It's all about security. What makes you insecure? What do you see as enhancing your security? Is your security dependant on others? Is it purely physical? Is it psychological, social, intellectual, philosophical? Your sense of security as an individual, as an organization, as a community and as a nation/state is what drives and shapes your choices.

Think for a minute about the things that make you insecure. In particular, think about those things that are so built in to your psyche that you seldom even give them much thought, yet they shape so many of your most important choices.  Included in this range of influences are things like your physical status, your core values, and your fundamental life skills. Among the more obvious threats - Loss of income in a society where income is essential to survival is a pretty significant threat to your perceived security. Then there is threat of a loss of social acceptance, of becoming an outcast. How about the insecurity that comes with a loss of mobility, sight, hearing or sentience brought on by illness or aging?  Do you think you would have the same perception of threat or opportunity if you were of another gender, size, race?  If you are a member of the dominant race and culture in your community do you not think this affects your perception of threat or opportunity?  And what about where you live?  If you call a small isolated community home, how does this shape your perception of threat or opportunity?  Your relationship with your physical and psychological environment is what I call your Strategic Culture. Every individual, every organization, every country, furthermore, has an evolving Strategic Culture. It is not a static thing, but it does have a core, a source from which it grows and evolves.

Imagine a large crowded shopping mall and what it might represent to a range of different individuals at various stages in their personal evolution:

•     a small lost child;

•     a teenager;

•     A successful adult with good income and no dependants;

•     A disabled shopper;

•     a busy parent with small children in tow;

•     a successful retiree;

•     a busy retailer;

•     a frail and elderly shopper; and,

•     a mall security guard

    The mall does not somehow shift and change for each individual yet for each of them the mall represents a different range of perceived threats and opportunities based largely on their physical and related psychological circumstances or their Strategic Culture.  The same concept has great utility when applied to the analysis of organizations or states.

Comparative Strategic Culture is a concept that has been around under other guises for some time, but has gained in specific interest for political theorists and analysts since the late seventies.  Similar concepts have been suggested in disciplines such as Political Science in discussions of National Style, Civic Culture or Political Culture; Geography where it has been alluded to in discussions of Strategic Geography or Geopolitics; and under various descriptions in History and Anthropology. As a specific study it can eventually benefit from this diversity of approaches in order to better understand the concept.  Before it is possible to build on all these understandings however, it is necessary to establish a clear and concise conceptual definition within the context of International Studies or International Relations Theory. 

    The challenges inherent in any attempt to define and understand this concept are multiple.  Foremost among them, however, is the need to eliminate confusion in the use of terms.  Language can be as much an impediment as it can a tool of communication.  To this end it is important to first be clear on what is understood by the terms strategic and culture and then to distinguish strategic culture from political culture and civic culture. The concept also has potential for individual, organizational or national application as all of these entities have a strategic physicality that influences perceptions and choices.  For the purposes of this research however, the focus will be on the national or state level of analysis. 

    So what is Strategic Culture?  The opening hypothesis of this research holds that it is quite simply those few elements of the many that go into shaping a culture that specifically influence or shape perceptions of threat or opportunity. The key will be to isolate the strategically relevant elements from the encompassing range of historically and socially enlightening ones that are more specific to the development of a specific political and civic culture.

    I have begun the thesis specific reading and am only just beginning to realize how very important it is today to understand Strategic Culture. The concept has application from the micro to the macro levels of analysis of human interaction, especially in the face of conflict or potential conflict. 

  “Done well, the careful analysis of strategic culture could help policymakers establish more accurate and empathetic understandings of how different actors perceive the game being played, reducing uncertainty and other information problems in strategic choice.  Done badly, the analysis of strategic culture could reinforce stereotypes about strategic dispositions of other states and close off policy alternatives deemed inappropriate for dealing with local strategic cultures”

Alastair Iain Johnston

I shall briefly borrow from Wikipedia before going on to try to lay a foundation throughout this web site for understanding the fundamentals of the concept.

    My MA thesis is supposed to define Strategic Culture, and so it shall sometime in late 2008.  For now though I thought I would share some recent thoughts.  Strategic Geography is an understood concept.  Strategic Culture, to a large extent, is how that Strategic Geography has shaped and evolved the culture of a people, particularly their political culture.  The physicality of a country or a nation, both as a stand alone and in context  with surrounding nations or states, shapes and defines a people's perception of threat and opportunity.  In doing so it will also influence the evolution of their core values and ideals. 

    Before you can begin to understand what shapes the perceptions of another however, you must recognize and come to terms with what shapes your own perceptions of threat and opportunity.  If you cannot do that, you will, I believe, be perpetually inclined to project your own fears on any analysis of the actions or plans of another, whether it be an individual, an organization or a country.  Course work is done, the time for reading has begun.  It will be an interesting year.

 

    There are pictures on this page of Afghan horsemen called "Chapandazan" participating in a traditional Afghan game called Buzkashi or "goat grabbing:". 

     There is little in the way of written record to explain the origins of this wild game.  There are rumours and theories, however that have the game dating back to the Turkic-Mongol people.  They were said to be able to ride at full speed through a community and reach down to pick up goats and other livestock. The natural Afghan reaction to this was, apparently, to cultivate the ability to ride past an invading Mongol and snatch back their pilfered property.  Hence Buzkashi. 

    G. Whitney Azoy has written a delightful and informative book on this game and goes further to use the sport as an insightful parallel for understanding the Afghan political culture.  There will be more on that in a pending paper that will explore the impact of Geography on the Political Culture of Afghanistan.  For now though, it is enough to say that I believe the Strategic Geography of Afghanistan is sufficiently distinctive and pronounced to serve as an excellent example in helping to define Strategic Culture... sometime early next year.

    Strategic Culture as a stand alone concept should not be particularly complex, yet there there appears to be little consensus on a definition.  It would appear, therefore, that before venturing in to the development of a basis for comparative analysis, I must first distinguish between culture, political culture, and strategic culture.  The distinctions should be intuitively obvious.  I suspect, though, that there are aspects of the world of traditional political theory that remain tightly wedded to yesterday's concepts, determined to overlook or trivialize the relevance of areas such as history, anthropology, sociology and geography in their conscious analysis. One might also say that there appears to be a tendency on the part of some political theorists to think only in tactical terms and in isolated competition with other theorists.                                 

        The term strategic alone should simplify understanding.  At the very least it will make the preliminary research to achieve consensus on a definition interesting.  I am not sure how I will know that I have achieved consensus, but I will leave that to self resolve.  I am far more interested, once this first hurdle is overcome, to move on to the deeper work that may eventually establish some method of comparative strategic culture analysis. I cannot lose the belief that success in this direction may eventually lead to better cross cultural understanding and a way past a great deal of human conflict and misery.  Humanity will never, I suspect, be free of conflict, but how wonderful it would be to enhance understanding and minimize some of the chronic areas of cross-cultural conflict and hatred based on fear and ignorance.  And the ignorance is not just of the "other".  We do not know ourselves very well anymore and it is long past time that we revisited our own motives, reassessed our own core values.

        In this web space I plan to not only explore the concept of strategic culture but to place it in a more readily understood context.  I suspect, at this time, that much of the confusion has to do with the approach that has traditionally been taken to defining the concept.  I believe that might be overcome, to a certain extent, if we stopped trying to define it in terms of what it is and focused instead on why and how strategic culture comes about in the first place.  It is one thing to analyze what someone is doing, but I believe it is far more valuable to understand why and how they are doing it.  I also believe that the primary underlying motivator for all that we do is the compelling urge to survive, as an individual, as a community, as a race, as a species.  Take your choice, but they are all relevant.  Physically, psychologically, ideologically we all want to survive and band with like minded others for the safety and security of a group.  There are aspects of this drive to survive that are universal, but there are other aspects that are shaped by history, political and environmental circumstances, and geography.  I hope to do more than achieve a definition of Strategic Culture.  I want to identify those elements that are key to understanding why people see things as a threat or opportunity, to identify those aspects of physical and philosophical culture (core values) that inform and define how a society is likely to perceive and respond to threat and opportunity.  This area of study promises to be very interdisciplinary but I believe that it has the potential to be increasingly useful as borders and distance become less and less relevant in our frantic globalization process. 

        If you reduce this concept to the ordinary, to the every day, it is not hard to see how a child has a far different perception of threat and opportunity than a middle aged adult or an elder.  Someone who cannot walk, or someone who cannot see has an entirely different notion of threat and opportunity than someone who is ambulatory or sighted.  It's all relative to the elements that are unique to our personal strategic culture.  We all have a tendency, however, to project our own perception of threat and opportunity onto those with whom we come into contact and exchange.  This can lead to terrible misunderstanding and in the case of international relations, can have a devastating impact. 

        I believe that I can read, think, and analyze enough to  first clearly define strategic culture.  That will, apparently, suffice for the MA.  From there I plan to continue my research in order to devise a "neutral voice" or objective and  systematic, analytic process, and supporting matrix whereby it will be possible to recognize and better understand one another's strategic culture, whether at the micro or the macro level.  One of the keys will be the requirement to first apply the process in reflective or self-analysis.  Without this you will have no point of reference for comparison.  I suppose that this means that your own strategic culture becomes the control in your laboratory of strategic culture analysis.  I also believe that this will have application not just at the macro or international, political and military level, but also at the micro or individual and day to day level. 

        We have such wonderful communication and creative expression technology and we are, I believe, capable of so much that is good.  It stands to reason that with a little help we can do far more than simply overcome our differences.  We can celebrate them!  Diversity is a wonderful thing.  Nature knows the value of balanced diversity.  (So did humanity once upon a time).  Perhaps I am naive, but I believe we can find a balance of technological brilliance and spiritual maturity/enlightenment that is not threatened by difference. 

The intent behind this web site has not changed.  It remains a kind of interactive virtual learning journal, where I hope to build, share, exchange and evolve ideas that will help me to develop a viable foundation and framework for my research.  I hate to reduce it to a mere BLOG!

I first became intrigued by the concept of Comparative Strategic Culture and its analysis when asked in 2002 to summarize a paper by Andrew Scobell on the Comparative Strategic Culture of China. I found the concept itself to be most compelling.  The possible applications and implications of some kind of methodical system of analysis of the key elements that might inform and define a nation's strategic decision making have bubbled and boiled on the back burner of my brain for four years.  I've read, and thought, and discussed to the point where there was no escape.  I returned to school. 

I am closing in on the conclusion of my first semester of a masters degree program in International Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia (Prince George, BC) and will soon return to my job with the Canadian Forces in Victoria, BC.  I have learned much and have a clearer idea of how to lay out my work.  I will continue with part time studies through distance learning and hope to complete the MA over the course of the next 18 months.  It is quite evident , however, that this is only a beginning.  This short burst of reading and research will only scrape the surface of what promises to be a massive undertaking.  The prospect of the learning and discovery that lies ahead, however, is very exciting.