https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5141-7418
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ABSTRACT
The strategic culture approach has been suffering from a prolonged theoretical stalemate, despite a surge in case studies, which culminated in the Johnston-Gray debate and subsequent schism. The present paper outlines a new approach designed to overcome this deadlock, and consists of three arguments. First, the three previous generations of strategic culture studies have failed to explain how strategic culture influences behaviour. Second, aligning strategic culture theory-building with discursive institutionalism offers a way to overcome this fundamental fallacy. Third, a research programme for strategic culture should draw on computational social science to enable it to present and test middle-range theories.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Alastair I. Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, International Security 19/4 (Spring 1995), 32–64.
2 Ibid, 63.
3 David G. Haglund, ‘What can Strategic Culture Contribute to our Understanding of Security Policies in the Asia-Pacific Region?’ Contemporary Security Policy 35/2 (June 2014), 310–28.
4 Tamir Libel, ‘Restarting History: Post-Cold War Ontological Insecurity, Epistemic Communities and the Remaking of Strategic Cultures’, paper presented at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg, Germany, 17 November 2016.
5 Tamir Libel and Vanessa Hubl, ‘Tracing Strategic Culture: A Computational Approach’, paper presented at the 11th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Barcelona, Spain, 13–16 Sep., 2017.
6 Jack Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Nuclear Options (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1977). Also cited in Colin S. Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context: the First Generation of Theory Strikes Back’, Review of international studies 25/1 (January 1999) 49–69.
7 Michael C. Desch, ‘Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies’, International Security 23/1 (Summer 1998) 141–170; John Glenn, ‘Realism versus Strategic Culture: Competition and Collaboration?’ International Studies Review 11/3 (September 2009) 523–551; Alan Bloomfield, ‘Time to Move on: Reconceptualizing the Strategic Culture Debate’, Contemporary Security Policy 33/3 (October 2012) 437–61.
8 Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture, 8.
9 Jeffrey S. Lantis, ‘Strategic Culture and National Security Policy’, International Studies Review 4/3 (Autumn, 2002) 87–113; Stuart Poore, ‘What is the Context? A Reply to the Gray-Johnston Debate on Strategic Culture’, Review of International Studies 29/2 (April 2003) 279–284; Darryl Howlett and John Glenn, ‘Epilogue: Nordic Strategic Culture’, Cooperation and Conflict 40/1 (March 2005) 121–140.
10 Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, 38, footnote 12.
11 Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, 36–43; Desch, ‘Culture Clash’, 151; Howlett and Glenn, ‘Epilogue’, 123; Glenn, ‘Realism versus Strategic Culture’, 530. For an alternative categorisation, see Desch, ‘Culture Clash’, as well as Haglund, ‘What can Strategic Culture Contribute’, 312–315.
12 Haglund, ‘What can Strategic Culture Contribute’, 316–17; ‘Snyder was the first to coin the term “strategic culture”… However, he did not find the roots of Soviet strategic culture deep in Russian historical-cultural antecedents, nor did he view strategic culture as narrowly determining strategic choice. Indeed, Snyder has distanced himself from the first generation of literature’ (Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, 36, footnote 8).
13 Desch, ‘Culture Clash’, 145; Haglund, ‘What can Strategic Culture Contribute’, 310. As the latter indicated (p. 315), the first wave was largely focused on European security concerns. The ethnocentric bias in the literature was maintained in the two generations that followed.
14 Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, 32, 36–39; Desch, ‘Culture Clash’, 145–147; Poore, ‘What is the Context?’ 280.
15 Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, 32, 38; Howlett and Glenn, ‘Epilogue’, 121.
16 Elizabeth Stone, Comparative Strategic Cultures Literature Review (Fort Belvoir: Defense Threat Reduction Agency-Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, 2006) 1.
17 Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, 33, 38.
18 Desch, ‘Culture Clash’, 148–149; Howlett and Glenn, ‘Epilogue’, 121.
19 Jeffrey Checkel, Jeffrey Friedman, Matthias Matthijs, and Rogers Smith, ‘Roundtable on Ideational Turns in the Four Subdisciplines of Political Science’, Critical Review 28/2 (July 2016) 1–32.
20 Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, 39.
21 Stone, Comparative Strategic Cultures Literature Review, 1.
22 Haglund, ‘What can Strategic Culture Contribute’, 317.
23 Desch, ‘Culture Clash’, 154; Howlett and Glenn, ‘Epilogue’, 123.
24 Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’; Bloomfield, ‘Time to Move On’, 443.
25 Stone, Comparative Strategic Cultures Literature Review, 2.
26 Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context’; Bloomfield, ‘Time to Move On’, 443–5.
27 Poore, ‘What is the Context?’ 280–1.
28 Colin S. Gray, Out of the Wilderness: Prime Time for Strategic Culture (Fort Belvoir VA: Defense Threat Reduction Agency 2006).
29 Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context’, 55.
30 Ibid, 67.
31 Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context’, 52; Gray, Out of the Wilderness, 10.
32 Ibid, 22.
33 Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context’, 51.
34 Ibid, ibid.
35 Gray, Out of the Wilderness, 7.
36 Ibid, 22.
37 Ibid, 18.
38 Gray, ‘Strategic Culture as Context’, 67.
39 Alastair I. Johnston, ‘Strategic Cultures Revisited: Reply to Colin Gray’, Review of International Studies 25/3 (July 1999) 519–23.
40 Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, 34–5.
41 Ibid, 41.
42 Ibid, 45–6. Reference to strategic culture as an ideational explanatory variable may be found ibid on p. 44, footnote 25.
43 Johnston, ‘Strategic Cultures Revisited’, 521.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid, 522.
46 Bloomfield, ‘Time to Move On’, 438–40.
47 Haglund, ‘What can Strategic Culture Contribute’, 317; Alex Burns and Ben Eltham, ‘Australia’s Strategic Culture: Constraints and Opportunities in Security Policymaking’, Contemporary Security Policy 35/2 (June 2014) 187–210; Libel, European Military Culture and Security Governance; Libel, ‘Explaining the Security Paradigm Shift’.
48 Burns and Eltham, ‘Australia’s Strategic Culture: Constraints and Opportunities in Security Policymaking’,187–210; Tamir Libel, ‘Explaining the security paradigm shift: strategic culture, epistemic communities, and Israel’s changing national security policy’, Defence Studies 16/2 (2016), 137–157; Tamir Libel, European military culture and security governance: Soldiers, scholars and national defence universities (London: Routledge 2016); Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, ‘“In Blood and Fire”: Strategic Subcultures and the Roots of Israeli Strategic Culture’, paper presented at the ‘A Western or Eastern Nations? The Case of Israel’ – the 32nd Annual Conference of the Association of Israel Studies, Jerualsem, Israel, 20–22 Jun., 2016.
49 Checkel et al., ‘Roundtable on Ideational Turns’, 21.
50 Ibid, 3–4.
51 Ibid, 3. For a discussion of the analytical eclecticism see ibid, 6–8.
52 Following Ronald R. Krebs and Jennifer K. Lobasz, ‘Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony, Coercion, and the Road to War in Iraq’, Security Studies 16/3 (August 2007), 409–51, a hegemonic position is defined hereby as ‘dominant, constituting for many an unquestioned “common sense” and marginalizing alternative understanding.’ (Ibid, 411–2).
53 Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, 45.
54 Ibid, ibid.
55 Haglund, ‘What can Strategic Culture Contribute’, 316.
56 An interesting aspect of the emerging fourth generation literature is that it seems to lacks the ethnocentric bias and focus on major powers typically found in previous generations. It has already significantly increased the knowledge on Asia-pacific strategic cultures and small states. See: Haglund, ‘What can Strategic Culture Contribute’, 310–311.
57 Burns and Altham, ‘Australia’s Strategic Culture’.
58 Haglund, ‘What can Strategic Culture Contribute’, 323.
59 Andrew L. Oros, ‘Japan’s Strategic Culture: Security Identity in a Fourth Modern Incarnation?’ Contemporary Security Policy 35/2 (June 2014), 227–48.
60 Haglund, ‘What can Strategic Culture Contribute’.
61 Ben-Ephraim, ‘“In Blood and Fire”’.
62 Udi Lebel, ‘Postmodern or Conservative? Competing Security Communities over Military Doctrine-Israeli National-Religious Soldiers as Counter (Strategic) Culture Agents’, Political and Military Sociology: An Annual Review 40 (2013), 23–57.
63 Bloomfield, ‘Time to Move On’. In an unpublished manuscript, Burns presents the evolution of the fourth generation very differently, identifying Jeffrey S. Lantis as the ‘founding father’. However, he does not disclose more information about this study, rendering further discussion impossible. See: Burns, 2017.
64 Bloomfield, ‘Time to Move On’, 438–40; Haglund, ‘What can Strategic Culture Contribute’, 316.
65 Bloomfield argued that at the core of each subculture there is a certain cultural interpretation of who the state’s friends and foes are. See: Bloomfield, ‘Time to Move On’, 438–440.
66 Social mechanism is hereby defined as ‘a complex system, which produces an outcome by the interaction of a number of parts as found in Stuart S. Glennan, ‘Mechanisms and the Nature of Causation’, Erkenntnis, 44/1 (January 1996) 49–71 and Derek Beach and Rasmus B. Pedersen, ‘What is Process Tracing Actually Tracing? The Three Variants of Process Tracing methods And their Uses and Limitations’, in Paper Presented at the American Political Science Association Annual meeting, Seattle, USA, 1–4 Nov., 2–11.
67 Haglund, ‘What can Strategic Culture Contribute’, 316.
68 Ellen M. Immergut, ‘Historical-Institutionalism in Political Science and the Problem of Change’, in Andreas Wimmer and Reinhart Kössler (eds.), Understanding Change: Methods, Methodologies and Metaphors (London: Palgrave Mcmillan UK 2006) 237–59; Sven Steinmo, ‘What is Historical Institutionalism?’ in Donatella Della Porta and Michael Keating (eds.), Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences: A Pluralist Perspective (Newbury Park, CA: Sage 2008) 150–78.
69 Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, ‘Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms’, Political Studies 44/5 (December 1996) 936–57.
70 Steinmo, ‘What is Historical Instituionalism?’ 162. See also Robert C. Lieberman, ‘Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change’, American Political Science Review 96/4 (December 2002), 697–712.
71 Edwin Amenta and Kelly M. Ramsey, ‘Institutional Theory’, in Kevin T. Leicht and Craig J. Jenkins (eds.), Handbook of Politics (New York: Springer 2010), 15–39. See also Immergut, ‘Historical Institutionalism’, 240; Vivien A., ‘Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously: Explaining Change through Discursive Institutionalism as the Fourth “New Institutionalism”’, European Political Science Review 2/1 (March 2010), 1–25; Steinmo, ‘What is Historical Institutionalism’, 167–8.
72 Little attention, if any, has been given to strategic culture by rational-choice institutionalist scholars.
73 Hall and Taylor, ‘Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms’, 5; Steinmo, ‘What is Historical Institutionalism’, 153–8.
74 Hall and Taylor, ‘Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms’, 6; Steinmo, ‘What is Historical Institutionalism’, 157–8.
75 Amneta and Ramsey, ‘Institutional Theory’, 21–2; Immergut, ‘Historical Institutionalism’, 241–2; Steinmo, ‘What is Historical Institutionalism’, 150.
76 Hall and Taylor, ‘Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms’, 8; Amneta and Ramsey, ‘Institutional Theory’, 22, 26; Immergut, ‘Historical Institutionalism’, 240–3.
77 Hall and Taylor, ‘Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms’, 6–7; Steinmo, ‘What is Historical Institutionalism’, 150.
78 Amneta and Ramsey, ‘Institutional Theory’, 23, 25–6; Immergut, ‘Historical Institutionalism’, 242; Steinmo, ‘What is Historical Institutionalism’, 150.
79 Schmidt, ‘Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously’, 10.
80 Amneta and Ramsey, ‘Institutional Theory’, 17.
81 Steinmo, ‘What is Historical Institutionalism’, 162–3.
82 Hall and Taylor, ‘Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms’, 14; Schmidt, ‘Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously’, 13.
83 Hall and Taylor, ‘Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms’, 15.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid, 16; Amneta and Ramsey, ‘Institutional Theory’, 17–8.
86 Ibid.
87 Amneta and Ramsey, ‘Institutional Theory’, 18–20.
88 Ibid, 20.
89 Vivien A. Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse’, Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008), 303–326; Schmidt, ‘Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously’, 1–2; Steinmo, ‘What is Historical Institutionalism’, 169–70.
90 Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism, 313.
91 Ibid, 304.
92 Ibid, 305.
93 Ibid.
94 Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism, 313–4; Schmidt, ‘Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously’, 3, 9–12; Steinmo, ‘What is Historical Institutionalism’, 173.
95 Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism, 313–4.
96 Ibid, 316; Giovanni Capoccia and Daniel R. Kelemen, ‘The Study of Critical Junctures: Theory, Narrative and Counterfactuals in Historical Institutionalism’, World Politics 59/3 (April 2007), 341–69.
97 Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism, 322.
98 Schmidt, ‘Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously’, 2, 15.
99 Libel, European Military Culture and Security Governance; Libel, ‘Explaining the Security Paradigm Shift’. The only other notable exception of fourth-generation large-scale, testable study is by Wilhelm Mirow, Strategic Culture, Securitisation and the Use of Force: Post-9/11 Security Practices of Liberal Democracies (London: Routledge 2016). However, in order to save strategic culture as a testable, rigorous concept he sacrificed its independent, explanatory power by reformulating it as a component within broader securitisation theory. By contrast, Libel, in European Military Culture and Security Governance and ‘Explaining the Security Paradigm Shift’ pursues to refine and re-conceptualise strategic culture as an explanatory theory in itself.
100 Gil Eyal and Larissa Bucholz, ‘From the Sociology of Intellectuals to the Sociology of Interventions’, Annual Review of Sociology 36 (2010), 128–129.
101 Peter. M. Haas, ‘Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination’, International Organization 46/1 (1992), 3.
102 Emanuel Adler and Peter M. Haas, ‘Conclusion: Epistemic Communities, World Order, and the Creation of a Reflective Research Program’, International Organization 46/1 (Winter 1992), 367–90.
103 Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, ‘Preface’, in Claudio Cioffi-Revilla (ed.) Introduction to Computational Social Science: Principles and Applications (London: Springer 2014), location 31; Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, ‘Introduction’, in Claudio Cioffi-Revilla (ed.) Introduction to Computational Social Science: Principles and Applications, (London: Springer 2014), location 955; Ray M. Chang, Robert J. Kauffman and Young O. Kwon, ‘Understanding the Paradigm Shift to Computational Social Science in the Presence of Big Data’, Decision Support Systems, 63 (2014), 67–80.
104 Cioffi-Revilla, ‘Introduction’, location 955.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid, location 963–976.
107 Cioffi-Revilla, ‘Preface’, locations 31–41; Cioffi-Revilla, ‘Introduction’, location 955
108 Javier Borge-Holthoefer, Yamir Moreno and Taha Yasseri, ‘Editorial: At the Crossroads: Lessons and Challenges in Computational Social Science’, Frontiers in Physics 4/37 (August 2016), 1–3.
109 Ibid, 1. Some authors go so far as to claim that ‘the move to computational social science in the presence of big data involves a Kuhnian scientific paradigm shift’ (italic in origin)’. See: Chang, Kauffman and Kwon, ‘Understanding the Paradigm Shift’, 68. This issue, however, is beyond the purview of the present paper.
110 Gary King, ‘Preface’, in Ramon Michael Alvarez (ed.) Computational Social Science: Discovery and Prediction, (New York: Cambridge University Press 2016), location 90. See also Chang, Kauffman and Kwon, ‘Understanding the Paradigm Shift’, 69.
111 Alvarez, ‘Introduction’, locations 190–9; Wallach, ‘Computational Social Science: Toward a Collaborative Future’, locations 7877–89.
112 Libel and Hubl, ‘Tracing Strategic Culture’.
113 Justin Grimmer and Brandom M. Stewart, ‘Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts’, Political Analysis 21/3 (2013), 267–97.
114 Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey T. Checkel, ‘Process Tracing: From Philosophical Roots to Best practices’, in Jeffrey T. Checkel and Andrew Bennet (eds.) Process Tracing in the Social Sciences: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014), 3–38.
115 Thad Dunning, ‘Improving Process Tracing: The Case of Multi-Method Research’, in Jeffrey T. Checkel and Andrew Bennet (eds.) Process Tracing in the Social Sciences: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014) 211–36.
116 Margaret E. Roberts, et al. ‘The structural topic model and applied social science’, Advances in neural information processing systems workshop on topic models: computation, application, and evaluation. 2013.
117 Margaret E. Roberts, Brandon M. Stewart and Edoardo M. Airoldi, ‘A Model of Text for Experimentation in the Social Sciences’, Journal of the American Statistical Association 111/515 (2016), 989.
118 Bennet and Checkel, 2014.
119 Sebastian Benthall, ‘Philosophy of Computational Social Science’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 12/2 (2016), 13–30.
120 Cioffi-Revilla, ‘Bigger Computational Social Science’, 2 footnote 4.
121 Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox, ‘Introduction: Ideas and Politics’, in Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox (eds.) Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011), 8.
122 Institutions are defined hereby ‘… as social rules, norms and ideas (Leitideen) that guide, but also restrain, social behavior’, see: Bernhard Ebbinghaus, Can Path Dependence Explain Institutional Change? Two Approaches Applied to Welfare State Reform Discussion Paper 05/2 (Cologne: Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung 2005), 6.
123 Béland and Cox, ‘Introduction’, 8–10.
124 Ibid, 11.
125 Ibid, 11–12.
126 Ibid, 16.
127 Ibid, 17.
128 Christopher Lucas, ‘Computer-assisted text analysis for comparative politics’, Political Analysis 23/2 (2015), 254–277.
129 See for example: Naoki Egami, et al. ‘How to make causal inferences using texts’, Accessed October 20 2018. Available at: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/bstewart/files/ais.pdf.
130 Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, 45–6.
131 Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture.
132 Libel, European Military Culture and Security Governance; Libel, ‘Explaining the Security Paradigm Shift’.
134 Gary King, ‘Restructuring the Social Sciences: Reflections from Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science’, PS: Political Science & Politics 47/1 (January 2014), 165–72.
135 Raphael H. Heiberger and Jan R. Riebling, ‘Installing Computational Social Science: Facing the Challenges of New Information and Communication Technologies in Social Science’, Methodological Innovation 9 (2016), 1–11.
136 Ibid, 373.
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Tamir Libel
Tamir Libel is a former Beatriu de Pinós research fellow at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI). Before joining IBEI he was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin, and a visiting scholar at both the Department of Political Science at the University of Trier and the Department of History at the University of Marburg.