I am very grateful to the European Research Council (ERC) for funding the five-year research programme Security in Transition: A Multidisciplinary Investigation of the Security Gap, on which this book is based. I am also grateful to the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Department for Science and Technology Laboratories (DSTL) for funding a complementary project called Strategic Governance of Pathways to Security that focused on the role of technology in security cultures and really helped to further the ideas in this book. I want to thank the teams in both projects for the exciting and productive discussions and collaborations that they involved. Special thanks to Sam Vincent for identifying the key readings that enabled me to write the book, for helping me undertake interviews in Washington DC and elsewhere, and for his work on drones and the war on terror security culture; Sabine Selchow, who pushed the boundaries of my thinking and co-developed the concept of security culture; Christine Chinkin, with whom I worked on a parallel book project International Law and New Wars that enormously helped to advance my understanding; Domenika Spyratou, who managed the research and kept on top of all the complexities, intellectual and administrative; Iavor Rangelov for helping me run the ERC programme and for his application of the cultures concept to justice; Anouk Rigterink for help with numbers and data; Rim Turkmani for explaining Syria and for her work on the war economy and on ISIL, and also Ali Ali; Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic for help and insights on Bosnia, and also Denisa Kostovicova; Florian Weigand and Marika Theros for keeping me up to date on Afghanistan; Ruben Andersson for invaluable comments on the concept of cultures and his work on Mali; James Revill for his work on new wars and IEDs; Paul Nightingale for collaboration on technology and culture; Stefan Bauchowitz for helping me with German-language sources; Shalaka Thakur for research assistance on the geo-politics chapter; and, last but not least, Julian Robinson for discussing the arguments, applying them to chemical warfare, reading bits of the manuscript and, in general, being very encouraging. I am also very grateful to the reviewers for Polity Press, especially James Der Derian, whose constructive and detailed comments have been incredibly helpful.

During the period that I was writing the book, I was also CEO of a research programme funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) called the Justice and Security Research Programme (JSRP). Discussions and research undertaken for JSRP also had a considerable influence on this book, especially the chapters on new wars and the liberal peace, so I would also like to thank all my colleagues in JSRP.

At the time of writing, there is a general sense of foreboding, rather like in the 1930s: the feeling that there is going to be some terrible worldwide tragedy, just as there was in the twentieth century. As a matter of fact, the tragedy is already happening; refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, the bombing of hospitals and medical facilities, the killing of thousands of young men (as well as women, children and older men) at long distance with drones, cruise missiles and aircraft, the use of hideous weapons prohibited in international law like nerve gases, incendiaries or cluster munitions, the reintroduction of sex slavery, the starvation of ordinary people as a consequence of sieges, the use of lorries and aircraft as weapons of mass destruction in crowded cities, or the beheading, forced detention and torture of innocents. These are phenomena that anyone growing up in the aftermath of World War II hoped would disappear for ever. Yet what we are experiencing is not a war in the twentieth-century sense. It is something else.

This book is an attempt to make sense of this ‘something else’. I use the term ‘global security culture’ as a conceptual tool to help us describe or explain what is happening in a way that might open up possible answers. A security culture is a specific pattern of behaviour, or constellation of socially meaningful practices, that expresses or is the expression of norms and standards embodied in a particular interpretation of security and that is deeply imbricated in a specific form of political authority or set of power relations. A security culture comprises different interconnected combinations of ideas, rules, people, tools, tactics and infrastructure, linked to different types of political authority that come together to address or engage in large-scale violence. The term ‘culture’ helps to explain why certain practices become normalized or habituated even if they appear to be contrary to logic. Why, for example, sixteen years after 9/11, are military means still being used to attack terrorists when the phenomenon of terrorism is more pervasive than ever? Why do politicians think that war is the answer to terror when the wars that have been conducted – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Mali, Somalia and elsewhere – have made things worse? And why do conflicts in places like Syria or Democratic Republic of Congo never end? Why do armed groups go on fighting when it is clear that they will not win? The argument is that this kind of behaviour makes sense from within the vantage point of the culture, that the culture structures narratives, career paths, material incentives and political power in such a way as to inculcate and naturalize ways of thinking and doing.

The term ‘security’ is used because not all methods of addressing large-scale violence are military. There is much military history that describes different ways of war, what one might call different military paradigms, associated with different epochs¹ – feudal knights, clan warfare, slave armies, industrial warfare, guerrilla warfare and so on. A security culture is similar to a way of war but it does not necessarily involve military force. A central proposition of this book is that the utility of military force has been transformed as a consequence of technological change. Because all military technology is increasingly destructive and accurate, differences in capabilities have narrowed. As a consequence, military force is a very clumsy instrument for imposing order or for what in the military jargon is called ‘compellance’. It is often pointed out that the United States has more military capabilities than all the other nations combined; it possesses well-trained, professional military personnel equipped with the most technologically advanced weapons that exist in the world today. Yet the United States has been unable to impose order in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. As in World War I, conventional battles have become hugely destructive and difficult to win. Towns like Grozny in Chechnya, Fallujah in Iraq and Vukovar in Croatia have been razed to the ground and yet insurgents pop up again when the battle is over. This is not to say that the use of military force has no utility; but it has other utilities for those engaged in military operations than winning or losing – political, psychological or economic utilities – as will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

At the same time a security culture is something more than a way of addressing large-scale violence that is not necessarily military. Security is bound up with authority and power. It is only meaningful if it underpins belief in political authority either out of fear or because the culture conforms to subjective perceptions about security. The production and reproduction of security cultures can only be understood in terms of the way in which they are both enabled by and enable a particular set of power relations.

The term ‘global’ is used to draw attention to the way in which security cultures are about ways of doing security or patterns of behaviour rather than about national or ethnic cultures. In the strategic studies literature, the term ‘strategic culture’ is used to describe different national ways of war. My concern is with different ways of doing security that cross borders and that emerge out of the interconnectedness of the contemporary world and, yet, are embedded in power. During the Cold War, the world was characterized by what could be described as a single international security culture. Nation-states and blocs of nation-states possessed regular military forces and associated armaments, and the main threat to security was considered an inter-state war on the model of the European wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The scale of military spending and the number and sophistication of armaments were imagined to indicate how well a state or bloc would do in a future confrontation and this then shaped the hierarchy of power in the international system. Domestically, of course, there were differences between rights-based, law-governed societies and more repressive societies. Today, by contrast, we face several competing global security cultures jostling for position; security cultures that are both international and domestic, ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, and that are associated with different types of political authority.

Distinguishing different security cultures and drawing attention to the different ways of doing security is illuminating for debates about intervention in wars.² There is a tendency to conflate all types of intervention and to assume, at any rate among critical scholars, that intervention should be avoided. But there is no such thing as non-intervention in an era of interconnectedness. The issue is whether the intervention is managed through political authorities – the state or international institutions – and whether it is aimed at ending wars or assisting one or other side in war, and how.

In this book, I distinguish four main types of security culture, although there is a lot of overlap and it would of course be possible to use the approach to identify others. One is geo-politics, the security culture of the Cold War based on military forces and nation-states. A second is new wars, the rise of networks of state and non-state actors associated with sub-state forms of political authority. A third is what I call the liberal peace, the combination of peace-keepers and a range of international agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), under the umbrella of the United Nations (UN) or regional organizations like the European Union (EU) or the African Union (AU). And the final security culture is the war on terror, involving a new group of actors – intelligence agencies, special forces, and private security actors – as well new technology such as mass surveillance and drones. The war on terror is associated with American exceptionalism although many other countries are following the path set by the United States.

This book is the outcome of a five-year research programme entitled Security in Transition: An Interdisciplinary Investigation into the Security Gap. The programme was concerned primarily with the transition from a Cold War model of security to a different set of security arrangements. What we called the security gap expressed the notion that the Cold War security model no longer fits contemporary times. By the security gap, we referred to the proposition that millions of people live in conditions of deep insecurity and yet our security apparatus, largely consisting of military forces, does not address their problems; indeed it often makes things worse. At the time the project was conceived, still basking in the afterglow of post-Cold War optimism despite 9/11, it was hoped that the project would substantiate this proposition and put forward proposals for alternative ways of doing security. In particular, I was preoccupied with the notion of human security, the security of the individual rather than the state, and how a human security approach might be implemented.

Parallel to our research was a concern in the strategic studies community with the way in which new technologies would impact the military. Both George W. Bush, when president, and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, argued that the advent of information and communications technologies (ICTs) was as significant for military practice as the stirrup in feudal times, or the combustion engine in the twentieth century. Following earlier Soviet writers, American defence analysts had, for a decade or more, talked about a revolution in military affairs (RMA). Our argument was that the transition is not just about technology. Indeed, as I argue in chapter 3, the RMA ended up in introducing new technology into the geo-politics security culture in such a way as not to disturb existing organizational structures – merely making existing cumbersome weapons systems even more complex and expensive.

So it was hoped that the programme would come up with new ideas about how to address contemporary insecurity in terms of social relations, new ways of organizing, new tactics, new strategies, rather than in terms of technology even though new technologies would be relevant. What became painfully evident during the course of the research programme was how misplaced was my optimism. Ways of doing security are changing but not in the direction of human security. The new wars have made use of new technologies within a very different pattern of behaviour. Armed groups that participate in contemporary wars in places like the Balkans, the Middle East or Africa have been able to organize in the form of loose networks or coalitions primarily as a consequence of improvements in communication. They were able to develop what might be called vernacular technology, for example improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that combine household ingredients with sophisticated triggering devices such as mobile phones.³ And their tactics were shaped at least in part by the need to get around concentrations of high-technology military force.

Just as important, by the end of the first decade of the new century, a new war on terror way of doing security (or insecurity) came together in the long-distance campaign of kill-or-capture operations, using mass surveillance and drone technology.

The insight that was most helpful in unpacking these developments was the realization that ‘security’ is a highly ambiguous concept. From one viewpoint, it means safety, freedom from care. But from another, it refers to an apparatus or a set of practices – locks, airport scanners, welfare budgets, police, military and so on. The security gap is actually a rather trivial proposition because it involves comparing apples and pears; the objectives (safety) are defined very differently from the practices. This difference can be observed in the scholarly literature on security, as I discuss in chapter 2. Some scholars are preoccupied with the objectives of security – whose security (that of the individual, the nation or the world) and from what (violence, poverty, environmental disaster and so on) – while other scholars are more concerned with the practices of security.⁴ Among the latter group are the ‘securitization’ scholars who point out that by performing security, we draw attention to the urgency of what is being performed and, by the same token, we respect and submit to those who are responsible for the performance. For example, when we go through security procedures at airports, we are reminded of the terrorist threat and how grateful we should be to our government for protecting us against this threat. During the Cold War, military exercises on the East German plain for the deployment of missiles had a similar function; it was a way of telling us that a world war would be the worst thing that could possibly happen and that the Western Alliance was our bulwark against that eventuality.

A security culture brings together objectives and practices. It helps to explain how objectives are shaped by practices as well as vice versa. Cultures are constructed and the various mechanisms (money, experience, technology) through which they are reproduced evolve over time even though they tend to follow prescribed pathways. This method allows us to identify openings – contradictions or niche experiments – where alternative pathways might be possible. The human security approach could still find a way through the maze of contemporary tragedies that are the consequence of current directions of change.

As part of our research programme, one of my PhD students was undertaking fieldwork in Afghanistan. My institution, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), became concerned about whether we had conducted the risk assessment properly and what this implied for the institution's insurance policy. A private security company was hired to conduct a new risk assessment. Unfortunately, one of the company's personnel had been killed the previous week and everyone was confined to their protected base. The task was therefore subcontracted to the notorious firm G4S.⁵ My student, living in a compound in Kabul with Afghan colleagues, became extremely nervous that G4S would arrive conspicuously in an armoured car, potentially making him and his colleagues targets. Luckily G4S also decided that it was too dangerous for them to venture out of their base and they decided to conduct their risk assessment on the telephone. Its report, when it was completed, proposed that the LSE needed to invest in armoured cars and security guards to protect its researchers, and that G4S not surprisingly would be happy to assist.

The story illuminates two different security cultures. One is the ‘hard’ security approach embedded in a nexus of security companies, insurance agencies and equipment providers. The other is the researchers' ‘soft’ security approach, based on keeping a low profile, blending in to the community, and being extremely well informed about the situation in areas where fieldwork is to be undertaken so as to avoid dangerous times and places. It is a model that also has its social underpinning, shaped by ethnographic methods and links between foreign researchers and local people.

The story also provides an illustration of the utility of thinking about different security cultures that I investigate in this book. In chapter 2, I develop the concept of global security cultures and show how it relates to the notion of strategic culture as well as to parallel concepts such as assemblage (Sassen), communities of practice (Adler and Pouliot), techno-economic paradigm (Freeman), field (Bourdieu) and dispositif (Foucault).⁶ The next four chapters represent a first stab at the genealogy or evolution of each of the four main security cultures.

Chapter 3 on geo-politics charts the origins of geo-politics as a culture in the rise of nation-state and regular military forces. I show how in the post-Cold War period, geo-politics has remained the dominant culture both in terms of levels of military spending and in terms of the national security discourse. Yet although geo-politics is very persistent in terms of both discourse and apparatuses, I argue that the practices have become increasingly bio-political instead of geo-political, that is to say, the use or possession of military force has more to do with the control of population than military capture of territory. This is partly because the main form of power projection is communicative; power is performed through displaying the supposed instruments of power. But it is also because military force is used against people as opposed to military forces, against civilians for example or terrorists.

Chapter 4 is about the new wars culture, and it traces the evolution of new wars from the irregular wars of the post-World War II period. It treats new wars as a culture in contrast to a political and military contest in order to explain their persistence and spread. It describes how new wars are continuing to change and how the new wars culture interacts with other cultures. Thus the combination of new wars and liberal peace produces hybrid peace, an uneasy and unstable peace in which the warring parties remain the dominant political and economic actors. The combination of new wars and geo-politics leads to hybrid war as in Ukraine, while the outcome of the interaction between new wars and the war on terror is the spread of jihadism.

Chapter 5 is about the liberal peace, a security culture associated with international institutions such as the UN, the EU or the AU, that came into its own during the 1990s. The chapter addresses the contradictions and dilemmas associated with the liberal peace and its various components – humanitarianism, peace-making, peace-keeping and peace-building. The liberal peace as a culture is still anchored in old war or geo-political thinking; the founding ideas derive from a traditional view of peace that developed in response to European wars in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What we can observe is a continuing tension between the traditional conception of peace and new initiatives that emerge from experience and from local civil society groups. It is out of this tension that new possibilities open up.

Chapter 6 is about the war on terror, which I depict as a new type of long-distance manhunt rather than a war. While the war on terror was initially shaped by geo-politics, it has evolved into a distinct culture making use of specific tactics (mass surveillance, identification based on a set of algorithms and technical criteria, air strikes especially by drones, and raids by special forces) with a dedicated infrastructure that includes the multiplication of intelligence agencies, private security contractors and special forces. The war on terror together with terror has produced a generalized sense of insecurity. Together with new wars, it constitutes that ‘something else’ other than a twentieth-century war that we experience today.

Chapter 7 is called ‘Geographies’. It is about how global security cultures play out in specific contexts. The three sites chosen were those where we conducted research for the Security in Transition research programme – Bosnia, Afghanistan and Syria. Bosnia is an example of hybrid peace – the combination of a new war culture and the liberal peace. Afghanistan represents a combination of new wars, the liberal peace and the war on terror. And Syria has become the laboratory for the worst aspects of new wars, geo-politics and the war on terror, marginalizing the liberal peace. The security cultures framework has been applied primarily in these areas. The book does not deal with Latin America, for example, where armed criminal gangs represent many elements of the new wars culture, or Asia, where wars in Xinjiang or Tibet can also be analysed in similar terms.⁷

The final chapter is about what we can learn from this analysis in order to develop approaches that can begin to reverse what is happening. It asks what can be done to rescue civility. This new ‘something else’ is hugely fragmented; alongside all the horrors are relatively peaceful areas where people continue to live together or negotiate alternative forms of security. I ask how those ‘islands of civility’ to be found in regions of pervasive insecurity – civil society groups, local municipalities that have negotiated local ceasefires, safe areas where legitimate economic activities take place – and that are either attacked or neglected by all the security cultures, including the liberal peace, could become the basis for a new peace or post-liberal peace. Are there ways to take advantage of the tensions and contradictions in the main security cultures and build on experiments in civility?