Introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT

Since its substantive development after the Second World War, Strategic Studies has seen different waves of research foci, each rising as the other declines. This special issue uses a ‘fashion’ lens to analyse these frequent thematical shifts and their related conceptual creations. It looks at both long-term and short-term changes in strategic thought, addressing changes in content and their underlying dynamics and patterns. This issue contributes to our understanding of the history and sociology of Strategic Studies, but also sheds new light on recent debates in the field, including on hybrid warfare, counterinsurgency, and cyber war.

KEYWORDS:

• Strategic Studies
• fads
• fashions
• strategic thought
• changing character of war

In 1969, Raymond Aron noted that ‘[s]trategic thought draws its inspiration each century, or rather, at each moment of history, from the problems which events themselves pose’.¹ John Baylis and Jim Wirtz have even argued that ‘interest in strategic studies is cyclical and reflects the times’,² suggesting that the field is attractive mainly when its knowledge can be mobilised to deal with current political affairs. Thus, while the field of Strategic Studies has a stable core interest – the threat, use, and control of force for political purposes³—its research agenda has been somewhat volatile. Strategic Studies has seen different waves of predominant research topics, largely driven by the threats perceived by Western defence establishments, especially that of the United States. This influence of current affairs on the research agenda goes back to what is widely understood as the field’s foundational question, which emerged after the Second World War: how to navigate the rivalry between the two nuclear superpowers.⁴ This moment established a close personal and ideational connection between practitioners and scholars in the field that persists to this day and fundamentally shapes their research agenda.

Since the Second World War, this agenda evolved considerably. Nuclear weapons, limited war, deterrence, crisis management and arms control dominated the first decade or so, often referred to as the field’s ‘golden age’,⁵ followed by a shift to counterinsurgency during the Kennedy administration. Not until the early- to mid−1970s, as the US extricated itself from the Vietnam quagmire, and amidst the Soviet Union achieving nuclear parity, did the nuclear issue regain its earlier prominence, added to which the US military shifted its focus back to conventional warfighting.⁶ Within a decade, counterinsurgency briefly returned in the guise of ‘low intensity conflict’, although preparing for a large-scale conventional war in Europe remained dominant. After the Cold War, interest shifted to the ‘revolution in military affairs’, inspired by the lop-sided US victory in the 1991 Gulf War, and to ethnic conflict and peacekeeping in response to the violent break-up of Yugoslavia. In the absence of the Soviet Union, the threat posed by ‘rogue states’ was elevated in importance despite being considered relatively insignificant prior to 1991. By the late 1990s, the rise of China was viewed as the looming security challenge. After the 9/11 terror attacks, China dropped off the radar screen as these attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq generated a new wave of interest in terrorism and counterinsurgency. By the early 2010s, focus shifted back to great power conflict, inspired in part by the Obama administration’s announcement of a pivot to Asia, and further entrenched in the following years with Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and intensifying competition in the South China Sea.

As part of each topical reorientation, new terms and concepts were coined. During the Cold War, we saw, for example, the prominence of terms such as ‘massive retaliation’, ‘flexible response’, and ‘mutual assured destruction’. After the Cold War, numerous concepts loomed large such as ‘information warfare’, ‘transformation’, ‘network-centric warfare’, ‘effects-based operations’, ‘Fourth Generation Warfare’, ‘asymmetric warfare’, ‘cyber warfare’, ‘full-spectrum operations’, ‘grey zone’, ‘hybrid warfare’, ‘integrated approach’, ‘integrated deterrence’, and so on. The ad-hoc creation of these terms and concepts raises the question of whether we tend to periodically reinvent the wheel and create conceptual silos of strategic thought. In other words: do those concepts allow us to accumulate knowledge or have we succumbed to some sort of ‘concept-hopping’?

Many of these concepts were intensely embraced by both practitioners and scholars, but only for a limited amount of time. Once praised as ways to win wars or portrayed as the face of future warfare, concepts such as the ‘revolution in military affairs’ and ‘counterinsurgency’ went in and out of fashion in a matter of years. Despite the immense effort that went into debating, researching and elaborating each of these concepts, they later moved to the margins of the policy debate, with scholars losing interest as well. At the same time, these terms often lacked an agreed-upon definition, leaving their meaning up to authors’ individual tastes. Commentators in the field have noticed this pattern and drawn attention to the plethora of buzzwords and fashions that dominate strategic thought. Reactions have ranged from engagement with and criticism of individual concepts,⁷ to attempts to understand the recurrence of concepts as a pattern in a comprehensive manner,⁸ to outright rejection of categorizing wars in general.⁹

This special issue aims to contribute to our understanding of the causes and effects of the frequent thematical shifts and related conceptual creations. How do shifts from one topic to another occur? What kinds of topics attract attention? Which research gets funded? How have external actors and events shaped the research agenda? How do shifts in policy relevance affect the topics scholars address and the quality and progress of the field? We approach these questions from a fashion perspective, which has the primary advantage of offering a systemic perspective, thus allowing us to grasp recurring fashions as a pattern in the field.

The terms ‘fad’ and ‘fashion’ denote a ‘short-lived enthusiasm’ that can capture essentially anything, from clothes to ideas.¹⁰ Research on fashion(s) as a social phenomenon has been conducted mainly in sociology, where the interest is on its social function.¹¹ This approach mainly looks at clothing, but has always held that fashion can affect any social realm, including that of science and academia.¹² In management studies, a separate research strand has developed that critically studies management fads and fashions, i.e., the quick overturn of leading management principles.¹³ Fads and fashions can be understood as the two opposite points of a continuum: fads are ‘episodic’ and unrelated to one another – examples include hula hoops, planking, or fidget spinners – while fashions are ‘systematic, [yet] not predictable’.¹⁴ Fashions are ‘a succession of styles, each rising in popularity and then falling as its successor rises’.¹⁵ We can situate the popular concepts related to the character of war and warfare closer to the ‘fashion’ end of the continuum: they are related to one another, for example, in that they all try to capture a formula to describe the contemporary character of war or a panacea to win within this context; and they all are based on the idea that the character of war is forever changing, which legitimises the constant flow of new concepts. The decline of one fashion tends to go hand in hand with the rise of another. At almost every point in time, one can point to the ‘warfare fashion’ of the day.

Fashions display three key characteristics: they are transitory, vague, and powerful. The fact that fads and fashions eventually diminish in popularity distinguishes them from innovations.¹⁶ The duration of fashionability can vary, albeit typically lasting a matter of years rather than multiple decades. In the case of fashionable concepts, it is usually the label that is transitory, rather than the idea per se: Duyvesteyn and Michaels have noted the ‘tendency [in Western strategic thought] to re-label old, tried and tested concepts for new, fashionable and catchy terms that, in fact, do not denote anything new’.¹⁷ A fashionable concept, by definition, is widely used by a plethora of actors who attach their preferred meaning to the label, thus rendering it increasingly vague and ambiguous. Often, this widespread use broadens a concept to such an extent that it is eventually stripped of its substantial content. Finally, fashions are powerful, which is why it is key to not simply dismiss them, but understand their dynamics and origins. Due to their reach, fashions become self-reinforcing: scholars and commentators might want or even feel coerced to refer to the latest fashion in order to show that they are aware of and able to contribute to the latest developments in the field, or to increase their chances of securing funding or getting published.

The terms ‘fashion’ and ‘fad’ are often negatively connotated, meaning that they can be used or understood as a call to drop a concept or a practice. While this issue does problematize fashions in the field, it does not call for simply dismissing them. We acknowledge that fashions will inevitably occur in Strategic Studies, as they do in other academic fields. Because of this, our aim should be to understand their drivers and effects. Moreover, the content of fashions is not random; they might point to knowledge gaps of the field or issues that had previously been marginalised.¹⁸

Researching trends and fashions in Strategic Studies, of course, brings several challenges with it. First and foremost, the contributors to this issue had to tackle the basic question of how to define Strategic Studies. The field’s key concern might be the study of the threat, use, and control of force for political purposes, but it is difficult to determine the boundaries of this endeavour. This is additionally complicated by the history of Strategic Studies and its relation to Security Studies. For some, Strategic Studies is simply the ‘traditional’ wing of Security Studies.¹⁹ Others consider Strategic Studies as an interdisciplinary field that is rooted at least in equal parts in Security Studies and History, but also draws on fields such as economics, psychology, sociology, and geography.²⁰ Additionally, there is the question of where and by whom Strategic Studies is done. As noted above, the field is characterised by a close connection between scholars and practitioners. Moreover, relevant research is carried out not only in universities, but also in military academies, and civilian and military think tanks. Taking this aspect into account is fundamental to understanding the field’s dynamics; the contributions to this issue thus specifically survey a variety of actors.

Related to this aspect is the geographic and cultural dimension of Strategic Studies. While strategic theory might be the same throughout time and place, the research agenda of Strategic Studies is typically influenced by the (strategic) culture of the state within which it is practiced. Our special issue focuses on Western Strategic Studies and, within that, largely on North-American and British actors. Zooming in on this field was chosen over a comparative approach that could survey trends and fashions across a more diverse range of cultures of Strategic Studies; the latter, too, is a worthwhile research endeavour and will hopefully be taken on by someone.

This special issue brings together a collection of articles covering the rise and fall of different concepts that have dominated the field at one point or another, as well as exploring the dynamics underpinning this phenomenon. Jeffrey Michaels and Matthew Ford examine the role philanthropic foundations have played at different times in providing the essential financial resources needed to allow academics working in the field to flourish. They discuss the importance of funding to those topics that receive scholarly attention and note the consequences when funding evaporates. In addition, Michaels and Ford highlight the shifting political leanings of the key philanthropic foundations supporting the field.

Lukas Milevski provides a discussion of long-term and short-term fashion cycles and how they affect each other. Covering strategic thought from the Renaissance to today, Milevski offers a novel perspective on the dynamics of change in strategic thinking. He then zooms in on the Clausewitzian understanding of war as the present long-term fashion cycle, and analyses short-term fashions that appeared within this long-term cycle, reaffirming or challenging it.

This is followed by three substantive articles that evaluate individual fashionable concepts and utilize different methods to measure them. David Ucko and Thomas Marks analyse the rise and fall of the counterinsurgency fashion in the United States, particularly in the post−9/11 period. They argue that scholars and practitioners too hastily embraced and later too quickly abandoned the concept, which led to superficial engagement and limited learning from the episode. Their contribution not only offers an insightful discussion of the ‘counterinsurgency era’; it specifically shows how it was the fad-like engagement with the concept and the practice that led scholars and practitioners alike to draw flawed conclusions and ‘learn’ incomplete lessons.

Samuel Zilincik and Isabelle Duyvesteyn’s article covers the evolution of cyber warfare as a topic addressed by strategic studies scholars. Specifically, they explain the limited duration of interest in the concept of cyber warfare despite the growing interest of Western governments in the role of cyberspace for statecraft and domestic security. Their study shows that fashions can have both positive and negative effects: the cyber-warfare fashion provoked new debates and opened up new routes for research; however, its underlying idea to treat digital interactions as a form of warfare has implicitly challenged and confused some of Strategic Studies fundamental tenets and concepts.

Finally, Chiara Libiseller examines when and why the ‘hybrid war’ concept became fashionable and how this affected academic research. Specifically, she shows that as NATO adopted the term in 2014 – as Russia annexed Crimea and became involved in Eastern Ukraine – academics too became interested in it, and largely adopted NATO’s version of the term, including its political assumptions. This led to a politicisation of the academic debate on ‘hybrid warfare’, which meant that, ironically, neither the concept itself nor the case of Ukraine were engaged with in any detail. Based on this discussion, she also reflects on the effects of the close connection between scholars and practitioners in the field on knowledge production.

The special issue concludes with some observations from Lawrence Freedman, a leading scholar of the field, and a close observer and critic of its fads and fashions. Freedman not only engages with the phenomenon from within the field, but also discusses it in relation to other academic fields. He notes that although they can often have a negative impact on intellectual development, they still generate considerable useful knowledge.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chiara Libiseller

Chiara Libiseller has recently graduated with a PhD from the War Studies Department at King’s College London. Her thesis, entitled ‘Reconceptualising War: The Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies’, investigated the underlying processes of recurring conceptual fashions in the field. She is currently a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Jeffrey H. Michaels

Jeffrey H. Michaels is the IEN Senior Fellow in American Foreign Policy and International Security at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). He also holds Visiting Fellowships with the Department of War Studies, King’s College London and the Changing Character of War Centre, Pembroke College, Oxford. Earlier experience included working as a Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s, as well as serving as an official with NATO and the US Defense Department. He is the co-author, with Sir Lawrence Freedman, of The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (4th Edition).

Notes

¹ Raymond Aron, ‘The Evolution of Modern Strategic Thought’, in Alastair Buchan (ed.), Problems of Modern Strategy: Part One, Adelphi Paper 54 (London: IISS 1969), 7. On the relation of events and theory development see Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP 2009), 55f.

² John Baylis and James J. Wirtz, ‘Introduction: Strategy in the Contemporary World: Strategy after 9/11’, in John Baylis, James J. Wirtz, and Colin S. Gray (eds.), Strategy in the Contemporary World, 5th edition (Oxford UK: Oxford UP 2016), 2.

³ Cf. Stephen M. Walt, ‘The Renaissance of Security Studies’, International Studies Quarterly 35/2 (1991), 212; Thomas G. Mahnken, ‘The Future of Strategic Studies’, Journal of Strategic Studies 26/1 (2003), x; Isabelle Duyvesteyn and James E. Worrall, ‘Global Strategic Studies: A Manifesto’, Journal of Strategic Studies 40/3 (2017), 247.

⁴ This refers to the institutionalisation of the field which most commentators locate at the beginning of the Cold War; see, for example, Joseph S. Nye Jr. and Sean M. Lynn-Jones, ‘International Security Studies: A Report of a Conference on the State of the Field’, International Security 12/4 (1988), 8; Steven E. Miller, ‘International Security at Twenty-Five: From One World to Another’, International Security 26/1 (2001), 5; Ole Wæver, ‘The History and Social Structure of Security Studies as a Practico-Academic Field’, in Trine Villumsen Berling and Christian Bueger (eds.), Security Expertise: Practice, Power, Responsibility (London, New York: Routledge 2015), 79f.

⁵ Cf. Walt, ‘The Renaissance of Security Studies’.

⁶ For the evolution of nuclear strategy see Lawrence Freedman and Jeffrey H. Michaels, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy: New, Updated and Completely Revised (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan 2019).

⁷ Relevant contributions are too numerous to list, but prominent examples include Silove who aimed to bring back order into the debate on grand strategy, and Futter who argued in favour of abandoning the term ‘cyber’ due to its ambiguity; see Nina Silove, ‘Beyond the Buzzword: The Three Meanings of “Grand Strategy”’, Security Studies 27/1 (2018), 27–57; Andrew Futter, ‘“Cyber” Semantics: Why We Should Retire the Latest Buzzword in Security Studies’, Journal of Cyber Policy 3/2 (2018), 201–16.

⁸ Karl Erik Haug and Ole Jorgen Maaø (eds.), Conceptualizing Modern War (London, UK: Hurst 2012); Bettina Renz and Hanna Smith, ‘PART 1: “Hybrid warfare” as an Operational Approach to War: A New War-Winning Formula?’ in ibid. (eds.), Russia and Hybrid Warfare: Going Beyond the Label, Aleksanteri Papers 1/2016, 2–10; Chiara Libiseller, Reconceptualising War: The Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies, unpublished PhD thesis, King’s College London, 2022.

⁹ See M.L.R. Smith, ‘COIN and the Chameleon: The Category Errors of Trying to Divide the Indivisible’, in Celeste Ward Gventer, David Jones and M.L.R. Smith (eds.), The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan 2014), 32–57; Colin S. Gray, Categorical Confusion? The Strategic Implications of Recognizing Challenges Either as Irregular or Traditional (Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute 2012).

¹⁰ Joel Best, Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads (Berkeley et al.: University of California Press 2006), 2.

¹¹ The usual motivations that are identified are distinction and assimilation; see Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion’, American Journal of Sociology 62/6 (May 1957), 541–58; Herbert Blumer, ‘Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection’, The Sociological Quarterly 10/3 (1969), 275–91; Lars Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy, transl. by John Irons (London: Reaktion Books 2006), 41f.

¹² Cf. Blumer, ‘Fashion’; Patrik Aspers and Frédéric Godart, ‘Sociology of Fashion: Order and Change’, Annual Review of Sociology 39 (2013), 171–92. Svendsen, Fashion, 15. For law, see Cass R. Sunstein, ‘Foreword: On Academic Fads and Fashions’, Michigan Law Review 99/6 (2001), 1251–264; for conservation, see Kent H. Redford, Christine Padoch, and Terry Sunderland, ‘Fads, Funding, and Forgetting in Three Decades of Conservation’, Conservation Biology 27/3 (2013), 437–8.

¹³ Eric Abrahamson and Alessandro Piazza, ‘The Lifecycle of Management Ideas: Innovation, Diffusion, Institutionalization, Dormancy, and Rebirth’, in Andrew Sturdy et al. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Management Ideas (Oxford, UK: Oxford UP 2019).

¹⁴ Best, Flavor of the Month, 11ff.

¹⁵ Ibid., 11.

¹⁶ Ibid., 5f.

¹⁷ Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Jeffrey H. Michaels, ‘Revitalizing Strategic Studies in an Age of Perpetual Conflict’, Orbis 60/1 (2016): 32. See also Jos Benders and Kees van Veen, ‘What’s in a Fashion? Interpretative Viability and Management Fashions’, Organization 8/1 (2001), 47.

¹⁸ Benders and van Veen, ‘What’s in a Fashion?’ 47.

¹⁹ Buzan and Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies.

²⁰ Cf. Baylis and Wirtz, ‘Introduction’.