Interpreting Global Security

Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow, Ian Hall, Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow, Ian Hall

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138289451
• eBook ISBN: 9781134445011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited collection explores the fruitfulness of applying an interpretive approach to the study of global security. The interpretive approach concentrates on unpacking the meanings and beliefs of various policy actors, and, crucially, explains those beliefs by locating them in historical traditions and as responses to dilemmas. Interpretivists thereby seek to highlight the contingency, diversity, and contestability of the narratives, expertise, and beliefs that inform political action. The interpretive approach is widespread in the study of governance and public policy, but arguably it has not yet had much impact on security studies. The book therefore deploys the interpretive approach to explore contemporary issues in international security, combining theoretical engagement with good empirical coverage through a novel set of case studies.

Bringing together a fresh mix of world renowned and up-and-coming scholars from across the fields of security studies, political theory and international relations, the chapters explore the beliefs, traditions, and dilemmas that have informed security practice on the one hand, and the academic study of security on the other, as well as the connections between them. All contributors look to situate their work against a broader historical background and long-standing traditions, allowing them to take a critical yet historically informed approach to the material.

1 Interpreting global security

Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall

This book aims to make sense of the transformations that our theories and practices of global security have undergone in the past quarter century. Global security could once be described in terms of the actions and interactions of sovereign states with hierarchical and authoritative political institutions directing police forces and organized militaries to deal with internal and external threats (Buzan and Hanson 2009: 66–100). The security of the state was assumed to imply the security of citizens and communities. The state was presumed to act in the ‘national interest’ and to seek to maximize its economic and military power to secure that interest (Morgenthau 1951). Global security was often understood in terms of the ‘balance of power’ between states and alliances of states (Waltz 1979). International organizations and international law were sometimes thought to restrain political and military elites, but only within limits (Claude 1962). The world of global security, in other words, was one of power-seeking states keeping the peace at home and fighting wars –or threatening to fight – abroad.

This understanding of global security is now widely seen as obsolete by both theorists and practitioners. Most now believe that all states are now subject to new transnational challenges – human and environmental – that are not easily addressed by old, statist responses. Established, Western states now address security challenges in new ways, employing new modes of governance and even engaging private actors to deal with particular problems (Krahmann 2003). We now recognize that many non-Western states lack authoritative political institutions, police forces or organized militaries. Most theorists and practitioners now acknowledge that the security of the state does not always imply the security of citizens and communities (Buzan 1991). States are often predators rather than protectors, acting not in the ‘national interest’, but in that of sectional interests. Strengthening the power of the state can – and frequently does – mean increasing the insecurity of individuals and groups. In this context, global security can no longer be understood just in terms of states, balances or institutions, but requires new frameworks of analysis and new political practices (Buzan et al. 1998).

This book is one response to that demand for new frameworks of analysis. Collectively the essays engage with the various theories of global security that have emerged since the end of the Cold War and the practices with which they are associated. To introduce this account of global security, we must first describe the interpretive approach to social science, for the account of global security found in this book arose out of an experiment with interpretive theory (see Bevir et al. 2013). Next we consider the way this interpretive theory transforms our understanding of global security and the complex picture of global security that emerges from the essays in this book. Finally, we conclude by considering the lessons learnt for the future of an interpretive theory of international relations, especially in the study of global security.

Interpretive theory

Although the essays in this book cover a range of cases of global security, they all adopt an interpretive approach. Following interpretive theory, they ask these questions:

1 What elite beliefs informed security policies and practices? How did national and local elites conceive, for example, of the balance of power, the national interest, economic development and global security?

2 What traditions underpinned these beliefs? Are there rival traditions inspiring competing policies and conflicting actions?

3 Did the relevant beliefs, policies and practices change over time? If so, what dilemmas led people to change their beliefs and how did the relevant actors conceive those dilemmas?

Our interpretive theory can thus be introduced through its use of the three key concepts found in these questions: beliefs, traditions and dilemmas.

Why beliefs?

As early as the 1950s, philosophers were forcefully criticizing positivism and its concept of pure experience (Quine 1961: 20–46). Yet international relations scholars have often failed to take seriously the consequences of rejecting a positivist notion of pure experience. Many cling tenaciously to the positivist idea that we can understand or explain human behaviour by objective social facts about people rather than by reference to their beliefs. They thus exclude the interpretation of beliefs from the ambit of the discipline on positivist grounds. Other international relations scholars reject positivism, distancing themselves from the idea of pure experience, but still abstain from interpreting beliefs. Often, they try to avoid direct appeals to beliefs by reducing beliefs to intervening variables between actions and social facts (see especially Goldstein and Keohane 1993).

Interpretive theorists argue, however, that once we accept that there are no pure experiences, we undermine the positivist case against interpreting beliefs. A rejection of pure experience implies that we cannot reduce beliefs to intervening variables. When we say that a state has particular interests for which it will go to war, we rely on a particular theory to derive its interests from its global role and position. Someone with a different set of theories might believe that the state is in a different global position or that it has different interests. The important point here is that how the people we study see their position and interests inevitably depends on their theories, which might differ significantly from our theories.

To explain people’s actions, we implicitly or explicitly invoke their beliefs and desires. When we reject positivism, we cannot identify their beliefs by appealing to the allegedly objective social facts about them. Instead, we must explore the beliefs through which they construct their world, including the ways they understand their position, the norms affecting them, and their interests. Because people cannot have pure experiences, their beliefs and desires are inextricably enmeshed with theories. Thus, international relations scholars cannot ‘read-off’ beliefs and desires from objective social facts about people. Instead they have to interpret beliefs by relating them to other beliefs, traditions and dilemmas.

Of course, international relations scholars have grappledwith the issues arising from a rejection of positivism (see, for example, Booth et al. 1996). Today the leading theories of global security are realism, institutionalism (in which category we include most forms of constructivism) and rational choice. However, even advocates of these theories have begun to question their positivist inheritance – and as they have disentangled themselves from positivism, so they have placed greater stress on interpreting beliefs. New theories, including critical, feminist and postmodern theories, have also emphasized beliefs but commonly tend to appeal to material or ideational structures to explain actions (Buzan and Hanson 2009: 187–225). Although we welcome this semi–interpretive turn, we think it is still worthwhile drawing on interpretive theory to highlight the ambiguities that thus characterize these theories.

Realists are generally the most steadfast in rejecting beliefs as explanations. Classical realists commonly argue that theorists and policy makers must look to material capabilities to assess threat and set aside any consideration of the declared intentions of others (Morgenthau 1948). Structural realists seek to explain actions by reference to the distribution of power between states in international systems (Waltz 1979). Although so-called neo-classical realists depart from both of these positions, looking to the perceptions of state elites about their relative power in order to explain state behaviour, they still treat beliefs as intervening variables (Rose 1998). Realism can thus only take us part way towards an interpretive account of contemporary global security.

Institutionalists are often unclear about the nature of institutions. On the one hand, institutions are said to take a concrete and fixed form. They are often defined, for example, as operating rules or procedures that govern the actions of the individuals who fall under them (Barnett and Finnemore 2004). If institutionalists think of institutions in this way, they lapse back into positivism. They do not interpret what institutions mean to the people who work within them. They elide the contingency, inner conflicts and several constructions of actors in an institution. They assume that allegedly objective rules prescribe or cause behaviour. Yet, as we have just argued, international relations scholars cannot legitimately ‘read off’ people’s beliefs from their social location. Rules are always open to interpretation.

On the other hand, institutions are sometimes said to include cultural factors or beliefs, which may seem to suggest that institutions do not fix the beliefs or actions of the subjects within them. If international relations scholars open institutions in this way, however, they cannot treat institutions as given. Rather they must ask how beliefs, and so actions, are created, recreated, and changed in ways that constantly reproduce and modify institutions. Although we would welcome this decentring of institutions, we would suggest that the theory would no longer be institutionalist in any significant sense. Explanations would no longer cast as if behaviour were the result of rules but, rather, in a way that presented actions and outcomes as the contingent and contested results of the varying way in which people understood and reacted to conventions. Appeals to institutions would thus be misleading shorthand.

This commentary on institutionalism suggests that if we reject positivism, our notion of an institution desperately needs a micro-theory. Institutionalists could avoid engaging with beliefs and preferences only when they believed that they could reduce actions to social facts. However, positivism undermines just that belief, making a theory of individual action necessary. It thus seems plausible to suggest that rational choice theory has had a significant impact on the new institutionalism precisely because it is a theory about individual preferences and rational action.

Because rational choice theory views actions as rational strategies for realizing the preferences of the actor, it has sometimes reduced the motives of political actors to self-interest (Downs 1957). Yet, as most rational choice theorists now recognize, there are no valid grounds for privileging self-interest as a motive. Rational choice theorists have thus enlarged their notion of preference; moving toward a ‘thin’ analysis of that requires only that motives be consistent. The problem for rational choice theorists has thus become how to fill out this ‘thin’ notion of preference on specific occasions. At times, they do so by suggesting that preferences are more or less self-evident or that preferences can be assumed from the positions people occupy. Obviously, however, this way of filling out the idea of preference falls prey to our earlier criticism of positivism. At other times, therefore, rational choice theorists have suggested conceiving of people’s actions as products of their beliefs and desires without saying anything substantive about what these beliefs and desires might be (Vicchaeri 1993: 221-24). Here too, although we would welcome this decentring gesture, we would suggest that the theory would no longer be rational choice theory in any significant sense. Explanations would be based not on deductions drawn from assumptions of self-interest and utility maximization, but on appeals to people’s multiple, varying and diverse beliefs and desires.

The purpose of our theoretical reflections is not to undermine all appeals to institutions and rules as explanations of action. Our arguments do not prevent appeals to self-interest or the use of deductive models. We do not deny that quantitative techniques have a role in the study of global security. To reject any of these concepts or tools outright would be hasty and ill-considered. Our theoretical reflections imply only that international relations scholars need to tailor their appeals to institutions, rationality, models and statistics to recognize that their discipline is an interpretative one focused on the beliefs of relevant actors.

Why traditions?

The forms of explanation we should adopt for beliefs, actions and practices revolve around two sets of concepts (Bevir 1999: 187–218, 223–51). The first set includes concepts such as tradition, structure and paradigm. These concepts explore the social context in which individuals think and act. They vary in how much weight they suggest should be given to the social context in explanations of thought and action. The second set includes concepts such as dilemma, anomaly and agency. These concepts explore how beliefs and practices change and the role individual agency plays in such change.

We define a tradition as a set of understandings someone receives during socialization. Although tradition is unavoidable, it is so as a starting point, not as something that governs later performances. We should be cautious, therefore, of representing tradition as an unavoidable presence in everything people do in case we leave too slight a role for agency. In particular, we should not imply that tradition is constitutive of the beliefs people later come to hold or the actions they then perform. Instead, we should see tradition mainly as a first influence on people. The content of the tradition will appear in their later actions only if their agency has led them not to change it, where every part of it is in principle open to change.

Positivists sometimes hold that individuals are autonomous and avoid the influence of tradition. They argue that people can arrive at beliefs through pure experiences, so we can explain why people held their beliefs by referring to those experiences. However, once we reject positivism, we need a concept such as tradition to explain why people come to believe what they do. Because people cannot have pure experiences, they necessarily construe their experiences using theories they inherited. Their experiences can lead them to beliefs only because they already have access to the traditions of their community.

A social heritage is the necessary background to the beliefs people adopt and the actions they perform. Some international relations scholars, including some critical theorists and postmodernists, adopt a strong version of this conclusion. They argue that a social structure, paradigm, episteme, identity or discourse governs not only the actions people can perform successfully but also people’s beliefs and desires. Strong structuralists argue that meanings and beliefs are the products of the internal relations of self-sufficient languages or paradigms. They thus leave little, if any, room for human agency. They suggest that traditions, structures or paradigms determine or limit the beliefs people might adopt and so the actions they might attempt.

Surely, however, social contexts only ever influence – as distinct from define – the nature of individuals. Traditions are products of individual agency. This insistence on agency may seem incompatible with our earlier insistence on the unavoidable nature of tradition. However, our reasons for appealing to tradition allow for individuals to change the beliefs and practices they inherit. Just because individuals start out from an inherited tradition does not imply that they cannot adjust it. On the contrary, the ability to develop traditions is an essential part of people’s being in the world. People constantly confront at least slightly novel circumstances that require them to apply inherited traditions anew, and a tradition cannot fix the nature of its application. Again, when people confront the unfamiliar, they have to extend or change their heritage to encompass it, and as they do so, they develop that heritage. Every time they try to apply a tradition, they reflect on it (whether consciously or not) to bring it to bear on their circumstances, and by reflecting on it, they open it to innovation. Thus, human agency can produce change even when people think they are sticking fast to a tradition they regard as sacrosanct.

As humans, people necessarily arrive at their beliefs, and perform their actions, against the background of a tradition that influences those beliefs and actions, but they are also creative agents who have the capacity to reason and act innovatively against the background of that tradition. We are here discussing something like the familiar problem of structure and agency. Like the structuralists, interpretive theory rejects the idea of the self-constituting person, but unlike many structuralists, interpretive theory does not deny the possibility of agency. It is this commitment to the possibility of agency that makes tradition a more satisfactory concept than rivals such as structure, paradigm and episteme. These later ideas suggest the presence of a social force that determines or at least limits the beliefs and actions of individuals. Tradition, in contrast, suggests that a social heritage comes to individuals who, through their agency, can adjust and transform this heritage even as they pass it on to others.

Recognition of agency requires international relations scholars to be wary of essentialists who equate traditions with fixed essences to which they credit variations. Interpretive theory here presents tradition as a starting point, not a destination. It thus implies that instances cannot ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Interpreting global security
• 2. The rise of security governance
• 3. An interplay of traditions: The ‘return of uncertainty’ and its taming in post-9/11 US security thinking
• 4. Interpreting george W. Bush’S foreign policy
• 5. From value protection to value promotion: Interpreting British security policy
• 6. Negotiating the global security dilemma: Interpreting Russia’s security agenda
• 7. Interpreting missile defence: A comparative study of European reactions
• 8. Framing the sovereignty intervention dilemma: The strange omission of the Genocide Convention
• 9. Writing the threat of terrorism in Western Europe and the European Union: An interpretive analysis
• 10. Security politics and public discourse: A Morgenthauian approach
• Index