The article uses theories of strategic culture to show why Denmark has come to regard the use of armed force in new ways following the end of the Cold War. It is argued that Danish strategic culture is constituted by a debate between 'cosmopolitans' and 'defencists' about the utility of armed force. The debate shows that a minor power possesses a certain ability to choose how to act on the world stage, and what means to use in doing so, and illustrates that the prevalent structural explanations of why Danish foreign policy has been 'militarized' since the end of the Cold War are insufficient. In Denmark, a new focus on European integration and globalization has meant that military power is being understood in a new way. A practice of 'activism' has transcended the cosmopolitan-defencist debate that paralysed Danish security discourse in the late 1970s and 1980s.
A research programme on `reflexive security' is emerging, as a number of students of international security are applying sociological insights of `risk society' to understand new discourses and practices of security. This research note maps the current achievements and future challenges of this emerging research programme on risk arguing that it offers a way to overcome the debate about whether to apply a `broad' or `narrow' concept of security; a debate which is stifling the discipline's ability to appreciate the `war on terrorism' as an example of a new security practice. Discussing the nature of strategy in a risk environment, the paper outlines the consequences for applying the concept of reflexive rationality to strategy. Doing so, I address some of the concerns on how to study `reflexive security' previously raised by Shlomo Griner in Millennium.
In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, security policy in Western societies is driven by a wish to prevent future threats from becoming reality. Applying theories of 'risk society' to the study of strategy, this book analyses the creation of a new approach to strategy. The author demonstrates that this approach creates new choices for policy-makers and challenges well-established truths within the study of security and strategy. He argues that since the seventeenth century the concept of strategy has served to rationalise new technologies, doctrines and agents. By outlining the history of the concept of strategy in terms of rationality, Rasmussen presents a framework for studying strategy in a time of risk and uses this framework to analyse how new technologies of war, pre-emptive doctrines, globalisation and the rise of the 'terrorist approach to warfare' can formulate a new theory of strategy.
The article investigates the concept of lessons in IR. By means of a constructivist critique of the ‘lessons literature’, the article analyses one of the most important of IR lessons: that of Munich. Examining how the Munich lesson came about, the article shows the praxeological nature of lessons and emphasises the need to study the history of lessons rather than the lessons of history. This approach shows that Munich is the end point of a constitutive history that begins in the failure of the Versailles treaty to create a durable European order following the First World War. The Munich lesson is thus one element of the lesson of Versailles, which is a praxeology that defines how the West is to make peace, and against whom peace must be defended. The lesson of Versailles has been, at least in part, constitutive of the outbreak of the Cold War, and it continues to define the Western conception of what defines peace and security even in the ‘war against terrorism’.
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