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Abstract
Conventional wisdom on the phenomenon of war is criticised for providing little relevant guidance to deal with the security challenges of our era. One reason is that this attitude uncritically assumes power as synonymous with force. In response, ‘productive war’ is here proposed as a re-conceptualisation of war based on Michel Foucault's alternative understanding of power. Productive war appreciates the role of violence but subordinates it to non-kinetic dynamics influencing the dimension of meaning in international security. This theoretical perspective provides a conceptual framework to deal with the dynamics of political mobilisation essential to create public support for nation-building abroad and for visions of world order.
Acknowledgment
The author thanks Christopher Coker, Kristin Ropstad, Nigel de Lee, Tor-Erik Hanssen, Sigbjørn Halsne and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments on earlier drafts. This article does not represent the views of the Norwegian Military Academy.
Notes
1Carl von Clausewitz, On War. Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (London: Everyman's Library [1832]1993), 83.
2This selective use of Clausewitz's work does not in many ways do justice to someone, who saw war as deeply embedded in socio-political contexts, see Peter Paret, ‘Clausewitz’, in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton UP 1986), 186–213. Still, it is the military side of Clausewitz's work that has been most influential in important policy circles, as reflected in President George W. Bush's preface to the United States (US) National Security Strategy stipulating that to ‘maintain and expand our national strength … We must maintain a military without peer.’ United States National Security Council, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2006), <www.dtic.mil/futurejointwarfare/strategic/nss2006.pdf>. The same understanding has shaped the development of the US Armed Forces as expressed in US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2010, <www.dtic.mil/jv2010/jv2010.pdf>. A similar bias is largely assumed in the academic field of International Relations, for example, in the last decade's debate about US hegemony in world politics, see John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security and the American Experience (Cambridge: Harvard UP 2004); and Barry R. Posen, ‘Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of US Hegemony’, International Security 28/1 (2003), 5–46. Also within the military realm, see Warren Chin, ‘The Gulf War and the Future of War’, in Simon Trew and Gary Sheffield (eds), 100 Years of Conflict 1900–2000 (Phoenix Mill, UK: Sutton Publishing 2000), 319–38.
3Joseph S. Nye, The Powers to Lead (Oxford: OUP 2008); and Phillip Bobbit, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Knopf 2008).
4Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (London: Atlantic Books 2004), 85; and John Ikenberry, ‘The End of the Neo-Conservative Moment’, Survival 46/1 (Spring 2004), 8–9.
5For example, Paul T. Mitchell, Network Centric Warfare: Coalition Operations in the Age of US Military Primacy, Adelphi Paper 385 (London: Routledge for ISSS 2006); Hew Strachan, ‘The Lost Meaning of Strategy’, Survival 47/3 (Autumn 2005), 33–54; and from the military ranks Col. Thomas X. Hammes, USMC ret., The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St Paul, MN: Zenith Press 2006).
6Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford UP 1999). Force commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, US Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, also promotes this view, see NATO ISAF, Afghanistan, Commander's Initial Assessment (Kabul: ISAF HQ 2009), <www.media.washingtonpost.com/wp-/politics/documents/Assessment_Redacted_092109. pdf?sid=ST2009092003140>.
7Jonathan Goodhand and David Hulme, ‘From Wars to Complex Political Emergencies: Understanding Conflict and Peace-Building in the New World Disorder’, Third World Quarterly 20/1 (1999), 17.
8Productive war is defined as a discursive conflict about socio-political hegemony, which is produced by expedient discursive effects, created by networks of heterogeneous actors operating from local centres of power-knowledge to influence the discursive battlefield with the strategic objective of winning the will of the people.
9Julian Reid, ‘Foucault on Clausewitz: Conceptualizing the Relationship between War and Power’, Alternatives 28/1 (2003), 1–28, reaches the antithesis of the present conclusion when he compares Foucault's theorising of power with the philosophical rather than, as does this article, the more influential military side of Clausewitz's work.
10This dimension is imperative in US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, US Army Field Manual No. 3-24/Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33 (Univ. of Chicago Press 2007), 44–5. Also William S. Lind et al., ‘The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation’, Marine Corps Gazette (Oct. 1989), 22–6; and John Arquilla and David F. Ronfeldt, The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an American Information Strategy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 1999).
11Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio Press 1982), 1.
13See, for example, Lawrence Freedman, ‘The Changing Forms of Military Conflict’, Survival 40/4 (Winter 1998–99), 39–40; Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought (London: Frank Cass 2001), xvii; and Michael Howard, War in European History (Oxford: OUP 1977), 37.
12For example, Carl Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan: A Commentary/Remark on the Concept of the Political (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt 1963).
14Clausewitz, On War, 113.
15Ibid., 173.
16See note 2.
17A case in point is the US involvement in the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1973.
18John E. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Modern War (New York: Basic Books 1989); and Herfried Münkler, The New Wars (Oxford: Polity 2005).
19Christopher Coker, Humane Warfare (London: Routledge 2001). As expressed by Western heads of State and government in 1991: ‘The threat of a simultaneous, full-scale attack on all of NATO's European fronts has effectively been removed.’ North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, The Alliance's New Strategic Concept (Brussels: North Atlantic Council 1991), <www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_23847.htm>, para. 7.
20Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Allen Lane 2005), 372. More broadly Cooper argues that the European way of dealing with external threats is to create ‘voluntary empires that co-opt such people in the European way of life and political culture’. Cooper, The Breaking of Nations, 78.
21Kaldor, New and Old Wars. True, the importance of public support to national military campaigns has been vital at least since World War I, see Phillip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day (Manchester UP 2003). Yet, the concept of compulsory war largely assumes that confronted with threats to national survival people will rally around the flag. This cannot be taken for granted today, as the stakes are much lower and the purpose and specific deployment of Western armed forces have become politicised.
22NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe from 1993–97, US Gen. George A. Joulwan, explains: ‘NATO is exceptionally dependent upon positive public opinion. Political will to perform any task can never be expected unless the publics are clearly informed and sympathetic to our endeavors.’ Cited in Robin C.L. Clifford and T.J. Wilton, ‘Media Operations and the ARRC’, in Stephen Badsey (ed.), The Media and International Security (London: Frank Cass 2000), 11.
23Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 10.
24The recent US Counterinsurgency Field Manual stipulates: ‘The primary objective of any COIN [counterinsurgency] operation is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government.’ US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 37.
25Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs 2004). Smith argues that ‘the other manner in which we fight’ is through the media. Smith, Utility of Force, 284. He is supported by colleagues from the US Marines who point out that ‘[i]nsurgencies are wars of ideas’, James N. Mattis and Frank Hoffman, ‘Future Warfare: The Rise of Hybrid Wars’, Proceedings (Nov. 2005), 19. On the United Nations' successful use of public diplomacy in the Cambodian peace process 1992–93, see Ingrid A. Lehmann, Peacekeeping and Public Information: Caught in the Crossfire (London: Frank Cass 1999).
26John Mackinlay, ‘Defeating Complex Insurgency – Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan’, Whitehall Paper 64 (2005), 41–45; and Münkler, New Wars, 81.
27Smith, Utility of Force, 289.
28In 1999, during NATO's war against Serbia Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair argued: ‘When you fight an action like this in modern politics, in our modern media world, you're fighting it on television.’ Cited in Rhiannon Vickers, ‘Blair's Kosovo Campaign: Political Communications, the Battle for Public Opinion and Foreign Policy’, Civil Wars 3/1 (Spring 2000), 60. This view is generally accepted although the more specific relation between media and political processes is disputed. For differing views on this subject compare Steven Livingston and Todd Eachus, ‘Humanitarian Crisis and US Foreign Policy: Somalia and the CNN Effect Reconsidered’, Political Communication 12 (1995), 413–29 with Piers Robinson, The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention (London: Routledge 2002).
29Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, ‘Power in International Politics’, International Organization 59/1 (2005), 40, 49.
30Robert A. Dahl, ‘The Concept of Power’, Behavioral Science 2 (July 1957), 202–3. A and B are the theoretical actors. For the present purpose it suffices to refer to this early and most influential article which establishes the fundamental assumptions of his extensive subsequent writings on the subject, see Clarissa Rile Hayward, De-facing Power (Cambridge: CUP 2000), Ch. 2.
31Dahl, ‘The Concept of Power’, 203.
32Ibid.
33Brian C. Schmidt, ‘Realist Conceptions of Power’, in Felix Berenskoetter and M.J. Williams (eds), Power in World Politics (London: Routledge 2007), 43–63. This view also underpins many seminal works on strategy, for example, Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1966).
34Barnett and Duvall refer to productive power as one of four prominent power theories in the social sciences, see idem, ‘Power in International Politics’, 44. Foucault never used the term productive power. In fact, he did not conceptualise power although he did consider it a central theme of his scholarship, see Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982), 777.
35Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books [1975]1979), 194.
36Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality (London: Penguin Books [1976]1998), 131–59.
37Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 98.
38Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, 777–8.
39Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 296.
40The term discourse comes in many guises. Some use the notion in terms that are too general and evasive to serve as a means to reconceptualise the central dynamic in war, this includes Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock 1972), 80; and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso 1985), 105. Others use the term in a too specific sense for the present purpose, e.g. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (La Salle, IL: Open Court [1916]1986) considers discourse as a linguistic sequence that is more extended than a single sentence. None of these understandings apply in this article, which uses a particular variant of the term discourse derived primarily from one of Foucault's major works, The Will to Knowledge.
41Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 98.
42Ibid., 100.
43Ibid., 94–5.
44I coin the term ‘discursive battlefield’ inspired by Foucault's term ‘the field of force relations’ where the latter is discursive, Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 101–2. This is different from the physical battlefield, which forms part of the defining features of compulsory war. Many distinguish between the material and the perceptional realm in world politics, see note 2; Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Henry Holt 2000), 161–75; and also Lawrence Freedman, The Transformation of Strategic Affairs, Adelphi Paper 379 (London: Routledge for IISS 2006). Efforts to describe the latter realm in theoretical terms include Robin Brown, ‘The Contagiousness of Conflict: E.E. Schattschneider as a Theorist of the Information Society', Information, Communication & Society 5/2 (2002), 258–75; and David Betz ‘The Virtual Dimension of Contemporary Insurgency and Counterinsurgency', Small Wars & Insurgencies 19/4 (December 2008), 510–40.
45Michel Foucault et al., Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (New York: Picador 2003), 15.
46This carries associations to the cardinal importance of a political cause in counter-insurgency operations, David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International [1964]2006), 11–6; and Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam (London: Chatto 1966), 63–9. However, they see this as an operational method to achieve a political end within a state. In productive war political mobilisation is the overall goal and has no geographical limitations.
47Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (London: Macmillan 1994), 193–212. Although not a discourse analysis his historical account supports this argument.
48See Michael H. Doyle, ‘Too Little, Too Late? Justice and Security Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, in Charles T. Call (ed.), Constructing Justice and Security after War (Washington DC: US Institute of Peace 2007), 231–70.
49Clausewitz, On War, 113.
50US Marines' acknowledgement of this phenomenon is found in Gen. Charles C. Krulak, ‘The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War’, Marines Corps Gazette 83/1 (Jan. 1999), 18–22.
51For an overview on the academic literature on this cross-disciplinary subject, see Robin Brown, ‘Information Operations, Public Diplomacy and Spin: The US and the Politics of Perception Management’, Journal of Information Warfare 1/3 (2002), 40–50.
52While political communication as a means of power largely has gained little academic interest in the study of international relations, it has long been an integral part of the broader Social Sciences, see Steven H. Chaffee and John L. Hochheimer, ‘The Beginnings of Political Communication Research in the United States: Origins of the “Limited Effects” Model’, in Everett M. Rogers and Francis Balle (eds), The Media Revolution in America and Western Europe (Norwood, NJ: Ablex 1982), 263–83.
53The term ‘facts’ is placed within quotation marks to convey that these are defined to people by systems of legitimate knowledge. This subjective side to facts is formulated in more practical terms by Tony Blair's former Press Secretary, Alastair Campbell: ‘Facts do not always speak for themselves. What is an interesting “fact” in the morning gets analysed to death on live TV, and so has to become something different on the evening's bulletins, and in the next day's paper, by a press bored with a “fact” already subject to so much commentary.’ Alastair Campbell, ‘Communications Lessons for NATO, the Military and Media’, RUSI Journal 144/4 (Aug. 1999), 34.
54Clausewitz, On War, 83.
55Ibid., 158.
56NATO ISAF, Afghanistan, Commander's Initial Assessment, 1-1 – 1-3.