After Strategy: The Search for a Post-Modern Politics of Peace

The logic of strategic inhumanity and the cost of publicism

“…In so doing, it affirms – although certainly not invents, given the still broadly normalised terms of security and peace as established in strategic studies (cf. Klein, 1988) – a logic of strategic inhumanity desensitising the reading public to the terror of issuing more or less concealed threats to obliterate entire nations and destroy the living environment for millions of years, and instead passing off such politics of terror as legitimate statecraft. It reinforces the false certainty that decision-making in a crisis can be conceived as a set of mechanistic moves by leaders betraying Robert Kaplan’s (2002) virile ‘pagan ethos’ and nerves of steel, infusing decisiveness into modernity as the age of indecision and also betraying an ‘ancient virtue’ that, however, has nothing to do here with responsibility and all to do with Machiavelli’s new moral continent (cf.…”

Architects of Empire: The Military-Strategic Studies Complex and the Scripting of US National Security

“…By the late 1980s, the rise of strategic studies had resulted in the establishment of what Bradley Klein (1988a) has termed a hegemonic “strategic culture” in government circles in Washington (for an excellent overview of strategic studies in the USA, see Klein 1994). For Klein, “strategic culture” refers to the way a modern hegemonic state looks to the use of force to secure its geopolitical objectives (Klein 1988a, 1988b, 1989, 1994). In outlining the import of Washington's “strategic culture” during the latter stages of the Cold War, Klein has illuminated the dual “declaratory” and “operational” strategies of deterrence that were successfully mobilized to both legitimize and suppress dissent for an overtly aggressive US foreign policy (Klein 1989).…”

Human Security as Global Security: Reconceptualising Strategic Studies

“…Inviting a more extensive empirical purview of more diverse issues, in other words, does not mean ceasing to articulate conventional state-centric security concerns. It does mean taking a more critical perspective, though, as well as a willingness to manifest a (postmodernist) capacity to listen to a range of analytic languages, as well as a willingness to call into question the authority of the meta-discourse of Rationalism itself (Klein 1988).…”