Militarism and International Relations

Political Economy, Security, Theory

Anna Stavrianakis, Jan Selby, Anna Stavrianakis, Jan Selby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136235252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines contemporary militarism in international politics, employing a variety of different theoretical viewpoints and international case studies.

Militarism – understood as the social and international relations of the preparation for, and conduct of, organized political violence – is an abiding and defining characteristic of world politics. Yet despite the ongoing social, political and economic reach of military institutions, practices and values, the concept and subject of militarism has not received significant attention within recent debates in International Relations.

This book intends to fill the gap in the current body of literature. It has two key overarching aims: to make the case for a renewed research agenda for IR centred on the concept of militarism; and to provide a series of empirically focused and theoretically informed case studies of contemporary militarism in practice. Containing a wide-ranging selection of chapters, the volume presents a diverse and eclectic body of research on militarism, designed to act as a stimulus to further research and debate.

This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, war and conflict studies, international political economy and IR/security studies in general.

Part I

Theorizing militarism

1 Militarism and international relations in the twenty-first century

Anna Stavrianakis and Jan Selby

Militarism – understood as the social and international relations of the preparation for, and conduct of, organized political violence – is an abiding and defining characteristic of world politics. Recent and ongoing wars in Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Libya and Sudan, plus at least 30 lesser armed conflicts (Themnér and Wallensteen, 2011), and rising global military expenditures since 2001 (Perlo-Freeman et al., 2010), are but the most conspicuous contemporary indications of this. Successful military coups in Fiji and Thailand (both 2006), Mauritania and Guinea (2008), Madagascar and Honduras (2009), and Niger (2010), and the entrenched power of Middle Eastern military actors, even in the face of the Arab Spring protests (2011), all speak to the enduring power of military actors within political, economic and social life. In a very different but far from unrelated way, the recent record of the British state in supporting its domestic arms industry through a range of morally and legally questionable means – from facilitating the early release of Abdelbaset Megrahi from Scottish jail in order to promote arms (and oil) interests in Libya, to unlawfully quashing investigation of corrupt activity by BAE Systems, to collaborating with defence contractors to systematically under-budget military capital projects (Quinn, 2010; Peel et al., 2008; Haynes and Coghlan, 2010) – clearly suggests that militarism is characteristic of global North and global South alike.

Yet despite the ongoing social, political and economic reach of military institutions, practices and values, the concept and subject of militarism have not received significant attention within recent debates in International Relations (IR). A great deal of scholarly work was produced during especially the late Cold War era on arms races, military expenditure, arms sales to the Third World, the vast numbers of people under arms, and those militaristic attitudes, structures and practices that produce, or are shaped by, modern warfare (e.g. Albrecht et al., 1975; Eide and Thee, 1980; Enloe, 1988; Thompson, 1982). Extensive work was also undertaken on the concept of militarism itself (e.g. Berghahn, 1981; Mann, 1987; Skjelsbaek, 1979; Vagts, 1959; Shaw, 1988). But such sustained research and reflection has largely disappeared since the early 1990s, revitalized only in part by US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan (e.g. Bacevich, 2005; Johnson, 2004). In some fields, most notably political geography, discussion of militarism and militarization remains strong, so much so that political geographers can claim with some merit that ‘the topic of militarization has been resurgent in recent years’ (Bernazzoli and Flint, 2010; Bryan, 2010; Kuus, 2009; Loyd, 2009; Woodward, 2005). The same could not be said from the perspective of International Relations, however. Some, especially historical sociologists (e.g. Mann, 2003; Shaw, 2005) and feminist scholars (Enloe, 2000, 2004; Sjoberg and Via, 2010; Whitworth, 2004), have kept discussion of militarism alive. But there has been little uptake of their concerns in the wider discipline. Contemporary textbooks on world politics, IR theory, and security and strategic studies make few, if any, references to militarism and militarization. Even more tellingly, while since the mid-1980s IR has gone through an intellectual revolution – marked by the collapsing hegemony of conservative realism and a proliferation of assorted critical approaches, as well as a huge amount of epistemological, conceptual and theoretical innovation – none of this seems to have inspired much reflection on militarism. The systematic academic study of militarism and IR appears to be a thing of the past.

The evident contradiction between militarized social and international relations on the one hand, and little or no academic debate on the other, is paradoxical, and provides the motivation for this volume. Based on papers presented at an international, interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Sussex in May 2009, plus additional invited contributions, it brings together researchers working on militarism, militarization and international politics from a diverse range of theoretical perspectives. The guiding objectives of the conference were to identify the current state of play in the recent literature on militarism; to reflect on what we might learn from earlier discussions of militarism, as well as how these earlier understandings might require updating and revision; to analyse a wide range of contemporary practices and dimensions of militarism; and to consider how both the concept and practices of militarism and militarization might be studied, empirically and theoretically, at the crossroads between international political economy, security studies and IR theory.

The resulting book has a two overarching aims: to make the case for a renewed research agenda for IR centred on the concept of militarism; and to provide a series of empirically focused and theoretically informed case studies of contemporary militarism in practice. It does not, and is not intended to provide either a comprehensive survey of contemporary militarism, or a unified or exclusionary theoretical framework. The individual chapters’ substantive focuses vary widely, some considering militarism and militarization in specific national or regional contexts, from the US to China to the Middle East. Others concentrate on the extension or expansion of militaristic practices into new social, political and economic domains such as space, or popular culture. But there are many countries and domains on which the book does not touch, or discusses only in passing. Theoretical frameworks also vary widely, with chapters being variously informed by liberal, realist, Marxist, Gramscian, post-structuralist, constructivist and Weberian understandings of militarism. To this extent, the book aims to present a diverse and eclectic body of research on militarism, which hopefully is a stimulus to further research and debate.

The book is loosely structured into three parts. Part I provides a set of theoretical reflections on militarism, including chapters by Martin Shaw, with a historical sociological reading of militarism and one of its contemporary iterations, ‘global surveillance war’; by Simon Dalby, utilizing a critical geopolitics framework to argue that taken-for-granted geographical representations are key to the legitimization of violence; and by Nicola Short, utilizing a neo-Gramscian framework to theorize recent transformations in militarism in the global South. This section also includes an interview with James Der Derian, focusing on his recent film Human Terrain, as well as on key themes relating to militarism – culture, simulation, virtue, networks – within his research. Part II analyses militarism in relation to security, including chapters by Yoav Peled, on transformations in Israeli militarism and the role of the ‘enlightened public’ therein; by Dirk Kruijt and Kees Koonings, documenting the transformation of militarism in Latin America, from ‘political armies’ to the war against crime; by David Kinsella, on the role of the arms trade in the international diffusion of militarism; and by Andrew Bacevich, surveying contemporary US militarism (this chapter being abridged from his seminal 2005 book The New American Militarism). Finally, Part III turns to political economy, including chapters by Iraklis Oikonomou, offering a Marxist reading of the militarization of EU space research and policy; by Ramy Aly, on the history and political economy of the military and militarism in Egypt; and by Kerry Brown and Claude Zanardi, on the role of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in business and politics.

This introductory chapter both sets out a case for reviving the study of militarism in IR, and introduces and contextualizes the contributions to follow. We start by reflecting on why the concept of militarism has been so marginal within post-Cold War debates in IR, emphasizing in particular the political and intellectual ascendancy of liberalism, and the dominant disciplinary concerns with ‘new wars’, ‘state failure’, ‘human security’ and ‘securitization’. In each case we contend that these new emphases and conceptualizations do not provide solid grounds for jettisoning militarism, either as a concept or object of analysis. We then set out a more positive case for studying militarism, first by considering contending definitions and conceptions thereof, and theoretical approaches thereto; and second by giving an overview of some of the key empirical dimensions of, and recent transformations in, militarism and militarization. In each of these sections, we both map existing literatures, and discuss, compare and contrast the particular contributions in this volume. A brief conclusion reflects on some of the difficulties that we, as editors, have faced in pulling the book together, and on some of its consequent limitations.

Whatever happened to militarism in IR?

Since the end of the Cold War, discussion of militarism has fallen out of fashion in IR. It would be wrong to overstate this development: as Short shows (Chapter 4 in this volume), this change has been relative, not absolute. That said, it is noteworthy that the concept of militarism has been largely bypassed by IR’s ‘post-positivist revolution’, and that this has occurred without it having been subjected to any sustained or profound theoretical critiques. As this suggests, the notion of militarism has fallen by the wayside less because it is fatally flawed, than because it has become deemed passé. There are, we suggest, three main reasons behind this: the post-Cold War political and intellectual hegemony of liberalism; the rise of influential discourses on ‘failed states’ and ‘new wars’; and the predominance of discussions of ‘security’ and ‘securitization’, as against ‘militarism’ and ‘militarization’, within critical IR and security studies. However, each of these reasons, we argue, actually provides quite thin grounds for discarding or bypassing the concept of militarism.

The revolutions of 1989–91 and the consequent global ascendency of liberal capitalism provide the most fundamental structural reason why recent IR scholarship has been so inattentive to militarism. Discussions of militarism during the Cold War era had focused predominantly on the Soviet–American superpower rivalry, on arms racing, and on what E.P. Thompson (1982) labelled ‘exterminism’. With the end of the Cold War, not only was this era-defining rivalry decisively resolved, but global military spending sharply declined, as also did the incidence of inter-state armed conflicts and the proportion of authoritarian and military regimes worldwide. In the view of much mainstream as well as critical scholarship in IR, an era structured by geopolitical conflict had given way to one defined, for good or ill, by democratization, economic liberalization, globalization, global governance and peace dividends. Moreover, it was widely assumed – building upon a long tradition of liberal thought on the subject – that these processes of liberalization and democratization would inexorably challenge and undermine militarist ideologies, practices and structures. At the apex of such thinking, democratic peace theorists came to consider it no less than an ‘empirical law’ that democratic states did not and would not go to war with one another (Levy, 1988: 661–2); whilst others extended this thesis into claims that democracy, trade and high economic development are systemically correlated with a decline in the incidence and severity of warfare (Souva and Prins, 2006; Lacina et al., 2006), and that democratic states are more internally pacific too (Rummel, 1997; Hegre et al., 2001) – a claim which to this day informs accepted international doctrines of ‘liberal peacebuilding’ for societies emerging from civil war (Doyle and Sambanis, 2000; Richmond, 2007). Right across these intellectual and policy terrains, it has been widely if often only tacitly assumed that liberalism is ascendant, that liberalism and militarism are antithetical, and that militarism is thus on the wane.

The problem with such claims is that liberalism is neither incompatible with militarism, nor quite as hegemonic as its proponents imagine. Though rarely recognized by liberal or democratic peace theorists, liberal states – whatever their pacific inclinations towards other liberal states – actually have an unusually high propensity towards war with illiberal ones (Doyle, 1983). The leading liberal states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Great Britain and the United States respectively, fought more wars during these periods than any others (Blum, 2006: 162–220; Carr, 1946). The current leading liberal democratic state, the US, accounts for over 40 per cent of global military spending (SIPRI, 2011), and has military personnel in over 150 states (US DoD, 2011). Historically, liberal ‘civil society militarism’ visited genocide upon large swathes of the non-European world (Mann, 1996). Moreover, internal political and economic liberalization in the post-Cold War era has often been quite compatible with the entrenchment or extension military power (as a number of the contributions in this volume demonstrate). This is not to deny that some world regions and social domains have witnessed progressive demilitarization. But the claim, or suggestion, that the post-Cold War era has been characterized by a general decline in militarism simply cannot be sustained.

This being the case, it begs the question as to why critical scholarship, in particular, in International Relations has not in recent years been more attentive to militarism and militarization. This brings us to our second factor: the rise of influential policy and academic discourses, including within critical IR scholarship, on ‘state failure’, ‘new wars’ and ‘human security’. Since the end of the Cold War, ‘failed’, ‘collapsed’, ‘weak’ and, more recently, ‘fragile’ states have routinely been identified as the pre-eminent threat to international security (Helman and Ratner, 1993; Rotberg, 2003; Ghani and Lockhart, 2008; Department for International Development, 2009: 5). The underlying premise of this discourse is that it is in the weakening or collapse of the Weberian legitimate monopoly over violence, rather than in the assertion or extension of state power, from which the central challenges to human well-being and world order presently derive – whether this be internally, for example in increasing civil violence and population displacement within failed states, or internationally, for instance through the use of ungoverned territories by drug cartels or international terrorists. In parallel to this failed states discourse, it has been widely claimed that the post-Cold War era is characterized by a qualitatively new type of warfare ‘associated with globalisation and the disintegration of states’ (Kaldor, 2005: 491). Where classical ‘old wars’, it is asserted, were fought between formal state military institutions, in support of declared military, political or ideological objectives, and in a manner that was productive of state power, ‘new wars’ are thought to be internal or transnational rather than international, to be disorganized and informal, to revolve around identity conflicts and economic predation, and to reverse rather than support processes of state-building (Duffield, 2001; Kaldor, 1999; Münkler, 2004; Snow, 1996). A key policy and academic response to the violence associated with new wars and state failure has been the promotion of ‘human security’, with its emphasis on legitimate political authority, promotion of human rights and the rule of law, reform of institutional structures, and policing and community interventions to bolster the forces of civility in the context of the blurred boundary between war, crime and organized violence (Glasius and Kaldor, 2005; Kaldor, 2007a; Muggah and Krause, 2009). In all three discourses of ‘failed states’, ‘new wars’ and ‘human security’, then, contemporary political violence is seen essentially as a problem of declining and de-institutionalized state capacity. Viewed thus, the traditional IR problematique of military power and violence has been superseded by the problem of internal lawlessness and anarchy – with the corollary, if this is indeed correct, that the study of militarism is also somewhat outdated.

It is, however, not correct that the problematique of internal lawlessness has superseded that of military power. Indeed, the way the concepts of ‘state failure’, ‘human security’ and ‘new wars’ have been used has obscured our understanding of the predominant forms of war-making, war-preparation and military power in contemporary world politics, which remain predominantly state-based and retain powerful connections to state formation. For, not only has there not been, empirically, a ‘proliferation of armed conflicts within states’ since the end of the Cold War (ICISS, 2001: 4), but in addition conceptually, the ‘new wars’ discourse is premised on idealized and Eurocentric models of both inter-state and civil warfare (Barkawi and Laffey, 2006; Kalyvas, 2001). And for its part, whatever its policy world appeal, the ‘failed states’ discourse has been extensively critiqued as descriptively shallow and misleading, and as more suited to justifying interventionism than informed analysis (Boas and Jennings, 2007; Call, 2008; Hill, 2005; Jones, 2008). Many so-called ‘failed states’ have very powerful state structures including strong military and related paramilitary and intelligence institutions, whose influence is highly uneven, however, especially in territorial peripheries. ‘Human security’ interventions, meanwhile, are not, in principle, incompatible with analyses of militarism: they can be deployed as a critique of the traditional normative privileging of state over individual security. Yet in practice, human security discourse has focused on inter-personal violence, gang warfare and economically motivated crime (Geneva Declaration Secretariat, 2011; Human Security Centre, 2006), in the process underplaying the extent and nature of state, paramilitary and organized group involvement in this and other violence. Often, violence that may superficially appear to be between non-state actors is in fact no such thing: the ongoing ‘narco-war’ in Mexico, for example, which has resulted in 40,000 fatalities since 2007 but is not categorized as a ‘war’ in civil war datasets, is being fought not just between drug cartels, but with the active complicity of the Mexican state (Hernández, A., 2010; Wood, 2011). Furthermore, ‘human security’ analyses tend to sideline the wider influence that organized military actors exercise on social relations above and beyond direct lethal violence and war preparation, and whose significance goes beyond the number of people they kill.

The enduringly organized and centralized nature of contemporary political violence becomes even clearer if we adjust our conception of statehood and recognize its heterogeneity and historicity. In International Relations debates, the label ‘state’ and the notion of ‘sovereignty’ are usually reserved for those institutions which are internationally recognized as such, even if their actual control over territory is in certain respects limited: IR mostly follows a ‘juridical’ as against ‘empirical’ understanding of statehood (Jackson, 1990). During the late Cold War, the dominant approach to IR, neo-realism, focused on states (viewed as functionally undifferentiated and homogeneous ‘billiard balls’) and on their interaction within the international arena. The many post-positivist critiques of this dismissed neo-realism but with it also a strong analytical or critical focus on states and their militaries. Yet the problem with these critiques was that they too readily accepted neo-realism’s problematic understanding of states. States remain the central institutions of world politics and global order, both legally and practically. But they are far from homogenous in form and function, and some barely deserve the name. Simultaneously, there are institutions of organized political violence that do not possess international recognition, but nonetheless have strong state-like characteristics (in that they are organized, centralized, have institutionalized military and administrative capabilities, and exert control over territory) and may in certain cases possess more ‘state-ness’ than recognized national states (Clapham, 1998; Davis, 2003). Organized military and related institutions remain the central agents of the pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Cass Military Studies
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Part I Theorizing militarism
• Part II Militarism and security
• Part III The political economy of militarism
• Reference
• Index