Raw Ideas
(This will likely become one of my favourite places to toss down and around ideas, poke them and shake them until they make sense, work in some way or another or simply fall apart)
8. I had a thought about Strategic Culture and gender. Actually more about social constructs and gender, security and gender. Or maybe it's to do with the Strategic Culture OF gender. In any event, it goes back to the original gender based roles of early social constructs - those of hunter versus gatherer in an early clan or extended family grouping. The hunter was engaged in a zero sum game while the gatherer was engaged in a more non-zero sum game. For the gatherer the experience of the social construct was more collaborative and incremental. For the hunter the social construct was cooperative but hierarchical and the outcome was black and white - success or failure, with the added possibility of inadvertently shifting from hunter to hunted. Gatherer - Maker versus Hunter - Breaker. This dichotomy probably continues to shape core gender perceptions of threat and opportunity to some extent today. It may also serve as the basis for gender driven perceptions of preferred interaction with the surrounding material agencies. The gatherer and subsequently agrarian view could be predisposed to a more collaborative role with the environment (cumulative and long term), while a hunter view is inclined to be more predatory and exploitive (short term and opportunistic). I wonder if this means that a failure to understand your own Strategic Culture can be reflected in a preference for non-sustainable abuse of use your physical environment? Just a free roaming thought. Like the header says - RAW ideas. Sun Tzu rocks.
7. 24 June 2008 - It's been a while - far too long even - since I articulated some of the raw stuff swirling about in my head. There are so many distractions from work that I sometimes feel like I am trying to climb a very slippery slope and keep losing my footing. I know the way and can see the next few milestones in the journey off ahead. Peter Stoett has directed my attention to two very valuable areas: Critical Security Studies and Social Constructivism. Both have generated a great deal in terms of a frame of reference, a context for Strategic Culture. I need to get away from all the distractions and simply read, think, read, map out pockets of concept and begin to build linkages. I have, however, found a starting point to a more focused framework for the thesis than is currently laid out in the prospectus. I believe that my best starting point is to open with my own definition and work back from there. I think I will use the results of the Comparative Strategic Culture conference of 2005 held in Monterey, California as a base on which to build. Organized by the Center for Contemporary Conflict, at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School for the Advanced Systems and Concepts Office of the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the objectives of this conference included the hope of agreeing on a definition. The readings covered by the conference were extensive and have been incorporated in my own literature review. There's no point, however, in reinventing the wheel. Better to build on their work. I am too distracted tonight to do justice to a summary of where recent readings have led my thoughts, but anticipate some peace and solitude in the weeks ahead so should be able to make good headway.
6. Many thoughts wrestling for dominance. Much of this term has been spent chasing political theory. I have no difficulty recognizing the validity of a sound base of political theory. I find, however, that it is often presented in such an arcane and scattered manner that it is difficult to decipher what is really being said let alone the intent or objective behind the teaching. Then there is the passion for always citing someone else, no matter what you have to say, otherwise it is not valid, not legitimate. I begin to feel that I need to refer to some other work to verify even the mundane and everyday. It's like I must confirm that a red light is still a red light lest I am making theoretically ungrounded empirical assumptions that will not stand when I come to a stop at an intersection. Perhaps some theoretically more adept driver will have reasoned, with a whole page of cited references, that the principle underlying the red light has been theoretically overturned and reduced to an unsupported abstract that has no more relevance at this particular intersection and I risk being rammed from behind as an unenlightened obstructionist driver!
This discipline seems overburdened with theorists fearful of original thought based on good old fashioned observation and analysis. If your theorizing must be exclusively rooted to someone else's vision, which is in turn linked to that of yet another, how can new ideas break out of the circle? Is it not possible to present a solid concept, laid out in logical and progressive steps, based on what is observed and analyzed? Within the cited circle, furthermore, what happens when the arguments and models presented are based on outdated information and have lost sight of significant changes in the real world?
And oh the "isms" - the disconnected, often dysfunctional, shifting isms. And what about the people who have become so obsessed with presenting a strong theory for its own sake, that they have lost sight of the issue they were trying to resolve by theorizing? By the time there is any consensus, reality will have evolved so far past their argument that none of their conclusions will have anything but historical relevance. A glorious circle jerk of hind-sighted, elitists locked in an exclusive and hierarchical world. I will learn their language, learn it well - pay my dues at the theoretical altar of absurdity and learn as much as I can. But once I have researched and organized what it is I want to build and teach, I will write predominantly for the more down to earth reader. These are the everyday folks who will take an idea that they understand and actually DO something worthwhile with it. The ivory tower has its purpose. There are many who are engaged in valuable research and debate. But it also serves to keep the self absorbed and marginal academic out of the way, off the streets so to speak, and out of the field, so that the real thinkers, movers and shakers (and some of these are wonderful academics) can get on with real living and working and building a better future together.
5. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs presents an interesting psychological perspective on my research. Is it possible to identify where a culture is in its evolution with respect to this hierarchy model, or to develop something parallel for application to political theory? Has someone already done this? Must dig around and see what I can find.
4. International Strategic Theory - This expression finds use in corporate and economic management theory as well as in “The Way of Economy in China in the 21st Century”, “Mao Zedong’s International Strategic Theory and Diplomatic Policy”. It has interesting potential as an alternate to International Relations Theory. If you are aligned with Holsti's argument that a viable paradigm of International theory must deal with the causes of war, the essential actors, and images of the world system perhaps International Political theory could be equally well identified as International Strategic Theory. How do the key actors in the international arena position themselves to effectively manipulate events and lesser players to their best economic and strategic advantage? And what defines a key actor? This also brings to mind Niall Ferguson's Cash Nexus or the link between war and economic development. (http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people3/Ferguson/ferguson-con3.html)
"there are four institutions that come about almost inadvertently as a result of war-making and the exigencies of war finance. These institutions are a tax collecting bureaucracy, a representative assembly, a central bank, and some kind of financial markets in which the national debt can be financed. These are the institutions that arise." They arise primarily out of the exigencies of military conflict, but when they come together, first in Holland, and then spectacularly in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they turn out to be the magic key that unlocks economic development."
If war leads to economic development, then is it so far a stretch to identify a two way flow in that linkage with each being critical to and defining the state of the other? That would support the notion that international political theory is little more than the ongoing strategic positioning and aligning of the power elite in anticipation of potential conflict.
3. Applicable Concepts of week 1 - Enlightened Domination, Empirical Theory, Communitative as opposed to Cosmopolitan International Theory. Early International Relations Theory, at the open of the 20th century, appears to have focused on the What. A debate around WW II seems to have shifted the focus to the How. I want to take it to the Why. It's not about some static neat definition, it's about identifying the key elements of a dynamic, human, social, organizational, and even hierarchical process that has evolved in spite of us to ensure species survival. Isn't it?
2. What are those elements that define individual, corporate, or national perceptions of threat and/or opportunity? Some are pretty straightforward, like geography. Beyond the obvious, like a continental or island locale, arid arid or temperate conditions, there are dozens, perhaps even hundreds of subtle influences. All of these elements have the potential to define or influence in some way just how individuals, organizations, and nation states identify, distinguish between and, ultimately, respond to threat or opportunity.
1. I had first thought that the starting point on this thinking journey would be to define the key Elements of Comparative Strategic Culture. Recent reading, however (Conference Report - Center for Contemporary Conflict - Monterey 2005) indicates that there is, as yet, no consensus for a definition for Comparative Strategic Culture itself. The one thing they could agree on, however, appeared to be a recognition of its significance in current international political affairs and the development of strategic policy. Before addressing the elements, then, I shall have to work on that definition!