After Strategy: The Search for a Post-Modern Politics of Peace

For a concise genealogy of the term “strategy,” see Luttwak Edward N. , Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), pp 239–241.

Tzu Sun , trans Griffith Samuel B. , The Art of War (London: Oxford University Press, 1963).

These and other examples from military history are culled almost arbitrarily and arrayed in Simon Goodenough, Tactical Genius in Battle (London: Phaidon Press, 1979).

Luttwak , Strategy, p 239, expresses this sentiment in the most straightforward of nominalist terms: “It is my purpose to demonstrate the existence of strategy as a body of recurring objective phenomena that arise from human conflict, and not to prescribe courses of action.”.

Howard Michael , “The Strategic Approach to International Relations,” in The Causes of Wars and Other Essays, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp 36–48.

For an uncompromising example, see Art Robert J. Waltz Kenneth N. , “Technology, Strategy, and the Uses of Force,” in: Art Robert J. Waltz Kenneth N. (editors), The Use of Force, 2nd edition (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), pp 1–32. By contrast, Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983) offers a thoughtful version of strategic studies that renders problematic rather than uncritically accept as given these conditions of strategy.

On Clausewitz's contribution to the articulation of modern army strategy, see Howard Michael , Clausewitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). The most concise account of Mahan's contribution is Margaret Tuttle Sprout, “Mahan: Evangelist of Sea Power,” in Edward Mead Earle (editor), Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), pp 415–446. On Douhet, see Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959).

The methodological argument for a genealogical unhinging of discourse, as opposed to a historical search for origins, is presented by Foucault Michel , “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Bouchard Donald F. (editor), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice trans Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp 139–64. The classic example of this genre is of course, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals trans Francis Golfing, (New York: Doubleday & Co, 1956).

Der Derian James , On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), delineates six paradigms of diplomatic practice by which statesmen mediate the estrangement of states: “Mytho-Diplomacy,” “Proto-Diplomacy,” “Diplomacy,” “Anti-Diplomacy,” “Neo-Diplomacy,” and “Techno-Diplomacy.”.

See my Strategic Discourse and its Alternatives, Occasional Paper No 3 (New York: Center on Violence and Human Survival, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 1987); and “The Textual Strategies of the Military: Or, Have You Read Any Good Defense Manuals Lately?,” in James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (editors), International/Intertextual Relations (Lexington: Lexington Books, forthcoming).

de Saxe Marshall Maurice , “My Reveries Upon the Art of War,” in Phillips Thomas B. Major (editor), Roots of Strategy (Harrisburg: Military Service Co, 1940), pp 189–300. Consider de Saxe's famous line, “I do not favor pitched battles, especially at the beginning of a war, and I am convinced that a skillful general could make war all his life without being forced into one” (p 298).

Jomini Antoine Henri , The Art of War trans Mendell G.H. Captain Craighill Lieutenant W.P. , (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co, 1862).

von Clausewitz Carl (editor), On War trans Michael Howard and Peter Paret, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).

Carr E.H. , The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London: Macmillan and Co, 1940).

The importance of international relations institutes for the consolidation of a policy-knowledge that would enable the coordination of global politics was first suggested to me by a reading of Ekkehart Krippendorff, Internationale Beziehungen als Wissenschaft (Frankfurt: Campus, 1977), pp 24–39.

Green Philip , Deadly Logic (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966); and Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armaggedon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), pp 52–57, 86–91.

For non-nuclear powers, one can further specify that institutes devoted to strategic/security studies only emerge in the midst of impending regional military crises. For example, The Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo was founded in 1968: Israel's first such institute, The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, was founded in 1977. See Chipman John , Survey of International Relations Institutes in the Developing World (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1987); and Survey of Strategic Studies (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1982).

Howard Michael , “Weapons and Peace,” in The Causes of War and Other Essays, pp 265–284, is refreshingly open in this regard. “As it is, I myself am one of those fortunate people for whom the existing order is tolerable, and I want to maintain it” (p 268). “If the existing framework of international order is to be preserved, a deterrent capacity must be maintained against those, whatever their ideological persuasion, whose resentment at its injustices tempts them to use armed force to overthrow and remould it” (p 271).

Schmidt Helmut , Verteidigung oder Vergeltung: Ein deutscher Beitrag zum strategischen Problem der NATO (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1961), proclaimed the virtues of strategic science and explained them to a West German audience, thereby shaping a consensus by helping overcome early Social Democratic opposition to NATO nuclear strategy.

On perception-misperception, see Jervis Robert , Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). On ethnocentrism, see Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979).

Clark Asa A. IV (editors), The Defense Reform Debate (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

The relevant debates are to be found in Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (editor), Die Praxis der defensiven Verteidigung (Hameln: Sponholtz, 1984).

Sharp Gene , The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973); Social Power and Political Freedom (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1980); and Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-based Deterrence and Defense (Cambridge: Ballinger, 1985).

Dyson Freeman , Weapons and Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

Sharp Gene , Gandhi as a Political Strategist (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1979); Krishnalal Shridharani, War Without Violence (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1962); and J. Ann Tickner, “Local Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics: Conflicting Priorities of National Development,” Alternatives, Vol XI, No 4, October 1986, pp 461–485.

Walker R.B.J. , “Contemporary Militarism and the Discourse of Dissent,” in Walker R.B.J. (editor), Culture, Ideology, and World Order (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), pp 302–322.

There are enormous theoretical difficulties to be negotiated in developing a global class analysis of militarization along these lines. For a successful example, see Krippendorff Ekkehart , Internationales System als Geschichte (Frankfurt: Campus, 1975).

Engels Friedrich , “Über den Krieg,” in Marx Karl Engels Friedrich , Werke, Vol 17 (Berlin: Dietz, 1979), pp 9–264.

Luxemburg Rosa , Selected Political Writings. Edited by Howard Dick , (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); and Karl Liebknecht, Militarism (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1917).

Kaldor Mary , The Baroque Arsenal (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981).

The US literature on the military-industrial complex was itself an occasion to find empirical fault with pluralist conceptions of US policy making. See here Nieburg H.L. , In the Name of Science (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970).

Holloway David , “War, Militarism, and the Soviet State,” in Thompson E.P. Smith Dan (editors), Protest and Survive (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), pp 70–107; and David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race, 2nd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).

Kaldor Mary , “Warfare and Capitalism,” in Thompson E.P. , Exterminism and Cold War (London: Verso, 1982), pp 261–88.

Janowitz Morris , The Professional Soldier (Glencoe, IL; The Free Press, 1960); and Morris Janowitz (editor), The New Military (New York: The Russell Sage Foundation, 1964). Also see the journal Armed Forces and Society..

Kende Istvan , “Local Wars 1945–76,” in Eide Asbjorn Thee Marek (editors), Problems of Contemporary Militarism (New York: St Martin's Press, 1980), pp 261–85; and Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures 1987–88 (Washington, DC: World Priorities, 1987).

Wulf Herbert (editor), Aufrüstung und Unterentwicklung (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 1983); and Mac Graham, Richard Jolly and Chris Smith (editors), Disarmament and World Development, 2nd edition (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1986).

Kaldor, op cit, note 30; and DeGrasse Robert W. Jr. , Military Expansion, Economic Decline (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1983).

Thompson E.P. , “Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization,” in E.P. Thompson, op cit, note 3, pp 1–33.

Mike Davis, “Nuclear Imperialism and Extended Deterrence,” in E.P. Thompson, op cit, note 3, pp 35–64. Also see Halliday Fred , The Making of the Second Cold War, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 1986), pp 46–80.

The classic argument against such structural positions is now Thompson E.P. , “The Poverty of Theory,” in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp 1–210.

Galtung Johan , “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol 6, No 2, 1969, pp 167–191.

Falk Richard A. , A Study of Future Worlds (New York: Free Press, 1975); and Johan Galtung, The True Worlds (New York: Free Press, 1980).

Fanon Frantz , The Wretched of the Earth trans Farrington Constance , (New York: Grove Press, 1968).

Falk Richard A. , “Anarchism and World Order,” in Falk Richard A. Kim Samuel S. (editors), The War System: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980), pp 37–57.

Chilton Paul (editor), Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate: Nukespeak Today (London: Frances Pinter, 1985).

I owe this phrase to Michael J. Shapiro. The basic idea, though not the sentence, is found in his “Literary Production as a Politicizing Practice,” in Shapiro Michael J. (editor), Language and Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1984), pp 215–253. See also his The Politics of Representation (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming).

The imagery of “inside” and “outside” as replicated in realist discourse has been analyzed by Walker R.B.J. , “Realism, Change, and International Political Theory,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol 31, No 1, March 1987, pp 65–86. Throughout this paper I have drawn on Walker's unraveling of the realist tradition. Crucial is his argument that realism does not comprise a single view, and that discussions of realism tend to conflate at least two different realist traditions: structuralism and political historicism. This distinction enables us to appreciate how postmodernists have been drawn to the moment of political historicism in classical realism in an attempt to revive the space for contemporary international politics. Along with Walker, the foremost works here are those of Richard K. Ashley, see his “The Poverty of Neo-Realism,” International Organization, Vol 38, No 2, Spring 1984, pp 225–286; and “The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space: Toward a Critical Social Theory of International Politics,” Alternatives, Vol XII, No 4, October 1987, pp 403–434. Ashley's aspiration, to use a radically historicized realism as the basis for international political community, is vitiated somewhat by his abstracting the practice of community from social and economic relations. This is most evident in his appropriation of Gramsci. See Richard K. Ashley, “Theory as War: Antonio Gramsci and the War of Positions,” paper presented at the 1984 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC.

Walker R.B.J. , One World/Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder, CO: Lynn Reiner, 1988). See also R.B.J. Walker, “Culture, Discourse, Insecurity,” Alternatives, Vol XI, No 4, October 1986, pp 485–504.

Campbell David , “Recent Changes in Social Theory: Questions for International Relations,” in Higgott R. (editor), New Directions in International Relations, Canberra Studies in World Affairs (Canberra: The Australian National University, 1987), offers a thoughtful critique of the empiricist bias of international relations theory and explores the philosophical foundations of a postempiricist (not “anti-empiricist”) position.

Kull Steven , “Nuclear Nonsense,” Foreign Policy, No 58, Spring 1985, pp 28–52. Disaffected strategists have begun writing their “strategic confessionals” in an attempt to explain the unavoidable failures of the whole enterprise. See the literature cited in my Strategic Discourse, op cit, note 10, pp 9–10, especially notes 12–15.

Freedman Lawrence , The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St Martins Press, 1981), p 400. On the page before, Freedman observes that “The Emperor Deterrence may have no clothes, but he is still Emperor.” On this quotation, see the important critique undertaken by Philip K. Lawrence, “Strategy, the State and the Weberian Legacy,” Review of International Studies, Vol 13, No 4, October 1987, pp 295–310, where he makes the argument that it is disingenuous to manifest such cynicism while adhering uncritically to the strategic project and defending it as a policy science. I agree with Lawrence's criticism of Freedman here, but wonder whether Lawrence's defense of a Weberian approach to policy would not likewise rule out all self-proclaimed academic policy sciences. Lawrence confines himself—probably wisely—to the case of strategic studies, on the grounds that strategic studies, alone among policy sciences, has no empirical field of evidence available to it. I suspect both that other policy sciences are also vulnerable, and, in any case, that the Weberian criteria of evaluation relied on by Lawrence comprise a caricature of the policy enterprise.

Sylvester Christine , “Some Dangers in Merging Feminist and Peace Projects,” Alternatives, Vol XII, No 4, October 1987, pp 493–509, makes this point with respect to feminist distinctions between “positive” and “negative” embodiments of female identity.

For an account of the Western Alliance as “the highest stage of modernism,” see my “Beyond the Western Alliance: The Politics of Post-Atlanticism,” in Gill Stephen R. (editor), Atlantic Relations in the Reagan Era and Beyond (Brighton, UK: Wheatsheaf Books, forthcoming).

Bahro Rudolf , The Alternative in Eastern Europe trans Fernbach David , (London: NLB, 1978).