Robert Farley has written a veritably excellent post on the need for liberals (er, “progressives”) to get serious about defense policy.
I only wish to add that it is time for international-relations scholars to re-engage with defense policy and “hard” security questions. We’re going through a revolution in military affairs, a power transition, and two U.S.-led wars, but not that many political scientists work on “guns and bombs” issues.* Moreover, political science produces very few PhDs competent to do so.
Most of security studies deals with issues such as crisis bargaining, alliance choice, and the determinants of war and peace. The bulk of work on conflict processes focuses on ethnic and substate violence. Recent studies of the conduct of war itself have, for unsurprising reasons, generally been about counterinsurgency and have dealt with the mechanisms that link cash assistance to pacification, whether indiscriminate force suppresses or exacerbates insurgencies, and so forth. Even nukes work has tended to focus on either the determinants of proliferation or the broad question of whether proliferation is stabilizing and destabilizing.
These are all critically important concerns, but they are generally divorced from the technical side of military capabilities and the relationship between those capabilities and deterrence, warfighting, and so forth. This impoverishes security studies and, apropos my earlier post, its relevance to defense policy.
*A vast majority of those who do are located at the National Defense University, Naval Postgraduate School, and other assorted military institutions work on “guns and bombs” issues. They produce excellent scholarship, but I think we can agree that it isn’t a good thing for academia that most people working on defense policy work at government-run military colleges and universities.
Well, hello again, Prof. Nexon (I enjoyed your Intro to IR class at Gtown in 2004, graduated in '08 with a government major). I very much agree that progressives need to establish some sort of foreign policy strategy coherence, and I hope that such a strategy might turn out to be much more realist than one might initially suppose.
It seems to me Obama has essentially been extending Bush's foreign policy strategy of global dominance and democracy promotion while paying some lip service to soft power. What do you think of offshore balancing as a possible progressive foreign policy strategy? That could allow for at least a significant reduction in U.S. military spending, if not a major budget cut like many lefties want, while also elevating international law enforcement and multilateral organizations as new, less expensive, potentially more effective tools of U.S. foreign policy.
Check out this post on my blog, The Daily Taylor, for more and let me know what you think. Hoya Saxa!
Prof. Nexon, I agree that IR scholars, especially those in the field that many refer to as security studies, have shifted away from 'nuts and bolts' technical discussions of security. But I don't think you have given a very good reason to reverse this trend. It appears you seem to want people to engage with technical security issues because IR scholars need to talk about 'guns and bombs' issues, because they don't do so already.
While I agree that some technical issues have been, or currently are, central to security issues (for example the nuclear revolution, or the more recent development of drone warfare), the real issues of security studies are not technical, but political. For example, you argue that because the United States is in two wars, and therefore technical security issues are important. But those wars are not relevant because of their technical aspects, and in the cases that they are relevent (i.e. the recent development of drone warfare) are ultimately marginal to the conflicts themselves. These conflicts are ultimately political questions.
What security studies needs to do, and here I refer to North American, especially IR in the U.S., is go back to the basics in its assessment of security. Here I ask, what is security? This question remains radically underexamined, with only a few exceptions in the U.S. (Walt, 1991; Baldwin, 1997). Look at world politics, and the U.S.' role in particular, where we are assailed with a multiplicity of 'securities' from national, to energy, to health, to border, to cyber, and so on. Non-American IR has done an excellent job in investigating security at a practical and conceptual level in the study of securitisation (Buzan et al, 1998). I would love to see something equally compelling from American Scholarship. This would be a far more fruitful direction for security studies than branching out into technical discussion with no real solid foundation for understanding what security is.
Alternatively, it may be pedagogically useful to confine the 'technical' discussion of security studies to what is now becoming the smaller field of 'strategic studies'. This would create a more appropriate place for the discussion of technical defence issues, which is what you are really after when talking about guns and bombs, while avoiding having to engage with the tricky concept of security.
Cheers,
-Eric
@Eric:
1) I'm not saying that everyone should do “guns and bombs,” but that the growing paucity of “guns and bombs” analysis is impoverishing the field of security studies. You're correct that my central concern here involves RMA issues: from BMD, to CPGS, to cyber, you just can't have an adequate assessment of what's at stake–whether for theory or practice–without some understanding of the technical issues. For example, we're looking at a future with an increasingly expanding pre-nuclear escalation ladder, and quite possibly a more attenuate nuclear escalation ladder, but with analytic tools that have been barely dusted off in twenty years.
2) I would be careful about drawing too rigid a distinction between the “political” and the “technical.” The “technical” is not only often “political,” but the “political” is often structured by “technical.” Indeed, our level of theorization of the “technical” (and this relationship), whether in North America or Europe, has been appallingly bad.
3) I have a lot of positive things to say about the “securitization” research project, but I'm less enthusiastic about it then you seem to be. Its been pretty terrible at providing mechanisms and processes that account for continuity and transformation in–let alone variation in the character of–securitization. The fundamental wager about the impact of securitization on political contestation strikes me as deeply problematic, in ways that advocates have begun to grapple with only in the last few years. There's also been an enormous amount of scholasticism in the second- and third-order securitization literature.
4) I'm not terribly impressed by claims that we need “foundations” for concepts like security ex ante. I can't imagine the field will ever have a consensus on what “security is,” and I'm not sure that would even be a desirable state of affairs. We don't really have a “solid foundation” for most of the concepts that define our subfields, e.g., “international,” “power,” “politics,” etc. Engaged disagreement about those concepts not only keeps things interesting, but is a necessary consequence of theoretical and analytical pluralism (or ecclecticism, which seems to be the new pluralism).
Prof. Nexon, an excellent set comments.
What I would suggest is a somewhat ironic proposition: a zero sum game of security studies. There are only so many people with so much time working in the field, and emphasising aspects like RMA takes away from other areas.
Where my bias against emphasising RMA comes in is that it over determines peoples understanding of world politics. And here it is important to make a distinction between policy makers and academics. It is not a stretch to say that previous American policy decisions were encumbered by the belief that the RMA, specifically America's technical dominance, would be a central determinant of outcomes in world politics. A key element of neoconservative foreign policy orthodoxy was that American intervention is made possible by the RMA (Williams and Schmidt, 2008). Yet for all of America's technical dominance, its foreign policy goals remain elusive. You could argue that adademics are much more careful in parcing out what RMA means for things like state power, and that may be true, but those nuanced opinions don't trickle down to policy makers or the general populace.
My concern is simply that too much emphasis on RMA by the academic community can be taken as a sign by policy makers and the general population that that is what really matters and then proceed from there. What's worse is that this can preclude any examination of other determinants world politics (i.e. diplomatic relations, internaitonal institutions, etc.). While, I am sure that some sort of balance be struck to ensure the preservation of technical security studies, I am skeptical of its expansion. I'm not going to comment on the issue of pre-nuclear escalation ladder because I am not familiar with the concept.
I agree with you that IR's theorization of the technical, perhaps even more broadly speaking the material is badly impoverished. This was a most unfortunate consequence of the social and linguistic turn in IR. I even agree with some of your concerns about the securitization project, although I have to let you know first hand that there are several dedicated people working on this problems right now.
One last point. You equated the use of my word 'foundational' with something being immutable and universal. I can see I picked a poor choice of words. You are very right when you say security will always be a contested concept. But just because a concept's meaning changes over time doesn't mean it cannot be evaluated at a definitional, conceptual, or even at the philosophic level (Huysmans, 1998). To read journal after journal droning on about security without any discussion of what security is, or what it might be, is dissappointing. Just because something is ephermal and methodologically tricky to examine, doesn't it should be done. In this respect theoretical pluralism does not mean be we should abdicate the examination of important or contested concepts.
Cheers,
-Eric
I'd recommend Amitai Etzioni's “Security First” if you haven't read it. Really good.