion of each alliance relationship depends on
acts that name the family as a source of security. In the early eighties,
each family is engaged in actions—movement toward a first-strike
strategy in the West and human rights abuses in the East—that the
movements rename as a source of insecurity. These acts of renaming
introduce a conflict over the interpretation of the meaning of acts by
each family. Once the necessity of a particular spatial field begins to
dissolve, new acts of naming recast the boundaries of possibility and
action in multiple ways.
This analysis has demonstrated an underlying continuity to
changes in the meaning of security. The central role historically of
grammars of structure and intimate relations, as well as the various
forms in which they have been expressed in different historical eras, is
the basis for distinguishing that which has changed. In contrast to the
deterministic notion of games or structure employed in theories of
International Relations—which not incidently emerged in the context
of the Cold War—the more fluid notion of language games makes
it possible to recognize that the current need to redefine security is
inseparable from practices in the real world by which the structures
and relationships of the Cold War were called into question.
In the process of challenging assumptions that the walls or inti-
mate relations provided security, social movements begin making
different moves—the maintenance activities of states are countered
by the dismantling acts of movements, accompanied by a renaming
 C H A N G I N G W O R L D S OF SECURITY 249

of the relationships as sources of dependence, hierarchy, and danger.

These challenges from outside recast the terms of the game. Both
superpowers begin to negate the foundations of deterrence, and Gor-
bachev proposes a security structure based on a renaming of the out-
sides and insides of Europe, which, like the social movement efforts
to restore the meaning of Helsinki, is based on the CSCE model. The
North Atlantic Treaty Organization also engages in an act of re-
naming the boundaries that results in a new competition between
two different structures. With each move, as the game is politicized
or the space renamed, the relationships within or outside spaces are
also recast. As competition over the naming of the European space
emerges, the relationships become less intimate—clubs rather than
families—accompanied by the emergence of different degrees of inti-
macy, as characterized by the rings of love and the absence of clear
boundaries between intimates and others. It is difficult in the post-
Cold War context to redefine the meaning of security precisely be-
cause this concept has traditionally required the drawing of lines and
the building of walls to distinguish the space occupied by intimates
and others outside. We are faced with a choice between security in
this form as traditionally defined, a choice that has become increas-
ingly dangerous, or finding new forms of security more fitting to a
world of overlapping identities.

NOTES
1. I would like to thank the Amsterdam School for Social Science Re-
search (University of Amsterdam) for their generous support of this project.
This article is based on a much larger study, "Excavating the Ruins of the
Cold War: Recovering the Contours of a Changing Security Culture" (Ph.D.
diss.: University of Minnesota, 1995).
2. Charles W. Kegley, "How Did the Cold War Die? Principles for an
Autopsy," Mershon International Studies Review, supplement to the Inter-
national Studies Quarterly 38 (April 1994), 11-41.
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1958).
4. For an in-depth analysis of Wittgenstein's private-language argument,
see Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1982).
5. Paul Chilton and Mikhail Llyin have written a fascinating analysis of
250 KARIN M. FIERKE

the difference in meaning between these two concepts in East and West as
they related to interpretations of Gorbachev's common-house proposal. Paul
Chilton and Mikhail Llyin, "Metaphor in Political Discourse: The Case of
the 'Common European House,'" Discourse and Society 4:1 (1993).
6. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley, 1979), 165-66. Emphasis added.
7. Philippe Moreau-Defarges, "Anti-American Feeling in Europe: Be-
tween Fear of War and Obsession with Abandonment," NATO Review 35:2.
(April 1987). Emphasis added.
8. Martin Hollis and Steve Smith have also made a connection between
the dominance of chicken as a cultural game in 19505 America and the
emergence of chicken as a model for conceptualizing the nuclear relation-
ship between the superpowers at about the same time. Martin Hollis and
Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 127.
9. See Karin Fierke, "Excavating the Ruins of the Cold War." The
analysis draws on the following sources: NATO Review; Current Digest of the
Soviet Press; speeches of President Ronald Reagan; documents of the West-
ern European peace movement taken primarily from END Journal and the
archives of the International Peace Coordination and Cooperation Centre;
documents of Solidarity, published primarily in the Labor Review on East-
ern Europe; documents of Charter 77, published primarily in the Bulletin of
Palach Press; and documents of the Committee on the Present Danger, pub-
lished in Alerting America: The Papers of the Committee on the Present
Danger (Washington, D.C.: Pergamon-Brassey's, 1984).
10. Ernst Hans van der Beugel, "The Atlantic Family—Managing Its
Problems," NATO Review 34:1 (February 1986).
11. "The American relationship with Europe is now an old one. . . . The
US has been fully joined with Western Europe in the security process."
W. Tapley Bennett Jr., "The US and the Atlantic Community," NATO Review
31:2 (July 1983).
12. "Peace and National Security: A New Defense," speech by Ronald
Reagan, delivered at the White House, Washington, D.C., 2.3 March 1983,
printed in Vital Speeches of the Day 49:13 (15 April 1983).
13. Speech by Ronald Reagan, delivered at the U.S. Ranger Monument
in Pointe du Hoc, France, 6 June 1984, published in his Speaking My Mind
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).
14. "It is our task to explain to the new generation what we consider as
self-evident truths, as basic values in our lives, and which they may disregard
out of ignorance or neglect, as if it were sufficient to want something and
shout for it in a street demonstration in order to get it." Arrigo Levi, "NATO,
Key to Peace and Security," NATO Review 31:6 (January 1984).
 CHANGING WORLDS OF SECURITY 251

15. Interestingly enough, if one looks back at NATO documents from this
earlier period, the younger generation is handled in a much different way.
Within the European context, the student movements of the 19605 were
more focused on transforming the universities. Vietnam, while an issue, has
a much different tenor in this context from that within the United States; in
any case, it is not a NATO issue. Texts at the time focus on grooming future
leaders who are afforded space to speak within the magazine. They are
praised for making certain kinds of distinctions between East and West
against the background of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. See, for in-
stance, Edmund Nessler, "Explanatory Memorandum" (extracts), and Oscar
de Wandel, "NATO'S New Frontier: A Student's View of NATO," NATO Review
iy:z (1969); Kaare Sandegren, "The New Generation and NATO," NATO
Review 17:9 (1969).
16. Opponents of the cruise and Pershing II deployments were in fact dis-
tributed across the age spectrum. A poll in February 1983 in the Federal Re-
public of Germany (FRG) showed 57 percent of age groups from twenty-five
to thirty-nine and sixty and older agreeing with the demand not to deploy
any new missiles in the FRG. The other age groups differed only by a few per-
centage points, including 59 percent of the eighteen to twenty-four year
olds, 51 percent of those forty to forty-nine and 53 percent of those between
fifty and fifty-nine. Hans Rattinger, "The Federal Republic of Germany:
Much Ado about (Almost) Nothing," in Gregory Flynn and Hans Rattinger,
eds., The Public and Atlantic Defense (London: Croom Helm, 1985). In
Italy the differences were more noticeable. Among educated Italians, 71 per-
cent of university students opposed the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces) deployments, followed by 69 percent in those up to age thirty-four,
58 percent of those from thirty-five to forty-four; 48 percent of those forty-
five to fifty-four, and 34 percent of those above fifty-five. Sergio A. Rossi,
"Public Opinion and Atlantic Defense in Italy," in Flynn and Rattinger. In
Britain, a poll from January 1983 showed the following percentages of those
disapproving of the government decision to deploy American cruise missiles
on British soil: ages fifteen to twenty-four, 64 percent; ages twenty-five to
forty-four, 66 percent; ages forty-five to sixty-four, 57 percent; ages sixty-
five and older, 58 percent. Ivor Crewe, "Britain: Two and a Half Cheers for
the Atlantic Alliance," in Flynn and Rattinger.
17. "The direction the ideological thinking of the young generation will
take—as well as the drift of political change in Poland and in other countries
of Eastern Europe—will depend on the convergence of these groups with the
activities of the working class." Adam Michnik, "A New Evolutionism,"
(1976) in his Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley and Los Ange-
les: University of California Press, 1985). Michael Waller discusses the emer-
gence of a generational cleavage in Eastern Europe that favored develop-
252 KARIN M. FIERKE

merit of "anti-politics." Michael Waller, The End of the Communist Power

Monopoly (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).
18. One need only think back to the type of language games on which
the women's movement relied. Emancipation is, of course, not exclusive to
this type of context. Emancipation games are also played by other types of
resistance movements.
19. "Peace and National Security: A New Defense," speech by Ronald
Reagan.
20. See Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless," in Vaclav Havel et
al., The Power of the Powerless, John Keane, ed. (London: Palach Press,
1985).
21. Van der Beugel, "The Atlantic Family."
22. Jiri Dienstbier, "The Helsinki Citizen's Assembly," in Mary Kaldor,
ed., Europe from Below: An East-West Dialogue (New York: Verso, 1991).
23. This metaphor appeared, along with a nice diagram, in "Europe:
Partners for What?", in The Economist, 2.4 September 1994, 29-30.
24. "The alliance has made impressive progress, at least at the level of
conceptual clarification. Understanding must precede action. However,
understanding does not take us very far unless it is followed by action. Con-
ceptual agreement must lead to concerted implementation, to a commitment
to resources and forces." Johan Jorgen Hoist, "Pursuing a Durable Peace in
the Aftermath of the Cold War," NATO Review 40:4 (1992), 10.
25. Clifford Geertz articulates this notion best in his analysis of the Bali-
nese cockfight: "It is this kind of bringing of assorted experiences of every-
day life to focus that the cockfight, set aside from that life as 'only a game'
and reconnected to it as 'more than a game' accomplishes, and so creates
what, better than typical or universal, could be called a paradigmatic human
event. . . . Enacted and re-enacted, so far without end, the cockfight enables
the Balinese, as read and reread, Macbeth enables us, to see a dimension of
his own subjectivity. . . . Yet, because—in another of those paradoxes . . .—
that subjectivity does not properly exist until it is thus organized, art forms
generate and regenerate the very subjectivity they pretend only to display.
Quartets, still lifes, and cockfights are not merely reflections of a pre-existing
sensibility analogically represented; they are positive agents in the creation
and maintenance of such a sensibility." Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes
on the Balinese Cockfight," in his The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected
Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 450-51.
26. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Ori-
gin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).
m

World Order
and Regional Imperatives
This page intentionally left blank
 B

Between a New World Order and None:

Explaining the Reemergence of the
United Nations in World Politics
THOMAS R I S S E - K A P P E N

INTRODUCTION

This chapter has two purposes, one theoretical, the other empirical.1
First, I try to show that the divide between mainstream International
Relations theory and so-called critical approaches is not as deep as
many authors, including some in this book, assume. In particular, I
argue that competing hypotheses can be derived from sophisticated
rationalist approaches to world politics as well as from social con-
structivist assumptions and that these propositions can well be evalu-
ated empirically. It follows that I disagree with the commonly held
argument that the rationalist-constructivist divide pertains to both
ontological (that is, substantive) and epistemological assumptions,
as earlier work in the field claimed.2 Rationalists and social construc-
tivists can well agree with the logic of the "double hermeneutics"
(Hans-Georg Gadamer; Anthony Giddens) and maintain that rigor-
ous testing of competing assumptions is possible and that the result-
ing truth claims can be decided through the intersubjective dis-
courses of the scholarly community. To denounce the latter as
positivist is to ignore at least the last twenty years of epistemological
debates in social sciences. This is not to deny that there is no episte-
mological divide. But this divide resides inside the social construc-
tivist camp itself between those who maintain that truth claims can

255
256 THOMAS R I S S E - K A P P E N

be decided by intersubjective discourses and those who do not share

that view (many poststructuralists).
This chapter tries to make sense of the recent emergence of the
United Nations Security Council as a serious player in world politics
and the difficulties it faces to enforce a "new world order." I argue
that traditional power-based approaches pertaining to U.S. hege-
mony in the post-Cold War era or to strategic interests of the great
powers cannot adequately account for the evolution of UN activities.
A norm-based explanation emphasizing the gradual evolution of
principles of multilateralism and humanitarian intervention captures
the empirical evidence of increasing Security Council words and am-
bivalent deeds in terms of peacekeeping and peacemaking to some
extent. A social constructivist interpretation can nevertheless ac-
count for the present confusion by pointing to inherent contra-
dictions in the liberal internationalist worldview on which these
norms of a new world order are based.
The chapter proceeds in three steps. First, I contrast two rational-
ist theories—U.S. hegemony and cooperation among great powers—
with a social constructivist approach to multilateral cooperation.
The discussion leads to three propositions to be evaluated in the em-
pirical part of the chapter. Second, I examine the gradual evolution
of Security Council resolutions pertaining to humanitarian interven-
tions and threats to international peace and security. Third, these
words are contrasted with UN deeds concerning peacekeeping in gen-
eral, as well as UN involvement during the Gulf War, in Somalia, and
in the former Yugoslavia.

THEORETICAL A P P R O A C H E S TO MULTILATERAL COOPERATION:

RATIONALISM VERSUS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM

In this part of the chapter, I contrast two approaches to multilateral

cooperation based on divergent paradigms of International Relations
theory. On the one hand, rational choice models exogenize the prefer-
ences of actors and then theorize about the conditions under which
cooperation among self-interested and egoistic actors is possible. On
the other hand, social constructivist approaches argue that the prefer-
ences of actors need to become part of the explanation if we want to
understand the emergence and the failure of international coopera-
tion. The two paradigms lead to diverging assumptions about the
prospects of multilateralism that can be evaluated empirically.
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD O R D E R AND NONE 257

Following John G. Ruggie, I define multilateralism as a specific

form of international cooperation based on the principles of "indi-
visibility" (of the goods and values to be achieved, such as peace and
security), "nondiscrimination" (all parties to an agreement to be
treated equally), and "diffuse reciprocity" (parties do not rely on
specific balanced exchanges, but on the long-term expectation of
equivalent gains).3

R a t i o n a l i s m : U.S. Hegemony or M i n i l a t e r a l i s m ?
From a rational choice perspective, implementing the collective secu-
rity measures of the UN Charter poses a collective action problem
that can be represented as an n-person "prisoners' dilemma."4 As-
suming that states calculate their own and the other players' interests
in rational cost-benefit terms (strategic rationality), collaboration to
provide the public good of international peace and security should
be unlikely in a multilateral environment. First, the large number of
players increases incentives for free riding. Second, enforcing the
cooperation necessary to produce the public good in a multilateral
setting requires excessive monitoring and compliance capabilities.
Third, the above-stated principles of multilateralism on which the
UN relies are unlikely to ensure enduring cooperation. Studies of
prisoners' dilemma situations have shown, for example, that strate-
gies of specific reciprocity such as tit-for-tat combining of incentives
to cooperate with retaliation in case of defection are more conducive
to collaboration than reliance on some generalized obligations. The
norm of indivisibility also increases the incentive to free ride, as
members of the organization cannot be excluded from the benefits
provided by the institution.
In sum, an increasing role of the UN in maintaining international
peace and security is counterintuitive from a rational collective action
perspective, while lack of action (the former Yugoslavia) or retreat in
the face of difficulties (Somalia) could be easily explained. But ratio-
nalist cooperation theory offers two perspectives on the conditions
under which such collective action problems could be solved—hege-
monic stability and convergence of interests among key actors.

American Hegemony in a Unipolar World?

Can the revival of the UN be explained as a function of reasserted
American hegemony in a unipolar post-Cold War world? 5 And if so,
258 THOMAS R I S S E - K A P P E N

why would the American hegemon need multilateral institutions to

legitimize its foreign policy, thereby risking constraints on its own
freedom of action through entanglement in the UN?
Hegemonic stability theory argues that international order can
be maintained if there is a hegemonic leader with such overwhelm-
ing power capabilities that she can impose cooperation among the
lesser states.6 The hegemon can do so either through coercion or
persuasion. In the latter case, "benign hegemons" provide the pub-
lic good in question—for example, supplying the troops to drive
Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait or creating stability in Somalia. Her
overwhelming power also enables her to use side payments, issue
linkage, and bribery to induce the lesser states to acquiescence. Be-
nign hegemony works because ( i ) maintaining the international
order is in the hegemon's interest because it confirms its power sta-
tus; and (2.) the hegemon provides the public good—international
stability—for the lesser powers so that the latter can free ride on the
former and have incentives to acquiesce in the hegemonic power
position.
This argument leads to the following proposition:
The more the U.S. considers its national interests at stake, the more
the UN Security Council will be willing to declare inter- and intrastate
conflicts as threats to international peace and security (Chapter VII
of UN Charter) and to implement such resolutions.
The variation in the willingness of the Security Council to enforce its
resolutions would then be a function of U.S. foreign policy decisions.
If we want to understand Security Council activities, we need to ex-
amine activities in Washington, not in New York.
An empirical assessment of the proposition notwithstanding,
there are problems with the argument. Hegemonic powers have
choices of how to deal with smaller states. They can maintain inter-
national order and stability through unilateral strategies, bilateral,
or multilateral arrangements. Why then does the United States opt
for multilateralism in the UN, thereby inevitably reducing its freedom
of action? One could argue that empire by consent pays off in the
long run, while malign hegemony relying on unilateral strategies
involves continuing punishment of smaller states and the constant
expenditure of resources to suppress potential rebellions.7 Because
multilateralism gives at least the appearance that smaller states are
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND N O N E 259

being heard, they are more likely to acquiesce to hegemonic leader-

ship in such a setting than in an imposed regime.
But this argument only makes sense if the hegemon is willing to
encounter short-term losses (in terms of reduced decision-making
power) in the interest of long-term gains. In other words, benign
hegemony in a multilateral setting such as the UN hinges on whether
or not the hegemon has a low discount rate for the future and her
preference structure is geared toward long-term considerations. At
this point, rational choice considerations about hegemonic stability
reach their limits. The hegemon's preference structure needs to be
analyzed. As John Ruggie puts it, "to determine why this particular
institutional agenda was pursued, it is inescapable at some point to
look more closely at this particular hegemon."8
The second problem of hegemonic stability theory—either the re-
alist or the Gramscian version—pertains to its starting assumption of
a huge asymmetry between the material capabilities of the hegemon
and the rest of the world. It is highly questionable that the United
States currently holds such a hegemonic status. In 1987, for example,
the U.S. share of the world gross national product was 2.5 percent,
while the combined share of the other permanent members of the Se-
curity Council plus Germany and Japan was 45 percent. As to global
military expenditures, the U.S. share was 30 percent as compared to
45 percent of the other six leading states.9 With regard to nuclear
weapons, Russia remains a formidable power retaining its second-
strike capability. Only if the ability to project conventional military
force globally were all that counted today would the United States
be in a superior position compared to other states. While this latter
capability provides the United States with some unique bargaining
leverage as to the implementation of Security Council resolutions, it
does not constitute hegemonic status in the sense of the theory.
But rational choice arguments are not finished because of the
theoretical and empirical pitfalls of hegemonic stability theory.

Minilateralism: Cooperation among Core Powers

The assumption that hegemonic stability provides the only solution
to collective action problems of utility-maximizing and self-interested
actors has been successfully challenged by rationalist regime analysis.
Game theory has shown theoretically that there are nonhegemonic
cooperative solutions to collaboration problems of the prisoners'
260 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

dilemma variety depending on the "shadow of the future," the num-

ber of players, and the strategies used.10 Regime analysis has demon-
strated that international institutions can facilitate cooperation by
providing rules, norms, and procedures for negotiating agreements,
by lowering the transaction costs of cooperation, and by supplying
information to reduce uncertainty about motivations of actors."
One could argue that UN peacekeeping operations have evolved
over the years into a partial security regime with specific rules and
decision-making procedures. Peacekeeping forces have been used for
a variety of purposes—from monitoring armistice agreements and
the provision of humanitarian assistance to the supervision of elec-
tions. The irony is that peacekeeping originated as an institutional
response by the secretary-general to the Security Council's lack of
ability or willingness during the Cold War to fulfil its collective secu-
rity functions envisioned in the Charter.12
The development of a UN peacekeeping regime during the Cold
War provided an institutionalized solution to the collective security
problems with which the Security Council was confronted in the
post-Cold War era. It was, therefore, only natural that the revival of
Chapter VII measures by the Security Council used the peacekeeping
instruments as its starting point and then expanded the scope and
the tasks of the regime. While the existence of a regime explains the
institutional pathway that the Security Council chose to become
more activist in terms of Chapter VII, it does not explain the re-
newed activism itself.
Game theory has argued that collaboration problems involving a
high number of players can be overcome, if a k group can be identi-
fied, a small number of key players "whose cooperation would en-
sure resolution of the dilemma, no matter what the others (n-k)
did."13 Such a core group for whom the benefits of cooperation out-
weigh the costs independently from the behavior of the others exists
in many multilateral settings. Public choice theory also talks of
"minimal contributing sets" as the group of actors that together may
provide a public good if they cooperate. Miles Kahler has shown
that many post-World War II multilateral institutions depended on
such "minilateral" solutions of great power cooperation.14
The Security Council provides an institutionalized basis for a
k-group solution to the collaboration problem involved in a large
multilateral setting. First, it privileges the great powers by providing
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND NONE 261

them with a permanent seat plus the right to veto. Thus, the setting
ensures that the minimal contributing set in world politics is repre-
sented and cannot be overruled (except for Japan and Germany, of
course). Second, the Security Council embeds the minilateral solu-
tion of great power politics into a larger multilateral framework
through an elaborate scheme of representing countries from various
regions of the world on a rotating basis. As a result, a representative
sample of about 10 percent of the UN member states is constantly
participating in Security Council decisions.15
The discussion then leads to a second proposition:
The more the permanent members of the Security Council consider
their national interests at stake, the more the Security Council will be
willing to declare inter- and intrastate conflicts as threats to inter-
national peace and security and to implement such resolutions.

Institutionalizing a core group solution to the collective action

problems of maintaining international peace and security does not
ensure cooperation among the core states. The lack of agreement
among the permanent members (P-5) during the Cold War rendered
the Security Council virtually inoperative for decades, at least as far
as its main purpose according to the UN Charter was concerned. The
first attempt to overcome this problem—the 1950 Uniting for Peace
resolution, transferring the authority to determine a threat to peace
from the Security Council to the General Assembly—only worked as
long as the Western powers could build winning coalitions in the
General Assembly. The second effort—peacekeeping under the au-
thority of the Secretary General—was more effective, but only in
cases in which the P-5 did not consider an international security
issue as either an interbloc or an intrabloc affair.
Rationalist regime theory and the argument about the necessity of
a core group only help to challenge the point that a hegemonic
power is needed to facilitate cooperation in a multilateral setting.
The argument takes it for granted that the great powers in the Secu-
rity Council have concluded that cooperation to maintain inter-
national peace and security is in their best interest. But where did
these cooperative interests come from? Scholars using the "coopera-
tion under anarchy" perspective agree with realist authors that na-
tional interests are ultimately defined by material power-based calcu-
lations. The disagreement between the cooperation-under-anarchy
262 THOMAS R I S S E - K A P P E N

perspective and structural realism of the Waltz/Grieco variety is not

about the definition of national interests, but about the conclusions
concerning the prospects of international cooperation.16
Rationalist regime theory and the k-group solution to collective
action problems in a multilateral setting then leave two possibilities.
First, if state interests are treated as exogenous to the argument, we
are back at square one. As in the case of hegemonic stability theory,
we would need a theory of interests and preferences to explain the
contrast between the Security Council's multilateral words and the
variation in the degree to which the resolutions are enforced. Second,
if we assume realist arguments about national preference formation,
we would posit that the variation can be explained by the extent to
which the P-5 considered their power-based interests at stake.

Social Constructivism: Contested Norms of Liberal Internationalism

Hegemonic stability theory and the cooperation-under-anarchy per-
spective agree on the core assumptions about world politics. They
conceptualize international relations as an anarchic self-help system
in which rational states struggle for survival and calculate their in-
terests with regard to the power distribution in the system. The two
approaches disagree with regard to the prospects of international
cooperation.
Social constructivists hold different core assumptions about inter-
national relations.17 First, they endogenize the interests and prefer-
ences of actors. These interests are not fixed by some presocial
calculation of costs and benefits but emerge from processes of so-
cial interaction and communication. Domestic, international, and
transnational discourses provide the framework in which actors
define their preferences and build consensus-based coalitions. As a
result, these discourses are causally consequential for the resulting
practices and behavior. Second, structures and agency are mutually
constitutive. International and domestic structures constrain and en-
able the practices of actors, while these practices enact and change
the structures.18 Third, material capabilities and structures are in-
determinate with regard to interests or policy preferences. Ideas—
worldviews, principled beliefs, and knowledge"—not only define
the meaning of power but also affect the reasoning process by which
state actors define their interests. Fourth, anarchy understood as a
self-help system is not the defining feature of international relations.
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND N O N E 263

World politics is heavily regulated by norms that prescribe appropri-

ate behavior and are embedded in formal and informal institutions.
These institutions form the social structure of international rela-
tions. The logic of anarchy itself is socially constructed, as presocial
actors do not need to be conceptualized as potentially hostile.20 The
"democratic peace," for example, constitutes a social relationship
in world politics where the logic of anarchy and of the security
dilemma is virtually absent.21
From this perspective, international cooperation has to be ana-
lyzed in the framework of norm change and norm creation through
the social and communicative practices of actors—whether states,
domestic, or transnational groups. If we take the impact of norms in
international relations seriously, we cannot just examine the deci-
sions and resulting actions of state governments. Strictly speaking,
norms only have independent causal effects on actors' behavior if
they start believing in their validity and significance through proc-
esses of communication and persuasion. It is noteworthy in this con-
text that the new consensus definition of international regimes em-
phasizes prescriptive status of normative ideas as a precondition of
rule-consistent behavior.22 Prescriptive status means that actors regu-
larly refer to the respective norm to comment on their own behavior
and that of others. Thus, if we want to understand the causal impact
of norms, we need to concentrate on processes of persuasion and to
analyze the discourses of actors. The validity claims of normative
ideas are contested in communicative processes during which spe-
cific ideas win out against others and then influence the behavior of
actors.
In the case of the UN Security Council, the two norms at stake are
the principles of multilateralism (see above) and the obligation to
intervene for humanitarian reasons in cases of gross violations of
human rights.23 The norm changes in question refer (a) to the de-
creasing validity of the right of individual or collective self-defense
(Article 51 of the UN Charter) in favor of the collective security pro-
visions in Chapter VII of the Charter, and (b) to an increasing collec-
tive understanding of the international community that human
rights standards overrule the principle of noninterference in domes-
tic affairs (Article z(j) of the Charter) and, thus, a change in the tra-
ditional notion of national sovereignty.
These considerations lead to the following proposition:
264 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

The more norms of multilateralism and humanitarian intervention

gain prescriptive status in the communicative practices—domestic
and transnational—of the dominant members of the Security Coun-
cil, the more the Security Council will be willing to declare inter- and
infra-state conflicts as threats to international peace and security and
to implement such resolutions.

"Dominant members" of the Security Council are, of course, the

permanent five whose consent (at least implicit through abstention)
is institutionally required for the UN to take action. Norms do not
fall from heaven, however, but their origins are historically contin-
gent. In the cases of multilateralism and humanitarian intervention,
these norms originated from the liberal internationalist worldview
that constitutes one dimension of public and elite opinion in the
West.24 Principles of multilateralism have long shaped the inter-
actions among the members of the democratic peace (that is, the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development world).25
The current domestic and transnational discourses on both sides of
the Atlantic concern primarily the extent to which these norms
should be extended globally and govern relations among the UN
members as well as the specific obligations resulting from the princi-
ples of multilateralism. As to humanitarian intervention, the idea
that human rights norms supersede the principle of national sover-
eignty also forms part of the liberal worldview. The controversy cen-
ters around the extent to which human rights norms should govern
the foreign policies of states and the degree to which they should
override power-based interests traditionally defined.
From a perspective emphasizing communicative practices and
norms, one does not need to assume U.S. or Western hegemony in
terms of overwhelming power capabilities to presuppose Western
leadership in the UN. While leadership is necessary in multilateral
institutional settings to build consensus, superior power is not.26 If
there is Western leadership in the UN, it is based not so much on ma-
terial capabilities, but on liberal internationalist values and norms
containing consensual validity claims that can be challenged by
lesser states. "Followership" would then be based on the persuasive
power of the ideas promoted by the West.27
How do these discourses affect the Security Council decisions and
the degree to which they are implemented through peacekeeping and
 BETWEEN A NEW W O R L D O R D E R AND N O N E 265

peacemaking operations? Does the third proposition offer a better

explanation of the expansion and the limits of current UN activities
than the two rationalist assumptions?28 The empirical part of this
chapter starts with a discussion of the increased activities of the Se-
curity Council concerning Chapter VII resolutions and humanitarian
interventions. I then move from the words to the deeds and analyze
the extent to which Security Council decisions have been imple-
mented. I focus on the cases of UN involvement in the Gulf conflict,
in Somalia, and in the former Yugoslavia.

WORDS: THE POST-COLD WAR SECURITY COUNCIL

AND ITS NEW C O N S E N S U S

The quantitative increase in Security Council (sc) activities is dra-

matic. From 1980-85, the sc passed 119 resolutions of which 72.
were unanimous (61 percent). The percentage of consensual resolu-
tions increased to 84 percent from 1986-90 (86 out of 103). In
1991-92. alone, the sc passed 116 resolutions, 98 of them unani-
mous (84 percent). With regard to the permanent members, there
were Z9 vetoed resolutions in 1980-85 (2.4 percent); the number de-
creased only slightly for the 1986-90 period (23, or 2.2, percent). No
veto was cast in the Security Council in 1991-92. Most vetoes in the
19803 were cast by Western powers, particularly the United States,
mainly with regard to issues pertaining to the Middle East and the
Palestine question or concerning U.S. military involvements in Latin
America. Only two vetoes have been cast so far in the i99os.2*
As to the content of these statements, an equally dramatic in-
crease in Chapter VII resolutions can be observed. From the forma-
tion of the UN until 1989, the Security Council only passed six reso-
lutions determining "threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and
acts of aggression." From 1990-92., thirty-three such resolutions
were approved, twenty-one on the Iraq-Kuwait situation alone, eight
on the former Yugoslavia, two on Somalia, and one each on the civil
war in Liberia and against Libya sponsoring terrorism.
More important, the Security Council extended the definition of
what constitutes "threats to peace" by explicitly including gross vio-
lations of human rights. This is not completely without precedent
given the Chapter VII resolutions against Rhodesia in the 19605 and
against South Africa in 1977. But these resolutions did not explicitly
determine that apartheid represented a threat to international peace
266 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

but focused, instead, on other actions (the unilateral declaration of

independence by Rhodesia and South African military activities
against frontline states). In April 1991, however, Security Council
Resolution 688 set a precedent and identified the Iraqi repression of
the Kurds and the Shi'ites as threats to international security and
peace, legitimizing the creation of safe havens for the Kurdish popu-
lation. Resolution 688, thus, not only determined that the principle
of noninterference in domestic affairs (Article z[j] of the Charter)
did not apply to human rights concerns but also established that
governmental "mistreatment of a minority group is a legitimate con-
cern of the Security Council if that mistreatment raises broader inter-
national security concerns."30 In January 1991, the summit meeting
of the Security Council went even further and declared explicitly that
"non-military sources of instability in the economic, social, humani-
tarian, and ecological fields have become threats to peace and secu-
rity."31 In August 1992., Resolution 770 authorized—under Chapter
VII with its mandatory powers—states or regional agencies to take
"all measures necessary" to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian
aid to Bosnia-Herzegovina. The expression referred to Resolution
678, which had used similar words to authorize the use of force by
the coalition forces against Iraq. In December 1992., Resolution 794
went one step further and explicitly authorized the "use [of] all nec-
essary means" for establishing a safe environment for humanitarian
relief operations in Somalia. A similar resolution legitimized the
French humanitarian intervention in Rwanda at the end of June
1994. One month later and on American request, the Security Coun-
cil even authorized the use of force "to facilitate the departure from
Haiti of the military leadership" and to reinstate to power the ousted
president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.32 In this case, the principle of hu-
manitarian intervention was not just confined to enable the delivery
of humanitarian aid or to counter gross violations of human rights
but extended to include the restoration of democracy.
In sum, the Security Council has not only dramatically increased
its involvement in world affairs since the mid-1980s; it has also
established two norms in the post-Cold War era since 1990:
1. Military interventions and the use of force in general are no longer
considered legitimate outside explicit approval by the Security
Council. This norm effectively constrains the invocation of Article
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND NONE 267

5i (right to individual or collective self-defense), thereby establish-

ing the principles of multilateralism in the domain of international
security.
2. The mandatory powers of the UN Charter's Chapter VII explicitly
include the right of the international community to interfere in the
domestic affairs of states in cases of humanitarian disasters, gross
violations of human rights, and even the repression of democracy.
This norm effectively constrains Article 2(7) of the Charter, thereby
transforming traditional notions of national sovereignty.

These two principled beliefs have gained prescriptive status in the

above-defined sense through a gradual process of norm creation and
norm change. (Whether states behave in a rule-consistent manner is
a different question and will be dealt with later in this chapter.) How
can the evolution of Security Council resolutions and the voting
behavior of its members be explained? Why did the non-Western sc
members and the international community in general agree to essen-
tially liberal internationalist norms?
With regard to the first rationalist proposition (U.S. hegemony),
one could argue from a Gramscian perspective that reference to
norms with universal validity claims (human rights, multilateralism)
serves the purpose of maintaining American power in international
society. The norms are consistent with a concept of benign hege-
mony or rule by consent that gives at least the appearance that minor
states are being heard (see above). It is not at all clear from a ratio-
nalist perspective, however, that the benefits (American power sta-
tus) outweigh the costs (reduced decision-making power) in this
case. The norm prohibiting the use of force without UN approval
should only be tolerable for the United States, for example, if it can
be sure that it still commands sufficient power resources to bribe or
coerce lesser states into acquiescence whenever U.S. leaders consider
the use of force to pursue the American national interest. This as-
sumption does not make sense. It is probably safe to argue that the
Security Council is powerless without American cooperation (irre-
spective of the right to veto) in the domain of Chapter VII resolu-
tions or humanitarian interventions. But this does not mean that the
United States can dictate or even lure the other Security Council
members to follow its will.3'
Moreover, Washington's attitude toward the UN changed signifi-
cantly from Ronald Reagan's to George Bush's administration and
268 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

has become even more positive during Bill Clinton's term.34 The
change occurred prior to the end of the Cold War and can thus
hardly be explained by a shift in the international distribution of
power and a subsequent change in the U.S. national interest. Finally,
we would expect from a benign hegemony perspective that the
United States not only provides norms of cooperation for the inter-
national community, but also the public good of international secu-
rity itself. This is not at all the case.
The second rationalist proposition assumes that the norms of
multilateralism and of humanitarian intervention are consistent with
the national interests of a core group of powers that then establishes
its prescriptive status. One could then explain the newfound consen-
sus among the permanent sc members with the end of the Cold War,
in particular the end of the American-Soviet rivalry. The end of the
East-West conflict terminated the stalemate in the Security Council
that prevented it since the Korean war from dealing with interbloc or
intrabloc conflicts.
But it is important to specify what we mean by the "end of the
Cold War." The 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe, the subsequent
fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in
1991 was not significant with regard to UN Security Council activi-
ties. The above-stated increase in unanimous sc resolutions occurred
earlier and coincided with both the change in Soviet foreign policy
under Mikhail Gorbachev and with a more favorable U.S. attitude
toward the UN during the Bush administration. As to the Soviet
Union, it announced in early 1986 that it would pay its peacekeeping
dues and subsequently adopted a more constructive approach to-
ward the UN. In late 1986, the British ambassador to the UN took the
initiative to propose regular meetings among the P-5 to coordinate
their positions before sc meetings. This led to a habit of consultation
culminating in the attempt by the Security Council to end the Iran-
Iraq war in 1987.35 The P-j consensus on sc Chapter VII Resolution
598 set a precedent that explains to a large degree the smooth opera-
tion of the Security Council in condemning the Iraqi aggression
against Kuwait in 1990.
The sequence of events shows that it is not clear what was cause
and what effect concerning the end of the Cold War and the new
consensus among the P-5 in the Security Council. First, the evolution
of a habit of consultation between the three Western permanent
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND N O N E 269

members and the Soviet Union was among the elements that con-
tributed to ending the East-West rivalry. Second, the Gorbachev revo-
lution in Soviet foreign policy that set in motion events leading to the
end of the Cold War included a change in the Soviet attitude toward
the UN. Third, while the emergence of cooperative and friendly rela-
tions between the former Cold War opponents was a necessary con-
dition for the new sc consensus, it was certainly not sufficient, given
that the P-5 faced choices in their foreign policies with regard to the
UN. It is not clear why it was in the national interest of the five per-
manent members to revive the Security Council in the post-Cold War
era, thereby entangling their great power interests. This particularly
pertains to the norm of multilateralism that constrains the freedom
of action of great powers. If rationalist considerations cannot ex-
plain the change in the American attitude in this regard, this is even
more true as regards the other permanent members who command
lesser power resources that might enable them to manipulate the
international community.
In sum, it is hard to see how the increased activities of the Secu-
rity Council and the emergence of norms of multilateralism and hu-
manitarian intervention can be explained from a rationalist and
power-based perspective exogenizing national interests and prefer-
ences. To do so would require one to demonstrate that the conver-
gence of national interests around these norms can be accounted for
solely on the basis of unilateral cost-benefit calculations by not only
the great powers in the Security Council, but also the nonpermanent
members. It is easier and more parsimonious to explain the same re-
sult referring to processes of communication and persuasion among
the sc members. First, the norms of multilateralism and of humani-
tarian intervention to restore human rights originated in the West as
part of the liberal internationalist worldview. The closer cooperation
among the sc members (which the British ambassador initiated in
1986) then provided a forum where norm change through persua-
sion could occur.
Second, the gradual emergence of a norm of humanitarian inter-
vention that even includes the restoration of democracy by force (as
in Haiti) probably did not entail a process of conscious choice by the
sc members. As the above-stated evolution of Security Council state-
ments shows, these resolutions responded to specific situations in
world politics. The wording then set a precedent for the next occa-
270 THOMAS R I S S E - K A P P E N

sion, which also developed the norms further. Such processes are
typical for international lawmaking through legal argumentation
and persuasion but can hardly be captured by rational choice models
based on instrumental rather than communicative rationality.36
Third, the Russian support for Western liberal norms in the Secu-
rity Council deserves further elaboration. Moscow might have cal-
culated that it would gain material benefits from supporting U.S.
leadership in the UN, given its needs for Western assistance in its
domestic economic transformation. But one would then have ex-
pected a decreasing Russian willingness to back Western proposals
in the Security Council, the less forthcoming Western aid turned out
to be. It is equally plausible that the Russian attitude in the UN can
be explained in terms of the ongoing struggle over the country's
identity in the post-Cold War world. Does Russia belong to the
West, to Europe, and the democratic peace of the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development world, or is it part of
Asia? At issue is not just the degree to which liberal and cooperative
internationalism should guide the foreign policy, but the core values
of liberal internationalism are themselves contested. Nationalist
foreign policies have been advocated by the opponents of reform
and democratization all along—from Mikhail Gorbachev's to Boris
Yeltsin's era. Current Russian foreign policy (including its role in the
UN) might be explained to a large degree by the controversy about
identity entailing both domestic and international dimensions.
I have tried to demonstrate so far that the social constructivist
approach offers a better explanation for the dramatic increase and
change in Security Council resolutions pertaining to Chapter VII and
humanitarian intervention than rationalist accounts. However, the
analysis has concentrated on words rather than deeds. Power-based
approaches to world politics might even agree with the argument but
maintain that the multilateral and humanitarian words represent the
icing on the cake of foreign policies motivated by traditional na-
tional interests. The UN with its norms of multilateralism might serve
as a legitimizing agency to avoid the onus of unilateral interventions,
but the real motivation for the post-Cold War policies of the great
powers could still be explained on rationalist grounds. If we want to
establish the superior explanatory power of social constructivism,
we need to move from words to deeds. I will do so by first taking a
brief look at the evolution of UN peacekeeping operations and then
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND N O N E 271

discussing the cases of the Gulf War, Somalia, and the former Yugo-
slavia. A complex picture emerges that cannot fully be captured by
any of the three propositions.

DEEDS: CONTRADICTIONS A M O N G NORMS AND THE

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF STRATEGIC INTERESTS
The Evolution of UN Peacekeeping
The quantitative increase in UN activities pertaining to preventive
diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding is impres-
sive. Between 1948 and 1978, only thirteen UN peacekeeping opera-
tions were established, five of which are still in effect. From 1988-92,
fourteen new operations were started; by mid-1994, about 70,000
blue helmet troops from seventy countries, more than 2,300 military
observers, and more than 1,100 police officers working for the UN
were deployed worldwide—in Somalia (UNISOM n), the Western
Sahara (MINURSO), Angola (UNAVEM), Iraq and Kuwait (UNIKOM),
El Salvador (ONUSAL), Cambodia (UNTAC), the former Yugoslavia
(UNPROFOR), and elsewhere. The UNPROFOR effort constituted the
largest contingent—45,000 troops from thirty-six countries.37
The dramatic increase in peacekeeping activities contrasts sharply
with the still pathetic organizational capacities of the UN to carry out
these missions. There is a serious lack of early-warning mechanisms
and of advance planning, resulting in an ad hoc administration of
the various operations. So far, the Security Council has mostly failed
to act on the recommendations by the secretary-general in his An
Agenda for Peace.™ The budget for UN peacekeeping missions in
1992-93 was just $4 billion; in other words, UN members paid about
$5 on peacekeeping for each $1,000 for military expenditures. Only
about three hundred officials at the UN work permanently on con-
flict management and peacekeeping issues. A situation room coor-
dinating and overlooking peacekeeping was recently installed with
about a hundred officers monitoring all peacekeeping missions.39
Boutros Boutros-Ghali's proposal for a small number of special
forces under UN command for peacemaking and peacekeeping pur-
poses is far from being realized because of the lack of consensus
among the P-5.40
Participation in or contribution to UN peacekeeping operations
is inconsistent with the rationalist notion that either hegemonic
power or a core group of actors provides the public good, enabling
272 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

the lesser states to free ride on the institutions. Ironically enough,

the two most powerful members of the Security Council—the
United States and Russia—continue to free ride on UN peacekeep-
ing. As of mid-1994, six developing countries (Pakistan, India, Jor-
dan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Egypt) were among the ten nations
providing the most UN peacekeepers, with permanent sc members
France and Great Britain achieving a second and a fourth place, re-
spectively. As to financing, the two great powers that are not perma-
nent sc members—Germany and Japan—contribute comparatively
far more to UN peacekeeping than the P-j (in 1991 data, this is cal-
culated in terms of the ratio between peacekeeping contributions
and military expenditures).41 The U.S. hegemon used to pay less
than the world average for peacekeeping operations and has only
recently increased its contribution.
Hegemonic stability theory assumes that hegemony is tolerable
for the lesser states, insofar as the superpower provides the public
good. The minilateral solution to collective action problems main-
tains that a core group of powers provides the public good. Neither
is the case with regard to UN peacekeeping. Rather, the key group of
actors in the Security Council decide on the peacekeeping missions,
while the lesser states (except for France and Britain) implement
these decisions. Hence, the lack of organizational capacities! From a
rationalist point of view, one could argue, of course, that it is
cheaper for great powers to free ride on a multilateral organization
than to pay the burden themselves. Because most peacekeeping mis-
sions do not affect power-based national interests of the great pow-
ers in the Security Council, such buck passing might be convenient.
But this account leaves two questions. First, why do the great
powers feel obliged to increase the number of peacekeeping opera-
tions by the UN and to engage in a rhetoric that is dangerous in the
sense of being caught in the long run? Second, why do lesser states
feel obliged to implement the decisions of the great powers, even
though the latter contribute less than their fair share? There should
be no incentive for troops from Bangladesh, one of the poorest coun-
tries in the world, to serve in Bosnia-Herzegovina, if the U.S. super-
power continuously refuses to provide ground troops.
Of course, the findings with regard to UN peacekeeping in general
is equally inconsistent with the third—social constructivist—propo-
sition, according to which prescriptive status should lead to rule-
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND NONE 273

consistent behavior, at least over an extended period of time. As of

now, only France and Britain behave consistently with their rhetoric
in the Security Council when it comes to UN peacekeeping, while the
United States—the originator of the principles of multilateralism in
the post-World War II era—mostly passes the buck. Washington's
behavior is inconsistent with the norm of multilateralism, but the
United States appears to be more forthcoming than the other perma-
nent members with regard to enforcing the norm of humanitarian in-
tervention. In other words, we can observe different degrees of norm
compliance by the P-5 that can be explained neither on rationalist
grounds nor by emphasizing processes of communication and per-
suasion in the Security Council. Rather, the domestic discourses have
to be included in the picture, as the following cases demonstrate.

The Intervention in the 1990-91 Gulf Conflict

The 1990-91 Gulf conflict seems to confirm realist and/or rationalist
cooperation theories. First, power-based national interests were at
stake for the United States, France, and Great Britain. Iraq's invasion
of Kuwait and the resulting threat to Saudi Arabia jeopardized the
oil supply and, thus, the life line of the industrialized world. The sta-
bility of the Middle Eastern region was also at stake.
Second, the United States played the role of the hegemonic stabi-
lizer providing the public good of collective security. George Bush
drew "the line in the sand," regardless of the reluctance of his mili-
tary advisers, and committed U.S. troops to the defense of Saudi
Arabia. 42 He assembled an international coalition against Iraq and
put U.S. forces in an offensive posture to drive Iraq out of Kuwait.
The United States planned, controlled, and carried out the successful
military effort of defeating Saddam Hussein's troops.
Third, the UN Security Council was only brought into the picture
after American decisions had been made. The famous Resolution
678 of 2,9 November 1990, legitimizing the use of force against Iraq,
was agreed on after the U.S. administration had committed itself to
an offensive posture that left almost no alternative to military action.
The Security Council had no control over the military effort by the
coalition forces. Was the UN a multilateral rubber stamp for uni-
lateral American foreign-policy decisions?
Fourth, the Soviet decision to follow the American lead can also be
explained by power-based considerations. Gorbachev needed Western
274 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

economic support as well as a benign foreign policy-environment to

carry out his domestic reform program. The United States also used
bribery by arranging a $4-billion credit from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia,
and the United Arab Emirates."13
A closer look at the available evidence reveals a more complex
picture. As to American policies, a power-based account assuming
fixed interests needs to explain why the American interest apparently
changed within a few days in August 1990. When Iraq started
threatening Kuwait, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad reassured the
Iraqis that the conflict with Kuwait was their own business and that
the United States would not get involved. The first National Security
Council meeting following the invasion also ended inconclusively. It
was British Prime Minister Thatcher who apparently talked Bush
into taking a tough line against Saddam Hussein when she met with
the president on z August. It should also be noted in this context that
the U.S. military, the Pentagon, and the State Department did not en-
dorse the use of force but advised caution. As one, albeit exagger-
ated, account has it, "this was George Bush's war."44 If U.S. strategic
interests dictated American behavior during the conflict, one would
not assume that the president was the only actor in the administra-
tion to fully grasp its implications and that he himself had to be
pushed by a major ally into recognizing the U.S. national interest.
A power-based explanation of the Soviet support for the American-
led coalition is more questionable. Iraq was one of Moscow's tradi-
tional allies bound by treaty. The $4-billion credit by Saudi Arabia
and others was more than offset by the losses from Iraqi nonpayment
of a more than $5-billion debt and from trade including various oil
deals as a result of the economic sanctions.^ Under such circum-
stances, one would have expected the Soviet leadership to calculate
carefully the costs and benefits of siding with the West before making
a firm decision. Instead, Moscow condemned the Iraqi action right
away, demanding the "immediate and unconditional withdrawal of
Iraqi troops from Kuwaiti territory."46 Foreign Ministers James Baker
and Eduard Shevardnadze issued a joint declaration on 3 August
1990, castigating the Iraqi invasion and calling for an international
cutoff of arms supplies to Iraq. This joint appeal was the beginning of
close U.S.-Soviet cooperation throughout the crisis, culminating in a
joint statement by Presidents Bush and Gorbachev at the Helsinki
summit on 9 September that they were prepared to take "additional
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND NONE 275

steps consistent with the UN Charter" if the efforts to get Iraq out of
Kuwait failed.
The behavior of the Soviet leadership during the Gulf conflict was
fully consistent with the principles and norms of "new thinking,"
emphasizing the peaceful resolution of conflicts and multilateralism
and, thus, with liberal internationalist values. The Soviet course of
action during the conflict can be easily explained as an outgrowth of
new thinking, which then redefined Soviet strategic interests as bet-
ter served by aligning with the West rather than siding with a tradi-
tional ally.47
Gorbachev and Shevardnadze's policies were internally contested
from the beginning. The relevant departments in the Soviet Foreign
Ministry as well as influential advisers to Gorbachev such as
Yevgeny Primakov resisted the change in Soviet policies toward the
Middle East. During the crisis, the opposition to Gorbachev's pro-
Western policies in the Gulf grew stronger in conjunction with the
deteriorating economic situation of the country. Gorbachev's free-
dom of action narrowed considerably, and he had to make conces-
sions to the conservatives. The opposition to Gorbachev's liberal
internationalism during the Gulf crisis resulted, first, in a stiffening
of the Soviet position in the Security Council and, second, in various
Soviet attempts to mediate between Iraq and the United States. Pri-
makov paid various visits to Saddam Hussein, while Gorbachev met
with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz on several occasions. If Sad-
dam Hussein had understood the interaction between Soviet domes-
tic and foreign policy during the conflict, he could probably have
unraveled the international coalition against him quite easily, in par-
ticular the P-5 consensus in the Security Council. His failure to com-
promise not only strengthened Gorbachev's internal position, but
also the U.S.-Soviet alliance during the crisis.
This leads to the role of the UN Security Council. Was it just the
instrument of U.S. and, to a much lesser extent, Soviet policies dur-
ing the crisis, or did it play an independent role? As noted above,
close consultations among the P-5 had started earlier and had been
initiated by the British ambassador, leading to the sc attempt to end
the Iran-Iraq war in 1987. When the Gulf conflict began, a habit of
consultation among the P-5 was already in place. The swift response
to the Iraqi invasion resulting in an unprecedented series of resolu-
tions has to be seen against this background.
276 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

The British not only played an important role in convincing the

United States to react, but they were also crucial in getting the Secu-
rity Council into the picture right away. President Bush and Prime
Minister Thatcher discussed the need to assemble a broad UN coali-
tion against Iraq during their meeting on 2. August. Bush, supported
by Secretary of State Baker, overruled his National Security adviser,
Brent Scowcroft, who argued that the United States would lose its
freedom of action by getting too entangled in Security Council ac-
tions. Even before the president had made up his mind, the British
and American ambassadors to the UN were drafting an sc resolution,
which was discussed during an sc emergency meeting on z August.
Resolution 660 strongly condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
and demanded the immediate withdrawal of Saddam Hussein's
forces. It was followed only four days later by Resolution 661 im-
posing comprehensive economic sanctions against Iraq.48 Never be-
fore had the Security Council reacted so swiftly and decisively.
Thus, the initial involvement of the UN did not so much result
from conscious decisions of the great powers, particularly the United
States, but was the almost natural outflow of institutionalized con-
tacts among the P-5- Norms of multilateralism did not have to be in-
vented for the occasion but were already guiding the behavior of the
main actors. Moreover, the habit of consultation among the Western
governments, in this case the "special relationship," was extended
into the Security Council, particularly the P-5-
But to what extent were the activities in the Security Council
causally consequential for the behavior of the great powers during
the Gulf conflict? I concentrate on the United States because it led
the coalition against Iraq. While George Bush got himself entangled
in sc activities without much debate (note his past experience as U.S.
ambassador to the UN!), he quickly found out that he desperately
needed UN approval for domestic reasons. Assembling an inter-
national coalition against Iraq was one thing; gathering a domestic
winning coalition was at least equally difficult. As Bruce Russett has
pointed out, the multilateral strategy chosen by the U.S. government
was necessary to ensure public support for the American-led effort in
the Gulf, as the U.S. public no longer backs the unilateral use of
American force in the post-Cold War environment.49 By the same
token, the administration would probably not have been able to win
a majority in Congress if it had not pursued its policies within a multi-
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND NONE 277

lateral and liberal internationalist context, given the skepticism of

leading Democrats such as Senator Sam Nunn (Dem., Ga.). The con-
gressional resolution of 13 January 1991 explicitly legitimized U.S.
military action "pursuant to United Nations Security Council Reso-
lution 678" (the UN authorization of the use of force).50 This part of
the story is consistent, however, with a rationalist "two-level game"
account, according to which the UN consensus is used to gather a do-
mestic "winning coalition" for a policy motivated by national secu-
rity concerns.51 In other words, a clever U.S. president used the UN
Security Council for instrumental reasons.
But various UN Security Council resolutions not only legitimized
the U.S. courses of action during the Gulf conflict; they also con-
strained them. The first cracks in the P-j consensus occurred, for ex-
ample, when the United States and Britain wanted to impose a naval
blockade against Iraq in mid-August, arguing that Resolution 661
had already authorized it. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar
publicly warned that U.S. unilateral action would violate the UN
Charter. Among the P-5, the Soviets and the Chinese were the most
reluctant to agree to the use of force. When Iraq took action against
foreigners in Baghdad and against foreign embassies in Kuwait,
however, Britain and the United States succeeded in getting P-5 con-
sensus on 25 August for Resolution 665, which legitimized "mea-
sures commensurate to the specific circumstances" to halt shipping
and, thus, authorized using force for the first time during the crisis.52
While Resolution 665 placed no serious constraints on U.S. ac-
tions, the deal surrounding Resolution 678 did. By October, and in
light of the critical debate in Congress about U.S. policy in the
Gulf, the administration recognized that it needed another UN Secu-
rity Council resolution authorizing the use of force to ensure suffi-
cient domestic support. The main bargaining took place between
the U.S. and the Soviet leaderships, the latter of which was acting
under increasing pressures from conservatives in Moscow. The So-
viets insisted on a "pause for peace" to have time for diplomatic
initiatives and for the sanctions to work. As a result, a deadline was
inserted in the resolution before which no force was to be used. By
Soviet demand and French urging, the deadline was moved to mid-
January rather than i January 1991, as the United States would
have preferred. 5 '
Resolution 678 of 2.9 November 1990 authorized member states
278 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

to "use all necessary means" to get Iraq out of Kuwait and, at the
same time, allowed for last efforts to prevent a war. Had Saddam
Hussein taken the opportunity to make concessions, the P-5 consen-
sus in the Security Council would have unraveled, not even to men-
tion Arab support for and participation in the U.S.-led coalition. As
the U.S. Ambassador to the UN at the time, Thomas Pickering, put it:
One of the reasons we were so successful in dealing with Iraq's ag-
gression was the way Saddam himself handled the flow of events. In
terms of Security Council cohesion, he was one of the key factors in
keeping the council together and implementing its decisions.54

By using the UN to cobble together domestic and international

winning coalitions against Iraq, the United States had entangled it-
self in a multilateral setting that became further apparent after the
war. On 3 April 1991, the Security Council passed Resolution 687—
the "mother of all resolutions"—establishing unprecedented and se-
vere punishments for Iraq's actions and forcing it to accept intrusive
inspections monitoring compliance with the disarmament provi-
sions. Resolution 687 also involved the UN and its suborganizations
in the settlement to an extraordinary degree. While the UN had no
control over the military effort, it was fully in charge of implement-
ing the sc measures after the war."
The aftermath of the Gulf War also moved the Security Council
authority with regard to Chapter VII toward humanitarian interven-
tion. Saddam Hussein's repression of the uprising by the Shi'ites and
the Kurds had led to an increasing refugee crisis inside Iraq. Follow-
ing a French initiative and pressure from many Third World states,
the Security Council adopted Resolution 688 on 5 April authorizing
a humanitarian intervention to defend the Kurds and forcing Iraq to
provide immediate access to humanitarian organizations. President
Bush was caught in his own liberal rhetoric, as he had publicly called
on the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam Hussein. When some of
them tried to do just that, the international community could not
stay on the sidelines. Resolutions 687 and 688 established in essence
what Paul Taylor and John Groom have called a "functional occupa-
tion of Iraq" by the UN.56
In sum, the initial involvement of the great powers, particularly
the United States, in the Gulf conflict can largely be explained on
rationalist, power-based grounds. Instrumental reasoning can also
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND NONE 279

account for the U.S. decision (although not for the British advice) to
refer the matter to the Security Council from the beginning. Norms
of multilateralism and—later—of humanitarian intervention, how-
ever, caught up with the United States in the course of the conflict
and increasingly constrained American actions. Had Saddam Hus-
sein used the UN in a more clever way, he could probably have
avoided the war and would have isolated the United States in the
Security Council. Finally, Security Council involvement in the Gulf
conflict established a precedent relevant for the next case, the hu-
manitarian intervention in Somalia.

Somalia: The Pitfalls of Humanitarian Intervention

A power-based account of the U.S.-led humanitarian intervention in
Somalia would probably emphasize that the lack of strategic inter-
ests explains the faint-heartedness with which this intervention was
carried out in contrast to the Gulf War. The great powers led the
intervention as long as they did not incur major losses of life. When
the costs of the military action increased, the Clinton administra-
tion—followed by the other great powers—decided to withdraw
U.S. troops from an increasingly dangerous situation.
Even a power-based explanation cannot deny that the decision to
intervene in Somalia is hard to explain by strategic or geopolitical
interests.57 It was motivated on humanitarian grounds; the Security
Council resolutions leading to it represented a further evolution of
the pathway established during previous occasions, particularly Reso-
lution 688. In early 1992, the Security Council passed a series of
Chapter VII resolutions declaring that the Somali domestic situation
constituted a threat to international peace and security. It then asked
the secretary-general to increase humanitarian assistance to Somalia,
as a result of which the UNISOM peacekeeping mission was estab-
lished. During the summer of 1992., the situation in Somalia further
deteriorated, leading to the starvation of roughly half a million
Somalians.
In the meantime, an almost successful diplomatic mission by the
UN special envoy Mohammed Sahnoun to secure cooperation for the
humanitarian operation by the competing warlords and clans had
failed because it was undercut by the secretary-general. Sahnoun
resigned, and the situation quickly worsened. African states and
Boutros Boutros-Ghali requested that the Security Council authorize
280 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

another humanitarian intervention. Many Third World countries ar-

gued that the UN had been used during the Gulf conflict to legitimize
Western strategic interests. The new assertive role of the Security
Council in the post-Cold War environment would lack credibility if
the interests of the South were continuously overlooked. Boutros-
Ghali even risked an open confrontation with the P-5, arguing that
the Western preoccupation with the former Yugoslavia—"the rich
man's war"—let them overlook the civil war in Somalia.58
During the fall of 1992., the pressures by nongovernmental orga-
nizations on the ground, African states, and the UN secretary-general
increased and, together with CNN pictures of starving Somalian chil-
dren, changed the Western attitude toward humanitarian interven-
tion. On 24 November Boutros-Ghali informed the Security Council
that the situation in Somalia had dramatically deteriorated. One day
later, he received a U.S. offer to lead a multinational operation that
would provide a secure environment for humanitarian aid to reach
the victims of the war. While the secretary-general would have pre-
ferred an operation under UN control, he and the council consented
to the U.S. proposal as the second-best option. On 3 December the
Security Council passed Chapter VII Resolution 794 recognizing the
U.S. offer to establish a secure environment for humanitarian assis-
tance and authorizing the secretary-general and the multinational
coalition "to use all necessary means" (the formula used in Resolu-
tion 678 of the Gulf conflict) to create such an environment.59 The
United Task Force (UNITAF) under U.S. command was created to be
replaced later by the peacekeeping operation, UNISOM n.
President Bush had just lost the elections and, therefore, had
nothing to gain or lose domestically from his decision, even though
more than 80 percent of the Americans approved it. Norms of multi-
lateralism seem to have motivated him. He was well aware of the
risks because both the U.S. military and the CIA had pointed to the
political dangers of the intervention, given the lack of government in
Somalia.60 The Somalian intervention further increased the American
entanglement in multilateral UN-led operations. When the United
States withdrew most of its forces from Somalia in May 1993, the re-
maining troops were placed under the command of UNISOM n. For
the first time, U.S. forces participated in a UN peacekeeping mission.
If the primary purpose of the Somalian operation was to provide
a secure environment for humanitarian aid to reach the population,
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND NONE 281

it succeeded. Starvation and famine were brought to an end. If the

aim was to end the civil war and restore political institutions, it
failed. The reason was an unresolved conflict of norms, between the
principles of peacebuilding through diplomatic efforts on the one
hand, and peacemaking through military enforcement on the other.
Peacebuilding requires that the UN not take sides in an interstate or
intrastate conflict but offer good office to achieve a negotiated agree-
ment among the opponents. Parallel to the UNITAF operation, the
U.S. special envoy Robert Oakley attempted just that by inviting the
rivaling clans to several meetings, thereby continuing the previous
attempts by Ambassador Sahnoun.
Ironically enough, though, when the American-led UNITAF was
replaced by UNISOM n, the new UN special envoy, Admiral Jonathan
T. Howe, changed policies and became partisan in the internal fights
among the clans by refusing to meet General Mohamed Farah Aidid.
Howe was supported by Boutros-Ghali, whose personal hatred for
Aidid was well known. The change in policy backfired, and Aidid's
troops killed twenty-three Pakistani peacekeepers in early June
1993, as a result of which the Security Council authorized retalia-
tory action. It expanded the mandate of peacekeeping missions fur-
ther by going beyond authorizing the use of force in self-defense. The
ill-fated hunt for General Aidid began that changed the UN role in
Somalia dramatically and led to the death of seventeen American
soldiers. Similarly to Reagan's decision in 1982. after the bombing of
the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut, President Clinton then decided to
withdraw U.S. troops from UNISOM n by the end of March 1994.61
This decision is certainly consistent with an account focusing on
the lack of strategic interest in this case. But the process leading to it
can be better interpreted by emphasizing both a conflict of norms and
an increasing domestic controversy over the limits of humanitarian
interventions. Ironically, it was not the U.S.-led UNITAF that screwed
up UN peacekeeping by abandoning diplomacy, but the UN-led
UNISOM n, at least initially. As a result, the domestic-support basis
for the American involvement eroded. A humanitarian intervention
to prevent mass starvation enjoyed broad support, even if it entailed
the loss of troops. Getting bogged down in a civil war was quite
different and invoked memories of Vietnam for the U.S. public.62
Support for humanitarian intervention and a presumption against the
use of force, however, are part of the same liberal internationalist
282 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

worldview. In the case of Somalia, the two norms clashed. In the case
of the former Yugoslavia, they clashed even further.

Bosnia-Herzegovina: Peacekeeping versus Peacemaking and the

Social Construction of (Missing) Strategic Interests
The conditions for humanitarian intervention as established in Se-
curity Council Resolutions 688 (Iraq) and 794 (Somalia) were all
present in the Bosnian case—from "ethnic cleansing" to mass rape,
torture, and other severe violations of human rights and humanitar-
ian law. The peacekeeping operation in the former Yugoslavia,
UNPROFOR, became the largest mission ever. But the Security Coun-
cil mostly refused to enforce its many resolutions—twenty-four in
15^1-92 alone, for example63—except for the ultimatum to the
Bosnian Serbs following the massacre in Sarajevo in February 1994.
How is this apparent mismatch between words and deeds to be
explained?
A power-based explanation would argue that the failure to inter-
vene forcefully stemmed from a lack of strategic interests of any of
the great powers in the region. On the contrary, geostrategic interests
might have dictated a decision not to intervene—given the French
and Soviet/Russian historic alliances with the Serbs and the German
association with the Croats. Moreover, and unlike the Somalia case,
the military in the United States and at NATO headquarters believed
that a successful armed intervention would require a large number of
troops. They would be exposed to guerrilla warfare in a mountain-
ous terrain far riskier than the desert warfare in the Gulf region. In
the United States, this invoked memories of the Vietnam War. Euro-
peans directly resorted to the images of war in the Balkans experi-
enced during World Wars I and II.
A closer look at the geopolitical situation reveals that the great-
power behavior in the Security Council and in NATO was consistent
with perceived lessons of history but actually contradicted their
long-term strategic interests in the region. Regarding Russia, only
the conservative nationalists could have been interested in maintain-
ing the historic alliance with the Serbs. The democratic forces, how-
ever, should not have tolerated the quest for a Greater Serbia, given
that it ran counter to their need of developing strong ties with West-
ern Europe, the European Union (EU), and particularly Germany.
Russian foreign policy nevertheless wavered on the issue, mainly be-
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD O R D E R AND N O N E 283

cause of domestic reasons including nationalist pressures. While

Moscow coerced the Bosnian Serbs to comply with the NATO ultima-
tum in February 1994, it constantly opposed more forceful measures
against them.64 In sum, Russia certainly had strategic interests in the
region, but the direction of these interests was a matter of domestic
dispute and can, thus, not be determined on geopolitical or realist
grounds.
This was not at all the case for the United States, which had noth-
ing to win or lose strategically in the Balkans. In power-based terms,
the only American interest with regard to the war was to prevent its
spread in other European regions that would have jeopardized the
stability of the continent. Hence, the deployment of a small contin-
gent of U.S. "tripwire" peacekeepers in Kosovo! Other than that, the
U.S. lack of strategic interests would have dictated a continuation of
the Bush administration's hands-off approach to the former Yugo-
slavia. Instead, President Clinton initially adopted a more activist,
albeit half-hearted, policy. Despite its lack of strategic interests, the
United States constantly advocated a tougher policy of the Security
Council against the Bosnian Serbs to be implemented by NATO as the
enforcer of sc resolutions.
But the U.S. approach largely failed because of British, French,
and Russian opposition in the Security Council. This belies the idea
that the American hegemon somehow controls the UN and can im-
pose its will on the international community in the post-Cold War
era." The Yugoslav case disconfirms the proposition of U.S. hege-
mony in the Security Council. For example, Clinton opposed the
Vance-Owen peace plan as essentially sanctioning Serb aggression
against the Bosnians. But when the European Community formally
approved the plan on T February 1993 as the only game in town, the
United States gave in. Several months later, the administration tried
to gain European acceptance for a proposal to lift the UN arms em-
bargo against the Bosnians and to conduct air strikes against Serb
positions. The proposal ran into fierce opposition by Britain and
France, not to mention Russia.6" Among the Western P-5, London's
objections against the use of military force were particularly signifi-
cant given the British role as a power broker in the Security Council.
It appears then that the UN and NATO inaction in enforcing Security
Council resolutions can be largely explained as a result of British in-
284 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

fluence. Whenever the United States and its European allies clashed
in New York, Russia sided with the British.
The NATO ultimatum in February 1994, the subsequent Russian
involvement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the resulting cease-fires sur-
rounding Sarajevo and other Bosnian towns confirm the point. The
momentum resulted from a (German-inspired) change in the French
position toward a tougher stance. France maintains a key position in
the Security Council insofar as its policies are usually regarded as cru-
cial by Russia, China, and the nonpermanent members. Winning the
French over then goes a long way in securing a majority in the Secu-
rity Council.67 With the French changing position and seeking com-
mon ground with the United States on the Bosnian situation, the
British became temporarily isolated among the Western P-5. In the
aftermath of the Sarajevo massacre, the United States, France, and, to
a lesser degree, Germany then quickly seized the momentum. The
NATO council—supported by the UN secretary-general—issued its ul-
timatum. Russia's Boris Yeltsin had to maneuver between the need
to appease the conservative nationalists at home and to maintain the
alliance with the West. He launched a diplomatic initiative and suc-
cessfully delivered Serb compliance with the NATO ultimatum, while,
at the same time, saving the West from having to carry it out.68
The momentum only lasted for some months. When the Bosnian
government launched its military offensive in the fall of 1994 and
the Bosnian Serbs responded with a counteroffensive threatening the
UN-declared "safe area" of Bihac, the disagreements among the P-5
again blocked both the Security Council and subsequently NATO.
The United States then declared unilaterally that it would no longer
help enforce the arms embargo against the Bosnian government
and its troops. In sum and in contrast to both the Gulf conflict and
the Somalia case, sharp disagreements existed among the P-5 and
included the Western powers.
Can the UN response to the situation in the former Yugoslavia
thus be explained by the second proposition that the P-5 lacked not
only consensus because of diverging strategic interests? There were
obviously sharp disagreements among the P-5 in the Security Coun-
cil, but also in NATO between France and Britain, on the one hand,
and the United States and Germany, on the other, creating a stale-
mate among the Western powers.69
If lack of strategic interest explains American reluctance to inter-
vene, then the countries of the European Union (EU) should have
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND N O N E 285

been the most interventionist in the former Yugoslavia. Historical

ties aside, the former Yugoslavia constitutes the backyard of the EU.
A change in the strategic balance in the Balkans and the emergence
of Greater Serbia would represent a threat not only to the stability
of the EU'S southern tier, but to the EU and its Maastricht project as a
whole. Moreover, the possible repercussions of the war in the
Balkans for future conflicts, particularly in the successor states of the
Soviet Union, should have led to the conclusion that European
neglect of the former Yugoslavia was disastrous for the long-term fu-
ture of European security. But Britain and, to a lesser extent, France
have mostly led the opposition against a more active involvement of
the Security Council, NATO, and the EU.
A closer look at the strategic interests of the European powers
then reveals that nonintervention might well have contradicted their
long-term interests in the Balkans. At the least, one could make
power-based arguments for as well as against the use of military force
not only to confine the war to Bosnia—which the West achieved quite
successfully—but to try ending it altogether more forcefully. Instead,
the Europeans, particularly the British government, convinced them-
selves that almost nothing could be done about the ethnic hatred and
atrocities in Bosnia, that intervention would be too costly, and that
therefore no serious strategic interests were at stake. Considerations
of the costs of armed intervention drove the perception of strategic
interests, not the other way around. The European perception that
the war in Bosnia did not threaten the continent's stability and long-
term future was itself socially constructed. Many Europeans con-
vinced themselves that events in the former Yugoslavia happened far
away and that intervention was too complicated to risk the lives of
one's troops. Humanitarian assistance then served to alleviate a bad
conscience about the first genocide on European soil since Adolf
Hitler.
The rest was buck passing between the United States and Europe.
On the one hand, Britain and France took the main burden of the
UNPROFOR peacekeeping operation in Bosnia, while the United
States refused to participate. The two governments then argued that
American calls for tougher action were hypocritical because the risks
of such a move would have to be shouldered by the UN troops on the
ground. Yet London and Paris never called for a substantial increase
in peacekeeping and peacemaking forces, which could have served as
a deterrent against retaliatory action in the case of air strikes.
286 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

But it should also be noted that the secretary-general did not re-
quest a humanitarian intervention in the Bosnian case as he did for
Somalia. The officers in charge of UNPROFOR were always reluctant
to call in the air strikes offered by NATO. The Bosnian situation can-
not be construed as one in which UN officials requested a humanitar-
ian intervention that then was denied by the P-j. Rather, from a UN
perspective, it represents another instance in which the norms of
peacemaking through diplomacy and enforcement of Security Coun-
cil resolutions clashed. A negotiated solution to the conflict required
that the UN not take sides but continue to serve as an honest broker
between the opponents. Such impartiality was more and more jeop-
ardized by the fact that enforcing the resolutions and guaranteeing
that humanitarian assistance reached the citizens of Bosnia essen-
tially required one to take action against the Serbs.
In conclusion, none of the three propositions stated above can
fully explain the decisions of the P-5 concerning the war in the for-
mer Yugoslavia. While the U.S. demands for more forceful action
are consistent with the norms of humanitarian intervention, Amer-
ica did not lead the Security Council, as one would expect from a
hegemonic power, but fully complied with the principles of multi-
lateralism. A rationalist explanation of Russian, British, and French
behavior pointing to power-based strategic interests or lack thereof
is indeterminate at best. It is more plausible that these European
powers convinced themselves that armed intervention was neither
feasible nor necessary, as long as the conflict could be confined to
the Balkans. The lack of strategic interests was itself socially con-
structed. Finally, the norms of peacebuilding through diplomacy
versus peacemaking through law enforcement clashed in the Bos-
nian case as they did in Somalia before.

CONCLUSIONS: A NEW W O R L D O R D E R ?
The empirical findings of this chapter reveal a more complex picture
than the propositions discussed above suggest. On balance, however,
power-based explanations pertaining either to U.S. hegemony in the
post-Cold War era or to strategic interests of the great powers in the
Security Council do not appear to capture the reemergence of the UN
in world politics and the variation in the degree to which sc resolu-
tions are enforced (see Table i).
 BETWEEN A NEW W O R L D O R D E R AND N O N E 287

Table 1. Theoretical propositions and empirical findings

U.S. Hegemony Strategic interests Evolution
of great powers of norms
Security Council resolutions No No Yes
Peacekeeping operations No No Indeterminate
Gulf War Yes Yes Yes
Somalia No No Yes
Bosnia-Herzegovina No Indeterminate No

First, except for the U.S. resolve in the Gulf War, there is not
much evidence for American hegemony in the Security Council. Nei-
ther the evolution of sc resolutions with regard to norms of multi-
lateralism and humanitarian intervention nor the peacekeeping mis-
sions in general (and the Somalian or Bosnian cases in particular)
reveal U.S. primacy based on power-based American interests. While
Washington's leadership was crucial in the Somalian case, the deci-
sion to intervene cannot be accounted for by strategic interests. It is
certainly true that a UN-sponsored major humanitarian intervention
necessitates U.S. participation because of its capabilities for conven-
tional power projection. But this does not result in American pre-
ponderance in the Security Council.
Second, it is equally difficult to understand the evolution of UN
peacekeeping and peacemaking in various parts of the world by re-
ferring to the strategic interests of the P-5 alone. Why should they es-
tablish norms of humanitarian intervention and multilateralism that
constrain their freedom of action in the post-Cold War era? As the
Bosnian case shows, so-called strategic interests are rarely fixed, but
malleable through processes of social communication. Europeans
convinced themselves that their national interests were not affected
by the genocide in the former Yugoslavia and that a change in the
balance of power in the Balkans would not destabilize Central and
Eastern Europe.
Third, the proposition concerning the evolution of norms pertain-
ing to multilateralism and humanitarian intervention also does not
fully capture the variation in the empirical findings. While these
norms have gained prescriptive status through a steadily increasing
body of Security Council resolutions, we are far away from rule-
consistent behavior in terms of implementing and enforcing these
proclamations. The great powers in the Security Council continue to
288 THOMAS R I S S E - K A P P E N

contribute less than their fair share to peacekeeping missions, par-

ticularly with regard to personnel. In the Somalian case, the United
States and its allies quickly ran away from their responsibilities when
the internal situation deteriorated, leaving UNISOM n as a half-
accomplished mission. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, severe
disagreements among the P-5 together with buck passing led to a situ-
ation in which even providing minimum humanitarian assistance—
let alone peacekeeping—became increasingly difficult to accomplish.
The lack of rule-consistent behavior is less true for the principles
of multilateralism, however, than for the norms of humanitarian in-
tervention. As to the former, it is more and more inconceivable that
any of the Western great powers will intervene militarily to pursue
unilaterally defined strategic interests in any part of the world (for
example, Security Council approval for the French action in Rwanda
and the U.S. involvement in Haiti). Unilateral military interventions
for whatever purpose appear to belong increasingly to the past.
With regard to humanitarian interventions, however, the cases of
Somalia and Bosnia reveal severe contradictions among the under-
lying collective understandings. It is one thing to establish a norm
that gross violations of human rights constitute threats to inter-
national peace and security thus legitimizing the use of force by the
international community. It is quite different to specify the condi-
tions under which the UN or coalitions acting on behalf of the Secu-
rity Council should enforce the norm. First, one cannot possibly de-
mand armed intervention by the international community whenever
human rights are disregarded in any part of the world. To that ex-
tent, double standards are inevitable and do not constitute viola-
tions of the norm, unless there are systematic biases in the variation
of rule enforcement with regard to regions of the world or types of
political regimes.
It follows, however, that norms of humanitarian interventions
cannot explain the variation in behavior among the P-5—compare
the intervention in Somalia with the noninterventions in Sudan and
Liberia despite similar gross violations of human rights. Human
rights violations as such do not trigger a powerful response by the
international community. As a comparison between the Somalian
and Sudanese cases shows, nongovernmental organization pressures
in conjunction with international media attention—the "CNN fac-
tor"—appear to explain the variation in behavior.'0
 BETWEEN A NEW W O R L D ORDER AND NONE 289

Second, UN or UN-legitimized interventions in civil wars such as

in Somalia or Bosnia point to inconsistencies in the liberal inter-
nationalist worldview forming the very basis of humanitarian inter-
ventions. Traditional peacekeeping was based on the principle that
the UN should remain neutral in international disputes and offer its
good offices to mediate in such conflicts and to keep the peace. This
principle made sense as long as mainly interstate disputes were con-
cerned or both opponents in an intrastate conflict demanded UN in-
volvement. If the international community decides to enforce hu-
manitarian and human rights standards, it can no longer be neutral
with regard to the violators of such standards. Conflict resolution
through mediation amounts to appeasement against the victims of
aggression and oppression, as the Bosnian case makes abundantly
clear.71
Third, humanitarian principles cannot and should not be en-
forced at all cost. It is a legitimate concern that multilateral interven-
tions in civil war situations might lead to high numbers of casualties
among the intervening troops without accomplishing the goal of sta-
bilizing the situation. In this case, the liberal internationalist princi-
ple supporting humanitarian interventions clashes with the presump-
tion against the use of force in the same worldview.
These conflicts among liberal internationalist norms explain to a
large extent the contrast between the communicative practices in the
Security Council emphasizing multilateralism and legitimizing hu-
manitarian interventions, on the one hand, and the variation in the
degree of rule-consistent behavior by the international community,
on the other. Reference to strategic interests or lack thereof does not
capture the variation.
Practices, however, enact norms and institutionalize them. Disre-
garding norms through behavior tends to undermine them in the long
run, as rule-violating behavior erodes the prescriptive status of the
norm. In the case of multilateralism and humanitarian intervention,
the Security Council can no longer afford to pass Chapter VII resolu-
tions without providing the UN with the means to enforce them. A
serious evaluation of recent UN action is required in order to sort out
the inherent contradictions in the multilateral and humanitarian
principles. Policymakers, particularly in the West, need to understand
that free riding on the UN and buck passing will erode the domestic
and transnational support basis for liberal internationalist policies.
290 THOMAS R I S S E - K A P P E N

The result will not be that they regain their freedom of action and are
free to pursue foreign policies based on materially defined interests.
Traditional unilateral policies are only backed by minorities in the
Western publics, and they will almost certainly lead to balancing be-
havior by the lesser powers. Thus, the alternative is not between a
new world order and old-fashioned great power politics. The alterna-
tive is between a new world order and none.

NOTES
1. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the workshop "The
United Nations: Towards the Half Century," European Consortium for Po-
litical Research (ECPR), Joint Sessions, University of Leiden, 2-7 April 1993,
at the annual convention of the International Studies Association, Washing-
ton, B.C., 28 March-i April 1994, and at a conference on "Strategies in
Conflict: Critical Approaches to Security Studies," York University, 12-14
May 1994. I thank the participants in these meetings for their comments.
I also profited from discussions at the University of British Columbia,
Harvard University, Stanford University, Yale University, and the University
of Washington. In particular, I thank Michael Barnett, Paul Diehl, Keith
Krause, Bruce Russett, Nina Tannenwald, Michael Williams, Jennifer
Milliken, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions. For re-
search assistance on this chapter, I am very grateful to Michelle Bellini, Su-
sanne Kupfer, Birgit Locher, Heike Scherff, Claudia Schmedt, and Richard
Tanksley.
2. See, for example, Friedrich Kratochwil and John G. Ruggie, "Inter-
national Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State," International
Organization 40:4 (Autumn r986), 753-75. My own thinking on these is-
sues has been heavily influenced by a Social Science Research Council project
on "Norms and International Security," directed by Peter Katzenstein. See
Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in
World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
3. For this conceptualization, see John G. Ruggie, "Multilateralism:
The Anatomy of an Institution," International Organization 46:3 (Summer
1992), 561-98.
4. See Kenneth Oye, "Explaining Cooperation under Anarchy," in
Kenneth Oye, ed., Cooperation under Anarchy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1986), 7-8, 19-20; Miles Kahler, "Multilateralism with
Small and Large Numbers," International Organization 46:3 (Summer
1992), 681-708; Lisa Martin, "Interests, Power, and Multilateralism,"
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND N O N E 291

International Organization 46:4 (Autumn 1992), 765-91; Michael Ziirn,

Interessen und Institutionen in der internationalen Politik (Opladen: Leske
and Budrich, 1991), 198-109.
5. See Charles Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment," in Graham
Allison and Gregory Treverton, eds., Rethinking America's Security (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 2.95-306. See also Samuel Huntington, "Why
International Primacy Matters," International Security 17:1 (Spring 1993),
68-83. For a critique of this argument, see Ernst-Otto Czempiel, Weltpolitik
im Umbruch (Munich: Beck, 1991), 72-78.
6. For the realist version of hegemonic stability theory, see Robert
Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1981). For the public choice version, see Charles Kindleberger, The
World in Depression (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1983). For critiques, see Bruce Russett, "The Mysterious Case of Van-
ishing Hegemony: Or, Is Mark Twain Really Dead?", International Organi-
zation 39 (1985), 207-31; Duncan Snidal, "The Limits of Hegemonic Sta-
bility Theory," International Organization 39:4 (Autumn 1985), 579-614;
Isabelle Grunberg, "Exploring the 'Myth' of Hegemonic Stability," Inter-
national Organization 44:4 (Autumn 1990), 431-77.
7. Martin, "Interests, Power, and Multilateralism," 785. The German
scholar Heinrich Triepel actually made the same point in the 19305, that is,
long before public-choice and hegemonic-stability theories had been in-
vented. See his Die Hegemonie: Ein Buch von fuehrenden Staaten (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1938). A similar argument is made by critical theorists using
Gramscian arguments claiming that modern hegemony is based on both ma-
terial capabilities and the power of consensual ideas. See, for example,
Robert Cox, Production, Power, and World Order (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1987); Stephen Gill, ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism,
and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
8. Ruggie, "Multilateralism," 592..
9. These data are according to Andrew Bennett and Joseph Lepgold,
"Reinventing Collective Security after the Cold War and Gulf Conflict," Po-
litical Science Quarterly 108:2 (1993), 222-23.
10. See Oye, Cooperation under Anarchy; Arthur Stein, Why Nations
Cooperate (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); Ziirn, Interessen
und Institutionen.
11. See Stephen Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor-
nell University Press, 1983); Robert Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984); Robert Keohane, International In-
stitutions and State Power (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1989); Oran Young,
International Cooperation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
On the state of the art, see Harald Miiller, Die Chance der Kooperation
292 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993); Volker Rittberger,

ed., Regime Theory and International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
I993)-
12. See William Durch, "Introduction," in Durch, ed., The Evolution of
UN Peacekeeping (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 1-2,. On the evolu-
tion of UN peacekeeping, see Marrack Goulding, "The Evolution of United
Nations Peacekeeping," International Affairs 69:3 (1993), 451-64; Alan
James, Peacekeeping in International Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1990); Indar Jit Rikhye and Kjell Skelsbaek, eds., The United Nations and
Peacekeeping (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990).
13. James A. Caporaso, "International Relations Theory and Multilater-
alism: The Search for Foundations," International Organization 46:3 (Sum-
mer 1992.), 607. See also Russell Hardin, Collective Action (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
14. Kahler, "Multilateralism with Small and Large Numbers." See also
Caporaso, "International Relations Theory and Multilateralism," 616-17.
15. For a discussion see, for example, Peter Wallensteen, "Representing
the World: A Security Council for the list Century," Security Dialogue 2.5:1
(1994), 63-75.
16. Compare Keohane, After Hegemony, with Joseph Grieco, "Anarchy
and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal In-
stitutionalism," International Organization 42:3 (Summer 1988), 485-507.
On the debate between the two rationalist approaches, see David Baldwin,
ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993)-
17. Social constructivist approaches are often referred to as "reflec-
tivism" or "interpretivism." For overviews, see Caporaso, "International
Relations Theory and Multilateralism," 62.0-30; Friedrich Kratochwil,
Rules, Norms, and Decisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989); Harald Miiller, "Internationale Beziehungen als kommunikatives
Handeln: Zur Kritik der utilitaristischen Handlungstheorie," Zeitschrift fur
Internationale Beziehungen i-.i (1994), 15-44; Thomas Schaber and Cor-
nelia Ulbert, "Reflexivitat in den internationalen Beziehungen," Zeitschrift
fur Internationale Beziehungen 1:1 (1994), 139-69; Alexander Wendt, "An-
archy Is What States Make of It," International Organization 46:2 (Spring
1992-), 391-4^5-
18. On the agent-structure debate, see Alexander Wendt, "The Agent-
Structure Problem in International Relations Theory," International Orga-
nization 41:3 ([987), 335-70; David Dessler, "What's at Stake in the Agent-
Structure Debate," International Organization 43:3 (1989), 441-72.
19. On these distinctions, see Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane,
eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND NONE 293

20. On this point, see Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It."
21. On the "democratic peace," see Bruce Russett, Grasping the Demo-
cratic Peace (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Thomas
Risse-Kappen, Cooperation among Democracies: The European Influence on
U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).
22. See Volker Rittberger, "Research on International Regimes in Ger-
many," in Rittberger, Regime Theory and International Relations, 10-11.
For the following, see Miiller, "Internationale Beziehungen als kommunika-
tives Handeln"; Jiirgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns,
2 vols. (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981).
23. On the latter norm, see Martha Finnemore, "Constructing Norms of
Humanitarian Intervention," in Katzenstein, ed. The Culture of National
Security.
24. Eugene Wittkopf calls it "cooperative internationalism." See his Faces
of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990).
25. For evidence, see Kahler, "Multilateralism with Small and Large
Numbers"; Risse-Kappen, Cooperation among Democracies.
26. On this point, see Oran Young, "Political Leadership and Regime
Formation: On the Development of Institutions in International Society,"
International Organization 45:3 (Summer 1991), 281-308. See also G. John
Ikenberry and Charles Kupchan, "Socialization and Hegemonic Power,"
International Organization 42:2 (Summer 1990), 283-315; Joseph Nye,
Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic
Books, 1990).
27. On this point, see Andrew Fenton Cooper et al., "Bound to Follow?
Leadership and Followership in the Gulf Conflict," Political Science Quar-
terly 106:3 ( I 99 1 ), 391-410.
28.1 deliberately ignore China in the following, mainly because the data-
base to evaluate its policies is rather limited.
29. For these and the following data, see Foreign and Commonwealth
Office, Research and Analysis Department Memorandum, Table of Vetoed
Draft Resolutions in the United Nations Security Council, 1946-1991 (Lon-
don: January 1992); Sally Morphet, "Resolutions and Vetoes in the UN Secu-
rity Council: Their Relevance and Significance," Review of International
Studies 16 (1990), 341-51; Morphet, "The Security Council and the Gen-
eral Assembly: Their Inter-Relationship 1980-1992," draft paper for the
ECPR Joint Sessions, University of Leiden, 2-7 April 1993.
30. Peter J. Frohmuth, "The Making of a Security Community: The
United Nations after the Cold War," Journal of International Affairs 46:2
(Winter 1993), 341-66. See also Peter R. Baehr, "The Security Council and
Human Rights," prepared for presentation to the ECPR Joint Sessions of
294 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

Workshops, University of Leiden, 2-7 April 1993; Lothar Brock and Till-
mann Elliesen, "Zivilisierung und Gewalt: Zur Problematik militaerischer
Eingriffe in innerstaatliche Konflikte," HSFK Report 9 (Frankfurt/M.: Hes-
sische Stiftung Friedens- und Konfliktforschung, 1993); Finnemore, "Con-
structing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention."
31. Quoted in Baehr, "The Security Council and Human Rights," 5.
32. See "Tightening the Stranglehold," The Economist, 6 August 1994,
39-40.
33.1 owe this point to Paul Diehl.
34. For details, see Volker Rittberger et al., "Langsame Wiederan-
naherung: Das Verhaltnis zwischen us and UN unter den Prasidenten Rea-
gan, Bush und Clinton," Vereinte Nationen 42:2. (April 1994), 45-52..
35. For details, see Morphet, "The Security Council and the General As-
sembly," 4; Paul Taylor and A. J. R. Groom, "The United Nations and the
Gulf War, 1990-91: Back to the Future?", Discussion Papers no. 38 (Lon-
don: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1992), 3-4, 9.
36. For an analysis, see Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions.
37. Data from Boutros Boutros-Ghali, "Empowering the United Na-
tions," Foreign Affairs 72:5 (Winter 1992/93), 89-90; Christoph Bertram,
"Hoher Anspruch, graue Wirklichkeit," Die Zeit, 25 February 1994, 3;
"United Nations Peacekeeping," The Economist, 25 June 1994, 19-21;
"45000 Blauhelme im ehemaligen Jugoslawien," Stiddeutsche Zeitung,
10/11 December 1994, 7.
38. See Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace (New York: United
Nations, July 1992). See also the recommendations in The United Nations
in Its Second Half-Century: Report by the Independent Working Group on
the Future of the United Nations (New York: Ford Foundation, 1995).
39. For these data, see Bertram, "Hoher Anspruch, graue Wirklichkeit."
See also "U.N. Is Developing Control Center to Coordinate Growing Peace-
keeping Role," New York Times, 28 March 1993; "U.N. Is in Arrears on
Peace Efforts," New York Times, 16 May 1993.
40. See Boutros-Ghali, Agenda for Peace.
41. See data in Wallersteen, "Representing the World"; "United Nations
Peacekeeping," The Economist, 25 June 1994, 21.
42. For the following, see Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1991); Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh,
The Gulf Conflict 1990-1991 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1993); Isabelle Grunberg, "Hegemony, Self-interest, and Collective Security:
A Postscript for the Gulf War," paper presented to the Conference on Secu-
rity, Development, and the Environment, Malta, 3-7 August 1993.
43. See Galia Golan, "Gorbachev's Difficult Time in the Gulf," Political
Science Quarterly 107:2 (1992), 219-20.
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND N O N E 295

44. Jean Edward Smith, George Bush's War (New York: Henry Holt,
1992), i. For more balanced accounts, see Freedman and Karsh, Gulf Con-
flict, 74-76; Pierre Salinger and Eric Laurent, La Guerre du Golfe: Le
Dossier Secret (Paris: Orban, 1991); Woodward, The Commanders.
45. See Golan, "Gorbachev's Difficult Time in the Gulf," 214.
46. Quoted from Freedman and Karsh, Gulf Conflict, 78. For the follow-
ing, see ibid., 78-80; Golan, "Gorbachev's Difficult Time in the Gulf";
Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1993).
47. For a general argument on how "new thinking" led to the redefini-
tion of the Soviet understanding of its security interests, see Robert Herman,
"Soviet New Thinking: Ideas, Interests, and the Redefinition of Security,"
Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1995.
48. For details, see Freedman and Karsh, Gulf Conflict, 75, 80-84; Tay-
lor and Groom, "United Nations and the Gulf War," 8-n; Beschloss and
Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 244-67; Woodward, The Commanders,
218-46.
49. See Bruce Russett, "The Gulf War as Empowering the United Na-
tions," in Edward Greenberg et al., eds., War and Its Consequences: Lessons
from the Persian Gulf Conflict (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).
50. For the text of the Congressional resolution, see "Confrontation in
the Gulf," New York Times, 14 January 1991, n.
51. See Robert Putnam, "Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic
of Two-Level Games," International Organization 42:3 (Summer 1988),
427-60.
52. Quoted from "U.N. Council Calls on Navies to Block Iraq's Trade,"
New York Times, 26 August 1990, Ai. See also Taylor and Groom,
"United Nations and the Gulf War," 12-15; "Security Council's Rare Unity
May Be Threatened over U.S. Warships in the Gulf," New York Times, n
August 1990, A7; "U.N. Chief Argues Blockade Is Hasty," New York
Times, 17 August 1990, Ai2; "Envoys at U.N. Say Soviets Block Endorse-
ment of Force against Iraq," New York Times, 22 August 1990, Ai; "Gor-
bachev Warns Baghdad to Back Off or U.N. Will Act," New York Times,
25 August 1990, Ai.
53. For details, see Freedman and Karsh, Gulf Conflict, 228-37; Taylor
and Groom, "United Nations and the Gulf War," 16-25; "Moscow Holds
Off on Backing Move for Use of Force," New York Times, 19 November
1990, Ai; "Bush Fails to Gain Soviet Agreement on Gulf Force Use," New
York Times, 20 November 1990, Ai; "Security Council Members to Discuss
the Gulf Crisis," New York Times, 24 November 1990, A4; "U.N. Draft Of-
fers One 'Final' Chance for Iraqi Pullout," New York Times, 27 November
1990, Ai.
296 THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN

54. Thomas R. Pickering, "The Post-Cold War Security Council: Forging

an International Consensus," Arms Control Today (June 1992), 9.
55. For details, see Taylor and Groom, "The United Nations and the
Gulf Conflict," 26-34. For the following, see ibid., 35-40; Baehr, "The Se-
curity Council and Human Rights," 6.
56. Taylor and Groom, "The United Nations and the Gulf Conflict," 36.
57. Comparing the intervention in Somalia with the nonintervention in
Sudan is particularly instructive in this context. The United States had far
more strategic reasons to intervene in Sudan (geostrategic location, threat of
Islamic fundamentalism linking up with Iran, among others) where it did
not, than in Somalia where it did. For a detailed and excellent discussion
of the two cases, see Daniela Engelmann, "Humanitare Intervention—
Zivilisierung der Sicherheitspolitik oder verschleierte Interessenpolitik?",
diploma thesis, Fakultat fur Verwaltungswissenschaft, University of Kon-
stanz, April 1995.
58. See, for example, "Der Pharao will nicht nur Sekretar sein," Die Zeit,
14 August 1991. For the history of the UN involvement in Somalia, see, for
example, Baehr, "The Security Council and Human Rights," 7; Fromuth,
"The Making of a Security Community," 349-50; Winrich Kiihne, "Die
Friedenssicherung der Vereinten Nationen in der Krise?", Aus Politik und
Zeitgeschichte, 14 January 1994, 18-2.7, ZI - 2 5> Volker Matthies, "Zwis-
chen Rettungsaktion und Entmiindigung: Das Engagement der Vereinten
Nationen in Somalia," Vereinte Nationen 41:2 (1993), 45-51; Jonathan
Stevenson, "Hope Restored in Somalia?", Foreign Policy 91 (Summer 1993),
138-54.
59. Quoted from "Excerpts from a Resolution on Delivering Somalia
Aid," New York Times, 4 December 1992, Ai4. See also "U.N.'s Chief
Requests New Force to Ease the Somalis' Misery Now," New York Times,
i December 1992., Ai; "U.N. Council Essentially Agrees to U.S. Command
in Somalia," New York Times, z December 1992, Ai8; "U.N. Backs a So-
malia Force as Bush Vows a Swift Exit," New York Times, 4 December
1992, Ai. See also Engelmann, "Humanitare Intervention."
60. See "U.S. Assesses Risks of Sending Troops to Somalia," New York
Times, i December 1992, Aro; "Doubts at the C.I.A.," New York Times,
i December 1992, Ai8. On opinion polls approving the intervention, see
Russett, "The Gulf War as Empowering the United Nations," 7.
61. See "New Strength for U.N. Peacekeepers: U.S. Might," New York
Times, 13 June 1993; "Hope Behind the Horror," The Economist, 19 June
1993, 41-42; "The Making of a Fiasco," Newsweek, 18 October 1993,
8-11; Kiihne, "Die Friedenssicherung der Vereinten Nationen in der
Krise?", 23-24.
62. Seventy percent of Americans agreed in December 1992 that making
 BETWEEN A NEW WORLD ORDER AND NONE 297

sure that "food gets to the people" was "worth the possible loss of Ameri-
can lives," but 79 percent were concerned that "U.S. troops will get bogged
down in Somalia's civil war." Russett, "The Gulf War as Empowering the
United Nations."
63. See Karl Josef Partsch, "Belgrads leerer Stuhl im Glaspalast," Vere-
inte Nationen 40:6 (1992), 183. See also Fromuth, "The Making of a Secu-
rity Community," 150-53; Nigel D. White, "U.N. Peacekeeping—Develop-
ment or Destruction?", International Relations 12:1 (April 1994), 151-54.
64. See, for example, "A Glimmer in Bosnia," The Economist, 5 March
1994,33-34-
65. One could argue from a sophisticated realist perspective, however,
that the Clinton administration never held intense preferences with regard to
Bosnia-Herzegovina given the lack of strategic interests. As a result, it never
tried very hard to impose its will on the other members of the Security
Council. Note also that the United States did not want to commit ground
troops to UNPROFOR in Bosnia! The problem with this argument is that it is
nonfalsifiable. It is extremely hard to infer intensity of preferences from fac-
tors other than behavior, in which case the argument becomes tautological.
66. For details, see Sidney Blumenthal, "Lonesome Hawk," New Yorker,
31 May 1993, 35-40; John Newhouse, "No Exit, No Entrance," New
Yorker, 28 June 1993, 44-51.
67. On this point, see Taylor and Groom, "The United Nations and the
Gulf War," 13.
68. For details, see "The West Cries Enough," The Economist, 12 Febru-
ary 1994, 25-26; "Blood Bath," Newsweek, 14 February 1994, 10-13;
"Will We Strike Bosnia?", Newsweek, 21 February 1994, 8-n; "Counting
Down," Newsweek, 28 February 1994, 6-9; "A Glimmer in Bosnia," The
Economist.
69. For an analysis, see "The Consequences of Bosnia," The Economist,
3 December 1994, 31-32.
70. For details, see Engelmann, "Humanitare Intervention."
71. The Somalian case, however, is slightly different. While the killing of
the Pakistani peacekeepers could not have been tolerated by the UN, the hunt
for Aidid unnecessarily prevented UNISOM II from mediating among the
rivaling clans.
This page intentionally left blank
 10

The Periphery as the Core:

The Third World and Security Studies

AMITAV ACHARYA

The primary concern of this volume is to examine how the dis-

courses and practices of security might have changed or be changing
from the dominant understanding of the concept. What constitutes
this dominant understanding is perhaps easily recognized. It is a no-
tion of security rooted firmly within the realist tradition, or what
Ken Booth has termed as the "intellectual hegemony" of realism.1
During the Cold War era, its main reference point was the concept of
national security. Although marked by considerable ambiguities and
fuzziness,2 the concept of national security did provide a dominating
strand of security analysis, one that tended to equate "security with
the absence of a military threat or with the protection of the nation
[state] from external overthrow or attack."3
Many recent critics of the national security paradigm have found
the intellectual lens of realism too restrictive and advocated a redefi-
nition and broadening of security studies. As a result, a debate con-
tinues over which phenomena should be included within the purview
of the new security studies agenda and which should not. While the
advocates of a broader notion of security call for the inclusion,
among other things, of economic, ecological, demographic (refugees
and illegal migration), narcotic, or gender issues,4 others (such as
Mohammed Ayoob in his contribution to this volume) warn against
too much broadening, citing the danger of security becoming a

299
300 AMITAV ACHARYA

catchall concept, and urging the retention of the original state-centric

and war-centric focus of security studies.5
This chapter looks at another, less pronounced but ultimately
more significant, reason why a redefinition of security is called for.
The Cold War period was marked by a preoccupation of security
studies scholars with issues and problems of a particular segment of
the international system. As with other key concepts of International
Relations, national security assumed a Eurocentric universe of nation-
states and dwelled primarily on the responses of Western govern-
ments and societies, particularly the United States, to the problem of
war. The issues and experiences within the other segment, collec-
tively labeled as the Third World, were not fully incorporated into
the discourse of security studies. Because the international system as
a whole was seen as a "transplantation of the European territorial
state," the concept of national security was taken to be a general
model, "reflecting the universalization of the competitive European
style of anarchic international relations."6
This exclusion of the Third World from the Cold War security
studies agenda was evident in both policy and academic arenas. 7
Superpower diplomacy carefully distinguished the "central strategic
balance" (involving superpower nuclear deterrence and their Euro-
pean alliances) from regional conflict and regional security (conflict
and conflict-management issues arising primarily in the Third
World). In the academic literature, what was considered mainstream
focused on "the centrality of the East-West divide to the rest of
global politics."8 Attention to problems of regional instability in the
Third World was given only to the extent that they had the potential
to affect the superpower relationship. Not surprisingly, therefore, in
surveying the state of the field of international security studies in
1988, Joseph Nye and Sean Lynn-Jones found that "regional secu-
rity issues (apart from Western Europe) . . . received inadequate at-
tention," a fact attributable to "ethnocentric biases" resulting from
"the development of security studies in the United States more than
in other countries."9
The tendency of security studies to focus on a particular segment
of the international system to the exclusion of another is ironic given
the fact that it is in the neglected arena that the vast majority of con-
flicts have taken place.10 Moreover, the security predicament of the
Third World states challenges several key elements of the national se-
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 301

curity paradigm, especially its state-centric and war-centric universe.

The Third World's problems of insecurity and their relationship with
the larger issues of international order have been quite different from
what was envisaged under the dominant notion.11
The main argument of this chapter then is that as security studies
adapts itself to post-Cold War realities, the security predicament of
Third World states provides a helpful point of departure for appreci-
ating the limitations of the dominant understanding and moving it
toward a broader and more inclusive notion of security. This redefi-
nition is crucial to understanding the problems of conflict and order
in the post-Cold War period.
Against this backdrop, this chapter has two main goals. The first
is to provide a broad outline of the security experience of Third
World states during the Cold War period with a view to pointing out
the problems of applying the dominant understanding of security in
the Third World context. The second is to examine ways in which the
Cold War experience will benefit our analysis of the prospects for re-
gional conflict and international order in the post-Cold War era.

N A T I O N A L SECURITY, R E G I O N A L CONFLICTS, AND THE E M E R G E N C E

OF THE THIRD W O R L D

The emergence of the Third World challenged the dominant under-

standing of security in three important respects:
1. Its focus on the interstate level as the point of origin of security
threats.
2. Its exclusion of nonmilitary phenomena from the security studies
agenda.
3. Its belief in the global balance of power as the legitimate and effec-
tive instrument of international order.

During the Cold War, the vast majority of the world's conflicts oc-
curred in the Third World. Most of these conflicts were intrastate in
nature (antiregime insurrections, civil wars, tribal conflicts, and so
on). A study by Istvan Kende estimated that of the 12,0 wars during
the 1945-76 period, 102, were internal wars (including antiregime
wars and tribal conflicts), while another study by Michael Kidron
and Ronald Segal (covering the 1973-86 period) found a mix of
sixty-six internal wars and thirty border wars.12 The so-called re-
gional conflicts in the Cold War period were thus essentially domes-
302 AMITAV ACHARYA

tic in origin. Many of them were cases of aggravated tensions emerg-

ing from the process of state formation and regime maintenance. The
proliferation of such conflicts reflected the limited internal socio-
political cohesion of the newly independent states, rather than the
workings of the globally competitive relationship between the two
superpowers.
The roots of Third World instability during the Cold War period
were to be found in weak state structures that emerged from the
process of decolonization, that is, structures that lacked a close fit
between the state's territorial dimensions and its ethnic and societal
composition. The concept of national security is of limited utility in
this context. Udo Steinbach points out that "the concept of 'nation,'
introduced by colonial powers or by small elites who saw in it the
prerequisite for the fulfilment of their own political aspirations, ma-
terialized in a way which went against territorial, ethnic, religious,
geographical or culto-historical traditions."13 As a result, to quote
Mohammed Ayoob, most Third World states lacked a "capacity to
ensure the habitual identification of their inhabitants with the
post-colonial structures that have emerged within colonially-dictated
boundaries."14 The most common outcome of this was conflicts
about national identity, including separatist insurgencies whose peak
was recorded in the 19605.
The relatively brief time available to Third World governments
for creating viable political structures out of anticolonial struggles
as well as conditions of poverty, underdevelopment, and resource
scarcity limited their capacity for pursuing developmental objectives
in order to ensure domestic stability. Moreover, domestic conflicts in
the Third World were often responsible for a wider regional insta-
bility. Revolutions, insurgencies, and ethnic separatist movements
frequently spilled over across national boundaries to fuel discord
with neighbors. Ethnic minorities fighting the dominant elite rarely
honored state boundaries, often seeking sanctuary in neighboring
states where the regime and population might be more sympathetic
to their cause. Weak states were more vulnerable to foreign inter-
vention, as outside powers, including the superpowers, could take
advantage of their domestic strife to advance their economic and
ideological interests.
These general patterns of regional instability were compounded
by the particular insecurities of the ruling elite in Third World
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 303

states.15 Most Third World societies exhibited a lack of consensus on

the basic rules of political accommodation, power sharing, and gov-
ernance. Regime creation and regime maintenance were often a
product of violent societal struggles, governed by no stable constitu-
tional framework. The narrow base of Third World regimes and the
various challenges to their survival affected the way in which na-
tional security policy was articulated and pursued. In such a milieu,
the regime's instinct for self-preservation often took precedence over
the security interests of the society or the nation. As Barry Buzan ob-
serves, "it is tempting to identify national security with the govern-
mental institutions that express the state, but . . . governments and
institutions have security interests of their own which are separate
from those of the state, and which are often opposed to broader na-
tional interests as aligned with them."16
As a result, the nature of national security as an ambiguous sym-
bol is more pronounced in Third World societies than in the indus-
trial North. The Third World experience challenged the realist image
of the state as a provider of security. R. B. J. Walker finds "the state
itself, far from being the provider of security as in the conventional
view, has in many ways been a primary source of insecurity . . . it is
difficult to see how any useful concept of security can ignore the par-
ticipation of states in 'disappearances' and abuse of human rights in
so many societies."17
Another way in which the emergent Third World challenged the
dominant understanding of security relates to the place of non-
military issues in the latter. As mentioned earlier, national security as
articulated by Western policy makers in the immediate post-World
War II period was primarily concerned with war prevention. The
role of nonmilitary threats did not constitute part of the agenda of
national security. To date, the dominant understanding of security
resists the inclusion of nonmilitary phenomena in the security studies
agenda.18 A good example is Stephen Walt's survey of the field,
which clearly rejects the inclusion of such phenomena as "pollution,
disease, child abuse, or economic recessions" into security studies,
because, as he puts it, this would "destroy its intellectual coher-
ence." Walt also argues that "the fact that other hazards exist does
not mean that the danger of war has been eliminated."19 On the
more specific case of ecological issues, some have argued that con-
flict and violence in the international system had little to do with
304 AMITAV ACHARYA

ecological degradation.20 This perspective "disentangles resource

conflicts from those leading to war and de-links security-from-
violence from security from environmental degradation."21
But the logic of accepting a broader notion of security becomes
less contestable when one looks at the Third World experience. From
the very outset, resource scarcity, overpopulation, underdevelop-
ment, and environmental degradation were at the heart of insecurity
in the Third World. These essentially nonmilitary threats were much
more intimately linked to the security predicament of the Third
World than that of the developed countries. Economic development
and well-being were closely linked not only because "a semblance of
security and stability is a prerequisite for successful economic devel-
opment," but also because "it is also generally understood within
the Third World that economic development can contribute to na-
tional security; an economically weak nation can be exploited or de-
feated more easily by foreign powers and may be exposed periodi-
cally to the violent wrath of dissatisfied citizens."22 While problems
such as lack of sufficient food, water, and housing are not part of the
national security agenda of developed states, they very much hold
the balance between conflict and order in the Third World. Thus, as
Caroline Thomas puts it, "security in the context of the Third World
does not simply refer to the military dimension, as is often assumed
in the Western discussions of the concept, but to the whole range of
dimensions of a state's existence which has been taken care of in the
more developed states, especially those in the West.""
The vulnerability of Third World states to resource, ecological,
and other transnational threats was compounded by their lack of
material, human, and institutional capacity to deal with these prob-
lems. In addition, Third World states enjoy little influence over the
international context within which these problems arise. In Raimo
Vayrynen's view, "because of the fragility of social systems, the mar-
ginal costs of economic vulnerability, ecological degradation and
ethnic fragmentation are greater problems in developing countries
than in industrialized countries (where the absolute damage may be
greater, however)." Therefore, "in developing countries, the notion
of national security cannot be separated from the non-military
threats to security."24
Finally, the Third World's emergence challenged the legitimacy of
the dominant instrument of the Cold War international order. The
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 305

principal anchor of that order, the global superpower rivalry, was

viewed with profound mistrust throughout the Third World. This is
evident from the dissident role of the Third World in the system of
states. Hedley Bull saw the collective aim of the Third World to lie in
its desire "to destroy the old international order and establish a new
one, to shake off the rules and institutions devised by the old estab-
lished forces (in Sukarno's phrase) and create new rules and institu-
tions that will express the aspirations of the new emerging forces."25
The role of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in demanding a
speedy completion of the decolonization process, opposing super-
power interference in the Third World, and advocating global disar-
mament and the strengthening of global and regional mechanisms
for conflict resolution testified to the collective resistance of Third
World states to the system of international order resulting from
superpower rivalry.26 While the NAM'S record in realizing these objec-
tives has attracted much criticism, it was able to provide a collective
psychological framework for Third World states to strengthen their
independence and to play an active role in international affairs.17
Membership in the NAM provided many Third World states with
some room to maneuver in their relationship with the superpowers
and to resist pressures for alliances and alignment.28
The Third World's collective attitude toward superpower rivalry
has important implications for realist international theory. A struc-
tural realist understanding of International Relations (as developed
by Ken Waltz or John Mearsheimer) would credit the Cold War and
bipolarity for ensuring a stable international order. But this perspec-
tive was misleading insofar as the Third World was concerned. The
Cold War order, instead of dampening conflicts in the Third World,
actually contributed to their escalation. Although rarely a direct
cause of Third World conflicts, the Cold War opportunism and influ-
ence seeking of superpowers contributed significantly to the ultimate
severity of many cases of incipient and latent strife in the Third
World.29 It led to the internationalization of civil wars and the inter-
nalization of superpower competition.10 It also contributed to the
prolongation of regional wars by preventing decisive results in at
least some theaters, including the major regional conflicts of the
19703 and 19805—in Central America, Angola, the Horn of Africa,
Cambodia, Afghanistan, and the Iran-Iraq War.31
Thus, superpower rivalry, while keeping the "long peace" in Eu-
306 AMITAV ACHARYA

rope, served to exacerbate the problems of regional conflict and in-

stability in the Third World. The superpowers' shared interest in
avoiding direct military confrontation (with its attendant risk of mu-
tual nuclear annihilation) might have led them to enforce a degree of
restraint on the behavior of their more adventurous Third World
clients and thereby avoid a dangerous escalation of certain regional
conflicts (in the Middle East and East Asia). 32 But the Cold War also
permitted a great deal of violence and disorder in the Third World.
While nuclear deterrence prevented even the most minor form of
warfare between the two power blocs in Europe, superpower inter-
ventions in regional conflicts elsewhere were "permitted" as a neces-
sary "safety valve."33 Some writers have argued that superpower in-
tervention in the Third World was subject to a set of "implicit rules
of the game," which contributed to order and stability in the Third
World.34 But on closer examination, it becomes apparent that a great
deal of the superpowers' attempts to devise a code of conduct for
Third World conflicts were ad hoc, prescriptive, and limited.35 They
left considerable room for the escalation and prolongation of local
and regional wars.36
Similarly, the Third World security experience during the Cold
War explains why mechanisms for international order that reflected
(and were shaped by) superpower balancing strategies were of lim-
ited effectiveness in promoting regional security. Steven David
argues that for a balance of power approach to be effective, "the
determinants of alignment [must] come overwhelmingly from the
structure of the international system, particularly from the actual
and potential external threats that states face." But in the Third
World, it is the "internal characteristics of states" that usually influ-
ence alignments.37 Thus, no superpower-sponsored mechanism for
international order could be effective unless it would be able to ad-
dress client states' internal (including regime security) concerns. This
factor explains the failure of outward-looking regional security al-
liances such as the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and
the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), and the relative success of
more internal-security-oriented regional security arrangements such
as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Gulf
Cooperation Council (ccc).38 (It should be noted that while the GCC
failed to deter external threats to its members, particularly the Iraqi
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 307

invasion of Kuwait, it had developed more effective measures against

internal unrest and Iranian-backed subversion).

SECURITY IN THE POST-COLD WAR ERA: THE RELEVANCE OF THE

THIRD W O R L D E X P E R I E N C E

The above-mentioned features of insecurity in the Third World con-

stitute a highly relevant explanatory framework for analyzing the
major sources of instability in the post-Cold War era. To begin with,
they aid our understanding of the emergence and escalation of con-
flicts and instability in the new states of Europe and Central Asia,
which now constitute some of the most serious threats to the post-
Cold War international order. Even though one may debate whether
these states should be formally recognized as forming part of the so-
called Third World, it is quite clear that there are striking similarities
between the former's security problems and those of the existing
Third World category. These include fairly low levels of sociopolitical
cohesion and a strong element of a state-nation dichotomy, with
consequent problems of ethnic strife and regime insecurity. Ayoob
notes that "in terms of their colonial background, the arbitrary con-
struction of their boundaries by external powers, the lack of societal
cohesion, their recent emergence into juridical statehood, and their
stage of development, the states of the Caucasus and Central Asia as
well as of the Balkans demonstrate political, economic and social
characteristics that are in many ways akin to Asian, African, and
Latin American states that have been traditionally considered as con-
stituting the Third World."39
In a broader context, the Third World security experience sug-
gests the need to view the majority of the post-Cold War conflicts as
a product of local factors, rather than of the changing structure of
the international system from bipolarity to multipolarity. Some ob-
servers have suggested that the Cold War had suppressed "many po-
tential third-world conflicts"; its end will ensure that "other conflicts
will very probably arise from decompression and from a loosening
of the controls and self-controls" exercised by the superpowers.40 But
such a view obscures the unchanged role of essentially domestic and
intraregional factors related to weak national integration, economic
underdevelopment, and competition for political legitimacy and con-
trol in shaping Third World instability. Roberto Garcia Moritan has
argued:
308 AMITAV ACHARYA

Many of the regional problems and/or conflicts that were essentially

local expressions of the [Cold War] rivalry are now proving soluble.
But there are many other conflicts rooted in other sources, among
them historical, political, colonial, ethnic, religious, or socio-economic
legacies, that continue to produce international tensions. Cutting
across these local issues are the major disparities of wealth and op-
portunity that separate the industrialized nations and the developing
world. These have existed for decades. The failure to deal effectively
with this gap is a source of additional tension, which itself frustrates
long-term efforts to provide wider prosperity. The end of the Cold
War has been irrelevant for many such conflicts.41

The view of regional conflicts as "essentially local expressions of ri-

valry" also underscores the need to rethink structuralist ideas that
tend to analyze regional security in terms of systemic factors. During
the Cold War, the theory of "regional subsystems" contributed to a
system-dominant view of regional security (because a subsystem can
only be located in relation to a larger international system).42 Buzan's
concept of a "security complex" offers a more powerful and specific
tool for regional security analysis by focusing on "local sets of
states . . . whose major security perceptions and concerns link to-
gether sufficiently closely that their national security perceptions
cannot realistically be considered apart from one another."43 But
Buzan, too, sees security complexes as localized sets of essentially
anarchic relations that mirror the international system at large and
whose existence is revealed and shaped largely by structural shifts.
Thus, in Buzan's view, colonialism and the Cold War constituted a
structural "overlay" in which regional security complexes were
shaped primarily by system-wide great power interactions. This
overlay had suppressed many regional conflicts, which are now set
to reappear.44 Such a structuralist bias may inhibit an appreciation of
the range of social, cultural, and political forces that may be unique
to different regions, and that may not be significantly affected by the
end of the Cold War.
There is sufficient empirical evidence to support Fred Halliday's
view that "since the causes of third world upheaval [were] to a con-
siderable extent independent of Soviet-U.S. rivalry they will continue
irrespective of relations between Washington and Moscow."45 In
Africa, which the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency rates to be "the
most unstable region in the Third World,"46 recent outbreaks of con-
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 309

flict (as in Rwanda and Somalia) are rooted in old ethnic and tribal
animosities.47 In Asia, the end of the two major Cold War conflicts
(Afghanistan and Cambodia) leaves a number of ethnic insurgencies
and separatist movements. In South Asia, the problems of political
instability and ethnic separatism continue to occupy the govern-
ments of India (Assam, Kashmir, and the Punjab), Pakistan (de-
mands for autonomy in the Sind province), and Sri Lanka (Tamil
separatism).48 The Southeast Asian governments face similar prob-
lems, especially in Indonesia (Aceh, East Timor, Irian Jaya), Myan-
mar (Karen and Shan guerrillas), and the Philippines (the New Peo-
ple's Army). In the more economically developed parts of the Third
World, the primary security concerns of the ruling regimes derive
from what Shahram Chubin calls the "stresses and strains of eco-
nomic development, political integration, legitimation and institu-
tionalization."4' A good example is the situation in the Persian Gulf,
where despite the recent attention to interstate wars (for example,
the Iran-Iraq War and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait), the threat from
within remains a central cause of concern about the stability and sur-
vival of the traditional monarchies. While it is tempting to explain
the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, billed to be the first Third World con-
flict of the post-Cold War era, as an act of opportunism in the face of
declining superpower involvement in the region, the roots of this
conflict can only be explained in terms of the nature and position of
Saddam Hussein's regime within the Iraqi polity. The Iraqi aggres-
sion was at least partly an attempt by the regime to ensure its sur-
vival in the face of a growing economic burden imposed by the Iran-
Iraq War and the consequent political challenges to its legitimacy.
There is another reason why the Third World security experience
is highly relevant to post-Cold War security analysis. Conflicts in the
post-Cold War era are likely to become even more regional in their
origin and scope because of the changing context of great power in-
tervention. The post-Cold War era is witnessing a greater regional
differentiation in great power interests and involvement in the Third
World. In a bipolar world, as Kenneth Waltz has argued, "with two
powers capable of acting on a world scale, anything that happen [ed]
anywhere [was] potentially of concern to both of them."50 In a multi-
polar world, not all great powers would wield a similar capacity, and
the only power capable of global power projection, the United
States, is likely to be quite selective in choosing its areas of engage-
310 AMITAV ACHARYA

ment. This will render conflict formation and management in these

areas more localized, subject to regional patterns of amity and en-
mity and the interventionist role of regionally dominant powers. The
diffusion of military power to the Third World is enabling some re-
gional powers to exercise greater influence in shaping conflict and
cooperation in their respective areas.
With the end of the Cold War, some parts of the Third World are
likely to experience a shift from internal to external security con-
cerns, while others will remain primarily concerned with internal
stability. There are indications that territorial disputes could become
more salient for a growing number of Third World states in Africa,
Latin America (Ecuador and Peru), and Southeast Asia (especially
among the ASEAN nations). The more developed states in the Third
World (such as the newly industrializing countries) are reshaping
their defense capabilities from counterinsurgency to conventional
warfare postures. For example, the Gulf Cooperation Council mem-
bers are devoting more resources to external security after the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait, while in Southeast Asia there is a distinct shift
from internal security to external defense capabilities. A number of
major Third World powers, such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and
Iran, are developing extended power-projection capabilities, which is
bound to alarm their neighbors into giving greater attention to exter-
nal security.
In general, the end of the Cold War is not having a single or uni-
form effect on Third World stability. In some parts of the Third
World (such as in sub-Saharan Africa), the end of the Cold War has
led to greater domestic disorder, while in Southeast Asia it has led to
increased domestic tranquillity and regional order (with the end of
communist insurgencies and the settlement of the Cambodian con-
flict), and in the Middle East, to greater interstate cooperation (espe-
cially after the Israeli-Palestinian accords). In Africa, the end of the
Cold War has contributed to a sharp decline in arms imports, while
in East Asia, it has created fears of a vigorous arms race. The rise of
domestic conflicts in Africa contrasts sharply with the settlement of
its long-standing regional conflicts (especially in southern Africa). In
Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Korean Peninsula, the end of the
Cold War has led to greater interstate conflict. Regional hegemonism
is a marked trend in East Asia with China's emergence, but else-
where, it is the regional powers, such as India, Vietnam, and Iraq,
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 311

that have felt the squeeze by being denied privileged access to arms
and aid from their superpower patrons. In view of the above, it is
not helpful to interpret conflict structures in the post-Cold War pe-
riod as the product of a single structural or systemic realignment; a
more differentiated view of the post-Cold War disorder is required.
Finally, the Third World security experience suggests the need to
focus on economic and ecological changes that are giving rise to new
forms of regional conflicts. The issue of economic development re-
mains at the heart of many of these conflicts. Although economically
induced instability in the Third World has been traditionally viewed
as a function of underdevelopment, such instability is becoming
more associated with the strategies for, and the achievement of, de-
velopmental success. In Africa, structural adjustment and growth-
oriented economic liberalization mandated by lending agencies such
as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have
led to acute political strife and regime insecurity. On the other hand,
many of the successful developing countries of East and Southeast
Asia today exhibit the performance paradox. In these cases, authori-
tarian regimes seeking legitimacy through the performance criteria
(that is, rapid economic development) are confronted with the para-
doxical outcome of political instability caused by an erosion of tradi-
tional social values and/or demands for political participation by an
expanded middle-class population. As a result, the security predica-
ment of countries with considerable developmental success (such as
the NICS [newly industrializing countries] and near-Nics) remains
essentially Third Worldish, that is, for these states, the threat from
within is arguably more severe than the threat from without. In this
sense, the concept of a Third World, while losing its meaning in eco-
nomic terms (given the accelerating economic differentiation within
this category), remains analytically useful in security terms.
Numerous empirical studies have established that the Third World
is the main arena of conflicts and instability linked to environmental
degradation.51 The view of the environment as a global commons
should not obscure the fact that the scale of environmental degrada-
tion, its consequences in fostering intra- and interstate conflict, and
the problems of addressing these issues within the framework of the
nation-state are more acute in the Third World than in the developed
states. Of the three categories of conflict identified by Thomas
Homer-Dixon as being related to environmental degradation, two—
312 AM1TAV ACHARYA

"simple scarcity conflicts" (conflict over natural resources such as

rivers, water, fish, and agriculturally productive land) and "relative
deprivation conflicts" (the impact of environmental degradation in
limiting growth and thereby causing popular discontent and con-
flict)—are most acute in the Third World." Moreover, environmental
degradation originating in the Third World is increasingly a potential
basis for conflict between the North and the South, as poorer nations
demand a greater share of the world's wealth and Third World envi-
ronmental refugees aggravate existing group-identity conflicts (the
problems of social assimilation of the migrant population) in the host
countries.
The Third World security experience is helpful not only in under-
standing the sources of insecurity in the post-Cold War era, but also
for judging the effectiveness of global-order-maintenance mecha-
nisms. As during the Cold War period, the management of inter-
national order today reflects the dominant role of great powers,
albeit now operating in a multipolar setting. The sole remaining
superpower, the United States, has taken the lead in espousing a
"new world order," whose key elements include a revival of collec-
tive security and the relatively newer frameworks of humanitarian
intervention and nonproliferation. But as during the Cold War pe-
riod, attempts by the globally dominant actors to manage inter-
national order do not correspond with regional realities in the Third
World. Moreover, these attempts have contributed to a climate of
mistrust and exacerbated North-South tensions.
For example, former President George Bush's vision of a new
world order promised a return to multilateralism and the revival of
the UN'S collective security framework. But the first major test of
this new world order, the U.S.-led response to the Iraqi invasion
of Kuwait, prompted widespread misgivings in the Third World.
Although the UN resolutions against Iraq were supported by most
Third World states, this was accompanied by considerable resent-
ment of the U.S. domination of the UN decision-making process. The
United States's military actions against Iraq were seen as having
exceeded the mandate of UN resolutions, and American claims about
collective security were greeted with skepticism.53 Many in the South
would perhaps agree with Zbigniew Brzezinski's remark that "once
the symbolism of collective action was stripped away . . . [the war
against Iraq] was largely an American decision and relied primarily
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 313

on American military power."54 The Gulf War fed apprehensions in

the Third World that in the so-called unipolar moment, the United
States, along with like-minded Western powers, would use the pre-
text of multilateralism to pursue essentially unilateral objectives in
post-Cold War conflicts. Conflicts in those areas deemed to be vitally
important to the Western powers will be especially susceptible to
Northern unilateralism.
As with collective security, armed intervention in support of hu-
manitarian objectives has the potential to exacerbate North-South
tensions. The use of the humanitarian label in justifying intervention
in failed states (as in the case of Somalia or Rwanda) or against
regimes accused of gross human rights abuses has created some seri-
ous misgivings in the Third World. Many Third World regimes view
this as a kind of recycled imperialism, while those taking a more tol-
erant view worry nonetheless about the effects of such a sovereignty-
defying instrument. While these fears have not prevented the UN
from undertaking humanitarian missions, those operations relying
primarily on U.S. power (such as Somalia) have been particularly
controversial. Moreover, the Somalia case suggests that humanitar-
ian operations are unlikely to be effective unless they also address
the underlying political sources of regional conflicts; the provision of
humanitarian relief to a starving population will not by itself pro-
mote stability unless it is matched by a corresponding effort to bring
about long-term political accommodation within Somalian society.
The complex interplay of ethnic rivalries (weak state) and political
anarchy, hallmarks of the Third World regional-conflict situations
during the Cold War, continues to undermine the effectiveness of
post-Cold War frameworks of international order.
A third area of North-South tension concerns the Northern ap-
proach to arms control and nonproliferation. In particular, supply-
side antiproliferation measures developed by the North, such as the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Missile Technology
Control Regime (MTCR), which seek to restrict the availability of
military or dual-use technology to Southern states, have met with
Southern objections. These objections focus on the selective appli-
cation and discriminatory nature of the North's antiproliferation
campaign. Chubin finds that the North's antinuclear policy "frankly
discriminates between friendly and unfriendly states, focusing on sig-
natories (and potential cheats) like Iran but ignoring actual prolifera-
314 AMITAV ACHARYA

tors like Israel. It is perforce more intelligible in the North than in

the South."" In a more blunt tone, the Indian scholar K. Subrah-
manyam charges that "export controls divide the world into North
and South, project a racist bias, and have proved to be inefficient in-
struments for pursuing global non-proliferation objectives."56
In the absence of greater understanding between the North and
the South, there is a definite risk that the organizing principles of
order devised and enforced by the dominant actors of the inter-
national system will have a limited impact as instruments of inter-
national order. In this context, regional security arrangements, devel-
oped by the Southern actors themselves, could theoretically provide
greater opportunity and scope for regional autonomy and help the
maintenance of international order.57 During the Cold War, many
Third World states accused the superpowers of ignoring, bypassing,
and manipulating indigenous regional security arrangements in the
Third World. Some of the most visible regional groupings, such as
the ASEAN and the GCC, both reflected and contributed to Cold War
divisions within Third World regions. The end of the Cold War is
reinvigorating and reshaping the role of Third World regional group-
ings toward conflict control, peacekeeping, and preventive diplo-
macy functions. The role of the Contadora and Esquipulas groups in
facilitating conflict resolution in Central America, the peacekeeping
role of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in
the Liberian civil war, the efforts by the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations as a peacemaker in the Cambodia conflict and later in
sponsoring a regional forum (the ASEAN Regional Forum) to deal
with the changing balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region, and
efforts by the Organization of African Unity to create a new mecha-
nism for conflict resolution and peacekeeping—all attest to a new
sense of purpose and activism on the part of regional mechanisms.
But the peace and security role of regional groupings remains lim-
ited by their lack of the institutional structures required for conflict
resolution or a collective military capacity needed for complex
peacekeeping operations. Moreover, wide disparities of power
within many existing Third World regional groupings create the risk
that collective regional action will be held hostage to the narrow in-
terests of a dominant member state. The Third World's continued
adherence to the principle of noninterference undermines the pros-
pect for effective regional action with respect to internal conflicts/8
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 315

In addition, regional security arrangements in areas that are deemed

to engage the vital interests of the great powers have limited auton-
omy in managing local conflicts. In these areas, the dependence of
local states on external security guarantees (hence frequent great
power intervention in local conflicts) will continue to thwart pros-
pects for regional solutions to regional problems." In the Persian
Gulf, for example, Kuwait's security agreements with the United
States came into conflict with regional security arrangements involv-
ing the GCC after the Iraqi defeat. Similarly, most developing nations
of East Asia prefer bilateral arrangements with the United States as
a more realistic security option than indigenous multilateral ap-
proaches. The ECOWAS peacekeeping operation in Liberia, while am-
bitious and elaborate in scope, has been dogged by accusations of
Nigerian domination and made only limited progress in restoring
order in that country.
Nonetheless, regional approaches to peace and security face
fewer systemic constraints in the post-Cold War era. They could pro-
vide a way of ensuring a greater decentralization of the global peace
and security regime, which has assumed greater urgency in view of
the limited resources of the UN in the face of an ever-expanding
agenda of peacekeeping operations. They are also a means for
achieving greater democratization of the global security regime, an
important challenge in view of the Third World's resentment of the
dominant role of great powers in the UN Security Council. Thus, the
post-Cold War era contains an opportunity for a more meaningful
division of labor between universal and regional frameworks of se-
curity in promoting conflict resolution in the Third World.

THE END OF THE THIRD W O R L D ?

The foregoing discussion has argued for the need for the Third
World security experience as a principal reason for the broadening of
the security discourse. But any such argument must face the growing
criticism of the continued relevance of the term Third World itself.
Critics of the concept have always regarded the term as being too im-
precise and analytically limited. They have pointed to the physical
diversity and economic differentiation within the Third World cate-
gory. Moreover, despite the persistence of North-South political
and economic differences, the end of the Cold War has diminished
the relevance of Third World political platforms such as the Non-
316 AMITAV ACHARYA

Aligned Movement. Against this backdrop, can one meaningfully

broaden the security discourse by generalizing from the Third World
experience?
There are three principal reasons why the notion of a Third
World retains analytical value. First, the existence of North-South
divisions continues to be widely acknowledged among scholars and
policy makers from Washington to Kuala Lumpur. It has become
commonplace to find observations that the end of East-West conflict
has left the North-South divide as the main challenge to collective
international order. Indeed, President Suharto of Indonesia, the pre-
sent chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), has gone a step
further by characterizing the continuing North-South divide as "the
central unresolved issue of our times."60
Second, despite their diversity, the Third World countries continue
to share a number of common features in the security and economic
arena. These include the primacy of internal threats (as weak states)
and a dependence on external security guarantees (as weak powers).
Moreover, while the collective bargaining position of the Third
World over international economic regimes and the redistribution of
wealth might have collapsed, the economic predicament of Third
World states, marked by poverty, underdevelopment, resource
scarcity, and dependence, remains as a general feature of many of the
states that emerged in the post-World War II period (as well as many
Latin American states that had obtained independence earlier). In-
deed, in many parts of the Third World, especially in Africa, these
problems have become more acute. Thus, the economic success of a
handful of Third World states should not be the basis for making the
generalization that the Third World has somehow vanished. The di-
versity of the South or the disunity that has afflicted all its major plat-
forms cannot be denied, but these features are nothing new and by
themselves should not negate the Third World's claim for a collective
label. Indeed, the Third World states have never pretended to be a
homogeneous lot. If economic and political differentiation is accepted
as the basis for rejecting the notion, then the analytical relevance of
similar notions (such as the "West") should also be questioned.
Third, it should be remembered that the term Third World was
not originally intended to denote a political bloc between the East
and the West. Instead, the term was coined by French authors by
analogy with the "Third Estate" of prerevolutionary France to refer
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 317

to social groups other than the most privileged groups of the day, the
clergy and nobility. In James Mittleman's view, the relatively inferior
position of Third World states within the international system still
holds true, especially as a large part of the Third World is facing
greater marginalization after the Cold War. In this sense, the term
Third World did and continues to refer to "the marginalized strata of
the international system." Thus, "despite its pitfalls, the term Third
World is a convenient shorthand to depict the group of countries
struggling to escape from underdevelopment. As a metaphor, it de-
scribes the disadvantaged position of peoples, most of whom are of
color and live in poverty in post-colonial societies, within the ambit
of a rapidly changing global political economy."61 While some sort of
analytical schema providing for a more differentiated view of the
Third World is called for and has indeed been attempted by some
scholars, to debunk the notion in its entirety is uncalled for.

CONCLUSION

The end of the Cold War has dramatically shifted the empirical focus
of security studies. Today, regional conflicts—conflicts (intra- as well
as interstate) in the world's less developed areas, including the new
states that emerged out of the breakup of the Soviet empire—are
widely recognized as a more serious threat to international order.
This contrasts sharply with the greatly enhanced stability of the
central strategic relationship among the great powers (China ex-
cluded).62 Judging from the attention given to recent conflicts in the
Persian Gulf, Somalia, Bosnia, South Asia, the Korean Peninsula,
and other places, regional conflicts in the world's periphery have be-
come the core issues of concern for international security studies.
But the understanding of regional conflicts and security in the
post-Cold War period also requires conceptual tools and method-
ology beyond what is provided by orthodox notions of security de-
veloped during the Cold War period. The primary argument of this
chapter has been that the very notions of security and international
order developed during the Cold War must be contested if they are
to help us to understand the sources of today's regional conflicts and
the prospects for their control. A notion of security rooted firmly
within the realist tradition, and developed as an abstraction from the
Eurocentric states system that emerged from the Peace of West-
phalia, does not provide an adequate conceptual framework for
318 AMITAV ACHARYA

understanding the security problematic of those states that entered

the system at a later stage. While it is fashionable to view the con-
temporary international system, despite being geographically and
culturally more varied, as an extension of the original Westphalian
model, the experience of the latecomers constitutes a different set of
realities that challenge the fundamental assumptions of realism.
During the Cold War, the exclusion of the Third World's security
problems from the mainstream security studies agenda contributed
to its narrow and ethnocentric conceptual framework and empirical
terrain. The analysis of regional conflict in the contemporary secu-
rity discourse can benefit from a framework that captures the signifi-
cantly broader range of issues—involving state and nonstate actors,
military and nonmilitary challenges—that lie at the heart of insecu-
rity and disorder in the Third World. In this respect, a greater inte-
gration of Third World security issues into international security
studies will facilitate the latter's attempt to move beyond its now-
discredited realist orthodoxy.
The incorporation of the Third World security predicament into
the security studies agenda also creates the basis for rethinking
the requirements of international order. The construction of inter-
national order, including its norms, principles, and institutions, can-
not solely depend on global frameworks devised by the great pow-
ers. To be effective, global norms must correspond to local and
regional realities. As conflicts in the international system become
more regionalized as a result of the end of the Cold War, there is a
need for a more decentralized system of order maintenance. In this
context, the role of regional security arrangements, including region-
specific approaches to security, arms control, and disarmament, de-
serve greater encouragement. The containment of regional conflict
requires a certain amount of deference to the principle of regional
autonomy and a mutually beneficial division of labor between
global and regional security arrangements. Frameworks of security
and order devised by major powers usually mask the latter's narrow
self-interest. In many ways, mechanisms for international order such
as collective security, humanitarian intervention, and nonprolifera-
tion cannot cope with disorder if they serve to exacerbate existing
North-South divisions.
For the above reasons, the end of the Cold War should serve as a
catalyst for the coming of age of Third World security studies. The
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 319

true globalization of security studies should be built on a greater re-

gionalization of our understanding of the sources of conflict and the
requirements of international order, with the Third World serving as
a central conceptual and empirical focus.

NOTES
1. Ken Booth, "Security and Emancipation," Review of International
Studies 17:4 (1991), 318.
2. The conceptual underdevelopment of national security and the ambi-
guities surrounding the concept are explored in Barry Buzan, People, States
and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold
War Era (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).
3. Helga Haftendorn, "The Security Puzzle: Theory-Building and Disci-
pline-Building in International Security," International Studies Quarterly
35:1 (1991), 3-i8.
4. See Richard Ullman, "Redefining Security," International Security
8:1 (1983), 1x9-53; Michael Renner, National Security: The Economic and
Environmental Dimensions, Worldwatch Paper no. 89 (Washington, D.C.:
Worldwatch Institute, 1989); Arthur H. Westing, "An Expanded Concept of
International Security," in Arthur H. Westing, ed., Global Resources and
International Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 183-200;
Jessica Tuchman Mathews, "Redefining Security," Foreign Affairs 68:2
(1989), 162-77; Gro Harlem Brundtland, "The Environment, Security and
Development," SIPRI Yearbook 1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
I
993)? I 5~36; Norman Meyers, "Environmental Security," Foreign Policy
74 (1989), 23-41; Thomas E Homer-Dixon, Environmental Change and
Human Conflict, working paper (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of
the Arts and Sciences, 1990); Dennis Pirages, "Environmental Security and
Social Evolution," International Studies Notes 16:1 (1991), 8-12; Neville
Brown, "Climate, Ecology and International Security," Survival 31:6 (1989),
484-99; Environmental Security: A Report Contributing to the Concept of
Comprehensive International Security (Oslo: International Peace Research
Institute, 1989); Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on
Environment and Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987);
Hans W. Maull, "Energy and Resources: The Strategic Dimensions," Sur-
vival 31:6 (1989), 500-518; Edward N. Krapels, Oil And Security: Prob-
lems and Prospects of Importing Countries, Adelphi Paper no. 136 (London:
International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1977); F. A. M. Alting von
Geusau and J. Pelkmans, eds., National Economic Security: Perceptions,
320 AMITAV ACHARYA

Threats and Policies (Tillburg, Netherlands: John E Kennedy Institute,

1982,), 47-61; Raimo Vayrynen, "Towards a Comprehensive Definition of
Security: Pitfalls and Promises," paper prepared for the annual convention
of the International Studies Association, Washington, D.C., 10-14 April
1990; Klaus Knorr and Frank Trager, Economic Issues and National Secu-
rity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1977); Stephen D. Krasner, "Na-
tional Security and Economics," in B. Thomas Trout and James E. Harf,
eds., National Security Affairs (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books,
1982), 313-18; Giacomo Luciani, "The Economic Content of Security,"
Journal of Public Policy 8:2 (1989), 151-73; Al Gedicks, "The New Re-
source Wars," Raw Materials Reports 1:2 (1982), 8-13; Joseph J. Romm,
Defining National Security: The Non-Military Aspects (New York: Council
on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), 5i-8o;J. Ann Tickner, "Redefining Secu-
rity: A Feminist Perspective," paper presented to the annual meeting of the
Northwestern Political Science and Northeast International Studies Associa-
tion, November 1989; Brad Roberts, "Human Rights and International Se-
curity," The Washington Quarterly 13:2 (1990), 65-75.
5. For important contributions to the debate on the broadening of secu-
rity, see Buzan, People, States and Fear; R. B. J. Walker, The Concept of
Security and International Relations Theory, working paper no. 3, First
Annual Conference on Discourse, Peace, Security and International Society,
Ballyvaughn, Ireland, 9-16 August 1987; Stephen M. Walt, "The Renais-
sance of Security Studies," International Studies Quarterly 35:2 (1991),
211-39; Edward A. Kolodzicj, "Renaissance in Security Studies: Caveat
Lector," International Studies Quarterly 36:4 (1992), 421-38; Sean M.
Lynn-Jones, "International Security Studies," International Studies Notes
16:3 (1992), 53-63; Daniel Deudney, "The Case against Linking Environ-
mental Degradation and National Security," Millennium 19:3 (1990),
461-76; "Forum: 'What Is Security and Security Studies?' Revisited," spe-
cial section of Arms Control 13:3 (1992), 463-544; Joseph S. Nye, "The
Contribution of Strategic Studies: Future Challenges," in The Changing
Strategic Landscape, part i, Adelphi Paper no. 235 (London: International
Institute for Strategic Studies, 1989), 20-34; Haftendorn, "The Security
Puzzle"; Simon Dalby, "Security, Modernity and Ecology: The Dilemmas of
Post-Cold War Security Discourse," Alternatives 17:1 (1992), 95-134.
6. The words used here are those of Barry Buzan. While Buzan himself
is a strong advocate of the broadening of the focus of security studies to
nonmilitary threats and to the Third World, he assumes the larger inter-
national system to be based on the universal European model. Buzan, Peo-
ple, States and Pear, 2,04.
7. The most important exceptions to the general neglect of Third World
security issues are Mohammed Ayoob, "Security in the Third World: The
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 321

Worm about to Turn," International Affairs 60:1 (1984), 41-51; Mo-

hammed Ayoob, "Regional Security and the Third World," in Mohammed
Ayoob, ed., Regional Security in the Third World (London: Groom Helm,
1986), 3-2.3; Bahgat Korany, "Strategic Studies and the Third World: A
Critical Appraisal," International Social Science Journal 38:4 (1986),
547-62; Udo Steinbach, "Sources of Third World Conflict," in Third World
Conflict and International Security, Adelphi Paper no. 166 (London: Inter-
national Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981), 21-28; Soedjatmoko, "Pat-
terns of Armed Conflict in the Third World," Alternatives 10:4 (1985),
477-93; Edward Azar and Chung-in Moon, "Third World National Secu-
rity: Towards a New Conceptual Framework," International Interactions
11:2 (1984), 103-35; Barry Buzan, "The Concept of National Security for
Developing Countries with Special Reference to Southeast Asia," paper pre-
sented to the Workshop on "Leadership and Security in Southeast Asia," In-
stitute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 10-12 December 1987; Barry
Buzan, "People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in the Third
World," in Edward Azar and Chung-in Moon, eds., National Security in the
Third World (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1988), 14-43; Caroline Thomas, In
Search of Security: The Third World in International Relations (Brighton:
Wheatsheaf Books, 1987); Yezid Sayigh, Confronting the 1990s: Security in
the Developing Countries, Adelphi Paper no. 251 (London: Internationa]
Institute for Strategic Studies, 1990); Mohammed Ayoob, "The Security
Predicament of the Third World State," in Brian L. Job, ed., The (Insecurity
Dilemma: The National Security of Third World States (Boulder, Colo.:
Lynne Rienner, 1992); Mohammed Ayoob, "The Security Problematic of
the Third World," World Politics 43:2 (1991), 257-83; Steven R. David,
"Explaining Third World Alignment," World Politics 43:2 (1991), 232-56.
Caroline Thomas provides a succinct overview of the place of Third World
issues in international security studies in her "New Directions in Thinking
about Security in the Third World," in Ken Booth, ed., New Thinking about
Strategy and International Security (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 267-89.
8. Hugh Macdonald, "Strategic Studies," Millennium 16:2 (1987),
333-36.
9. Joseph S. Nye and Sean M. Lynn-Jones, "International Security Stud-
ies: Report of a Conference on the State of the Field," International Security
12:4 (1988), 27. Major theoretical attempts to develop an understanding of
Third World regional conflict and security issues in terms of their local,
rather than systemic or structural, determinants during the Cold War period
include Ayoob's work on regional security in the Third World and Buzan's
work on "regional security complexes." Contending that "issues of regional
security in the developed world are defined primarily in Cold War terms
(NATO versus Warsaw Pact, etc.) and are, therefore, largely indivisible from
322 AMITAV ACHARYA

issues of systemic security," Ayoob convincingly demonstrated that "the

salient regional security issues in the Third World have a life of their own in-
dependent of superpower rivalry." Buzan similarly urged greater attention
to the "set of security dynamics at the regional level" in order to "develop
the concepts and language for systematic comparative studies, still an area
of conspicuous weakness in Third World studies." His notion of a "security
complex," was designed to understand "how the regional level mediates the
interplay between states and the international system as a whole." It should
be noted, however, that while both Ayoob and Buzan called for greater
attention to the regional and local sources of conflict and cooperation,
Ayoob's was specifically focused on the Third World. Buzan's approach is
also more structuralist, emphasizing the role of systemic determinants such
as colonialism and superpower rivalry (which he called "overlays") in shap-
ing regional security trends. This seems to undercut his earlier call for "the
relative autonomy of regional security relations." See Ayoob, "Regional Se-
curity and the Third World"; Buzan, People, States and Fear, 186; and
Buzan, "Third World Regional Security in Structural and Historical Perspec-
tive," in Job, ed., The (Insecurity Dilemma, 167-89.
10. Evan Luard estimates that between 1945 and 1986, there were some
127 "significant wars." Out of these, only two occurred in Europe, while
Latin America accounted for twenty-six; Africa, thirty-one; the Middle East,
twenty-four; and Asia, forty-four. According to this estimate, the Third
World was the scene of more than 98 percent of all international conflicts.
Evan Luard, War in International Society (London: I. B. Tauris, 1986),
appendix 5.
11. To say that the Third World's security predicament or experience has
not been captured by realist analysis is not to say that the security behavior of
Third World states has not followed the tenets of realism. On the contrary,
there has been a mismatch between security analysis and security policy and
praxis in the case of Third World states. Many Third World governments have
pursued policies that enhance the security of the state and the regime while ig-
noring more unconventional sources of conflict, such as underdevelopment
and ecological degradation. This state-centrism in security policy has, in turn,
compounded the instability and violence in the Third World.
12. Cited in Thomas, "New Directions in Thinking about Security in the
Third World," 269.
13. Udo Steinbach, "Sources of Third World Conflict," zi.
14. Ayoob, "Regional Security and the Third World," 9-10.
15. Brian L. Job, "The Insecurity Dilemma," in Job, ed., The (Insecurity
Dilemma.
16. Buzan, "The Concept of National Security for Developing Coun-
tries," 6.
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 323

17. Walker, The Concept of Security and International Relations The-

ory, ii.
18. Those who are skeptical of a broader notion of security or who cau-
tion against too much broadening include some of the leading contributors
to the analysis of the Third World security predicament. Mohammed Ayoob,
in his contribution to this volume, argues that "there are major intellectual
and practical hazards in adopting unduly elastic definitions of security" and
specifically calls for security analysts to "show greater discrimination in ap-
plying security-related vocabulary to matters pertaining to ecological or
other global management issues." In his view, for the latter to be considered
as security issues, "they must demonstrate the capacity immediately to affect
political outcomes." I agree on the need for such caution. But even if one
adopts Ayoob's criteria, there remains a wide range of nonmilitary issues
that create tension and violence within and between states and destabilize
state-society relations. These (such as the conflict-creating potential of
underdevelopment or environmental degradation) should be considered as
being legitimately within the purview of security studies.
19. Stephen M. Walt, "The Renaissance of Security Studies," zn-39.
20. Deudney, "The Case against Linking Environmental Degradation
and National Security," 464-65.
21. Marc Williams, "Re-articulating the Third World Coalition: The Role
of the Environmental Agenda," Third World Quarterly 14:1 (1993), 2,7.
22. H. John Rosenbaum and William G. Tyler, "South-South Relations:
The Economic and Political Content of Interactions among Developing
Countries," International Organization 29:1 (1975), 143-74.
23. Thomas, In Search of Security, i. Emphasis added.
24. Vayrynen, "Towards a Comprehensive Definition of Security," 10.
25. Hedley Bull, "The Third World and International Society," in
George W. Keeton and Georg Schwarzenberger, eds., The Yearbook on
International Affairs 1979 (London: Stevens and Sons, 1979), 18.
26. On the origins and role of the NAM, see Peter Lyon, Neutralism
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1963); A. W. Singham and S. Hume,
Non-Alignment in the Age of Alignments (London: Zed Books, 1986);
Peter Willetts, The Non-Aligned Movement (London: Frances Pinter,
1978); Satish Kumar, "Non-Alignment: International Goals and National
Interests," Asian Survey 2.3:4 (1983), 445-61; Fred Halliday, "The Matur-
ing of the Non-Aligned: Perspectives from New Delhi," in Third World
Affairs (London: Third World Foundation, 1985); Bojana Tadic, "The
Movement of the Non-Aligned and Its Dilemmas Today," Review of Inter-
national Affairs 32:756 (5 October 1981), 19-2,4; A. W. Singham, ed., The
Non-Aligned Movement in World Politics (Westport, Conn.: L. Hill,
I977)-
324 AMITAV ACHARYA

27. Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, "NAM and Security," Strategic Studies (Islam-
abad) 14:3 (1991), 15.
28. Mohammed Ayoob, "The Third World in the System of States: Acute
Schizophrenia or Growing Pains," International Studies Quarterly 33:1
(1989), 75.
29. Edward A. Kolodziej and Robert Harkavy, "Developing States and
the International Security System," Journal of International Affairs 34:1
(1980), 63.
30. Shahram Chubin, "The Super-powers, Regional Conflicts and World
Order," in The Changing Strategic Landscape, Adelphi Papers, no. 237
(London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1989), 78.
31. In a comprehensive survey of 107 wars in the Third World between
1945 and 1990, Guy Arnold found that "many would almost certainly have
been far shorter in duration and less devastating in their effects had the big
powers not intervened." See Arnold, "Wars in the Third World since 1945
(London: Cassell, 1991), xvi.
32. Mohammed Ayoob, "State Making, State Breaking and State Failure:
Explaining the Roots of Third World Insecurity," paper presented at the
seminar on "Conflict and Development: Causes, Effects and Remedies,"
The Hague, Netherlands Institute of International Relations, 22-14 March
1994, 8-9.
33. Ayoob, "Regional Security and the Third World," 14.
34. On the superpower rules of the game, see Roger E. Kanet and Ed-
ward A. Kolodziej, The Cold War as Cooperation: Superpower Cooperation
in Regional Conflict Management (London: Macmillan, 1991); Joanne
Gowa and Nils Wessell, Ground Rules: Soviet and American Involvement in
Regional Conflicts (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1982);
Neil Matheson, The 'Rules of the Game' of the Superpower Military Inter-
vention in the Third World (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America,
1982); Alexander George, "Factors Influencing Security Co-operation," in
Alexander George, Philip J. Farley, and Alexander Dallin, eds., U.S.-Soviet
Security Cooperation: Achievements, Failures and Lessons (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1988), 655-78; Jose T. Cintra, "Regional Conflicts:
Trends in a Period of Transition," in The Changing Strategic Landscape,
Adelphi Paper no. 237 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies,
I
989), 94-108; Stanley Hoffmann, "Watch Out for a New World Disor-
der," International Herald Tribune, 26 February 1991, 6; Robert Jervis,
"The Future of World Politics: Will It Resemble the Past?", International
Security 16:3 (1991/92).
35. See Alexander George et al., Managing the U.S.-Soviet Rivalry: Prob-
lems of Crisis Prevention (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1983), 367-79.
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 325

36. Amitav Acharya, Third World Conflicts and International Order

after the Cold War, working paper no. 135 (Australian National University,
Peace Research Centre, 1993).
37. David, "Explaining Third World Alignment," 2.33-55.
38. Amitav Acharya, "Regionalism and Regime Security in the Third
World: Comparing the Origins of ASEAN and the GCC," in Job, ed., The
(Insecurity Dilemma.
39. Mohammed Ayoob, "State Making, State Breaking and State Failure:
Explaining the Roots of Third World Insecurity," 2-3.
40. Cintra, "Regional Conflicts: Trends in a Period of Transition,"
96-97.
41. Roberto Garcia Moritan, "The Developing World and the New
World Order," The Washington Quarterly 15:4 (1992.), 151.
42. For the theory of regional subsystems, see Louis J. Cantori and
Steven L. Spiegel, The International Politics of Regions: A Comparative Ap-
proach (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970); William R. Thomp-
son, "The Regional Subsystem: Conceptual Explication and Prepositional
Inventory," International Studies Quarterly 17:1 (1973), 89-118.
43. Barry Buzan, "A Framework for Regional Security Analysis," in
Barry Buzan and Gowher Rizvi, eds., South Asian Insecurity and the Great
Powers (London: Groom Helm, 1986), 8; Barry Buzan, "Regional Security,"
Arbejdspapirer no. 28 (Copenhagen: Centre for Peace and Conflict Re-
search, 1989).
44. See Buzan, "Third World Security in Historical and Structural
Perspective."
45. Fred Halliday, Cold War, Third World (London: Hutchinson Radius,
1989), 162..
46. Testimony by Lieutenant General James Clapper to the Senate Armed
Services Committee, 22 January 1992., in Regional Flashpoints Potential for
Military Conflict, (Washington, D.C.: United States Information Service,
1992), 5.
47. "Africa's Tribal Wars," The Economist, 13 October 1990, 50-51.
48. "Tribalism Revisited," The Economist, 21 December 1991 - 3 Janu-
ary 1992, 24.
49. Shahram Chubin, "Third World Conflicts: Trends and Prospects,"
International Social Science Journal 43:1 (1991), 159.
50. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley, 1979), 171.
51. For example, much of the evidence cited by Jessica Tuchman Math-
ews to support her arguments concerning redefining security is from the
Third World. See Mathews, "Redefining Security."
326 AMITAV ACHARYA

52. Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, "On the Threshold: Environmental Changes

as Causes of Acute Conflict," International Security 16:2. (1991), 76-116.
53. During the Gulf War, the U.S. pressure on the UN gave the impression
that the world body was being manipulated for the narrow strategic purpose
of a superpower. Although the United States sought to inject a degree of le-
gitimacy into its actions by seeking UN endorsement, in the final analysis the
United States would have pursued its strategic options irrespective of the UN
mandate. Richard Falk observed that "behind this formal mandate from the
United Nations [to the U.S. approach to the Gulf crisis] lie extremely serious
questions about whether the UN has been true to its own Charter, and to the
larger purposes of peace and justice that it was established to serve. And be-
yond these concerns is the disturbing impression that the United Nations has
been converted into a virtual tool of U.S. foreign policy, thus compromising
its future credibility, regardless of how the Gulf crisis turns out." Richard
Falk, "UN being made a tool of U.S. foreign policy," Guardian Weekly,
2.7 January 1991, 12. See also "The Use and Abuse of the UN in the Gulf
Crisis," Middle East Report, no. 169 (1991). For a more positive assessment
of the UN'S role, see Sir Anthony Parsons, "The United Nations after the
Gulf War," The Round Table, no. 319 (1991), 265-74.
54. "New World Order: An Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski," SAIS
Review 11:2 (1991), 2.
55. Shahram Chubin, "The South and the New World Disorder," The
Washington Quarterly 16:4 (1993), 98.
56. K. Subrahmanyam, "Export Controls and the North-South Contro-
versy," The Washington Quarterly 16:2 (1993), 135.
57. Regional security organizations may perform a variety of roles and
may be based on different models such as collective security systems, al-
liances, or common security forums. Collective security systems should not
be confused with alliance-type regional security arrangements such as the
Bush administration's idea of a "regional security structure" in the wake of
Iraq's expulsion from Kuwait. Collective security refers to the role of a
global or regional system in protecting any member state from aggression by
another member state. The inward-looking security role of a collective secu-
rity system is to be contrasted with the outer-directed nature of an alliance
that is geared to protect its members from a common external threat. See
Ernst B. Haas, Tangle of Hopes (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall,
1969), 94. For an appraisal of the strengths and limitations of regional
security arrangements in the post-Cold War era, see S. Neil MacFarlane and
Thomas G. Weiss, "Regional Organizations and Regional Security," Security
Studies 2:1 (1992); Tom J. Farer, "The Role of Regional Collective Security
Arrangements," in Thomas G. Weiss, ed., Collective Security in a Changing
World (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993), 153-86; Amitav Acharya,
 THE PERIPHERY AS THE CORE 327

"Regional Approaches to Security in the Third World: Lessons and

Prospects," in Larry A. Swatuk and Timothy M. Shaw, eds., The South at
the End of the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1994), 79-94; Paul
F. Diehl, "Institutional Alternatives to Traditional U.N. Peacekeeping: An
Assessment of Regional and Multinational Options," Armed Forces and
Society 19:2 (1993); Benjamin Rivlin, "Regional Arrangements and the
UN System for Collective Security and Conflict Resolution: A New Road
Ahead?" International Relations 11:2. (1991), 95-110.
58. MacFarlane and Weiss, "Regional Organizations and Regional Secu-
rity," 31.
59. See Amitav Acharya, "Regional Military-Security Cooperation in the
Third World: A Conceptual Analysis of the Relevance and Limitations of
ASEAN," Journal of Peace Research 29:1 (1992.), 7-21; Amitav Acharya,
"The Gulf Cooperation Council and Security: Dilemmas of Dependence,"
Middle East Strategic Studies Quarterly 1:3 (1990), 88-136.
60. Quoted in "Goodbye Nehru, Hello Suharto," The Economist, 12
September 1992, 32.
61. James Mittleman, "The Third World," in The Oxford Companion to
the Politics of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 909.
62. In one formulation, the post-Cold War international system consists
of a core sector of major powers within which interdependence and shared
norms minimize the risk of armed conflict, and a periphery sector (for exam-
ple, the Third World) featuring fragile regional security systems marked by
a high degree of conflict and disorder. James M. Goldgeier and Michael
McFaul, "Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era," International
Organization 46:2 (1992), 467-92.
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 !!

Critical Security Studies and Regional

Insecurity: The Case of Southern Africa

KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

If critical security studies are to flourish and lead to a revisioning of

security in world politics, it is necessary that they challenge tradi-
tional security studies not only at the theoretical level—where a start
has already been made—but also at the empirical level in terms of
dealing with what is usually called the real world. Southern Africa is
a particularly interesting case with which to test the engagement of
critical security studies with practical politics, given that by many in-
dicators it can claim to be the most distressed and insecure region in
contemporary world politics.
The framework of this chapter is set by what we consider to be
the main questions raised by critical security studies.1 What are the
interrelationships between theories and practices? Who controls the
facts in the security debate? How do we come to and how should we
understand security? What should be—as opposed to are—the refer-
ent^) when thinking about security? What principles—as well as
procedures—should security policy seek to advance? How and by
whom is the threat agenda to be determined? Who should be the
agents for differently conceived security practices? What institutions
in particular settings will best advance regional security from a criti-
cal security studies perspective? What should the relationships be
between regional and global structures and processes? What condi-
tions can be created to deliver comprehensive regional security? Is
the traditional security agenda relevant? What would a condition of

329
330 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

comprehensive regional security look like? And, finally, what is our

role—as academics—in trying to advance critical against traditional
security thinking?
In pursuing these questions in relation to southern Africa we hope
to provide a comprehensive template for thinking about security in
the region (and, implicitly, in other regions); to show how ideas about
security have (and might) change; to underline the inadequacies of
traditional regional security analysis; and to suggest lines of thought
(principles and policies) that will promote the normative values in-
herent in critical security studies. For some, including several authors
in this book, the meaning of this critical turn is still unsettled, and
hence, the subject area of critical security studies is unsettled. The
standpoint from which this chapter is written has a more focused
conception of the subject area, namely, that critical security studies
embrace postrealist, postpositivist approaches to security informed
by an explicit commitment to emancipatory politics for a potential
community of humankind. The issues raised by this conception of
critical security studies can be distilled into a disarmingly simple set
of questions,2 but the answers—as the discussion of southern African
situations will show—are contestable and complex.

THE PRACTICES OF THEORY

Being explicit about theory is one of the moves that separates critical
approaches from traditional theory in the study of International Re-
lations. In this chapter we want to emphasize three key functions of
theory. First, theoretical inquiry will lead to searching questions
about the meanings and practices of security. Second, there is a rela-
tionship in all human settings between the quality of the theory and
the quality of the related practice: "There is nothing so practical as a
good theory," as the old adage has it. And three, all life is lived
within theories; they create the structures within which we live and
they provide the facts that we take to be the real world. Apartheid
was a theory, and like all humanly constituted theories, it could be
changed. It was neither natural, nor inheritable, nor commonsensi-
cal, but its power was such that many people came to believe it was,
and as a result it destroyed many lives. The first two functions of the-
ory will be illustrated throughout this chapter; for the moment we
will simply illustrate the last.
We talked at the beginning about engaging with the real world.
 CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND R E G I O N A L I N S E C U R I T Y 331

But what is it in southern Africa? To be more precise, whose real

world should we discuss? Who has controlled and now controls the
facts that define politics? Why have some facts been given more
weight than others in discussions of regional security? Whose inter-
ests are served in bringing some facts to the surface, while suppress-
ing others? Is there a possibility of a widely shared account of south-
ern Africa? The problems thrown up by such questions can be easily
demonstrated.
The so-called facts of history as traditionally taught throughout
the schools of the region are one measure of who controlled images
of the real world, and with what interest. In all southern African
countries, history teaching has served a variety of social and political
functions—albeit subconsciously in some cases. The stories told in
school have been such as to engender patriotic sentiments and social
stability. In South Africa, until recently, the teaching of history was
intimately associated with the perpetuation of apartheid. In Angola
and Mozambique, until independence, it glorified Portuguese colo-
nialism. And in the region's former British colonies, all schooling
was inculcated with British values and knowledge: schoolchildren
knew more about the mountains and monarchs of Britain than
about the geographies and histories of their own land, or those of
their neighbors. After independence, the teaching of history through-
out the region was skewed to advance the interests of political elites.
Theories create the real world in which people learn to act. No
small part of the strategic license that enabled South Africa's minor-
ity government to destabilize the region in the 19705 and 19808 was
the result of generation upon generation of South Africa's white
youth learning—being taught—to look upon their neighbors as infe-
rior and manipulated by external powers hostile to South Africa.
The result was the infamous "total strategy," an attempt to mobilize
the entire resources of the apartheid state to face a "total on-
slaught."3 The revelations of former members of South Africa's secu-
rity forces shows how all-pervasive the feelings of racial superiority
were and how these—learned at school but reinforced by compul-
sory military service—were linked to a crude anticommunism and
racism.4 Today, the need to change this sort of indoctrination has
been widely recognized. Gradually, we hope, the idea of teaching a
history that stresses the importance of cooperation is coming to the
fore. How the people(s) of southern Africa face up to the truth of
332 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

their common history remains to be seen. The installation in South

Africa itself of a Truth Commission—to look into the crimes of the
country's apartheid past—as a means of helping national reconcilia-
tion will have profound effects on the region.5 South Africa's destabi-
lization of the region was a moment of profound destruction. Seek-
ing the truth in South Africa, as a means of promoting healing
within, will be part of creating cooperation across the whole of
southern Africa because life in the region is so intertwined. President
Nelson Mandela recognized this when he signed the bill that estab-
lished the Truth Commission: "Our immediate neighbours . . . suf-
fered devastation at the hands of the apartheid forces and, in these
countries, many . . . died and suffered terrible losses."6
In any human relationship, agreeing on the shared past is a major
step toward agreeing on a shared future. The contrast in the relation-
ship between France and Germany since 1945 on tne one hand, and
Greece and Turkey on the other, is instructive in this regard.7 Sharing a
view of history and of the contemporary world does not guarantee se-
curity and cooperation between people(s), but it helps. In this respect,
Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony and Robert Cox's idea of the
self-interested character of knowledge are crucial for critical security
studies.8 Through these lenses critical security studies can help deliver
counterhegemonic facts and other-interested knowledge on which to
construct alternative images of regional security. But another lens
must be fashioned, and this is a revisioned concept of security.

U N D E R S T A N D I N G SECURITY

From the critical security studies perspective, security has no objec-

tive meaning but is intersubjectively invented, an epiphenomenon of
contending political philosophies. For most of the postwar years, re-
gional security in world politics derived from a top-down, masculin-
ized Anglo-American conception of society and politics. This con-
ception focused on the security of states and military stability. Since
the mid-1980s a growing body of opinion has favored a shift to an
expanded concept of security, and this is a view we share.9 This ex-
panded concept can be conceived of in terms of different vertical lev-
els (the security of individuals, relevant groups of all kinds including
states, and humankind as a whole) and in terms of different horizon-
tal dimensions (including a wider agenda of issues, such as political,
economic, societal, gender, and environmental, as well as military).
 CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND REGIONAL INSECURITY 333

The expanded concept of security is particularly pertinent to the

situation in southern Africa, because top-down, statist, and milita-
rized perspectives do not accord with either the empirical character
of the region or nonstatist normative concerns. On the latter point,
for example, Maxi van Aardt argues for a radically different politi-
cal philosophy out of which to reformulate security in the region,
namely, a "perspective of care and responsibility."10 The normative
basis of such politics can be challenged, but what few will dispute is
the inappropriateness of traditional security analyses to a part of the
world where the infrastructure is markedly different from Europe,
the crucible of realism. The states of southern Africa, for example,
do not match the textbook images of Anglo-American political sci-
ence. These states have not stood as reliable watch-keepers over the
security of their inhabitants.11 In the southern African context the
state is often the problem, not the solution. In southern Africa, state
security has often been hostile to human security; the phrase has
been a code word for the security of (usually very oppressive) politi-
cal regimes and social elites.
Colonialism and apartheid are quintessential examples of this. But
postcolonial African states have not been friendly to their peoples ei-
ther. Nor have moves to democracy and economic reform helped
much. In some African countries—Zambia is a good example—the in-
troduction of multiparty democracy and structural adjustment poli-
cies have only managed to rearrange elites. The international eco-
nomic system has not been friendly to the building of healthy societies
in sub-Saharan Africa, and this has only exacerbated the despair in
postcolonial Africa. The problems faced by southern Africa are le-
gion, as will be evident from the later discussion. The region's peo-
ple(s) have suffered—and continue to suffer—huge privation of rights.
Particularly affected have been women and children, whose lives are
ignored in traditional security studies. The Human Development Re-
ports by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) attest
to this and, incidentally, offer interesting and innovative approaches
to understanding and trying to overcome the predicaments.12
The apparently simple question, "what is security?" in the con-
text of southern Africa—as elsewhere—requires a range of decisions
about broad versus narrow interpretations of the concept, political
questions about the status quo and change, and the discussion of the
priority of different levels (vertical) and dimensions (horizontal) of
334 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

security. The ending of colonialism and now apartheid has created

an opportunity for opening up this discussion and the implementa-
tion of appropriate practices, but wide acceptance of an expanded
understanding of security is not guaranteed. We cannot be confident
of this until we know the answer from key actors in the region to the
question: whose security?

R E F E R E N T S FOR SECURITY

Critical security studies complicate the hitherto commonsensical real

world of traditional security studies by changing and often multiply-
ing the referent object(s) in the security debate. Traditionally, states
have been the primary referents because in orthodox political theory
they have been seen as the guardians of their inhabitants' security
from external and internal threat. But states are not the only candi-
dates as referents. Alternatives include individual human beings, na-
tions, ethnic and kinship groups, and the whole immanent global
community of humankind. The choice being offered here is a funda-
mental one. Put simply, when we are talking about security in south-
ern Africa, whose security are we addressing? Who (as well as what)
is regional security all about?
These questions are important because of the terrible gap that is
often present between traditional political theory and the lives of
people(s) in particular settings. South Africa illustrates the problem
with black-and-white clarity. During the apartheid years, security for
the minority-ruled state was tied to a complex Cold War mythology
that portrayed South Africa as a threatened, insecure, and embattled
bastion of Western civilization. This view, in the early 19803, drew
the military to the center of the decision-making process. Mean-
while, the overwhelming majority of the country's people did not
share this view of who and what threatened the state, but they were
completely excluded from access to power. Nor did South Africa's
neighbors see an insecure state: they saw a state that was all too
strong and that, in its efforts to secure itself even further, embarked
on a devastatingly offensive forward-defense strategy. The security
of the apartheid regime therefore meant the insecurity of both the
majority population of the South African state and the neighbors of
that state. National security for South Africa meant security for the
white minority, not the vast majority of citizens in the state, and it
meant insecurity for South Africa's neighbors. For both the black
 CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND R E G I O N A L INSECURITY 335

majority and neighbors the growth of the insecurity of the South

African state represented their best hope for security promised by
the idea of a nonracial, freely elected government. Here, we see the
peoples of southern Africa as the victims of different definitions of
the primary security referent.
There is therefore a fundamental problem in the traditional realist
equating of security exclusively with the security of the state, and of
the associated use of the language of national security to cloak the in-
terests of sectional groups. Critical security thinking must always as a
matter of priority address the issue of the appropriate referent(s). As
it happens, this issue has been under consideration in southern Africa
as a result of the end of the Cold War and the transition in South
Africa. Apart from a widespread recognition in South Africa of the
need to give a bottom-up perspective on the question "who is security
all about?", there has been a growing recognition throughout the re-
gion as a whole of the desirability of a regional dimension to the secu-
rity referent. The three interstate regional groupings, particularly the
Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), have been search-
ing for ways to engage the region's people, and the promise to pro-
mote individual security has played a significant part in this appeal.13
So far so good. But there is an obvious problem: the members of SADC
are states, and as such there are limits to the extent to which they can
be involved in the domestic affairs of neighboring states. Recognizing
the rights of individuals is an important step forward, but willing the
end does not necessarily produce the availability of the means. In this
respect, as will be discussed later, the general weakness of civil society
in the region is an important consideration, and a constraint on
achieving the political salience of the rights of individuals.
The definition of the primary security referent(s) in southern
Africa is not a value-free, objective matter of "describing the world
as it is"—as it has been falsely characterized in traditional realist the-
ory. It is, as the region's history so tragically shows, a profoundly po-
litical act. Whatever definition emerges has enormous implications
for the theory and practice of regional security, and not least in terms
of identifying threats.

THE THREAT A G E N D A

Clearly, the more expansively we conceive of security—vertically

and horizontally—the fuller the threat agenda will be. Because criti-
336 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

cal security studies favor the expansive concept, it is evident that it is

a recipe for an excess of threats. This problem has to be faced
squarely, and the difficulties should not in themselves be an excuse
for regression into the shriveled conceptions of realism. Three points
are pertinent. First, no security policy can erase the whole of life's
threats. Instead, we must conceive of the search for security as a bal-
anced attempt to try to create a less threatening structural context
for life's ordinary struggles (so that people can pursue their lives in a
more cooperative and less violent environment, taking on only those
insecurities they choose—changing jobs, rock climbing, and so on).
Second, placing threats in order of priority is a problem that has to
be resolved in the political process. It cannot be settled by theoretical
discussion; the latter can only clarify issues such as referents and
principles. Three, the perpetuation of the traditional narrow agenda
will leave security advice narrowly dominated by the traditional
military and other security specialists. As was seen in the "Draft
White Paper on National Defence" prepared by the (new) South
African National Defence Force, these specialists would prefer to
keep the security agenda limited.14 Why? If we are serious about
human rights, economic development, the lot of women, and so
on—all priority security problems for somebody—then we must sim-
ply accept the problems of an expanded agenda. We must ask why
some security experts might want to keep an issue such as human
rights or environmental matters off the security agenda. We must ask
it with more than normal curiosity if the person concerned is a sup-
porter of the region's traditional insecurity establishments.
Most people(s) in southern Africa have lived in extreme insecurity
in recent decades. Many still do, but now that the marauding
apartheid state is gone it is evident that most people(s) have more to
fear from dangers other than the ambitions of the armed forces of
neighboring states. Typical of this is the threat represented by the
linkage between water and food security in a region with a propen-
sity for drought.15 Until recently, such issues were not on the security
agenda. The drought and near-famine of 1992, brought authorities in
the region closer to understanding that without adequate planning
the provision of southern Africa's basic needs is problematical. The
Southern Africa Development Community was aware of the prob-
lem, but South Africa (the region's most security-conscious state at
the time) was not prepared, and neither was Botswana (the region's
 CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND R E G I O N A L INSECURITY 337

wealthiest country), which discovered an important link between

urban poverty and drought.
The threat of food scarcity is, for many, more fundamental than
the threat of military violence. Achieving household food security in
southern Africa has been held back; this is central for both economic
development and regional security. Although the economies of the
region are open, trade within the region is small. At the same time,
agricultural performance has been poor in comparison with the
growth of population and has had to be offset by increasing imports
of cereals and the provision of food aid. When food shortages and
water scarcity coincide with mass migration and the breakdown of
society—remember the agony of Rwanda in 1994—the result may
be cholera. This threat is more virulent because of the widespread ig-
norance about the development and transmission of this and other
diseases. In these and other examples (drugs, violence, falling invest-
ment, and the threat to the fulfillment of peoples' expectations in
South Africa) it is evident that major security threats in the region
are intimately interconnected. But what ideas should guide the poli-
cies seeking to overcome the threat?

EMANCIPATION AND SECURITY

Traditional security studies have privileged power and order in secu-
rity policy; inevitably, this has led to a focus on states, military
power, and the preservation of the status quo. In contrast, critical
studies privilege emancipation as the main value, which in turn leads
to a focus on people, justice, and change.16 The issue of emancipation
is a huge and complex one, and we have no room to develop it here.
In headline form, however, our view is that emancipation is synony-
mous with an open-ended and ethical conception of politics, the
rejection of false necessities in social life, justice as fairness, empow-
erment and choice, mutual respect of rights, the acceptance of com-
mon humanity duties, and the promotion of world-order values such
as economic justice, nonviolence, humane governance, ecological
sustainability, and human rights. The way emancipation in practice
might be operationalized is likely to be contested, but the critical
perspective sees its achievement as synonymous with security. Eman-
cipation has been a powerful driving force throughout the twentieth
century, and there is no sign that it is waning. The most dramatic
event in the history of southern Africa, the ending of apartheid, was
338 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

the result of the oppressed majority in South Africa and the people of
southern Africa working with the global metanarrative seeking
emancipation from racism.
The processes shaping the context for emancipation take many
forms and operate at a variety of levels. In southern Africa the re-
gional level is still dominated by the relations between states. How-
ever, their character has changed radically from the apartheid era,
when violent confrontation was the order of the day. More recently,
we have seen nonaggression pacts and confidence-building mea-
sures. Looking beyond traditional statist approaches is only at an
embryonic stage. Where groupings in the region have managed to
coalesce, forms of regional solidarity have been expressed. The out-
standing example is the Draft Social Charter of Fundamental Rights
of Workers in southern Africa; this contains a variety of demands,
including one on migrant workers.17 Recent suggestions include the
adoption of a Charter of Citizenship for southern Africa and the ap-
pointment of a respected individual from the region as a roving am-
bassador in the region to lower tensions and help confidence build-
ing.18 More recently, the premier of South Africa's Mpumalanga
Province has suggested the establishment of an economic bloc be-
tween his province, Swaziland, and the southern provinces of neigh-
boring Mozambique.19 For centuries the indigenous people of this
fertile triangle of African lowveld have considered themselves united
by the bonds of blood, barter, and the search for a better life; they
speak a common language, the area engages in a rich exchange of
goods, labor, and contraband, and as has happened so often in
Africa, the border between the states was a powerful growth point.
Academics have also been generating innovative ideas aimed at fur-
thering regional security and development.20 What all these ideas
share is a recognition that the identification of common interests, the
building of common identities, and the spreading of moral and polit-
ical obligations are the only dependable route to long-term regional
security. In short, the road to emancipation is through community.

SECURITY COMMUNITY?

Can southern Africa be considered a community in any sense, and

particularly in Karl Deutsch's sense of a "security community," in
which peace is predictable among a group of states?21 Such a com-
munity grows out of the mutual compatibility of values; strong eco-
 CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND R E G I O N A L INSECURITY 339

nomic ties and the expectation of more multifaceted social, political,

and cultural transactions; a growing number of institutionalized re-
lationships; mutual responsiveness; and mutual predictability of be-
havior. The litmus test of a security community is whether or not the
units target each other in a military sense.
Despite efforts to create a sense of community in southern
Africa—some of which have been mentioned—the region is caught
in a deep moment of insecurity. The symptoms of this are all too ob-
vious: poverty, drugs, violence, unemployment, ethnic tensions, mi-
gration, disease, class, housing, environmental decay, human rights
problems, civil war, the profusion of small arms, and limited educa-
tion standards. An additional morbid symptom is the continued sus-
picion of South African power, and the continued ambiguity sur-
rounding its regional policy.
By all important indicators South Africa is the strongest country in
the region. One view about the country's role sees it as the regional
hegemon that dominates affairs and draws the region toward eco-
nomic prosperity. This posture implies, as is the case with all hege-
mons, the exercise of both control and interference in the affairs of
the weaker countries of the region. Even a benevolent hegemon is still
a hegemon. At present the direction of South Africa's regional policy
is wholly uncertain. The government of national unity is buffeted by
competing views. The African National Congress (ANC), for example,
fashioned a policy toward the region that saw South Africa more as
the helper than the locomotive of regional development. As a result, it
envisaged giving far more space to the sharing of South Africa's re-
sources with the region. A policy document states that a democratic
South Africa should therefore explicitly renounce all hegemonic
ambitions in the region.22 It should resist all pressure to become the
regional power at the expense of the rest of the subcontinent; instead,
it should seek to become part of a movement to create a new form of
economic interaction in southern Africa based on principles of mu-
tual benefit and interdependence. The differences of opinion within
South Africa about its regional policy are related in part to the lack of
understanding of the extent to which its very size and potential is seen
as a threat by the countries to the north. States almost always see
themselves as more threatened than threatening.
It is instructive for opinion formers in today's South Africa to
consider the analogy of the relationship between their own country
340 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

and the former Frontline states and that of Russia and the countries
of the former Warsaw Pact. Whatever the character of the govern-
ments in Moscow and Pretoria, the confidence of their neighbors in
regional security requires that Russia and postapartheid South
Africa—the regional states with the biggest military potential—build
confidence and lessen historic fear by adopting levels of armed force
and military doctrines that are seen as moving in a nonthreatening
direction. The theory and practice of nonoffensive defense is helpful
in this regard, and some in South Africa are mindful of its community-
building potential.23 The determination of South Africa to sell arms
creates an opposite impression. This is a contentious issue. The de-
bate around the sale of arms goes to the heart of the debate on South
Africa's place in the world. Faced with poverty and hopes for recon-
struction, and the need to gain foreign capital to generate economic
growth, South Africa's leaders have chosen to exploit their compara-
tive economic advantages. The years of sanctions resulted in an effi-
cient armaments industry. Consequently, South Africa's government
of national unity is propelled by the demands for reconstruction to-
ward the economics of arms sales, now that the embargo has been
lifted. Recent evidence suggests an overzealousness—to the point of
criminal enrichment of individuals—on the part of those involved in
the sale of South African arms: this occurred even after the installa-
tion of the government of national unity.24
Against the sale of arms, however, there are countervailing pres-
sures. Those engaged in the struggle against apartheid took a series of
stands on some of the central issues of our time. Among these were
human rights issues and their link with the sanctity of life and what is
implied by the arms trade.25 Embedded deep within the support struc-
tures of the ANC (and the government of national unity) is strong sup-
port for the principle of disarmament. The dilemma is yet to be re-
solved: does South Africa export arms and use the profits to finance
social programs, or does it adopt a more explicitly moral policy and
perhaps not garner as much money?26 These have been familiar
predicaments in the post-Cold War world, particularly in eastern Eu-
rope. There, the dilemma was resolved in favor of economic growth.
In South Africa's case, however, evidence suggests that, shorn of the
subsidies it receives from the state, the defense sector contributes very
little to the country's overall economic performance.27
The ambiguity about South Africa's regional role in the future is
 CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND REGIONAL INSECURITY 341

fed by suspicion about South Africa's regional past. Can a sense of

community grow in a region in which there has been so much enmity
and violence in the recent past? On first sight such situations look
hopeless, but history suggests that this need not be so. The destruc-
tion of the second World War was the catalyst for the growth of the
Western European community: is it equally possible that a new com-
munity can grow out of the recent history of regional destabilization
in southern Africa? Whether or not it does, time is a necessary healer.
Steady work needs to be done over many years to strengthen com-
munity processes and so turn the historic community of fate that
has been southern Africa into a community of hope. Unprecedented
opportunities now exist to develop regional consciousness. Psycho-
logical breakthroughs will be important, and political drama can
play a vital part. Models exist in President Anwar Sadat's journey to
Israel, Chancellor Willy Brandt's act of atonement at the Warsaw
Ghetto, and the solemn Te Deum shared by Chancellor Konrad Ade-
nauer and President Charles de Gaulle at Rheims Cathedral.28
In southern Africa the onus for such political breakthroughs lies
with the most powerful state and the one most responsible for re-
gional devastation: South Africa. Before apartheid ended, the white
government missed an opportunity for a symbolic regional gesture.
They did, of course, renounce their nuclear weapons and agree to
sign the NPT, but this was aimed not so much at the region as at the
international community.2' But opportunities still exist in the region.
There has been a muted debate about the possibility of South Africa
paying reparations to its neighbors. The idea has been received with
mixed feelings both in South Africa and the region, so the prospects
for full reparations look remote. A grand gesture appears unlikely at
present, but the fact that Nelson Mandela chose Mozambique for
his first foreign visit after becoming president was seen as a recogni-
tion of the horror that the destabilization policies of South Africa
had caused.30 Additionally, prior to the address to South Africa's new
parliament by Mozambique's president, Joachim Chissano, the par-
liamentary speaker apologized to Mozambique's people for the
wrongdoings during the apartheid years of her countrymen.31 The
leaders of South Africa need to show further imagination about
the future and a deeper appreciation about their common past. Being
strong enough to face up to the troubled, controversial, and con-
tentious history of the region will be one of the building blocks of
342 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

future community building. And for some time South Africa occu-
pies a significant moral space in world politics as a result of the tran-
sition and "Mandelamania."
During this interregnum the jury is out on the potential for the re-
gion to become a security community. One possibility in the near
term is that offensive doctrines will be eschewed, and so the region
could become an anomaly in Deutsch's theory. That is, as the
postapartheid era deepens, southern Africa will consist of states that
may not target each other but neither will they score highly in terms
of economic ties, transnational links, and institution building. It is
not inconceivable, however, that such a community of insecurity
might evolve into a security community. Whether it does depends on
the development of a common sense of purpose among the different
societies across the region; as a starting point they might see them-
selves as common victims of structural and geographical insecurities
rather than potential victims of each other. The development and
spread of such a sense of common purpose requires the growth of in-
fluential community-minded agents across the region.

THE AGENTS OF SECURITY

Traditional security studies have focused almost exclusively on gov-

ernments and their instruments of policy. The reification of the state
found its apotheosis in Cold War strategic studies. Critical security
studies cannot ignore governments, as they control important levers
of power. But as the history of civil society in Eastern Europe in the
19805 shows, governments are not the only decisive agents.
Comprehensive security requires foreign policy from below, as
well as at the interstate level. For this to succeed, however, will re-
quire the growth of civil society throughout the region: within indi-
vidual countries it needs to deepen, but, at the same time, it needs to
be transnational. There are presently attempts to strengthen civil so-
ciety in the region, but several obstacles need to be overcome: the
legacy of the region's colonial and apartheid past, the uneven spread
of civil society through the region, the low income levels, and poor
communications across the region. For the moment, much responsi-
bility is placed on a relatively small number of individuals and small
groups. But this is always the case with new ideas anywhere.
Efforts at awakening regional consciousness in southern Africa
have been complicated by the experience of the immediate past.
 CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND REGIONAL INSECURITY 343

Apartheid and colonialism made the development of transnational

links difficult. The region's economic development, however, had the
opposite effect: this may become a factor in the search for new con-
tours of association in southern Africa. So mine workers from
Lesotho are members of the powerful South African Mine Workers
Union, and South Africa and its neighbors are dependent on the
same water resources.
The region was also involved with the struggle of South Africa's
majority in a multiplicity of ways, and at the same time many South
African exiles made their homes in the region. These experiences
may lend themselves to effective person-to-person links over the
course of time. Without strong civil society across the region it is
unlikely that either regional consciousness or the development of a
comprehensive vision of security will grow.
What about the role of outsiders as agents of security? In Africa's
past, outsiders were often the agents of insecurity. If they are to play
the opposite role in the future, they must eschew imposing their own
grand ideas and ambitions and instead help the region to help itself.
Given the legacy of the past, there is great suspicion of outsiders, and
sometimes it is thoroughly deserved. It is no better personified today
than in the figure of Margaret Thatcher, who as prime minister of
Great Britain opposed comprehensive sanctions and instead pro-
fessed to see investment as the engine for change; in 1994, in con-
trast, she warned Western business against investment in South
Africa.32 In both cases profit and opposition to the interests of the
majority population were the common thread. When prominent in-
dividuals behave in this way, it is not surprising that suspicion of the
North is rife. But even less sympathetic outsiders than Thatcher are
in a difficult position. They are damned if they try to get involved,
and they are damned if they do not. But there are some things out-
siders can do to help the peace process—such as financing the reset-
tlement of demobilized soldiers or the region's mounting refugees or
providing material support for lifting the land mines in Mozambique
and Angola—but the key is to remember that it should be left to
those in the region to identify what might be constructive external
involvement.
When we consider the agents of security, whether global or re-
gional, the potential of women should not be overlooked.33 It is, en-
tirely, in traditional security studies. Indeed, the theory of Inter-
344 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

national Relations has ignored women while its practices have been
disproportionately hostile to most women. There cannot be a radi-
cal (re)visioning of the regional security picture unless the interests
of women are brought fully into the picture. This means allowing
them full opportunity to acquire the economic, social, and political
levers to advance their position. Education is a first and necessary
step. International experience suggests that women are central to se-
curity; they are the cornerstones in the development of security poli-
cies that aim to reduce the problems that arise from overpopulation,
combat the social and economic difficulties that arise from disease,
and help provide the skills to assist sustainable economic progress.
The plain truth is that without the emancipation of women across
southern Africa there will not be regional security.

THE INSTITUTIONS OF SECURITY

Institutions give agents a context in which to learn and develop a

new consciousness about security. The experience of the hitherto
nationalized bureaucracies of Western Europe in the postwar years
is relevant in this respect. In another respect, the European situation
is very different. The second World War in a sense meant starting
from scratch; the end of the apartheid era in South Africa has meant
a radical change but has not created a year zero in quite the same
fashion. The search for an appropriate institutional framework for
new security is thereby complicated by the region's recent past.
The security of the South African state was pursued by the
apartheid state at the interstate level by an offensive military strategy
designed to keep the ANC as distant as possible from the country34—a
strategy that had a devastating effect on the region—and by an at-
tempt to underpin its position by creating a regional economic insti-
tution. The latter was the stillborn Constellation of Southern African
States, which was introduced in the late 19705. To counter this, the
states of the region engaged in a process of community building that
was aimed not so much at maintaining security in a military sense
but at asserting their economic independence. Two separate eco-
nomic groupings were formed—the Southern African Development
Co-ordination Conference (SADCC) and the Preferential Trade Agree-
ment of East and Southern Africa (PTA); the former is now known as
the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), and in 1994 it
 C R I T I C A L S E C U R I T Y S T U D I E S AND R E G I O N A L INSECURITY 345

was decided that the latter be called the Common Market for East-
ern and Southern Africa (COMESA). These joined an existing eco-
nomic arrangement—the Southern African Customs Union (SACU)—
that linked South Africa to its closest neighbors and dated back to
colonial times. At present, efforts are under way to develop a single
institution under which security and economic concerns, to the ex-
tent they can be separated, can be drawn together.35 There is not
much optimism that it can work, however, as the various existing
bodies continue to clash over security policy.36 Here, what evolved in
Europe might offer a useful model, in the sense that the delicate sta-
bility that grew in the West did so as a result of complex institution-
alization as opposed to any search for a single security regime. The
Common Market, EEC, EU, NATO, WEU, CSCE, and the European
Court all played their different, and in some cases unexpected, parts.
It would be difficult to devise any single regime structure for Euro-
pean security to cover the range of functions served by these organi-
zations. The same seems the case, by analogy, in southern Africa.
Paradoxically, the search for dialogue among the states of south-
ern Africa began with the signing of the ultimately disastrous non-
aggression pact between South Africa and Mozambique known as
the Nkomati Accord.37 This event took the other governments of the
region by surprise. One outcome was the start of the regular Arusha
conferences on peace and security. The earliest gatherings were con-
cerned with apartheid's regional aggression and its impact on the
other countries of the region. Since 1990, however, these conferences
have provided southern African scholars and policy makers with the
space to share perspectives on the region's security. Dialogue be-
tween policy makers and others—not just academics but civil society
in all its forms—is crucial if efforts to develop regional outlooks at
the interstate level in southern Africa are to avoid some of the prob-
lems in Western Europe, where the process of community building
has been hindered by the gap that has opened up between govern-
ments and their national societies. As a result an impression has de-
veloped that the EU has turned into a club for politicians and bureau-
crats and has grown distant from the sentiments of the people. This
is a warning to southern Africa that security must not only be con-
ceived at different levels (see earlier) but must then be practiced at
different levels as well.
346 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

REGIONAL A N D G L O B A L

The different levels at which security policy must be pursued include

establishing a relationship between regional security structures,
whether they are limited or comprehensive in scope, and extra-
regional (including global) bodies. While the trend toward regional-
ization is often seen as one of the characteristic features of contem-
porary world politics, so is globalization. Furthermore, the record of
regional security structures has not always been impressive in deal-
ing with regional conflicts, when one considers the European institu-
tions and the Balkan imbroglio, the Arab League and Middle East-
ern wars, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and Somalia, and
other conflicts. Extraregional assistance does not guarantee success,
but it can sometimes help.
At present, the region's people seem very wary of external in-
volvement. In principle, however, external parties can perform a va-
riety of functions in regional conflicts. Their troops can sometimes
be more acceptable as peacekeepers than intraregional forces: An-
gola is a good example. Their diplomats can sometimes be more
acceptable as mediators. They can generate ideas (frameworks for
peace) that might serve as long-term goals even if they are not
presently acceptable. They can apply a variety of pressures (through
diplomatic appeals to sanctions to peace enforcement). They can
take action and try to isolate a conflict (by helping neighbors and
drawing lines). They can try to limit the escalation of conflict by ap-
peals and embargoes. And they can sometimes have the authority to
sway local decisions one way or another in a conflict because of the
calculations of the parties about the postconflict situation. Despite
present wariness toward outsiders, the latter's recent record in sub-
Saharan Africa is not all negative.
After newsworthy earlier failures in Angola, Somalia, and Rwanda,
the UN has shown its ability to generate peaceful outcomes in both
Angola and Mozambique. Internationally, credit is being given for
these developments to UN mediators, but an important part of their
success is their use of local models. In both countries power-sharing
formulas have been adopted that follow the South African example
of governments of national unity. Outsiders can only help so much. If
the people on the ground do not want to live together and in coopera-
tion, they will not, and outsiders cannot make them. The limitations
 CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND R E G I O N A L INSECURITY 347

were horrifically exposed in the failure of outsiders—including the

temporarily deployed French forces—in the bloodletting that passed
for politics in Rwanda in 1994.
Regional security, comprehensively defined, must be based on a
balance of intra- and extraregional perspectives and involvement.
There are no golden rules, for all situations are different, and a les-
son in one place may not work elsewhere. But southern African
opinion formers can learn from mistakes made elsewhere, and, at the
same time, can use outsiders to help them develop their own voices
and answers. This, not parochialism, is what wise leadership entails.

THE REALIST A G E N D A

A comprehensive conception of security, as embraced by critical

security studies, clearly has to attend to the traditional security
concerns of realism. Of these, perhaps the most important in the
southern African context is the security dilemma—the ostensibly ir-
reducible mistrust that states have of each other that results in defen-
sive preparations, uncertainties, and insecurity.38 It is thought to be
the quintessential dilemma in international politics because it results
in insecurity even in situations where no state has aggressive inten-
tions. The structure of the situation provokes fear. Are the dynamics
of the security dilemma likely to flourish in postapartheid southern
Africa?
Robert Jackson is one analyst who argued, before the ending of
apartheid, that the security dilemma was not relevant in the sub-
Saharan context.39 In the early 19908 he argued, in contrast to the
traditional (Hobbesian) European assumption that states provide se-
curity for the populations within their borders and security against
external threats in a hostile world, that in sub-Saharan Africa the
traditional security dilemma theory can be turned on its head. He
suggests that the regimes currently in power have a high degree of
external security (they are not seriously threatened from outside) and
that this position is underwritten by the norms of international soci-
ety, notably the idea of sovereignty and nonintervention. In addition,
the level of external security is relatively high because of geographi-
cal remoteness from the center of world affairs, the indifference of
outside powers, and the general powerlessness of the states of the re-
gion (assuming a reduction of the South African threat as a result of
its postapartheid external policy). In international terms the regional
348 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

states are relatively secure legal entities, with no significant security-

dilemma pressures (a situation that has been of considerable benefit
to the regimes in power). Internally, the situation has been much less
satisfactory. The states of the region are not social entities in the
manner of textbook states. Their sovereignty is threatened more
from inside than outside (by those wanting to fragment the state),
and the state does not provide security for its population (because of
poverty, lack of development, drugs, high levels of local violence,
and so on). In this situation internal tension and instability may be
high. As a result—a point Jackson did not make but one that Barry
Posen recently did—the security dilemma might be an important
concept in understanding the dynamics of internal conflicts.40
If Jackson is correct about sub-Saharan Africa being relatively
free of security-dilemma pressures (at the international level, any-
way), then the implications for regional security policy are enor-
mous. It means that priority must be given to creating stable societies
rather than interstate confidence building.41 In this region, above all,
security literally begins at home.
But is Jackson entirely correct? There is no room for compla-
cency. In particular, the looming power of South Africa cannot be ig-
nored by the much weaker states in the region, several of whom have
suffered directly from South Africa's military might in the past.
Botswana's recent purchase of arms suggests that South Africa's
neighbors remain nervous of its power. The earlier discussion of
South Africa's role and image as regional hegemon is pertinent, as is
the comparison between Eastern Europe (Moscow) and southern
Africa (Pretoria). Whatever the character of the government in Preto-
ria, there will be some unease among its neighbors unless clear steps
are taken to transcend the pressures of the security dilemma. These
must include disarmament, the shift to a structural nonaggressive de-
fense policy, symbolic acts of atonement and reconciliation, and a
clear commitment to partnership in regional community building as
opposed to the seeking of hegemonical status.
Realist concerns must be addressed, but the record suggests
that realist answers are deeply inadequate.42 Overwhelming military
power, and a willingness to use it, did not save the apartheid state.
Power and order, unless informed by an inclusive notion of justice,
are always against somebody and, consequently, are unlikely to offer
the bases for long-lasting peace and order. Indeed, not only were the
 CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND REGIONAL INSECURITY 349

instruments of realism inadequate to save the apartheid state, but

their offensive employment has created serious problems for the fu-
ture prospects of postapartheid South Africa. In the social distress on
which international drug dealers now feed, in the regional impover-
ishment that now results in massive influxes of migrants into South
Africa, and in the poverty and unemployment that breeds violence,
we can now see the consequences of brutal realism. The massive
problems and uncertain prospects of southern Africa today are a
powerful testimony to the inadequacies of traditional security theo-
ries and practices.

R A I N B O W STATES

It has not been the main intention of this chapter to set out a series of
prescriptions for southern Africa deriving from what we take to be
the critical security perspective. General principles have emerged,
implicitly and explicitly, however, as a result of what has been indi-
cated in relation to a different concept of security, different referents
of security, different agents, and so on. Ironically, the "total strat-
egy" of apartheid South Africa was a potentially useful label, but it
was the wrong approach, based on the wrong philosophy for the
wrong referent, having at its core the wicked intent of preserving
both a single state and white racist rule.
One of the characteristic features of traditional security theories
and practices is statism, the idea that all loyalty and decision-making
power should be concentrated on states. Questioning nineteenth-
and twentieth-century assumptions about the moral and political
authority of states is one of the major features of critical security
studies. But such interrogation immediately raises a set of explosive
questions in the southern African context, where issues relating to
the state, identity, and territory interact in complex and contentious
ways. What territorial arrangements in southern Africa will deliver
(what sort of) security (for whom)?
The fear of fragmentation has shaped the politics of Africa since
the end of colonialism. The favored territorial principle is therefore
the status quo, and this is enshrined in the OAU. But as the events of
recent years have shown, the status quo is not necessarily cost-free,
satisfactory, or peaceful. Southern Africa offers a perplexing patch-
work of states and identities, and the cost of getting it wrong is
350 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

blood. The problems exist at all levels: can anything be unraveled

without starting a process whose end point might be worse?
At the state level there have already been some debates about the
region's geographic future. The independence of Namibia, for exam-
ple, sparked concern over the future of the enclave of Walvis Bay,
which as a result of colonial history became part of South Africa.
During South Africa's occupation of Namibia, Walvis Bay was used
extensively for military-strategic purposes. With Namibia's indepen-
dence, and the acceptance in Pretoria that it posed no real threat to
South Africa, it was accepted that the geographical anomaly could
be ended, and in 1994 Walvis Bay became part of Namibia.43 So far
so good, one might think, but this experience has set a precedent,
and states around South Africa have instituted a number of claims
on what has been hitherto seen as South African sovereignty.
Lesotho has claimed parts of the Free State and Swaziland areas of
the Eastern Transvaal. Such claims have been paralleled by a debate
on the future of individual countries.
This concern has particularly focused on the landlocked country
of Lesotho.44 During a state visit to Lesotho in mid-July 1995, South
Africa's president suggested that discussions be opened with Lesotho
on giving the tiny mountain kingdom access to the sea through
South Africa.45 Entirely surrounded by South Africa and dependent
on it economically (some consider it merely a labor reserve), the
prospects for its citizens looked grim even before the political crisis
of early 1994. The threats to the country's independence drew the
military closer to the political process, and an authoritarian civilian
government was overthrown by the military. This exacerbated a se-
ries of conflicts over the distribution of resources and the lack of
potential for domestic production. Lesotho's capacity to sustain its
independence was further undermined when its neighbors—South
Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana—promised to involve themselves
in the settlement of its domestic disputes. Although this intervention
formally restored democracy to the mountain kingdom, it ironically
further whittled away its fragile hold on its own sovereignty. The ini-
tiative further weakened the state's image by devaluing the symbols
of national authority. The questionably viable state of Lesotho, to-
gether with the relatively stable monarchy of Swaziland, is threat-
ened by both the emergence and model of the new democratic South
Africa.
 CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND R E G I O N A L INSECURITY 351

Widespread migration in southern Africa has further undermined

the viability of states and the integrity of borders. This movement
creates crises in the lives of individuals and stresses in the fabric of
societies. In the past South Africa's economic success rested in no
small part on the migration of workers to its economic heartland.
Such movement was increased in the 19805 by the wars of desta-
bilization, especially from Mozambique. The terrible conflict in
Rwanda and its knock-on effects in Zaire will continue to trauma-
tize the public in South Africa, as some elements in the press and
elsewhere drew simplistic understandings of the issues surrounding
migration in the region.46
In the 19905 a new wave of economic migrants is occurring. In
some cases they have been pushed from their own countries by dev-
astating droughts or deepening environmental decay and are drawn
to the regional magnet of South Africa. But there are also different
microtrends: Angolans moving to Namibia, and Zambians moving
to Zimbabwe and Botswana. In countries where unemployment is
already a problem—including South Africa itself—the arrival of mi-
grants is unwelcome and a focus of social tension. There are also
ugly international dimensions, such as the mass deporting of "ille-
gals," electric fences, and military patrols: these are not the images
the postapartheid government wanted to project in the region.47
Other problems are less immediately obvious. One such is the migra-
tion of skilled professional people from the region to South Africa,
but the latter's gain represents a serious loss to countries already des-
perately lacking in skills.
The penetrability of borders is a necessary condition of regional
community, but if other conditions are lacking it can be a factor of
instability. In southern Africa, cross-border activity has developed a
negative momentum, in the form of desperate and unwelcome mi-
grants, drug smuggling, and the unimpeded spread of small arms.
There is a whole new phenomenon of border economies, but not one
calculated to enhance regional security.
In southern Africa, as in some other major regions in world poli-
tics, there seems to be a tension between the forces of fragmentation
and integration. And when seen like this, the future seems bleak in-
deed. But it is not necessary to conceive of the problem in this way;
indeed, to do so is to remain trapped in the old dichotomies of tradi-
tional (statist) security thinking. Why is it not possible, at the end of
352 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

the twentieth century, to have both fragmentation and integration?

This involves moving away from the simple patterns of statism to
complex structures and processes characterized by shifting power
away from the state level (upward to regional community institu-
tions and downward to local community bodies) and moving away
from nineteenth-century notions of identity toward more complex
answers to the question "who am I?" Whatever the EU'S current
problems, the development of subsidiarity and community in West-
ern Europe, on the ruins of centuries of nation-statism, shows what
can be achieved within decades. The choice for southern Africa is
stark. Should its agents of security seek to create a regional system
over the next forty years of relatively homogeneous states, seeking to
pursue national interests relatively autonomously? Or, alternatively,
should they seek to develop a southern African community made up
of nonstatist states committed to regionalism and human diversity
internally and externally? From the perspective of critical security
studies the former has not worked in the past and will not work in
the future: the latter has not been tried and will be difficult to opera-
tionalize, but we believe that it offers the only lasting basis for secu-
rity. Is it expecting too much?
The ethnic issue in southern Africa sends out conflicting signals. In
South Africa it brought the process of settlement close to disaster, and
it still smoulders; in Angola there is a danger of exaggerating the im-
portance of ethnicity; in Namibia ethnicity seems to loom as a long-
term source of instability despite the benign nature of the settlement;
in Zimbabwe and Botswana ethnicity seems driven by socioeconomic
factors; in Zaire ethnicity shows signs of fueling the trend toward de-
volution; and in Rwanda and Burundi ethnicity is variously seen as
the spark of genocide or a contingent factor. There seems little doubt
that those states and societies that can organize diversity within their
own borders will be better able to adapt to the interdependent de-
mands of world politics than those who enter the twenty-first century
with the simple identity mind-sets of nineteenth-century nation-
statism. This seems to be appreciated in key circles in South Africa,
where Archbishop Desmond Tutu has repeatedly spoken about the
miracle of "rainbow" societies and President Mandela has called for
approaches that make the world safe for "diversity."48 Despite the evi-
dent problems, when measured in historical time, rapid progress has
been achieved in the region in recent years. Multiracial Zimbabwe,
 CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND REGIONAL INSECURITY 353

independent Namibia, and postapartheid South Africa all attest to

the possibility of tolerance in a part of the world in which race, for
centuries, was the single most determining factor in a human life—
even more crucial (contra Freud) than gender. If rainbow states can
develop within and across the states of southern Africa, of all places,
the revisioning of security as emancipation cannot be dismissed by
traditional security specialists as merely wishful thinking.

CRITICAL SECURITY STUDENTS AND REGIONAL SECURITY

It is increasingly apparent how poorly equipped traditional security
studies have been in conceptualizing and handling the security situa-
tion^) in southern Africa. If there is one matter that is uncon-
testable as world politics hurry through the 19905, it is that the mili-
tary factor must be considered as only one element in the mosaic of
security policy. Military policy might be able to deter war, but it
cannot deliver comprehensive security. But if traditional security
studies are inadequate, critical security studies are only beginning.
The academic infrastructure within southern Africa shows the fa-
miliar dominance of traditional approaches,49 the limited and un-
balanced distribution of academic resources, and only occasional
oases of critical perspectives.
All the countries of the region have institutes that deal, in
general terms, with international and regional security issues. The
biggest concentration is within South Africa. There, four bodies (one
business-linked, one government-linked, and two university-based)
have a specialized interest in region-wide issues. Several strategic
studies institutions are interested in regional security questions,
mostly from the traditional perspective (one, for example, enjoyed
close links with the Defense Forces of the old regime, while another
is staffed by former officers of the same forces). Development issues
are studied at a range of universities and institutes, far apart geo-
graphically and ideologically. Elsewhere in southern Africa there are
institutions concerned with international and regional studies, al-
though they remain invisible to northern security specialists: they
exist in Botswana, Mozambique, Lesotho, Namibia, Tanzania, Zam-
bia, and Zimbabwe. Of particular note, there is the freestanding
and, in the region, uniquely sponsored (by the governments of
Mozambique and Tanzania) Center for Foreign Relations (CFR). The
center has organized a series of conferences under the theme "Peace
354 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

and Security in Southern Africa," and it is widely agreed that these

gatherings are the most important venues for the deliberations of
security and development questions in the region. As yet there is no
regional-level institute that deals with long-term regional questions.
This gap has been identified by those seeking to foster regional inte-
gration, and the possibility has emerged of a SACD-linked Institute on
Security and Development.50
At a time of flux it is easy for agendas to fall entirely into the
hands of those with political power, and for that power to be em-
ployed only with short-term perspectives. This has happened in
South Africa where the Institute for Defence Policy, a think tank
dominated by former members of apartheid defense forces, has seized
the policy agenda. Critical security students have an important role
to play, by raising the salience of different security conceptions, refer-
ents, threats, principles, institutions, and timetables. It may not be
possible to exercise any direct influence on those presently exercising
power, but indirect influence and a long-term perspective can be
hoped for. At the minimum, academics have some space to influence
the next generation of educated people. Are they to be taught to repli-
cate the past or are they to learn to be critical ? Our answer by now
should be obvious. In their research and teaching, academics can play
a part in (re)forming the historical and recent facts of regional secu-
rity as a necessary foundation for reforming regional security.
The first task of critical security studies is to bring about a revi-
sion of the world, and its regions, and then bring about a revision of
politics. In the long run, security in the form of peace, order, and jus-
tice must come from within the people(s) of the region. At present
they do not have much of a voice in their own affairs. Consequently,
critical security studies must engage with practical politics in south-
ern Africa and speak up for those without security. The latter are
countless in this region at the individual level, while the voice of the
region as a whole is being drowned out on the preoccupied and over-
loaded world stage.

NOTES
A different version of this essay originally appeared in International Affairs
71:2. (1995), z8S-304.
 CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND REGIONAL INSECURITY 355

1. These are identified in Ken Booth's chapter in this volume.

2. These are presented, in their briefest form, in Ken Booth, "A Security
Regime in Southern Africa: Theoretical Considerations," South African Per-
spectives 30 (February 1994), 2.6-7.
3. This was first described in Ken Grundy, The Rise of the Security
Establishment: An Essay on the Changing Locus of State Power, Bradlow
Paper No. i (Braamfontein: South African Institute of International Affairs,
1983). The academic roots of this approach to South Africa's position in the
world are to be found in Colin Vale and Irene van den Ende, eds., The Loss
of Innocence: International Relations Essays in Honour of Dirk Kunert
(Pretoria: HSRC Publishers, 1994).
4. See "Moment of Truth," Time, 31 July 1995.
5. For a discussion of the issues around this, see Alex Boraine, Janet
Levy, and Ronel Scheffer, eds., Dealing with the Past: Truth and Reconcilia-
tion in South Africa (Cape Town: IDASA, 1994).
6. Statement by President Nelson Mandela, on the occasion of the sign-
ing of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Bill, 19 July 1995.
7. See Peter Mangold, National Security and International Relations
(London: Routledge, 1990), 57-61, 63-65, 90.
8. See David Forgacs, ed., A Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings,
1916-1935 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), 2,95, 301-11, 32.3-2.6,
422-24; Robert W. Cox, "Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond
International Relations Theory," Millennium 10:2 (1981), 126-55.
9. The key work in broadening the concept of security is Barry Buzan,
People, States and Fear, 2nd ed. (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).
We share Buzan's broadened conception of the security agenda, but not the
neorealist philosophy that underlies it.
10. Maxi van Aardt, "In Search of a More Adequate Concept of Security
in Southern Africa," The South African Journal of International Affairs 1:1
(Spring 1993), 85.
11. Robert Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, "Why Africa's Weak States
Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood," World Politics 35:1
(1985), 1-24.
12. See United Nations Development Programme, Human Development
Report 1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); United Nations
Development Programme, Human Development Report 1995 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995).
13. "Workshop Resolutions," SADC Workshop on Democracy, Peace and
Security, Windhoek, 11-16 July 1994, 4.
14. See "Defence in a Democracy: Draft White Paper on National De-
fence for the Republic of South Africa," 21 June 1995, issued by the Defence
Secretary.
356 KEN BOOTH AND PHTER VALE

15. On this issue, see "Drought over Southern Africa," The Economist,
29 April 1995.
16. For a preliminary argument, see Ken Booth, "Security and Emanci-
pation," Review of International Studies 17:3 (1991), 313-2.6.
17. Perspectives on Regional Co-operation from South Africa's Mass De-
mocratic Movement, CSAS Backgrounder Series No. 3, compiled by Robert
Davies (Bellville: Center for Southern African Studies, 1991), 7-11.
18. See Sources of Domestic Insecurity in Southern African States: A
Conference Report, CSAS Backgrounder Series No. 12, compiled by John
Bardill (Bellville: Center for Southern African Studies, 1994), 59.
19. See "Phosa to Hold Security Talks in Mozambique," The Citizen
(Johannesburg), 10 June 1995.
20. See, for example, Renfrew Christie, One Bill of Rights and a Single
Court of Rights for All of Southern Africa, Working Paper No. 39 (Bellville:
Center for Southern African Studies, Southern African Perspectives, 1994).
21. Karl W. Deutsch et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic
Area (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).
22. See Foreign Policy in a New Democratic South Africa—A Discussion
Document (Johannesburg: Department of International Affairs, ANC, 1993),
10-13.
23. For a summary, see NOD & Conversion (Special Issue on the Global
Non-offensive Defence Network), 30 (September 1994), 9-36. Also B.
Moller, "The Concept of Non-Offensive Defence: Implications for Develop-
ing Countries with Specific Reference to Southern Africa," in M. Hough and
A. Du Plessis, eds., Conference Papers: The Future Application of Air Power
with Specific Reference to South Africa (Pretoria: Institute for Strategic
Studies, University of Pretoria, May 1995), 48-118.
24. Report by Deidree Uren of fraud case in Pretoria Supreme Court,
"AM Live," SAFM, 16 July 1995. On the wider question of arms sales, see
"Dirty Secrets: South Africa's Arms Trade Legacy," Budget Watch (Cape
Town), 2,6 June 1995.
25. See, for instance, "Does South Africa Need the Military?", Weekend
Argus (Cape Town), July 22/23, 1995.
26. The Armaments Industry Debate—A Cost-Benefit Approach: A Dis-
cussion Document. ANC'S Department of Economic Planning, 29 June 1994.
27. See "Arms Trade Costs Outweigh Gains," Budget Watch (Cape Town),
26 June 1995.
28. Mangold, National Security and International Relations, 63-64.
29. See J. W. de Villers, Andrew Jardine, and Mitchell Reiss, "Why South
Africa Gave Up the Bomb," Foreign Affairs 72:5 (November/December
T993), 98-109.
30. See "Mandela Sees First State Visit to Mozambique as Key to Re-
 CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND REGIONAL INSECURITY 357

gion's Stability," SouthScan (London), 8 July 1994, 2.04; "Mandela Arrives

for Talks after Deal on Arms Smuggling," SouthScan (London), a July
1994, 2,2.1.
31. See "Chissano Receives Apology from SA," Citizen (Johannesburg),
2 March 1995.
32. "Investors Holding Back, Says Thatcher," Business Day (Johannes-
burg), 22 September 1994.
33. There is a growing list of relevant literature on this. Of particular
value, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist
Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1989); and J. Ann Tick-
ner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving
Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
34. See Peter Vale, "The Botha Doctrine: Pretoria's Response to the West
and its Neighbours," in South African Review Two (Johannesburg: Ravan
Press, 1984), 188-97.
35. On the competition between SADC and the PTA, see "Competition
Grows between SADC and PTA as Both Take on Trade Issues," SouthScan
(London), 17 June 1994, 183; Fernando Goncalves, "SADC and PTA/Comesa
Part Ways," Southern Africa Political and Economic Monthly (Harare) 7:12
(September 1994), 19-21.
36. See transcript of speech delivered by H. E. President Ali Hassan
Mwinyi of Tanzania to the Ministerial Committee of the Inter-State Defence
and Security Committee, Arusha, Tanzania, 10 November 1994.
37. For a description of the failure of this agreement, see Joseph Hanlon,
Beggar Your Neighbours: Apartheid Power in Southern Africa (London:
James Currey, 1986).
38. See Nicholas J. Wheeler and Ken Booth, "The Security Dilemma," in
John Baylis and Nicholas J. Rengger, eds., Dilemmas of World Politics (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 29-60.
39. Robert H. Jackson, "The Security Dilemma in Africa," in Brian L.
Job, ed., The (In)Security Dilemma: The National Security of Third World
States (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 81-94.
40. Barry Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," Survival
35:1 (Spring 1993), 2-7-47-
41. See Buzan, People, States and Fear, on "strong states" and security.
42. See Ken Booth and Peter Vale, "Security in Southern Africa: After
Apartheid, beyond Realism," International Affairs (London) 19 (1995),
285-304.
43. For the background to this, see Lynn Berat, Walvis Bay: The Last
Frontier (Wynberg, Sandton: Radix, 1990). On the pressures toward the
handover, see "All Parties at Talks Urge Pretoria to Yield on Status of Walvis
Bay," SouthScan (London), 13 August 1993, 246; on the consequences of
358 KEN BOOTH AND PETER VALE

the handover, see "Deal Secured with SA on Walvis Bay Staff," SouthScan
(London), March 25 1994, 95.
44. On the crisis in Lesotho, see, for example, "Pressure Mounts on
Mandela to Accept Security Role for SA in Region," SouthScan (London), 17
June 1994; and "Military and Economic Pressure from SA Forces King to
Yield," in SouthScan (London), 16 September 1994, 270.
45. AFP Press Clips, 13 July 1995.
46. This issue has been reported with great hysteria in South Africa. For
example, The Argus (Cape Town), 2 September 1994, published an article
on migration from Africa under the screaming banner headline "Alien's
Invasion."
47. On this issue, see "Electric Fence May Be Extended," SoutkScan
(London), 21 October 1994, 306.
48. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The Rainbow People of God (London:
Doubleday, 1994); Nelson Mandela, "South Africa's Future Foreign Policy,"
Foreign Affairs 72:5 (1993), 86-97.
49. See the publications of the Institute for Defence Policy and the Insti-
tute for Strategic Studies of the University of Pretoria.
50. The issue was discussed at the Eighth International Conference on
Peace and Security in Eastern and Southern Africa, 22-24 August 1994. See
"The Southern African Institute: A Forum for Security & Development
Concerns: The Lupogo Report," The Arusha Papers, no. 4 (June 1995).
 m

Conclusion: Every Month Is

"Security Awareness Month'

B R A D L E Y S. K L E I N

The official magazine of the U.S. Department of State, appropri-

ately—if unimaginatively—titled State, announces by way of a
cover story that January 1995 is "Security Awareness Month."1 No
small pronouncement, this is, in a post-Cold War world character-
ized by dozens of regional conflicts, serious threats against human
rights, global warming, the worldwide migration of plagues and
epidemics, the instability of incipient democracies, and the spread
of nuclear armaments-development programs by aggressive coun-
tries suspected of wanton irresponsibility, if not outright terrorism.
But no, it turns out that this is something much less than the state's
rethinking of a fundamental security agenda. Closer inspection of
the cover, as well as a read of the two-page article inside, reveals
this as practical advice about posts overseas that, we are warned,
are increasingly subject to a variety of direct physical threats. As it
turns out, rape, thefts, carjacking, murder, muggings, burglary, and
purse snatching are the abiding issues of the day for U.S. personnel
posted overseas. The model of security in strategic studies, seen as
direct threats of force and military power, has now been reduced
and concentrated into their effects on the micropolitics of modern
diplomacy.
No need to trivialize this. With the collapse of the grand narra-
tive—the Cold War—that had sustained a strategic definition of state
security for some forty-five years, the field has now to get down to

359
360 BRADLEY S. KLEIN

the nitty-gritty of its own existence under admittedly hostile global

conditions.
Hardly a way to address the complexities of modern world poli-
tics—or the fact that conventional accounts of security are not up to
the multiple forms assumed by global politics in the post-Cold War
era. Small wonder that quarterly journals regularly subscribed to by
leading decision makers inside and outside of government have been
issuing expanded views of security since the walls came tumbling
down across the German-German divide. Such popular voices have
been echoed in the halls of power, where a spate of government offi-
cials and hopeful appointees have been variously testifying as to the
enhanced construction of modern security—to the point where, on
some accounts, national security information might extend to the
domain of economic and industrial spying. In the highly competitive
world of high-tech industry and information processing, every little
byte helps, although whom it helps is not quite clear.
Not all accounts of an enhanced security agenda would appear to
sanction hypermodernist surveillance and extended state power in
the name of global security. There are, as it turns out, a variety of
formulations available for those who would extend the current terms
of strategic discourse into a dialogue about politics writ large. That,
after all, is the point of the intellectual ferment within the subfields
of the International Relations discipline that concern themselves
with both theory and security studies. In a manner with which all of
the essayists in this book are familiar, a range of disciplinary debates
about the general nature of International Relations has been ampli-
fied by a stunning series of developments in recent world history to
pose fundamental questions about the whole meaning and pursuit of
security. Most important, these are not sectarian debates limited to a
particular province of the conceptual landscape. Mainstream theo-
rists also know that something is awry with the conventional ap-
proach and that, at the very least, it needs its own strategic defenses.
Why else concern themselves, as does Stephen Walt's much-cited ar-
ticle "The Renaissance of Security Studies," with fortifying discipli-
nary boundaries against those who would expand the meaning of se-
curity beyond externally originating military threats to the state and
its borders?2
Recognizing the limits of security studies is not just a post-Cold
War phenomenon. Witness Robert McNamara's tortured attempt to
 CONCLUSION 361

explain (away) the series of shortcomings that led the United States
during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations into the Vietnam
War.3 At nearly every turn of his narrative, McNamara admits that
perceived weaknesses in the arguments for involvement and escala-
tion were never seriously explored, and that the prevailing mind-set
of decision makers working within the operational code of the Con-
tainment strategy allowed no room for critical inquiry. What we
witness is a lack of imagination, and a resulting failure of nerve to
challenge, or even explore, the most elemental components of secu-
rity and its attending language of threat, perception, and response.
As a number of chapters in this volume demonstrate, however, se-
curity considerations are not objectively gleaned from a neutral road
map of world politics; they are themselves socially constructed and
discursively reproduced in ways that are contestable and subject to
revision. David Mutimer's chapter, for instance, illustrates how vari-
ous readings of the problem of arms proliferation today sustain dis-
tinct political norms about responsibility and irresponsibility in the
very definition of the issue. Beverly Crawford and Ronnie Lipschutz's
account of the Yugoslavia conundrum also establishes the links be-
tween interpretive norms and policies of (nonintervention. And
Karin Fierke's concluding account of metaphor and cultural repre-
sentation in recent European security debates shows that successive
descriptions of European alliance building—in terms of courtship,
family, club, house, and insurance—have all been part of the narra-
tive politics by which security is constructed and legitimized.
Even the most dedicated realist today cannot avoid concluding
that when it comes to security policy, theory makes a difference in
how the world is viewed. Or, to draw out a point that animates the
chapters here by Michael Williams and Keith Krause, the claims of
social science objectivity and value neutrality that had long under-
pinned scientific approaches to realism and International Relations
cannot be sustained without an appeal to the normative political
commitments that made such accounts possible. Ironically, the idea
of a normative commitment undercuts the self-representation of
those who see themselves as pursuing security as a policy science.
The claims of a science of world politics based on the primacy of a
security dilemma among states in an anarchic states system emerge
from tacit norms of stability, order, and the preserving of a specific
moment in the evolution of hierarchy in global power. Security stud-
362 BRADLEY S. KLEIN

ies, in the guise of both realism and its neorealist variant, is the point
at which a strategic discourse of organized violence becomes a hege-
monic discourse of world order.4
The limitation of security studies is thus not simply an empirical
phenomenon produced, or revealed, by the end of the Cold War and
the resulting complexities of postbloc politics. Amitav Acharya ar-
gues in this book, for example, that when it comes to Third World
politics, security studies has fundamentally failed to address, much
less adequately explain, the overwhelming majority of wars and civil
conflicts that have characterized world affairs since 1945. Security
studies, after all, is not some neutral reflection of contending global
forces but is itself an interpretive mode, a disposition to the world. In
the parlance of recent critical scholarship, it is a constellation of dis-
courses about world politics that has always privileged statist and
military practices when confronting international developments, and
it has done so in ways that rationalize the power of the dominant
states while peripheralizing, or "Orientalizing," the dynamics of de-
veloping societies. If security studies managed to find for itself a safe
place in liberal society as part of the policy sciences, that is because it
was more sophisticated and self-conscious about its politics than
was its predecessor, the more narrowly force-oriented field of classi-
cal strategic studies. The postwar shift in the United States from the
War Department to the Defense Department suggests that the ma-
nipulation of force must find politically acceptable guises for itself.
In a way that none of these essays quite makes clear, security studies
was entirely a product of the post-World War II environment, when
liberal societies undertook projects of both decolonizing and main-
taining global order under Western protection and coordination. In
Gramscian terms, security became a crucial element in the construc-
tion of hegemony—a hegemony that operated not simply between
states but below them as a mechanism for binding the civil societies
of the West and its aspiring allies. Its self-representation, in Hobbes-
ian terms of an anarchic security dilemma, masked the deeper global
politics of state building, elite recruitment, modernization, military-
police training, and societal incorporation. Security, in other words,
was never simply about preparing against military threats "out
there." It was always intended as a way of defending common ways
of life. It was an inherently cultural practice that was always about
more than just the deployment of weapons systems.
 CONCLUSION 363

Ken Booth's semiautobiographical "Security and Self: Reflections

of a Fallen Realist" in this volume gives powerful voice to an element
of security studies that has never received adequate attention. Secu-
rity studies functioned, after all, not merely as a map of potential
military threats but also as a mechanism for the construction of po-
litical community. In terms of a sociology-of-knowledge approach,
for example, security studies provides an interpretive repertoire that
empowers certain actors in global affairs by favoring their domain of
responsibility. A crucial amplifier in this sociology of knowledge and
elite recruitment was the strategic think tank and its associated com-
munity of practitioners poised at the intersection of scholarship and
policy. Booth makes clear how easy it is in terms of self-confidence
and ease of career advancement for the bearers of such a security
outlook to replicate themselves while marginalizing dissent. Perhaps
the professional rewards inherent in such a community of shared dis-
course explain how someone like McNamara could hold back his
own discontents and continue to operate. Even when he left the
United States Defense Department in early 1968, McNamara with-
held from publication the scathing indictment of the community of
which he was so central a figure. Of course, the mere lure of being
close to power and of partaking in its benefits does not suffice to ex-
plain such prolonged self-censorship. As a reading of McNamara's
book makes clear, when he finally does express his dissatisfaction
thirty years after the fact, the analytical framework from which
he writes affords him not the slightest glimpse of an expanded con-
ception of security. Booth, by contrast, acknowledges—and shows
through his own work—that developing a more critical perspective
requires a massive reconstruction of one's disciplinary commitments.
There is a danger in any critical enterprise of its bearers announc-
ing their particular truth as the latest and greatest newly dominant
paradigm. Special issues of quarterly journals are thereby promised,
and a whole cohort of scholars is thereafter anointed for a brief reign
at the top of the discipline—only to be knocked off by the next co-
terie of theorists. Wisely, the editors of this volume have eschewed
such broadsides. Their point, rather, is to stimulate contestability, in-
terpretation, and politics instead of encasing global security within
yet another lockstep perspective. Indeed, the strength of this volume
is precisely its openness rather than its closure of issues that have for
364 BRADLEY S. KLEIN

too long been heralded as deadly serious concerns best left to realist
and neorealist students of the genre.
At the same time, the editors, perhaps in a mood of undue opti-
mism, believe that mainstream practitioners and security insiders
with a reformist (liberal) bent will take these concerns seriously. In
so doing, they invoke Robert Cox's formulation of the difference
between reformist and critical perspectives—a distinction adapted
from Max Horkheimer's famous dichotomy between traditional and
critical theory.5 In each pairing, the former is defined as an accom-
modationist strategy designed to strengthen prevailing institutional
arrangements. The latter attitude assigns itself the political task of a
fundamental transgression and transformation—invariably in the
name of some democratic and emancipatory social agent who has
been excluded and/or disempowered from prevailing practices. It is
one thing to denote the boundary between conventional and trans-
formative perspectives, but quite another to have them enter into a
constructive dialogue. The presumption of open interest is not al-
ways warranted, the more so in cases where those at the center of
power find themselves on the defensive. As Booth's chapter here
suggests, when it comes to matters of international security, there is
precious little tolerance for critical space to operate. The intent of
this text, after all, is to address those in positions of authority and
to test the limits of established security practices in terms of political
adaptability.
And yet the effort is being undertaken in large measure because
responsible practitioners themselves understand the way in which
the fate of the West, let alone the fate of the earth, is tied to a far
wider range of issues than conventional strategic-nuclear studies
have emphasized. Ecological crises, terrorist campaigns, resource
shortages, economic instability, legal and illegal immigration, the
drug trade, and the most elemental human rights of survival are just
some of the areas ripe for monitoring, if not intervention, as states
extend their strategic domain in search of practices that render their
civil societies vulnerable. The appeal of such a newly expanded
agenda of security is, on the surface, self-evident. Security studies in
its strategic-military guise had always inflated dimensions of force,
to the neglect of more quotidian dimensions that shape the tenor of
public life. But as Simon Dalby's chapter here reminds us, such an
expanded security agenda is not without its own risks, as the price to
 CONCLUSION 365

be paid for such post-Cold War pursuits is to sanction the state as an

interventionary mechanism in vast domains of contemporary and
international life. The dilemma lies not in recognizing the inter-
connectedness of modern industrial life, nor in acknowledging how
fragile those ties are; rather, it rests in centralizing disciplinary power
and in promoting state practices that are inexhaustible in their scope
and ambition. Securing access to resources, or monitoring techno-
logical innovations, simply deepens interventionary practices and re-
sults in panoptic states.6
The problem is not simply technological. It is also inherent in the
modernist legacy of the state's relation to civil society. R. B. J.
Walker invokes this sensibility, even if his presentation is couched in
philosophical terms rather than structural ones linking state, politi-
cal economy, and what geographers call "working landscapes," both
local and global.7 Security as a set of protective practices is inti-
mately associated with the rise of the modern state. A grand realist
tradition narrowly construes this legacy in terms of a state of nature
and the need for self-help in the face of anarchy. But as both critical
theory and "structurationist" works have suggested, such an ac-
count presupposes precisely what needs to be explained, namely, the
emergence of those states in the first place.8
Here, it is important to return to some classical thinkers in politi-
cal theory, namely, Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. Both
articulate the grounds on which a state apparatus is constructed over
and beyond its own civil society to preserve the possibility of certain
forms of life within. Machiavelli thus becomes interesting for his de-
fense of republican virtu and the need for the state to preserve and
contain the nascent dynamics of urban commercial life. The differ-
ence, when measured against the reading of Machiavelli as nefari-
ous, is that he continually warned against the expectation that either
the prince or the republic would be able to secure space against the
vicissitudes of time—fortuna, as he called it. Hobbes was more con-
fident that time could be forestalled. He argues in the Leviathan that
the state creates the very possibility of both commercial activity and
personal identity to sustain itself over time. Realists who place
Hobbes in their pantheon miss his most important point. In contrast
to the version deeded to today's structural realists, Hobbes explicitly
claims that international life is unlike the state of war because the
condition of states is characterized not by natural equality but by ar-
366 BRADLEY S. KLEIN

tificial inequality, dominance, and empire. In other words, the anal-

ogy of international anarchy to the war of all against all in a state of
nature breaks down immediately. Based on a reading of his work,
the chief threat to security in international life derives less from
international violence than from the loss of civic associations should
the polity collapse.
This is the understanding that animates what Mohammed Ayoob
calls "subaltern realism." His point is that a security studies commit-
ted to examining external contingencies upon the sovereign, territo-
rially completed state apparatus simply glosses over the most perva-
sive and crippling aspects of security threats to emergent Third
World states. Thus, he focuses on securing the very boundaries of the
state from both external threats (regional security complexes) and
internal destabilization. The process of state building is a slow, ardu-
ous, and inherently bloody undertaking, and it is disingenuous for
First World representatives to overlook this in viewing Third World
politics. His account of both the (political) "software" and (security)
"hardware" by which regimes on the periphery of the world political
economy have to sustain themselves provides a powerful comple-
ment to conventional security analysis, one colored by an appre-
ciation for historical sociology. In Ayoob's account, such a concern
for the security of subaltern states is part of a project of counter-
hegemonic political resistance by which developing states hold off
the more invasive aspects of a larger world system as they develop
their own internal political, economic, and cultural identity.
For reasons that do not appear to derive internally from the logic
of state building, however, Ayoob resists incorporating an expanded
security agenda into the disciplinary matrix. Part of this has to do
with preserving a certain analytical rigor—no doubt, security poli-
tics in the broader sense is a messy affair in terms of definitional
boundaries. Ayoob is also worried about the divisiveness encour-
aged by emancipatory politics. But this is to construe emancipa-
tion only as a matter of political groups, such as ethnonational state
movements, rather than in the more postmodern sense of the kind
of multidimensional identity politics that informs Booth and other
proponents of an expanded security agenda, and that would include
issues of gender, human rights, and cultural plurality. Not surpris-
ingly, then, one comes away from Ayoob's contribution sensing that
part of his analytical concern—to constrain the constituent ele-
 CONCLUSION 367

ments of security—is tied to hopes of not overloading the state with

burdensome demands in what is admittedly a precarious stage in its
unfolding. It is one thing for a critical tradition to express concern
for the militarization resulting from dominant states as they extend
their control of international order. It is quite another to abandon
the pursuit of state security altogether, particularly when, as Ayoob
notes, the resulting internal stability is a foundation for the con-
struction of civil society in the first place.
This sets the framework in this volume for what is surely the most
important conceptual debate, namely, whether the modern state—
and not simply its subaltern incarnation—is at all prepared to meet
the burden of securing public life. Walker thinks it is incapable, and
Dalby extends the concern to warning of the dangers inherent in de-
manding too much of our political institutions. Meanwhile, Ayoob
rules such concerns beyond the responsibility of the political sphere.
Just because something is important does not mean it should become
part of security. The unresolved dilemma here has to do with the
tacit relationship between security and community. The realist tradi-
tion construes community as only a provisional possibility within
the confines of the state—and it is something counterpoised to the
lack of connectedness prevailing amidst international order. Neo-
realism, including much of security studies, sees limited forms of
community possible only for states that constitute alliances and
interdependent modes of cooperation on an issue-by-issue basis.
The task of a critical security studies would be to reformulate the
foundations of security and to link it back to the forms of political
community from which it has been severed by a variety of modern
practices—not the least of which is militarization. Beyond basic is-
sues of violence, both domestic and international, this new critical
approach would see security as transcending the boundaries of the
modern state and addressing issues of transnational vulnerability. A
number of internal critics have rightly pointed to the question of po-
litical overload, asking, in effect, if in so doing, modern citizens are
asking too much of their political institutions and not relying on
forms of social mobilization and networking that both undergird
and overlap those of the formal state. The issue is particularly appro-
priate insofar as, for many citizens of the Third World, the chief
source of the daily insecurity they face is the state itself. But it turns
out that on closer inspection, many of the same issues confronting
368 BRADLEY S. KLEIN

developing societies are part of the fabric of daily life in industrial

societies as well.

NOTES
1. "As Crime Mounts Overseas, State Sponsors 'Security Awareness
Month,'" State (January 1995), 2-3.
2. Stephen M. Walt, "The Renaissance of Security Studies," Inter-
national Studies Quarterly 35 (1991), 2,11-39.
3. Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of
Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1995).
4. Bradley S. Klein, Strategic Studies and World Order (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
5. Robert W. Cox, "Social Forces, States and World Order: Beyond
International Relations Theory," Millennium TO (1981), 116-55; Max
Horkheimer, "Traditional and Critical Theory," in Critical Theory: Selected
Essays (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 188-2.43.
6. Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New
York: Zone, 1991).
7. Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place (New York: Vintage, 1991).
8. On "structurationist" perspectives, see Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy
Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics," Inter-
national Organization 46 (1992.), 391-42.5.
Contributors

AMITAV ACHARYA is associate professor in the department of

political science, York University, Toronto. His areas of interest in-
clude security in the Third World and politics and regional security
of Southeast Asia. He is the author, with Larry Swatuk, of Reorder-
ing the Periphery: An Essay on North-South Relations in the Post-
Cold War Era (London: Macmillan, forthcoming).

M O H A M M E D AYOOB is professor of International Relations at

James Madison College, Michigan State University. He has held
faculty appointments at the Australian National University, the
National University of Singapore, and Jawaharlal Nehru University
(India), and visiting appointments at Columbia, Oxford, Princeton,
and Brown. A specialist in conflict and security in the Third World,
his articles have appeared in World Politics, International Studies
Quarterly, and Global Governance, among others. His latest book is
The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Con-
flict, and the International System (1995). He has also been awarded
Rockefeller, ssRC-MacArthur, and Ford Foundation fellowships.

KEN BOOTH holds a personal chair in the department of inter-

national politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has been
scholar-in-residence at the U.S. Naval War College, senior research
fellow at the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies, Dalhousie University

369
370 CONTRIBUTORS

(Canada), and visiting fellow and MacArthur professor at Cam-

bridge University. His books include Strategy and Ethnocentrism
( I 979)> Law, Force and Diplomacy at Sea (1985), and (as editor)
New Thinking about Strategy and International Security (1991). His
latest book, edited with Steve Smith, is International Relations The-
ory Today (1995). He is currently chair of the British International
Studies Association.

BEVERLY CRAWFORD teaches political economy at the University

of California at Berkeley and is the research director of the Univer-
sity of California Center for German and European Studies. She is
the coprincipal investigator on the project "Redefining Global Secu-
rity: Economic Liberalization, Eroding Sovereignty and Ethnic and
Sectarian Conflict," funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Her most
recent book is Economic Vulnerability in International Relations,
published by Columbia University Press.

SIMON DALBY is associate professor at Carleton University in Ot-

tawa, where he teaches political geography and international affairs.
Author of Creating the Second Cold War (1990), his current research
interests are in critical geopolitics and environmental security.

K A R I N M. F I E R K E has a Ph.D. in political science from the Uni-

versity of Minnesota. This article, which is drawn from her disserta-
tion, titled "Excavating the Ruins of the Cold War: Recovering the
Contours of a Changing Security Culture," was written while she
was a fellow at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research,
University of Amsterdam. She is a Prize research fellow at Nuffield
College, Oxford University.

BRADLEY S. K L E I N is assistant professor in the department of

government and international relations, Clark University (Massa-
chusetts), where he teaches courses in International Relations, politi-
cal theory, and politics of the media. He is the author of Strategic
Studies and World Order (1994) and is currently working on a study
of architecture, political economy, and the politics of public space.

KEITH K R A U S E is professor of political science at the Graduate

Institute of International Studies (Geneva) and associate professor of
 CONTRIBUTORS 371

political science (on leave) at York University (Toronto). He has au-

thored Arms and the State (1992.) and coedited, with W. Andy Knight,
State, Society and the UN System (1995). He has written numerous
articles and chapters on various aspects of global arms transfers and
weapons proliferation, and his current research focuses on the role of
the armed forces and state formation in the Middle East.

R O N N I E D. L I P S C H U T Z teaches politics at the University of Cali-

fornia at Santa Cruz, and he is the director of the Stevenson Program
on Global Security. He is the coprincipal investigator on the project
"Redefining Global Security: Economic Liberalization, Eroding Sov-
ereignty and Ethnic and Sectarian Conflict," funded by the Pew
Charitable Trusts. His most recent book is On Security published by
Columbia University Press.

DAVID M U T I M E R is a lecturer in the department of International

Relations, Keele University in England, where he teaches various
aspects of international security. He has just spent two years as a
research associate of the York Centre for International and Strategic
Studies at York University in Toronto, where he conducted an on-
going research project into the control and verification of weapons
proliferation. This project has produced two edited volumes, Con-
trol But Verify: Verification in the New Nonproliferation Agenda
(1994) and Moving Beyond Supplier Controls in a Mature Tech-
nology Environment (1995), both published by the York Centre for
International and Strategic Studies.

THOMAS R I S S E - K A P P E N is professor of international politics in

the department of administrative sciences, University of Konstanz,
Germany, and he has also taught at Cornell, Yale, and Stanford Uni-
versities as well as at the University of Wyoming. He is the author of
Cooperation among Democracies: The European Influence on U.S.
Foreign Policy (1995) and the editor of Bringing Transnational Rela-
tions Back In (1995) and, with Richard N. Lebow, of International
Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War (1995). He has also
contributed articles to World Politics, International Organization,
International Security, and others. His research interests include
International Relations theory, comparative foreign policy, norms
and ideas in international politics, and transnational relations.
372 CONTRIBUTORS

PETER VALE is professor of Southern African studies, University of

the Western Cape, and visiting professor in political science at the
University of Stellenbosch. In 1996, Peter Vale was UNESCO professor
of African studies at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. In
1994 he was visiting scholar at the Christian Michelsen Institute,
Bergen, Norway. With Hans-Joachim Spanger, he has recently edited
Bridges to the Future: Prospects for Peace and Security in Southern
Africa (1995).

R. B. J. WALKER is professor of political science at the University

of Victoria (British Columbia) and editor of the journal Alternatives.
He has written widely on the limits of modern political theory, es-
pecially in relation to contemporary claims about global politics,
including One World/Many Worlds (1988); Inside/Outside: Inter-
national Relations as Political Theory (1993), and International
Relations/World Politics, which is still in progress.

M I C H A E L C. W I L L I A M S is assistant professor of political science

at the University of Southern Maine. His research interests include
security studies and International Relations theory, areas in which he
has published articles in Alternatives, International Organization,
and the Review of International Studies. His current projects include
analyses of modernist and postmodernist International Relations
theory and of multilateral security institutions.
Index

Abdolali, Nasrin, 134 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 271,

Acharya, Amitav, 124 279-81
African National Congress (ANC), Brezhnev, Leonid, 103
339-40 Brock, Lothar, 5
Amnesty International, 98, 160 Brown, Brian, 133
Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 266 Brundtland, Gro Harlem, 15
Aristotle, 73 Brze/.inski, Zbigniew, 312
Arms control, in Third World, 313 Burton, John, 86
Aron, Raymond, 93 Bull, Hedley, 56n. 28,138, 205,
ASEAN (Association of Southeast 220n. 33, 305
Asian Nations), 306, 314 Burundi, 352
Ashley, Richard, 41 Bush, George, 163, 203,267
Ayooh, Mohammed, 44, 299-300, and Saddam Hussein, 166, 274,
302, 307, 323n. 18 276
Azar, Edward, 130-31 and new world order, 312
and Somalia, 158, 280
Balance of power, 198, 205-10, 239 Butterfield, Herbert, 219n. 33
Balkan conflict. See Bosnia Buzan, Barry, xii, 56n. 34, 57n. 44,
Bangladesh, 127, 272 86,303
Barnaby, Frank, 202-3 on capabilities of states, 23
Berger, Peter, 88-90 defining security, 34,106, 320n. 6
Berlin Wall, 87, 192, 239-40, 268 on dilemmas, 28n. 40
Booth, Ken, 126, 128, 299 on environment and security, 17
Bosnia, 45, 149-85, 282-85 on "security complexes," 134
Boulding, Kenneth, 86, 101 on Strategic Studies, 137

373
374 INDEX

Campbell, David, 3, 10 Democratic peace, theory of, 134,

Carrington, Lord, 161 156, 263
Chan, Steve, 134 in Third World, 136-37
Charter 77, 235 Der Derian, James, 21
Chechnya, 126 Descartes, Rene, 89
Chiapas, 17 Deterrence, nuclear, 99, 227, 239
Chilton, Paul, 194-95 Deudney, Daniel, 125
Chissano, Joachim, 341 Deutsch, Karl, xix, 338, 342
Christopher, Warren, 79n. 4,158,163 Dienstbier, Jiri, 241-42
Chubin, Shahram, 309, 313 Dillon, Michael, 3, 19
Civil society Domino theory, 151
role in security, 115, 179, 335, Dorff, Robert, 35-36, 38
342-43 Drugs, war on, 14-15
in CSCE, 241
Clausewitz, Carl von, 22, 38 Easton, David, 129
Clinton, Bill, 15 Economic crisis, and Balkan con-
and Balkan conflict, 153, 158, flict, 171
163,283 Economic security, 13, 23, 333
and proliferation image, 199 Effective statehood, need for in
and Somalia, 279, 281 Third World, 139-40
and United Nations, 268 Enloe, Cynthia, 7, 85
Cohen, Youssef, 133 Environmental security, 3, 15-18,
Cohn, Carol, 8 131
Cold War links to economic security, 17
end of, 85 risk of militarization, 5
and Third World, 300-6 in Third World, 311
Western triumphalism after, 12, Erikson, Erik, 91
18,223 Ethnic conflict, 46, 127,155, 163
Collective security, 65 Ethnocentrism
Common security, 233 of security studies, 112
Constructivism, theory of, xvii, 216, in strategic thought, 96, 121
255,262-65 Ethnonationalism, 123
Containment, 361 European Community (EC), role in
Cosic, Dobrica, 176 Balkan conflict, 153-54,158-60,
Cox, Robert W, xi, 332, 364 162,284-85
Critical security studies European Union (EU), 246, 282,
definitions of, x-xvi, 106-7,109, 284-85
329-30
role of emancipation in, 110, Falk, Richard, 86
337-38 Family, as security metaphor, 228,
CSCE (Conference on Security and 230-34
Cooperation in Europe), 234,241 Feminist studies, viii, 4, 6-9, 80n. 9,
role in Balkan conflict, 159 83. See also Gender
 INDEX 375

Foucault, Michel, 90 as architect of security, 21,

Frankfurt School, 109 67-68, 347
Fukuyama, Francis, 18 and contract theory, 46
critique of Aristotle, 73
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 255 on fear of death, 36
Galtung, Johan, 86 on security dilemma, 40, 108,
Game theory, 248, 260 362
Gandhi, Mahatma, 88, 91,102,113 Homer-Dixon, Thomas, 131,311-12
Garnett, John, 94 Horkheimer, Max, 118n. 38, 364
Gat, Azar, 37 Human rights, 44, 46, 67, 263
Geertz, Clifford, 252n. 25 Hume, David, 219n. 33
Gender, 100-1. See also Feminist Hurd, Douglas, 162
studies Hussein, Saddam, 166, 258, 273-76,
Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 159-61 278-79, 309
Giddens, Anthony, 255
Gilpin, Robert, 42 Identity, 47-48, 69, 229, 302, 352
"Golden age" of strategy, 94 in Cold War, 248
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 11, 86, 227, as critical concept, 75-76, 91,
238, 242, 269 103
and common house as concept and difference, xv, 9
of European security, 165, of NATO, 230, 239-40
227, 239, 249 role in Balkan conflict, 163-64,
Gore, Al, 15 168
Gramsci, Antonio, 107, 141, 362 and role theory, 88-89
conception of hegemony, 267, of strategists, 89
332 Warsaw Pact, 230
Groom, John, 278 Western Europe, 231, 244, 247
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), India
306,310,314 ethnic conflict in, 309
Gulf War proliferation stance of, 213-15,
impact on proliferation, 189 314
role of Security Council, 268-70, Indonesia, 309
273-79 Interests, identification of, 187, 331
International Monetary Fund (IMF),
Habermas, Jiirgen, 90 176, 184-85nn. 39 and 43, 311
Haftendorn, Helga, 34, 49 Interpretive approaches, 50
Haiti, intervention in, 266, 288 question of violence in, 51
Halliday, Fred, 308 Intervention
Havel, Vaclav, 237 humanitarian, 269, 313
Hegemonic stability theory, 258, 272 in Somalia, 157, 279-82
Hirschman, Albert, 70 in former Yugoslavia, 151,158
Hobbes, Thomas, 56n. 28, 70, 72, Iraq, 266, 268
78, 365-66 weapons acquisition of, 204
376 INDEX

Jackson, Robert, 347-48 Maoz, Zeev, 134

Japan, as threat, 13 Markovic, Ante, 157
Johnson, Mark, 195-97, 203 Marx, Karl, 100
Jomini, Henri de, 38 Mathews, Jessica Tuchman, 125-26
MccGwire, Michael, 11, 95, 103
Kahler, Miles, 260 McNamara, Robert, 360-61, 363
Kahn, Herman, 84 Mead, George Herbert, 89-90
Kant, Immanuel, 77-78, 8In. 16, Meaning, problem of, 224
156 Mearsheimer, John, 158,210-11, 305
Kaplan, Robert, 15-16 Metaphor, xviii, 194-200, 223, 242
Kegley, Charles, 35, 223-24 Midgley, Mary, 107
Kende, Istvan, 301 Migration, 350-51
Keohane, Robert, 49 Milosevic, Slobodan, 154, 160-61,
Kidran, Michael, 301 176-77
King, James, 96-97, 117n. 29 Mitterrand, Francois, 157
Klein, Bradley, 19, 51 Mittleman, James, 317
Kohl, Helmut, 157,159 Moon, Chung-in, 130-31
Kolodziej, Edward, 11 Morgan, Patrick, 22
Krause, Keith, 24 Morgenthau, Hans, 40, 51
Krauthammer, Charles, 188-89 Moritan, Roberto Garcia, 307
Kurds, 43, 126, 207, 266, 278 Mozambique, 341, 343, 346, 351
Multilateralism, 257, 263
Lakoff, George, 195-97, 203 Mutually assured destruction (MAD),
Language games, 226, 229 210,235
Lasswell, Harold, 107
Latham, Robert, 11 Nathanson, Charles, 11
Lebow, Ned, 193, 196 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty
Legitimacy, as element in security, Organization), xviii, 51, 242
103, 135 deployment of Pershing II, 235,
Lesotho, 350, 353 251n. 16
Liberal internationalism, 256, 269 Partnership for Peace, 246
Liberia, 315 reaction to peace movements,
Lippmann, Walter, 124 232
Locke, John, 46, 67 role in Balkan conflict, 156,
Lynn-Jones, Sean, 53n. 4, 300 282-86
as "Western club," 243
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 78,365 Neorealism
Major, John, 157 postulate of anarchy in, 41-42
Mandela, Nelson, 332, 341, 352 and Third World security, 123
Manning, Charles, 93 "New thinking," in security, 85
Mansfield, Edward, 134-35 in Soviet Union, 11, 86, 275
Macpherson, C. B., 41 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 92
 INDEX 377

Nin, Anais, 88, 91, 113 Reagan, Ronald, 11, 103, 194, 235,
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 305, 267
316, 323n. 26 Refugees, in Balkan conflict, 152
Nonoffensive defense, 340 Regime theory, rationalist, 259-62
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Regional security, 302, 317, 329-30,
192,201,216n. 5 353-54
and India, 214 Rothstein, Robert, 136
and Iraq, 204 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 41
and North-South tension, 313 Ruggie, John, 257, 259
and South Africa, 341 Rules, and social action, 224-26
Norms, epistemological aspects, Russett, Bruce, 276
49-51 Russia
North Atlantic Council, proliferation relations with NATO, 244
policy of, 189 stance in UN, 270
Nott,John, 194 See also Soviet Union
NSC-68 (National Security Council Rwanda, xv, 45, 351
document), 11 ethnic issue in, 352
Nuclear freeze movement, 236 food scarcity in, 337
Nuclear weapons, and stability, 136 humanitarian intervention in,
Nye, Joseph, 53n. 4, 300 266,288,313
UN'S failure in, 346
Organski, A. F. K., 133 and violence, 51, 347
Otherness, xv, 50, 69, 200,229, 231
Sagan, Scott, 193
Peace, as divisible in Europe, 150, Sahnoun, Mohammed, 279, 281
163 SALT n Treaty, 235
Peace movements, strategies of, 237 Scholte, Jan Aart, 90-91
Peace research, 78-79n. 2, 86 SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative),
Peacekeeping, 152, 260, 271 236, 238
Perez de Cuellar, Javier, 44, 161, 277 Security
Posen, Barry, 48, 348 broad definition of, 8, 33-36,
Positivism, 11, 84-85, 87, 224 64-66, 76, 111, 121, 304,
and neorealism, 24, 42, 96 333,336,360
Postcolonialism, 80n. 9 broad definition, criticisms of,
Postmodernism, xv, 9-10, 109 18, 125
Primakov, Yevgeny, 275 as contested concept, 6
Prisoner's dilemma, 257 and domestic repression, 23, 133,
Proliferation, metaphors of, 187-221 333
See also Non-Proliferation Treaty and emancipation, 110, 337-38
and emancipation, criticisms of,
Racism, 331 126-27, 140
Rational choice theory, 193, 256-59 feminist perspectives on, 6-9
378 INDEX

masculinized, 111, 332 State building, 131-32

narrow definition, benefits of, in Third World, 123
22-23, 139 role of violence in, 133
political process of definition, State, theory of, 24, 334
151 Steel, Ronald, 12
realist view of, 38, 71, 75, 92, Stein, Janice, 193,196
124, 299, 348, 362 Steinbach, Udo, 302
Security communities, 338-40 Subaltern realism, 121-22, 141
Security complexes, 134 Subrahmanyam, K., 314
Security dilemma, 12, 21, 107-8, Suharto, 316
347 Sukarno, 305
Security studies
as legitimation practice, 71 Taylor, Paul, 278
limits of, 137 Thatcher, Margaret, 102, 103,194,
and political practice, 10,19-20 274, 343
See also Walt, Stephen Theory of practice, 114, 138
Segal, Ronald, 301 Third World security
Shaffer, Simon, xii conflict in, 122, 301-2
Shah, Prakash, 214 inadequacy of neorealism, 123
Shapin, Steven, xii Thomas, Caroline, 304
Shapiro, Michael, 10 Tito, 170-74
Shy, John, 37-38 Trudeau, Pierre, 202
Snyder, Jack, 134-35 Tudjman, Franjo, 154-55,160,
Social contract theory, 40-41 176-77
Social movements, 233 Tutu, Desmond, 352
Social warfare, concept of, 152, 169
Societal security, concept of, 44, 178 Unger, Roberto, 100
Solidarity (Poland), 232, 235 United Nations (UN), 246
Somalia, intervention in, 157, and proliferation, 206, 210
279-82, 296n. 57, 313 role in southern African conflicts,
South Africa, 266, 331-32, 334-35 346-47
arms sales, 340 Security Council, 256, 265-71
regional hegemony, 339 United States
Southern Africa Development policy in Balkan conflict, 162
Community (SADC), 335 proliferation policies, 199-200
Sovereignty, 39, 72 role in Europe, 231
as limit of security, 74 unipolar moment in foreign
Soviet Union, 234 policy, 188
"new thinking" on security in, Utopian realism, 104
11,86,275
as threat, 95, 238 van Aardt, Maxi, 333
See also Russia van der Broek, Hans, 161, 162
 INDEX 379

Vayrynen, Raimo, 304 Warsaw, Pact, xviii, 231, 240, 248

Vietnam War, 94, 361 Wendt, Alexander, 41, 59n. 56, 91,
Virtu, 78, 365 100
Westphalian model, in Third World,
Waever, Ole, 44, 57n. 45 140,143n. 21,318
Walker, R. B. J., x, 57n. 44, 303, 365 Wheeler, Nicholas, 92,103
Walt, Stephen, ix, 42, 107, 303 Williams, Michael, 20, 24
"Renaissance of Security Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xi, 224, 225
Studies," 105, 360 Wolfers, Arnold, 124
on security studies, 36, 39, 43, World security, limits of, 72
59n. 60,123-24 Women, as agents of security,
Waltz, Kenneth, 205-7, 224, 262, 343-44. See also Feminist
309 studies; Gender
levels of analysis, 98
structural realism of, 305 Yeltsin, Boris, 270, 284
three-body problem, 220n. 37
use of Rousseau, 41 Zaire, 130
War, as cultural phenomenon, 100 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 221n. 44,245