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From War to Security: Security Studies, the Wider Agenda and the Fate of
the Study of War

Tarak Barkawi
Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2011 39: 701 originally published online 22
March 2011
DOI: 10.1177/0305829811400656
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MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies

Plenary Article

From War to Security:

Security Studies, the
Wider Agenda and the
Fate of the Study of War

Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
39(3) 701716
The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.
uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0305829811400656
mil.sagepub.com

Tarak Barkawi
University of Cambrige

Abstract
This article critiques the wider agenda in security studies from the perspective of the idea of a war
studies. It argues that security studies in any form has not adequately addressed the phenomenon of
war and that IR more generally reduces war to an effect of the states system. An analysis of inquiry
into the Second World War illuminates these points, while the Vietnam War is mobilised to show
how the study of war can refigure our understanding of the international as a distinct social space.
The conclusion suggests a new critical research agenda centred on politics, force, and war.

Keywords
Second World War, securitisation, security studies, Vietnam War, war studies

In a widely cited article published in 1991, Stephen Walt found it easy to identify the
main focus of security studies: the phenomenon of war.1 Nearly 20 years on, no responsible university teacher of security studies could so limit the focus of the subject. There
is perhaps no better sign of just how far the wider agenda has advanced, or of the impact
of securitisation theory, than that most such teachers would identify their subject matter
as concerning the logics and practices of security, and would hasten to underscore that
these topics can in no way be limited to the use of armed force or war. Buzan, Waever
and de Wilde relegate Walts main focus to one sector among five.2 Buzan would leave
military affairs to strategic studies, which then can make its more specialised
1.
2.

Stephen Walt, The Renaissance of Security Studies, International Studies Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1991): 212.
Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde, Security (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

Corresponding author:
Tarak Barkawi, University of Cambridge, UK.
Email: tkb24@cam.ac.uk

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contribution to the problem of national security, while security studies occupies the
holistic disciplinary high ground.3
A parallel development from war to security is evident in the institutions of state
concerned with armed force. Ministries of war were relabelled ministries of defence just
before and after the Second World War. Initially, these combined the armed services
under one ministry, replacing secretaries of the army and the navy who had previously
held cabinet posts in the US and the UK. During the Cold War, these institutions took on
more and more functions concerned with national security, moving into intelligence,
foreign policy and public relations among other fields. In political life generally, national
security, while remaining rooted in the dynamics of military threat, became articulated
with ever more diverse phenomena, from the diet of the working classes to practices
of motherhood. Terms such as national interest, which in the US used to refer to the economic welfare of the population as a whole, became ever more strongly associated with
security, which now took centre stage in politics.4 With the collapse of the only power
capable of existentially threatening the West in 1991, national security seemed briefly to
revolve principally around the wider agenda of economy, environment and society, with
force largely relegated to the role of international good works in the form of peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention.
At stake in these developments is something more than the politics of language and
the utility for state officials of reclassifying war as peace and security. There has been
a breakdown in the dialogue between the study of security and knowledge about war, a
breakdown that is neither appreciated nor mourned. For the wider agenda, comprising
securitisation theory, critical security studies and human security, a central aim was to
detach the concept of security from what was seen as the undue attention and priority
given to military affairs in traditional security studies. An unintended consequence of
this move was the abandonment of the possibility of the critical study of war, which arguably should be at the heart of the discipline of International Relations (IR). A further
consequence was the participation of wider security studies in the dissociation of war
from security, a dissociation that assists liberal societies and their leaderships in imagining that war is not, and has not been, central to the formation, course and character of
Western states and societies and much else in world politics. Using Walt and securitisation theory as foils, this article explores these consequences and the possibilities the
study of war offers for IR.
Given the ways in which security studies as an academic enterprise is caught up in
the public policy concerns of the day, it is perhaps no surprise that there was a parallel
widening of the agenda both in inquiry and in practice. Equally, the very centrality of
national security to the politics of the Western democracies demanded study in its own
right, as security came to inform not only party politics and the course of elections, but
also ideology, identity and culture, as well as nearly every area of public policy. That
security could be articulated with almost anything was in part due to long-term trends
in Western society through which material wealth and the health and welfare of the
3.
4.

Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1983), 2557.
Arnold Wolfers, National Security as an Ambiguous Symbol, Political Science Quarterly 67, no. 4
(1952): 4813.

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individual as opposed to political ideals that demanded sacrifice came to dominate

politics. But securitys chief advantage was in fact its inherent meaninglessness coupled
with its seeming call for urgency and priority. As Arnold Wolfers pointed out early in
these developments, security is an intermediate or derivative value that takes on
meaning only in reference to a higher goal or purpose one is seeking to secure.5 The
proliferation of security politics is therefore a prime instance of what Max Weber called
rationalisation, the increasing dominance of means over valued ends in modern culture,
science and politics.6
Securitisation theory embraces this meaninglessness with the idea that any referent
object can be securitised. In its beguiling and apparently irresistible combination of the
objectivism of positivism with the relativism of constructivism, it decisively breaks the
link between security and war. In sharp contrast to the civilian strategists who dominated
the national security debate during the Cold War, securitisation theory has helped to
spawn a generation of security studies specialists many of whom know little about weapons systems or military operations. With minors in the philosophy of inquiry, they focus
on topics like culture and identity, the environment and immigration, human trafficking
and gender. Force and war are most likely to be approached (if at all) within an ethical
register, or with a concern for overcoming the problem of war rather than as direct objects
of inquiry (e.g. peace-building, conflict resolution, or security and development). Of
course, mainstream security studies continues unabated, and the public sphere as well as
councils of state have an ample supply of scholars and other analysts advocating and
analysing various national security policies. Securitisation theory would seem to have
added an important and rigorous dimension to the study of security, while responding in
appropriate fashion to the real-world widening of the security agenda since 1945.
There remains a disturbing parallel between a discourse of national security that
transforms the relationship of force and politics into one of protection from threat, proliferating means to security in the relative absence of debate over ultimate ends or
purposes, and a security studies that participates in this process. Underlying this parallel
is a mutual distancing from the phenomenon of war, but one that works differently
in practice and in inquiry. While practices of the use of force have changed, for war is
historical, there remains no shortage of organised violence in world politics, or of the use
of force to pursue political values. Thus the renaming of war departments did not mark a
turn away from war, but rather a transformation of the public discourses through which
war was spoken of and legitimated. These discourses came to revolve around the notion
of defence from aggression, articulated initially with the identity politics of the Cold
War, even as Western power was used offensively, to forge a world order conducive
to Western interests. Force was regularly used to see off alternatives to this order,
principally in the Third World, but was referred to in languages of police actions and
assisting allies.
In inquiry based on the wider agenda of security, by contrast, there has been a principled and substantive move away from war and force. Indeed, this is the whole point of
5.
6.

Ibid., 492.
Tarak Barkawi, Strategy as a Vocation: Weber, Morgenthau and Modern Strategic Studies, Review of
International Studies 24, no. 2 (1998): 15984.

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the wider agenda.7 This would not pose any particular problem if only we could believe
Walts claim that the core of traditional security studies has been and continues to be the
phenomenon of war. In fact, neither security studies nor IR inquire into, much less
theorise, war as a set of social relations and processes. They study things like the incidence of war in the international system, the causes of war, crisis decision-making, the
dynamics of alliances and so on, none of which are the same object of analysis as war.
Perhaps surprisingly given their self-identity, these disciplines are part and parcel of the
decentring of war in the organisation of social-scientific knowledge inspired by the
European Enlightenments. The distinction between traditional and wider security studies
is in part based on a shared misunderstanding of war and what the study of it might entail.
Strategic studies serves as a prime example. Strategy concerns how to prevail in war,
and more broadly how to use military force among other instrumentalities to achieve
political ends. It is not about the study of war per se. Strategy, as a tradition if not always
in practice, has a major advantage over security studies in respect of the problem of
rationalisation in that it necessarily foregrounds valued ends. But that does not make it a
social science adequate to the phenomenon of war, however essential an understanding
of strategic thought would be to such a science. Thus the idea that military affairs can
be left to strategic studies while security studies gets on with the business of analysing
the logic of security itself mistakenly assumes that strategic studies and traditional
security studies amount to a war studies.8 They do not.
To the extent it is convincing, the implications of this line of argument are shocking.
In a world made in no small measure by ongoing histories of organised violence, we lack
a social science of war. The discipline supposedly most concerned with the question of
war and peace IR does not actually study the social and political relations that comprise war and its effects. The subdiscipline of security studies, which both traditional and
critical scholars assume has been focused on war, has not in fact been so focused. Now,
in a world in which everything from passenger air travel to religion is fundamentally
informed by war, major elements of that subdiscipline positively celebrate the marginalisation of war from the academy.
In fact, there is not even much of a grave on which the party goers from Copenhagen,
Aberystwyth and elsewhere might dance. For war is in the strange position of being both
taken for granted in its meaning and radically underdeveloped as an object of inquiry.
The first section below develops the argument about the lack of a war studies; the second
illustrates the consequences for IR through the example of the Second World War; the
third maps out how a focus on war produces a different window on the international
than does beginning with sovereign states and their security dilemmas. The conclusion
takes up the slippage that occurs when the relationship between politics and force is
rationalised in security terms.

7.

8.

Although cf. Vivienne Jabri, Discourses on Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996)
and War and the Transformation of Global Politics, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010);
Jennifer Milliken, The Social Construction of the Korean War (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2001); Iver Neumann, Identity and the Outbreak of War, International Journal of Peace Studies 3, no. 1
(1998); Michael Williams, Culture and Security (London: Routledge, 2007).
Buzan, Waever and de Wilde, Security, 4.

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The Strange Absence of War Studies

Walt moves from the idea of the phenomenon of war to this definition of security studies: the study of the threat, use, and control of military force.9 What is the difference
between war as a central object of systematic inquiry and this definition? The definition
is what might be called a strategic appropriation of war, of a kind that happens when Carl
von Clausewitz is taken to have defined war as the continuation of policy by other
means.10 Although he can be quoted in this way, Clausewitzs conception of war vastly
exceeds such an instrumental approach. At a minimum there is the matter of the variable
relations between his trinities of people, government and army and their attendant
characteristics of passion, reason and technique.11 For Clausewitz, and many of the thin
line of major thinkers who have tackled war as their centrepiece, a key dimension of war
is its socially generative properties.12 War consumes and reworks social and political
orders. As a strategist and staff officer, Clausewitz enjoins leadership to think carefully
about ends and means in war, for war is a resistant medium for instrumental action. As a
philosopher of war, he is attentive to the ways in which war undermines and even reverses
the relations between ends and means, as in his ideas of total and true or absolute war. He
repeatedly emphasises wars capacity to unmake certainties, in chaotic and unpredictable
ways.13 This was in part a reflection of his own experience of a period of violent social
transformation occasioned by the Napoleonic way of war and its impact on a profoundly
conservative Prussian military and society.
These larger themes, which Clausewitz would take to be central to any notion of war,
are offset in Walts definition, which invokes the use and control of force, and the idea of
a threat an intentional action which can be made and responded to in a more or less
rational fashion. War as a force that might rework and operate upon these intentions, their
bearers and the social formations of which they are a part is not centred in Walts definition. Instead Walt emphasises the strategic, instrumentally rational element. For him,
security studies is necessarily concerned with the policy issues of the day, and so war is
approached from the point of view of statespersons and their decisions and policies, in
line with a long tradition of work in IR. At the same time, security studies must not
neglect larger theoretical questions.14 But here Walt turns to IR theory, the central object
of analysis of which is a system of sovereign states, not war.15 His research agenda
for the future is concerned with things like the role of domestic politics, the sources of
cooperation and political economy.16 Walt goes from strategy to international politics,
whereas Clausewitz takes up strategy as a route into an account of the fundamental character and nature of war. Walt offers only a policy science of war, along with a cognate not
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.

Walt, Renaissance of Security Studies, 212.

Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 87.
Ibid., 89.
See, for example, Hans Delbrck, History of the Art of War, 4 vols (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1990); Michael Howard, Captain Professor (London: Continuum, 2006).
Katherine Herbig, Chance and Uncertainty in On War, in Clausewitz and Modern Strategy, ed. Michael
Handel (London: Frank Cass, 1989).
Walt, Renaissance of Security Studies, 2223.
Ibid., 219.
Ibid., 2247.

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a core discipline, IR, like an MBA taught with sociology but without economics. This is
because the relevant core discipline war studies does not exist except in fragmented
form, as a grab bag of disparate topics cobbled together from a variety of disciplines
and sources.
The ultimate reason for this state of affairs has to do with some presuppositions in the
Enlightenment organisation of knowledge that inspired and shaped the social sciences.
As Michael Mann observes: From the Enlightenment to Durkheim most major sociologists omitted war from their central problematic, believing future society would be
pacific and transnational.17 Proceeding in this manner was possible even as wars raged
inside and outside Europe because many Enlightenment thinkers understood civilisation
as a teleological process through which violence barbarous, rude, uncivil was being
removed from society.18 Rational inquiry and debate, embodied in the academy, were
conceived as the very antithesis of force and as chief instruments in the progress of
civility, a view elegantly recapitulated by Jrgen Habermas as the forceless force of the
better argument.19 Today, this othering of violence from inquiry is registered institutionally in the lack of university departments and scholarly associations principally devoted
to war.20
Of course there is a great deal of scholarly writing devoted to war and military matters, located in a variety of disciplinary subfields. But in the absence of a discipline, war
itself is not centred as the object of analysis and debate, as itself the focus of a continuing
scholarly conversation. At issue are the concerns of some other scholarly conversation,
such as the relationship between war and state-building, the effects of war on public
opinion and elections, the war-proneness of the international system, the legality or ethics of war, or the consequences of war for society. Whatever insights may be derived
about these subject matters, they do not centrally concern war per se. Of course we learn
much of war through studies of these and other kinds. But the dangers are that what war
consists of is taken for granted, usually as the clash of arms, and that it is addressed only
in and through the terms of a discipline or scholarly project principally devoted to some
other subject. In other words, war is reduced to another social domain. War appears as a
builder of states in historical sociology, a pattern of public opinion in political science,
an effect of the international system in international relations scholarship, or a disrupter
of personalities in literature and psychology. War is strangely decentred and fragmented
as an object of inquiry, in ways intensified by the institutional diversity of the sites where
war is studied.
One response to this situation has been the interdisciplinary study of war, as in the
worlds leading department of war studies at Kings College London (KCL). There, a
diverse and changing array of subjects is taught, from military history and sociology to
strategic studies and IR. The departments core idea of studying war in the round,
through the lenses of different disciplines, was a progressive response to drums and
17.
18.
19.
20.

Michael Mann, States, War and Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 147.
John Keane, Reflections on Violence (London: Verso), 14ff.
Jrgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1984), 25.
Partial exceptions include the Society for Military History (http://www.smh-hq.org/) and the InterUniversity Seminar on Armed Forces and Society (http://www.iusafs.org/). However, neither military
history nor armed forces and society are the same object as war.

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trumpets military history. At its richest, this has included philosophy, ethics and
literature, but no matter how many subjects are brought to bear on war at KCL or
similar programmes, core questions remain unanswered: how are these subjects justified
conceptually and theoretically? What unifies this field of inquiry other than use of the
word war, or a common-sense understanding of what this word might refer to?
The lack of a theoretic core in actually existing war studies becomes evident when a
comparison is made with other interdisciplinary formations. War studies is not based on
a considered critique of the disciplines, as is the case with the array of studies that came
of age in the 1970s, such as gender studies, race studies and cultural studies, and which
evolved their own bodies of theory. With some exceptions, it does not call for a revision
or restructuring of existing disciplines and approaches, another claim associated with
interdisciplinarity in the humanities and social sciences. The supposedly interdisciplinary study of war in fact mostly amounts to multidisciplinarity, where scholars retain their
separate disciplinary identities and concerns.
Earlier efforts to provide a basis for the study of war, such as those of the historians
Hans Delbrck and Michael Howard, have gone astray, crowded out by, among other
things, the policy-relevant focus of much of security studies. Military history, an essential foundation for any war studies, remains a mostly limited enterprise with a restricted
university presence, especially as regards major departments and core disciplinary
debates. The work of academically respected historians related to war tends to concern
political, social and economic contexts rather than wartime operations. This is the distinctive stamp of what is known as the war and society tradition. The impact of war and
military organisation on state, society and economy, rather than the conduct of war, is the
usual focus of this kind of scholarship.21 It was not intended to centre war in this sort of
approach to war and society, which in part owed its popularity to the implicit suggestion
that it was possible to do the history of war while leaving war out of it.22
By contrast, Delbrck sought to keep armed forces, politics and war in the same
analytic frame, offering reinterpretations of major historic and social transformations
by developing the neglected political-military dimension. Similarly, for Howard, war
and society are entwined in mutually constitutive relations.23 War is shaped by, and
shapes, social context. The implication is that war cannot be studied only as the conduct
of military operations, much less as the history of decisive battles. War, as it were,
exceeds war as the clash of arms and is related to a whole range of social phenomena
on and off the battlefield. This was a war and society approach that sought to keep war
centred while also placing it in a broader context.
Perhaps because they were historians, Delbrck and Howard made little effort to
critique, revise and incorporate theoretic traditions from the social sciences. This meant
that no intellectual basis was laid for a discipline, no core object of analysis and set of
approaches sketched out or debated. A key insight was left to lie fallow. If wars excess
is taken seriously, that is, the idea that war shapes the social relations in which it is
embedded, then war is present beyond the war front and beyond wartime, in and among
21. Stephen Morillo with Michael Pavkovic, What Is Military History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 40.
22. Doyne Dawson, The Return of Military History?, History and Theory 47 (2008): 598.
23. Howard, Captain Professor, 145.

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apparently pacific social, cultural and economic relations. Any conception of war limited
to the clash of arms, such as the measures of battle deaths extensively used to identify
incidences of war in quantitative analyses, necessarily misses this crucial and intrinsic
dimension of war. [W]ar must be seen as a social activity related to the whole complex
of social life and organisation.24 Analysis faces the apparently contradictory demands
of centring war, while simultaneously seeing it as shot through the surrounding
social context.
What these insights might mean for our understanding of the phenomenon of war,
and how they might be developed in ways which speak to the concerns of international
studies, can only be sketched in crude terms here. The absence of a discipline cannot be
made up for in a small library, much less an article of this length. An initial point to keep
in mind is that, as rich as Delbrck, Howard and the historical sociologists are in their
understanding of war as compared to IR and security studies, they are astoundingly
Eurocentric in their focus. Indeed, military history, military sociology and strategic
studies are almost entirely concerned with the armies and wars of the great powers,
which are mostly located in Europe and the West. Another relative weakness of these
thinkers is their unfamiliarity with more sophisticated conceptions of culture and cultural
relations, of how culture might be a primary sphere for wars effects, one intimately
bound up with politics, economy and society.

The Even Stranger Absence of the Second World War

Few would dispute that IR and security studies are profoundly shaped by the Second
World War. The core debate between realists and liberals regarding the amelioration of
great power conflict realpolitik versus international institutions rests upon competing
accounts of its origins and aftermath. Work on the war-proneness of different regime
types the so-called Democratic Peace grew out of these debates. Normative orientations across a range of positions in IR and security studies draw sustenance from moral
tales of the good war as a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, civilisation
and barbarism. More fundamental, if less remarked upon in disciplinary literature, is the
international system before the war one largely composed of European great powers
and their empires and that after the war, in which the sovereign states system rapidly
went global and imperialism reverted to more informal modes. However characterised,
the Second World War marks basic shifts in the character of world politics.
Yet note that in this overview the social, political and cultural processes of the war
itself remain a black box. It is taken for granted that the war changed everything, but just
how it did so is left unaddressed in the discipline concerned with war and peace and the
subdiscipline supposedly focused on the phenomenon of war. It is also more or less
taken for granted that we know what the war consisted of and when it began and
ended. But just how is it that the war consumed one world order and spat out another?
The Second World War cannot simply be seen as having destroyed the old world in some
direct cashing out of the pre-war balance of power; it helped to generate and shape the
new, not least in the extraordinary mobilisation of American world power it called forth.
24. Martin Shaw, Dialectics of War (London: Pluto, 1988), 11.

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At best, IR manages to say something about the causes of war and the sources of interstate peace, while traditional security studies can tell us a great deal about strategies of
coercion and deterrence, offensive and defensive force postures, and the dynamics of
alliance relations. Elsewhere, military history focuses on wartime operations and war
and society literature on the war at home; sociology covers the growth of the Western
states administrative and welfare capacities and the development of its international
reach; and military sociology born during the Second World War and closely tied to the
state has something to say about the morale and effectiveness of armed forces. Notably
absent, for the major conflagration of the 20th century, are efforts to theorise and understand the war itself as a set of reciprocal processes and relations.25 That is, while the
social science disciplines defined by the nation-state history, sociology, political science have literatures addressing various processes and effects of the war on their
objects of analysis, the only discipline concerned with the international does not address
the war as a combined set of international social relations, a set of relations all are agreed
transformed the world.
An important reason for this is the dominance of the idea of the sovereign state and
the states system as the core focus of IR and security studies, which even critics must
respond to. This plays out in different ways for different approaches, but what it means
is that war can only be understood on an analytic terrain defined in advance by some
form of IR theory concerning relations between states. In this way, war is deprived of its
own properties as a social phenomenon, for there is no necessary reason why one would
begin to understand, theorise and study war from the point of view of the states system,
however important a cognate subject it might be. In IR, war is reduced primarily to an
effect of the states system.
Some of these points can be illustrated and their implications traced by looking at the
Correlates of War (CoW) data set and its construct of the Second World War.26 This data
set and the terms of analysis it has evolved have shaped discussions across a range of
literatures and approaches well beyond the specific interests of its creators. For CoW, the
essential identity of the entities which engage in war is defined in terms of the sovereign
states system, producing a set of possibilities oriented around territorial states that are
members of the international system: interstate war intrastate war and an evolving
residual category of extra-systemic war. Wars are given a strict duration established by
battle casualties over time, suffered by a states own armed forces for it to be counted
as a participant in a war. A war can only fall into one category at a time, and so can only
be one kind of war in any given year between any given participants. This is CoWs
principle of mutual exclusivity of wars. CoW deals with the fact that some wars transmutate between categories by dividing them into phases, with the separate phases being
placed in different categories of war.
The essential point to underline here is that all of this is to frame war by reference to
the sovereign states system, which in the CoW dataverse begins after the Napoleonic
wars. What a war is, who fights in it and how long it lasts are all decided by reference to
25. Although cf. Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War (London: Verso, 1986).
26. The CoW data and explanations of its categories and coding are available at: http://www.correlatesof
war.org/.

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criteria derived from an account of the sovereign states system. A basic problem for this
approach is that war is an older phenomenon than the sovereign states system. Whatever
one makes of Small and Singers argument for beginning in the wake of Napoleons
defeat, it is an argument about states and the kind of wars they may fight, not about
war as such.27 Moreover, the positivist reduction of war to a set of generic observable
indicators deprives any given war of its historicity, of any specific transformations it may
have occasioned (and not only with respect to states). Wars do not leave history just as
they found it; rather they can fundamentally change the course and character of events,
structures and relations. The Second World War, interstate war number 139 for CoW, is
not just another war. Its social fecundity is evidenced in spectral fashion in the CoW data
set by the many more system members (i.e. sovereign states) that appear in the years following the war, as the new states were granted sovereign recognition. Observable indicators time and battle casualties also frame a wars duration for CoW. Thus the Second
World War, which still appears every day on our television screens, its victorious order
of battle still sitting on the UN Security Council, its discourses and contested memories
still informing identity politics in and beyond the West, is safely contained by CoW
between the dates of 1939 and 1945.
If we accept that war is a socially generative force, we cannot take for granted the
identities of the entities which engage in it, nor define its geographic and temporal scope
solely in terms of sovereign territorial states and their battle casualties. This is especially
so in the case of a war that played out in interconnected ways across different regions,
articulating various peoples and their diverse struggles, transforming political entities
and producing new ones. CoWs dates, for example, work to centre the war in the West.
For the Chinese and the Japanese, the war began much earlier, ending for the former in
1950 only to spill over directly into the Korean War as Korean communist forces returned
home from China to make possible the invasion of South Korea. More generally, Western
prestige in Asia never recovered from the daring and well-executed campaigns by which
the Japanese toppled the Europeans in the Far East in the six months from December
1941. Due in large part to the social and political energies unleashed by these campaigns,
which took down colonial orders built over three centuries, a whole series of struggles
across the Asian rim ensued well after the putative end of the war.28 CoW heroically
tries to disentangle these conflicts into separate wars, some interstate, some intrastate,
some extrastate, some in phases among all three. Extrastate war number 456 is the
conflict that started in August 1945 when Indonesian nationalists, who had been fighting the Japanese occupation forces, declared independence. They faced off first against
British Indian troops sent to take the Japanese surrender and then against Dutch forces
trying to reclaim their prize possession. Lacking any grip on the international relations
that comprise empire, much less the social and political processes of war, CoW is left
carving out wars by reference to its formal criteria and observable indicators. This is not
so much to study war as to reduce it to analytic and methodological terms derived from
IR theory.
27. Cf. J. David Singer and Melvin Small, The Wages of War 18161965 (New York: Wiley, 1972).
28. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 19411945 (London:
Allen Lane, 2004) and Forgotten Wars: The End of Britains Asian Empire (London: Penguin, 2008).

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CoW has more to say directly about war than almost any comparable scholarly
enterprise in IR and political science. Yet, rigorous as it is in collecting and coding data
in its own terms, CoW does not penetrate wars internal operations; its positivism works
to deprive war of its social content. Numbers of battle deaths and a typology of war tell
us little about war as a social process, which draws in peoples and polities, economies
and cultures, and reworks them amidst their violent, reciprocal embrace. The effects of
the Second World War are vast and continuing, and they have something to do with what
happened in the war itself.
Because there is no war studies which delves into and theorises these processes, we
tend to reduce the wars effects to other social processes. So, for example, constructivist
security studies cites norms as an important source of decolonisation, not the exhaustion of the imperial powers in war, or the ways in which Japanese victories provided
public lessons in the collapse of the imperial worlds racial hierarchy and the venality of
the whites once they were on the run.29 Indian independence, in a whole variety of ways,
is impossible to imagine without understanding the interaction between the independence movement, its British overlords and the social, political and cultural experience of
the two world wars, as well as how they shaped the political economy of the empire. The
way in which the Raj broke up, generating successor states and their identities, politics
and conflicts, is intimately bound up in the stresses and strains of an empire at war, and
in the particular experiences of that war for all concerned. Yet while I could cite various
histories that would support these claims, and invoke some general properties about war
from Clausewitz, Delbrck and a few others, as well as some insights from a developing
literature on violence in social theory and sociology, that is about all the Western academy has to offer in the face of the father and king of all things.30
While the logics and practices of security are certainly a legitimate object of inquiry,
it is I hope now possible to imagine a rather different response to Walt from the one
offered by Buzan, Waever and de Wilde: the critical study of the phenomenon of war.

War and the International

IR and security studies scholars, especially of a more traditional ilk, may have experienced a growing sense of frustration as they read the pages above. Of course the states
system is the site of the problem of war and whence theorising must begin. CoW may be
wrapped in knots by the complex interface between sovereignty and the statistics of war,
but the tradition of realpolitik entails no necessary commitments other than a world
composed of armed political entities in the absence of a common power. When states
choose to go to war, the conditions under which they do so and the strategies they pursue
are the proper focus of any security studies, for these matters have existential significance for states and their populations. Consequently, the question of war and peace has
been the subject of a long tradition that begins with Thucydides and has properly issued
in a modern social science.

29. Neta Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
30. Heraclitus, Fragments (London: Penguin, 2003), 29.

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The argument of this article, however, is not that a war studies should replace security
studies. The realist tradition has a wholly legitimate object of inquiry, and it is more or
less obvious why political leaders, their military staffs and learned advisers turn to the
traditions of statecraft and strategic thought to analyse and decide upon policy. The
strategic appropriation of war has a great deal to offer in this respect, for statespersons
desire to make rational calculations in so far as they are able. The argument here is rather
that war exceeds these matters, that war plays a constitutive role in social and political
relations that goes well beyond matters of strategy and security, and that in the current
organisation of knowledge we can only glimpse this role in a fragmented fashion. A
proper war studies would complement strategic and security studies, offering new
insights on how war transforms the entities and relations which comprise world politics,
the very ground on which strategies are made and security politics occur. But such a war
studies would also go well beyond matters of state, to the cultural and social relations
set in train by reciprocal organised violence, conceived as a distinct set of processes
requiring their own modes of inquiry. The extraordinary social energies generated by the
violences and sacrifices of war continue to work their effects long after the guns fall
silent, and they do so in ways that constitutively interconnect peoples and places.
In order to illustrate and clarify some of these points, it is useful to turn the tables on
IR. What happens if we approach the international as a distinct social space from the
perspective of war, rather than approach war from the perspective of the international
system of states? The Vietnam War has generated a fair amount of literature in security
studies and IR, which can be notionally compared to what a wider war studies might
offer, and the alternative histories and sociologies of world politics it might suggest.
The first point to note is that the American social science is reflected in the IR literature on Vietnam broadly conceived, as is the strategic appropriation of war from a US
perspective.31 Strategies of coercion, of the use of airpower, and analyses of revolutionary guerrilla war and counter-insurgency are the focus of much writing, as is the problem
of limited war amidst the nuclear stand-off between the superpowers. Other political
science literature considers the domestic political side of the war, and in particular the
question of public opinion and of the war powers of Congress and the executive. Some
of the most interesting IR literature to come out of the war began to combine these
two strands to address the question of why the US lost.32 In these efforts, the dynamic
interaction between peoples and polities at war becomes a central object of analysis and
a causal force in its own right. Similarly, some of the strategic literature probes the
actionreaction cycle that particular uses of force engender, and in counter-insurgency
theory this began to evolve a sociology of South Vietnam as a combatant society caught
up in the reciprocal play of violence.33
This is a richer literature on the internal dynamics of a war than IR manages for the
Second World War, and in that respect reflects the deep and profound connections that
developed in the decades after 1945 between (US) questions of state and work in security
31. Stanley Hoffman, An American Social Science: International Relations, Daedalus 106, no. 3 (1977):
4160.
32. Andrew Mack, Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars, World Politics 27, no. 2 (1975): 175200; Gil
Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
33. See, for example, Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

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studies.34 But if this more or less exhausts the kinds of questions that security studies is
interested in, it hardly exhausts the relations that comprise the Vietnam War and its
effects. Three further types of question can be imagined and are more or less reflected in
scattered literatures. The first is the enormous impact of the conflict on US politics,
society and culture, making a war 8000 miles away the most significant event for the US
in the second half of the 20th century. This impact continues in everything from
Hollywood films to electoral politics to the subjectivities of people transformed by
wartime events. It plays out also in US foreign policies and the identity politics on which
they are based, and shapes US use of force and the principles around which its armed
forces were reorganised in the wake of defeat, which produced the volunteer professional
army that made possible the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the
21st century. In the 1990s, Kuwait and Iraq were subjected to the kind of bombing they
were in part to escape the Vietnam syndrome, which returned again to help legitimate
the invasion of Iraq. These various effects of the war on US society and the world can
be traced in disparate literatures, but do not exist under a common analytic frame; nor are
they explored with reference to the generative powers of war, but rather are addressed
within diverse disciplinary terms from cultural studies to political science.
A second area the Vietnam War throws up is explored only in a very few sites of which
I am aware. War is a reciprocal set of relations which draws in the parties to a conflict
and reworks them in combined ways. An example of this is the Tet Offensive of 1968,
which played out in differentiated but intertwined ways on the battlefield and in the various combatant societies, their leaderships, high commands and populations. Yet, very
few studies of war place both (or all) parties to the conflict in the same analytic frame.
Some conventional military history does this by accessing archival and other material
from both sides of a battle or campaign, but this hardly begins to address the multiple
interconnections between war front and home front, much less the larger social contexts
of interest to a critical war studies. Examples of work that does bring together in the same
study two social formations locked in violent conflict include Howards book on the
Franco-Prussian War and Inga Clendinnens marvellous study of the Spanish and the
Maya in the conquest of the Yucatan, which looks at the different ways in which the
events of the fighting and occupation were constructed and experienced on both sides.35
While it does not address the Haitian side of the equation, Mary Rendas Taking Haiti
explores both the experience of US occupying forces in Haiti and the effects of various
representations of this experience in US society, working out some of the constitutive
social and cultural connections between war front and home front.36 While the demands
of this kind of inquiry for fieldwork and languages are challenging, and very little of it
exists in respect of Vietnam and the US, it has the great advantage of offering a vantage
point from which the comet like vibrations radiating out in all directions from the
fighting can be observed.37
34. Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: Americas Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2003).
35. Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Michael
Howard, The Franco-Prussian War (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
36. Mary Renda, Taking Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
37. Clausewitz, quoted in Arden Bucholz, Hans Delbrck and the Germany Military Establishment (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1985), 25.

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The third area the wars in Vietnam point to are the intertwined histories of war and
empire in the making of the modern world. Setting aside the recent infatuation with the
term in US political discourse, empire has often been constructed in political-economic
terms. More recently, the imperial turn literature has addressed in cultural registers the
mutual constitution of core and periphery.38 Aside from the study of counter-insurgency,
imperial war remains mostly a niche literature concerned with exotic campaigns. Yet the
consequences of small wars for metropolitan and world histories are immense. Such
conflicts have regularly led to political disruption, crisis and even regime change in the
metropole, as for Italy in Ethiopia, France in Algeria and Portugal in Angola and
Mozambique. These histories criss-cross and interconnect events that we normally
consider in Eurocentric and great-power frames. Ho Chi Minhs war arguably began at
Versailles, where he learned that Western liberals had little interest in his peoples fate.
But CoW divides his war into four, including the Second World War (during which Ho
fought the Japanese); the French war, which began with British Indian and rearmed
Japanese troops fighting the Viet Minh in 1945; the first phase of the Vietnam War, which
CoW codes as an intrastate war having no categories for the US-created but sovereign
entity of the Republic of Vietnam; and the US-led war from 1965. The international histories and sociologies by which anti-imperial violent struggles are interconnected, shaping one another39 as well as culture, society and politics in the West and elsewhere,
represent an almost wholly unexamined area for inquiry.
War and empire as sets of international relations both share the quality of being full
spectrum social phenomena.40 That is, they involve the complete range of social, cultural, economic and political relations, shaping everything from matters of state to
gender relations, from high politics to popular culture. The vision of the international
that arises from war, as from empire, is of a thick set of co-constitutive social relations,
not a thin set of state relations. Moreover, war and empire lead to analyses not of
relations between pre-given entities like the sovereign and national state that inform so
much work in IR and the social sciences generally, but of the international processes by
which social and political formations such as nation-states are created, undone and
remade. States do not make war so much as war makes states and societies. A proper war
studies therefore would help further work in IR which seeks to recover the international
as a distinct and under-studied social space that is the proper object of a social science of
international relations.41

Conclusion: Give War a Chance

The point of this article is not that war studies should supplant either traditional or wider
security studies, much less securitisation theory. Rather, and firstly, it is to argue that
38. See, for example, Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds, Tensions of Empire (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997).
39. See, for example, Rebecca Karl, Staging the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
40. Cf. Tarak Barkawi, Empire and Order in International Relations and Security Studies, in The International
Studies Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Denemark, Vol. III (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
41. Cf. Justin Rosenberg, Why Is There No International Historical Sociology?, European Journal of
International Relations 12, no. 3 (2006): 30740.

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the disciplinary backdrop against which the wider agenda was launched was not as
imagined. Traditional security studies has only a very narrow strategic grip on the
phenomenon of war. War and military affairs cannot be left to strategic studies because
only aspects of these topics fall within a strategic approach. Indeed, the very idea that
something like war can be controlled strategically is part of the modern politics of war,
by which political leadership fosters an aura of rationality and command against the
powerful centripetal logics of war. Policy-oriented security studies assists in this illusion
with its careful studies of crisis decision-making, deterrence and coercion as well as its
overall emphasis on instrumental rationality.
Secondly, it is argued here that this strange decentring of war in the discipline most
concerned with war and peace is part and parcel of a larger antagonism between war and
the Enlightenment organisation of knowledge. The social sciences and humanities mostly
have been content to leave the study of war to state officials and military staffs, who have
every reason to monopolise knowledge of war, for rational control of force lies at the
core of the legitimacy of the modern state. One of the first casualties of the critical study
of war would be the very notion of force as a rational instrument, and therefore a critical
war studies offers potential challenges to the foundation of political power: the command
of force.42 The articles main argument is a call for precisely such a war studies.
These last points regarding legitimacy begin to point to some of the powerknowledge
relations around war, and their centrality to politics. One of the strands of critique of
securitisation theory has been that it uncritically reflects the security politics of liberal
democracies.43 A critical war studies would extend this line of critique in at least two
ways. Liberal democracies normally present their wars as defences against aggression,
signalled by the renaming of war ministries invoked in the introduction. The violent
imposition of Western power on the states and societies of the Third World during the
Cold War was known as the defence of the Free World. Securitisation theory participates
in this defensive liberal politics of war by obfuscating the possibility of aggression, or
what are sometimes called wars of choice. Security politics only kick in when a threat
to a referent object has been successfully securitised. Accordingly, security politics for
securitisation theory always take the form of defence, of the protection of values from an
existential threat. While securitisation theory allows for the possibility that leaderships
cloak their offensive plans in defensive language, it offers little purchase on those
offensive plans themselves. That alternative political projects and insurgencies in the
Third World were securitised as a threat to the American way of life does not address
the planning by the US state to create a world order conducive to US interests, and to
do so through the frequent and regular use of force. The constitution of military forces in
subordinate states through mechanisms of advice and support and the orientation of
these forces towards internal security was a primary modality of the operation of US
power, a counter-revolutionary strategic offensive as it were, productive of small wars
and their effects around the world. While securitisation theory might get to some aspects
of security discourse around Third World revolution and communism in US politics, it
42. For further discussion of this point, see Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, Powers of War, International
Political Sociology (forthcoming).
43. Didier Bigo, Security and Immigration, special issue, Alternatives 27 (2002): 6392.

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hardly begins to address the relations at work here between force, politics and informal
empire. Needless to say, neither does traditional security or strategic studies.
This participation of securitisation theory in the defensive legitimation of liberal uses
of force is one dimension of the slippage that happens when we replace politics with
security, a slippage Wolfers was so concerned to warn us about. Securitisation theory
imagines it has a critical handle on this slippage, in its analysis of the movement from
normal to emergency politics. But the widening agenda engages in a prior sleight of hand
through precisely this slippage. If we think only of security, then of course a range of
threats arising from the different sectors environment, identity, economy come into
play. A threat of violence is only one type of threat to my security. However, in respect
of politics, force is not just another sector. For Max Weber and an important tradition
of political thought, force makes possible politics through the provision of order, and
sets limits on the kind of politics that are possible, often doing so through complex international hierarchies centred on its constitution and use. It is all too easy to forget amid
the everyday world of Western societies that our states too, and the orders they provide,
rely on coercive power, on an iron foundation deployed at home and abroad. Greater
clarity may be achieved by refiguring security as an ideological term and imagining a
new critical research agenda based on politics, force and war. Security and war need once
again to be put in dialogue with one another.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the editors of Millennium, Asli Cavilik, Faye Donnelly and Nivi Manchanda, for
comments on an earlier version of this article. Thanks also to the participants at the Conference on
the Politics of Securitisation, Centre for Advanced Security Theory, University of Copenhagen,
Denmark, 1314 September 2010, and to those who attended the Closing Roundtable, International
Relations in Dialogue, Millennium Annual Conference, London School of Economics, 1617
October 2010. The section on the strange absence of war studies draws on a co-authored article
with Shane Brighton, Powers of War: Fighting, Knowledge and Critique, International Political
Sociology (forthcoming).

Author Biography
Tarak Barkawi is Senior Lecturer, Centre of International Studies, University of
Cambridge, UK.

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