This is the second part of this post on security studies and strategic studies. Be sure to read that post first.

Rise of strategic studies

As discussed in the last post, security studies began in the 1930s with a group of Ivy League scholars in the United States. These scholars were concerned about the threat to liberal political order posed by totalitarian states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This emerging field came to overlap with the discipline of international relations (IR), which had developed in the UK, US, Europe and elsewhere after World War One.

By the end of World War Two, the relatively new concept of national security became a driving concern for the US government, which passed the National Security Act in 1947 as it prepared to confront the Soviet Union in what became the Cold War. The government, particularly the military, invested heavily in the social sciences as the country mobilised to face a new and powerful enemy. This investment helped the field of security studies to rapidly expand.

Within security studies, a stream developed that focused on military strategy, particularly on nuclear weapons. They were led by scholars concerned about how America could face a world where the next global conflict could be apocalyptic. Over time this would became a distinct field known as strategic studies.

Strategic studies never fitted neatly into any one discipline, as it included political scientists and international relations specialists, but also mathematicians, physicists, economists, and many historians. Nor was it a purely academic field. Some of its key figures were based in universities, but others were based in institutions such as the Rand Corporation (a think-tank created to conduct research for the military) and there was considerable crossover with government. The career of Thomas Schelling, an economist who worked for the US government from 1948 to 1953 on initiatives such as the Marshall Plan and went on to write influential books on arms control and game theory, exemplifies the eclectic nature of the field. More infamous, but less representative, strategic studies scholars included Herman Khan, a theorist of nuclear warfare who inspired the eponymous character in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

The field  focused on nuclear deterrence, making use of game theory and formal modelling. Their major concern was how to reduce the risk of nuclear war and control the arms race. At the same time, they were concerned with maintaining America’s military dominance. Whether there were tensions between these positions depends on one’s political stance. To these scholars, America’s military superiority and dominant global position reduced the prospect of global war, by discouraging Soviet and Chinese adventurism and reassuring allies, and therefore helped maintain international security. To their critics, America’s military dominance led to reckless actions and encouraged the global arms race, thereby undermining international security.

While nuclear deterrence was the field’s main focus, it was not the only one. When nuclear tensions began to ease after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, a few strategists turned to another dimension of Cold War confrontation: insurgency and counter-insurgency. Thriving insurgencies in Algeria and Vietnam, or failed insurgencies in Greece, the Philippines and Malaya, became the focus of study for this segment (a focus that would be temporarily revived in the mid-2000s). However, the failing counter-insurgency in Vietnam prompted a crisis in academic-military relations that would make strategic studies fall out of favour.

Turmoil in academia

Social change in the 1960s and 1970s ruptured the relationship between academia and state agencies such as the military.

The global context had changed since the 1930s and 1940s. The United States had become the most powerful country in the world. It had military bases across the globe. It provided military support to Western-aligned governments in most continents. It overthrew several governments (including democratically elected ones) that tried to move outside the Western orbit. By the late 1960s, it was deploying extraordinary levels of military force in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The idea of America as an embattled defender of freedom had a weaker hold on public, and particularly scholarly, opinion.

(students protesting outside the Pentagon in 1967)

As opposition to the war (and broader disquiet about America’s role in the world) grew, military involvement with higher education became controversial. Many academics felt that cooperation with the military and foreign policy arms of the state had corrupted the role of universities. One of the most prominent critics was MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky. His first book, American Power and the New Mandarins, focused heavily on academia. Social scientists were foremost among the “mandarins” referred to in the title. Those whose research was intended to assist the war effort in Vietnam were accused of having “the mentality of the colonial civil servant, persuaded of the benevolence of the mother country and the correctness of its vision of world order, and convinced that he understands the true interests of the backward peoples whose welfare he is to administer”.

Chomsky, as an anarchist, was among the most radical of the critics. But as Adam Elkus points out, you don’t need to share Chomsky’s politics to have had ethical problems with some of the academic-state collaboration that was happening. One social scientist, Samuel Huntingdon, was apparently involved in the Strategic Hamlets program which drove hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese peasants out of their homes. Another example is Henry Kissinger, who used his academic position to promote false claims of Soviet nuclear advantage (and that’s without getting into his future government career).

So it’s not surprising that opposition to research intended to assist military policy became widespread. Senator J. William Fulbright, an anti-war figure who came from a conservative tradition, similarly denounced the “military-industrial-academic complex”. Opposition grew, and had lasting effects:

The American university today would not accept what Chomsky took for granted in the 1960s. Anthropologists tend to be wary of working with the U.S. military in Iraq or Afghanistan. Sociologists are more inclined to identify with critics of American foreign policy than with its architects. MIT is more likely to teach courses in sustainable development than political development. There are precious few old mandarins left in the discipline of political science, let alone emerging new ones. One half of the evil axis identified by Chomsky is gone: work for any government agency, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency, and your chances of getting tenure will diminish with more than deliberate speed.

Fall of strategic studies

Strategic studies was one casualty of this rupture, and it gradually became a marginal field.

However, the political backlash was only one reason for its decline, and potentially an overstated one. The social sciences did not become dominated by “tenured radicals”, but they did experience a broadly leftward shift, resulting in discomfort with a field so closely identified with US military policy.

Another reason was that the easing of Cold War tensions with détente in the 1970s reduced the perceived need for the field, and there was also much disillusionment from the government end. Many government and military officials felt academia had provided useless input, if not interference, in matters that should be left to military professionals.

A further reason was strategic studies’ lack of a clear disciplinary home:

The main problem is not the pacifist or radical fringes of the academic world, despite the distaste they evince for a field they associate with support for U.S. policy. Neither groups has as much clout in political science as elsewhere in academia. The problem is that many in the liberal mainstream concede that strategic studies is legitimate, but when major war appears to recede as a prospect in the real world – as it did in the 1970s and again after the Cold War – they resist ranking the subject highly when their own fields’ priorities are at stake. Seen as legitimate in principle, strategic studies faces marginalization in practice when departments see it as a second-rate claim on their discipline.

That paragraph was written in the 1990s, but the field of strategic studies has not recovered since. Meanwhile, security studies went in a different direction.

Transformation of security studies

While strategic studies went through this drama, the broader field of security studies persisted and became even more closely integrated into the discipline of international relations. This was at first possible because the dominant IR paradigm (in the 1950s) of realism meshed closely with concerns of both security studies and strategic studies (which were not two clearly separate fields at the time).

That said, it was not always an easy fit. Edward Mead Earle had a strong distaste for the realism of E. H. Carr (mentioned in the first post), which contrasted with Earle’s idealised view of America. In addition, several realists opposed America’s Cold War posture and the Vietnam War. The most prominant was Hans Morgenthau, who drew parallels between the Vietnam War and Thucydides’s critique of the “Sicilian expedition” in 400s BC, an act of overreach that weakened the Athenian empire. This was consistent with his earlier realist critique of the Truman Doctrine. His objection was based on its universalistic nature; it committed the United States to fight any perceived communist threat, to anybody, in any part of the world, at any cost. Several other realists also critiqued America’s expansive ambitions and the Vietnam War, leading some of their hawkish critics to dismiss realism as a European import unsuited to an idealistic America. Nonetheless, both strategic studies and security studies were broadly compatible with realism.

Because security studies had a lot of crossover with international relations, the former gradually became closely integrated into the latter. Bazzy Buzan and Lene Hanson have shown, in great detail, how security studies went through a process of institutionalisation so that by the 1970s it had become a major sub-field within IR. As this occurred, security studies increasingly focused on international security (long an IR concern) and less on national security (which tended to be left to strategic studies, as the divide between the two fields gradually grew).

Then, the discipline of international relations changed substantially from the 1970s onwards. The realist paradigm came under challenge, not only from its historical competitor, liberalism, but also constructivism and other schools of thought such as Marxism, feminism and critical theory. The 2014 version of the Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) Faculty Survey Report, which received responses from 4,903 IR scholars in 32 countries, confirms this. Asked to describe the “paradigms or schools of thought” their work fell under, less than a fifth (18.7%) of respondents chose realism. Instead 23.13% chose constructivism and 26.73% selected “I do not use paradigmatic analysis”. Realist dominance died long ago.

As a result, the field of security studies transformed too, and adopted a greater focus on non-military aspects of security. This included issues such as economic interdependence, poverty, environmental degradation and oil dependence (particularly after the 1973 OPEC embargo), along with enduring debates on what issues did and did not belong within security studies. The field now covers issues such as human security, environmental security, and securitisation.

The remaining divide

So security studies has now become an integral part of international relations (and by extension political science), with a relatively secure position within academia. Unlike its first decades, the field now rarely focuses on national security or military strategy, to the point that the field is often just called “international security studies”.

In contrast, strategic studies focuses heavily on national security and the conduct of war, rather than the issues currently favoured by security studies. Compared to the “golden age” of strategic studies in the 1950s and 1960s, it is a marginal field today. This is partly because of its interdisciplinary nature and partly because the academy is less hospitable to military interests than it once was (traditional military history has been another casualty of this). The field experienced a temporary and mild resurgence during the 1980s, but has been on the back-foot since.

The clearest way to see the differences between the two fields is to look at the contents pages of two key textbooks.

The online table of contents for Oxford University Press’s major textbook on security studies looks similar to an international relations textbook, with chapters devoted to schools of thought such as realism, liberalism, constructivism and critical theory. It also has chapters focused on many types of security other than military security.

The online table of contents for Oxford University Press’s major textbook on strategic studies focuses instead on military strategy and national security. Some of its chapter titles, “Strategic Studies and its Critics” and “The Future of Strategic Studies”, allude to the field’s precarious position.

Hence the divide discussed by Rovner and Elkus. In the early Cold War years, security studies and strategic studies were not two clearly distinct fields, and were not spoken of that way. But a divide developed, and grew, particularly from the 1960s onwards. They are now two separate fields, with different focuses, approaches, and worldviews. They have also had very different fortunes.

Hello readers.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on an extremely fun side project with Kate Grealy.

Kate used to work for government in counter-terrorism and crime prevention, and for NGOs in Pakistan and Indonesia. She is also a musician and has just released a new EP.

What is our project? You will find out when we launch in late May or early June.

Get excited!

War on the Rocks recently published an article by Joshua Rovner on the academic divide between security studies and strategic studies. Adam Elkus wrote a follow-up article elaborating on the differences and identifying ways that the fields could find common ground.

Several people on Twitter and Facebook remarked that they were unaware that security studies and strategic studies were actually two different fields, which made me realise that this is more of a niche distinction than I had thought.

So this two-post series will provide a history of how security studies and strategic studies formed and became separate (and sometimes warring) fields.

This first post covers the period up to the 1950s, before the stark divide had developed.

A few caveats:

• I do not primarily identify with either field (except to the extent that terrorism studies might be considered part of security studies, broadly defined), so these two posts will have over-simplifications and possibly errors. Hopefully people in these fields will challenge or add to this short history.
• This history won’t cover the methodological issues raised in the War on the Rocks articles.
• This history will focus mainly on the United States.

International relations

To begin, we need to go back to before either security studies or strategic studies existed, and start with the discipline of international relations [IR]. Academic disciplines rarely arise from purely intellectual interest; instead they are influenced by wider political contexts and problems. The discipline of IR was established after the First World War, by scholars who sought to contribute intellectually to preventing global conflict, signified by the creation of Chatham House in the UK in 1920 and the Council on Foreign Relations in the US in 1921. As Fred Halliday notes:

Economics began as a reflection on problems of trade and the industrial revolution; sociology as a response to urbanization; political science in reaction to democratization and problems of governance; geography as a reflection on the rise of a world market and empire; psychology in response to a new awareness of mental illness. In the case of IR its academic origins lie in the response to World War One, as a reflection, mediate but engaged, on why the efforts of diplomats, lawyers, peace campaigners, industrialists, feminists, working-class leaders and the rest, were unable to stop the slaughter of 1914-18.

A particular intellectual approach, termed realism, gradually came to dominate the field. Initially the dominant theoretical approach was liberalism, strongly influenced by German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s ideals of international cooperation. However scholars who described themselves as realists challenged this approach, and emphasised international anarchy, the pursuit of power and the inevitability of conflict. A key realist text was E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Year Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, which was published on the outbreak of World War Two and seemingly validated by it. His 1946 preface to a republished version of the book accused the other theoretical approaches within IR of having “a glaring and dangerous defect… the almost total neglect of the factor of power”.

These aspects of the study of international relations – the desire to prevent global conflict, understand peace and war, and make sense of states’ competing pursuits of power – show that international security was a major focus of the discipline. But security was not initially considered a distinct field of study within the discipline, and there was no field of “security studies”. This only came about later, prompted by a largely separate academic development that occurred in the United States during this inter-war period.

(National) security studies

In the United States in the 1930s, an informal network of Ivy League scholars (such as Princeton’s Edward Mead Earle) began to create a distinct field of security studies. However, their focus was less on long-term notions of international security and more on national security. This was partly because their backgrounds were mostly not in international relations but in other disciplines (often they were historians). However, it was also because the 1930s were a less optimistic time for the democracies than the 1920s, given the Great Depression and the growing strength of totalitarian powers like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

This distinction between national security and international security implied different focuses of study. While international security implied efforts to prevent or manage global conflict between states, national security implied efforts to assist their own states to face the dangers posed by conflict, and to prevail.

However, it’s important to not treat national security and international security as entirely different focuses; for this network of US-based scholars in the 1930s they went hand-in-hand. These scholars feared that the totalitarian powers were undermining the “relatively stable international order” that previously existed, placing the United States at grave risk. In particular, Nazi Germany’s challenge to international security undermined America’s national security.

The notion of national security, being a broader concept than military defence, provided a way to understand the danger posed by Hitler, whose military forces did not pose an immediate physical threat to America. The Roosevelt Administration and the foreign policy establishment, including these scholars, saw the need to go to war with Germany in the late 1930s but much of the public was reluctant. Edward Mead Earle believed that “the isolationist tendencies of the public would melt away when it was presented with a well-articulated national security policy.” As it happened, Germany’s ally Japan made the job much easier by bombing Pearl Harbour. This brought America directly into the war, and set the stage for a new international order.

From this point on, the concept of national security became central to US policy:

World War II gave rise to the era of national security. This was an idea that would be institutionalized within American government and popularized in wider society. National security supplanted the more limited concept of “defense”. The disorder of the 1930s planted the seeds of an intellectual rediscovery of strategy as an intellectual discipline, and new weapons of greater range and lethality stoked fears in defense debate. Edward Mead Earle at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, along with Arnold Wolfers and Nicholas Spykman at Yale, led the academic embrace of the concept. But only after the United States formally entered the war did national security become an organizing principle for a new, complex bureaucracy. This would culminate in the creation of the Unified Command Plan of 1946 that placed large parts of the globe under geographically based military commands, and the National Security Act of 1947, establishing the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency.

This increasing government focus on national security helped security studies to grow. It’s worth noting that there was initially only limited interaction between the discipline of international relations and the emerging field of security studies, given the national focus and disciplinary diversity of the latter. Earle in particular felt that much of the more optimistic IR scholarship had become redundant after the League of Nations had failed to uphold its mandate. However, there was certainly some overlap, particularly after the Second World War. The newly dominant IR paradigm of realism sat well with security studies, and many security scholars did focus on “the study of the nature, causes, effects, and prevention of war”, which was a key component of the IR agenda.

It would take time for security studies and IR to become closer. What happened first was the Cold War mobilisation, combined with the US government’s desire for increased academic expertise on national security. This was a boon for security studies and resulted in a distinctive research focus within it which would grow to become the field of strategic studies.

Rise of strategic studies

The imperative for scholarly focus on strategy (specifically on military strategy) was outlined in 1949 by Yale scholar Bernard Brodie. He believed that strategy was “not receiving the scientific treatment it deserve[d] either in the armed services or, certainly, outside of them.” With two nuclear-armed superpowers facing off, security scholars feared the next global conflict would be apocalyptic, so a greater government and scholarly understanding of strategy was considered necessary to avoid catastrophe.

These scholars were also concerned that a long struggle against a fearsome enemy could lead to the militarisation of society, at odds with the United States’ domestic traditions. They believed that a strong core of civilian expertise in military affairs was needed to avoid civilian deference to the military (other than in the more operational and tactical questions that were more likely to be considered a purely military domain). Later civilian officials came to appreciate alternative sources of strategic advice, because of frustrations with some generals like Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay.

The field expanded rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of the American boom in higher education, as the government and private institutes like the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations invested heavily in the social sciences. Like area studies, strategic studies benefited from the expectation that it would give the United States the edge in its competition for global influence with the Soviet Union.

Strategic studies at this time was effectively a component of security studies. Government support helped turn strategic studies into a field in its own right, and it’s future looked bright.

But this would change. After the Vietnam War, the close relationship with government would hinder the field’s acceptance within academia. Meanwhile the broader field of security studies would become much closer to the discipline of international relations and establish a secure position within academia.

These changes will be covered in the next post.

Update 1: The second post can be found here.

On the Friday before last, the Prime Minister and State and Territory leaders unanimously agreed on another expansion of Australia’s counter-terrorism powers. The proposed law would keep convicted terrorists, if they were deemed to be un-rehabilitated, detained after their sentences have been served.

The following Friday saw another news report on counter-terrorism legislation. The Australian reported on how decisions to revoke the citizenship of dual-national suspected terrorists (based on legislation passed in December) would be made.

The government has created a Citizenship Loss Board, which includes members of “ASIO, ASIS, the Australian Federal Police and a raft of bureaucracies, including the ­Attorney-General’s Department, the Immigration Department and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade”. According the report, the government is prioritising Islamic State (IS) members believed to be intending to return to Australia, but has still “cast the net as wide as possible”. It is currently unclear what role the judiciary will have.

These two reports, within the last fortnight, caused little controversy. But they demonstrate the illiberal trend that marked Australia’s counter-terrorism approach under the Abbott government, and which has become normalised under the Turnbull government.

Under Abbott, jihadist terrorism was portrayed as an unprecedented danger that required a constant rush of new laws. From September 2014 onwards, the government declared every few months that many of Australia’s counter-terrorism laws were inadequate and soft, and that new laws to increase the power of security agencies were needed.

To be clear, there are exceptional aspects to terrorism when compared to most other types of crime. These include:

• the harm that one single major attack can do, in the form of mass deaths and injuries, enormous economic damage and dramatic political consequences;
• the expectations on security agencies to intercept plotters and prevent attacks rather than just investigate attacks after they occur;
• the transnational conflict aspect, whereby the terrorists are often inspired, assisted or directed by sub-state military entities at war with our society.

These aspects make some departures from traditional crime-fighting approaches justified, provided they are effective, proportionate, and consistent with human rights.

But most of these adjustments were already made a decade ago, with the legislative framework put in place by the Howard government after 9/11.

This older legislation did have problems, in that some parts went too far and others were unnecessarily complex. That was an unsurprising outcome of so much legislation being pushed through Parliament in such a short time (one international observer described Australia’s approach as “hyper-legislation”). But several of its core components were necessary and justified.

Measures such as passport confiscation, ASIO’s compulsory questioning powers, proscription of organisations and the criminalisation of preparatory activity for terror attacks, proved useful for Australia’s counter-terrorism efforts. Reviews by Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, and an independent review established by the Council of Australian Governments, judged these particular measures to be effective and appropriate. The jury is still out on some of the other measures introduced in that period, such as control orders.

So Australia already had a robust counter-terrorism regime. There was scope for changing some of the laws, given the evolving threat, changes in technology, and some of the shortcomings identified in the independent reviews. As the potential threat resulting from the Syrian conflict was apparent from at least 2012, there was an ideal moment for careful deliberation on how Australia could best adjust its laws.

Instead, there was little action at all until June 2014 (when IS seized Mosul and declared a “Caliphate”) and then we got another round of “hyper-legislation” in the form of constant tranches of new legislation.

With at least five tranches passed so far, Australia has a greatly expanded body of national security laws. Some of these measures were sensible and justified (fast-tracked passport confiscations, increasing ASIS’s ability to spy on Australian terror suspects overseas, allowing “special intelligence operations”), some were unjust (citizenship-stripping, no-go zones, the excessive media restrictions in the “special intelligence operations” legislation), and some were ambiguous (lowered thresholds on a range of existing powers like control orders). But regardless of where one stands on each specific law, it is clear that all the changes went in one direction.

They all involved increases in government power, explicitly at the expense of liberty.

This approach, of treating the terror threat as so exceptional that more and more departures from traditional rules of evidence and rights protections were constantly needed, was accompanied by apocalyptic rhetoric. While such rhetoric has been a feature of Australian security politics for over a century, it reached a remarkable level under the Abbott Government. Attorney-General George-Brandis described the threat as existential, while Foreign Minister Julie Bishop likened it to the Soviet Union.

The whole approach contributes to a wider polarisation. For some small parts of the community, this approach risks feeding fears that the current threat of al-Qaeda and IS-inspired terrorism is a catastrophic and unmanageable problem, contributing to the backlash against multiculturalism. For other small sections of the community, it risks feeding fears that terrorism is a phoney threat manufactured to increase state power and smear Muslims. Rather than facing the threat with calmness and unity, it encourages fear and unnecessary division.

When Malcolm Turnbull came to power, his rhetoric signalled a different approach. He did not portray the threat as catastrophic or frame it in a way that risked implicating Muslims collectively. His rhetoric acknowledged the seriousness of the threat but projected optimism about overcoming it.

However, even the inclusive language is under challenge, and the “hyper-legislation” approach has barely slowed down.

The news reports over the last fortnight, of potential indefinite detention post-sentence and the creation of the Citizenship Loss Board, show how normalised this type of law-making has become. Other ideas suggested by Federal and State politicians have included secret trials and 28-day detention without charge. With Federal MP Andrew Nikolic (who is now Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security) having declared after the Paris attacks that civil liberties debates were now “redundant”, it looks like Australia will keep steadily heading down this path.

Following on from my post on internal assessments of terrorism studies, this is a short post to introduce readers to critiques of the field, and some thoughts on where I stand myself.

There are four common types of critique, which are:

• Left-wing critiques: These portray terrorism studies as uncritically accepting Western state priorities and assumptions, and consequently producing flawed analysis. See this example from Richard Jackson (or this shorter one).
• Right-wing critiques: These portray terrorism research as forms of terrorist apologia or as attempts to push a ‘politically correct’ agenda. See this example from David Martin Jones and Carl Ungerer.
• Policy-utility critiques: These contend that terrorism research rarely provides workable ideas for counter-terrorism policymakers and practitioners, and that academics just prefer to criticise rather than offer helpful suggestions. See this example from Mils Hills.
• Methodological critiques: These contend that terrorism research usually lacks empirical rigour, and that it is theoretically under-developed and full of conceptual confusion. See many examples in this article by Lisa Stampnitzky.

The political critiques (‘political’ not in the pejorative sense but in the sense of being concerned with politics of such research and its potential impact on people’s lives) are widespread, and anyone researching in the area will regularly encounter them. In their worst variants, the political critiques mean that terrorism studies gets slammed as either a haven for right-wing academic frauds who have sold their souls to state power to demonise official enemies, or as a haven for left-leaning namby-pamby academics who would rather hug terrorists than have them be defeated. This is best seen in the rage that the Brookings Institution’s Will McCants generates from such opposing types such as Glenn Greenwald and Robert Spencer.

In their stronger variants, these political critiques need to be reflected on and engaged with.

My own position is not neutral; I don’t find both sides to be equivalent. Instead, I find some variants of the leftist critiques compelling. It’s certainly true that the field mainly focuses on groups that threaten Western countries. I disagree quite a lot with the work of Arun Kundnani, particularly Chapter 4 of his latest book (the field focuses far less on religious ideology as a causal factor for terrorism than you would expect from his writings), but everyone in the field should read it. These types of critique are particularly important because they often come from members of communities subjected to stigmatisation and harmful policies in the name of countering terrorism.

I find the right-wing critiques weaker, which is likely a result of my own politics tending to be centre-left liberal. But there’s been some times when I’ve found the right-wing critiques to hit the mark. For example, some scholarship on Hezbollah has indeed indulgently accepted their denials of involvement in terrorism.

I’m sympathetic to the policy-utility critiques, but am also wary of the risks of imposing narrow conceptions of policy-relevance on academia.

And last, I agree a lot with the methodological critiques, as would much of the field. As noted in my post on internal assessments, the emerging dominant view is that the field has dramatically improved in the past five to ten years, but that we definitely have a long way to go.

Update 1: Changed the Mervyn Bendle example to one by David Martin Jones and Carl Ungerer, on 5 April 2016.

The new Defence White Paper describes Australia as entering a more unpredictable and potentially more dangerous world. It frequently mentions terrorism, almost twice as much as earlier White Papers do, as a worrying element in Australia’s strategic outlook:

Events during the three years since the release of the last Defence White Paper in 2013 demonstrate how rapidly Australia’s security environment can change. The relationship between the United States and China continues to evolve and will be fundamental to our future strategic circumstances. Territorial disputes between claimants in the East China and South China Seas have created uncertainty and tension in our region. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea continues to be a source of instability. State fragility has helped enable the rise of Daesh (also known as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) terrorists in the Middle East, incidents across the world have demonstrated the pervasive nature of the threat of terrorism, and a violation of international law led to the deaths of Australians in the skies over Ukraine.

Yet Defence often isn’t perceived as having much of counter-terrorism role. For example, Allan Behm’s Strategist post on the White Paper said that:

Similarly, terrorism isn’t ultimately a defence matter. It’s evidently a law enforcement and intelligence issue, and some elements of the ADF capability (particularly the precision assault skills of the SAS) are applicable in certain situations.

This is true domestically, but internationally it underplays Defence’s role, which has gone beyond “certain situations” to become almost routine. The Australian Defence Force has directly fought groups like al-Qaeda and IS. The ADF engaged in combat against al-Qaeda during the initial invasion of Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda elements were among the insurgent groups Australia fought in Afghanistan in subsequent years. Recently, the RAAF has carried out air strikes against IS in both Iraq and Syria. While IS should not be seen as purely a terrorist problem, and nor should the insurgency in Afghanistan, this does demonstrate the ADF’s extensive use in operations against proscribed terrorist organisations.

It’s not just direct operations, as the ADF has more commonly played a counter-terrorism role through what’s called ‘building partner capacity’. Much of their role in Afghanistan involved training local forces. Australia has also helped train units of regional militaries, such as in Indonesia and the Philippines, as part of this capacity building effort. The ADF has reportedly assisted the Philippines military with operations against the Abu Sayyaf Group in Mindanao.

This is similar to the Australian Federal Police’s Fighting Terrorism at its Source initiative launched in 2004 following terrorist attacks in Indonesia, such as the Bali (2002), Jakarta (2003) and Australian Embassy (2004) bombings, which helped improve police counter-terrorism skills in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. The ADF’s effort to build partner capacity in several countries across the world has been the Defence equivalent of the AFP’s regional initiative.

Australia’s current role in Iraq is an extension of this effort, and shows how significant Defence’s role is. In early 2015 the government approved “the Building Partner Capacity (BPC) mission comprised of approximately 300 Australian Army personnel which will operate in partnership with 110 New Zealand Defence Force personnel.” Much of this effort has involved training the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service (CTS), which has become one of the most militarily and politically important entities in the country.

Militarily, they are important because they have remained standing while many other units have collapsed, with the result that they are taking on tasks much more ambitious than the activities (such as launching raids and gathering intelligence) they were created for. Counter-terrorism services aren’t usually thought of as firing artillery and seizing cities, but that has become required of the CTS. This Vice video follows members of the CTS during the retaking of Ramadi late last year, a city whose fall to IS in May 2015 represented a major setback .

Politically, the CTS is important because they operate outside of Iraq’s Ministry of Defence and Ministry of the Interior, and have proved controversial within Iraq’s political system. They have operated only under executive authority ever since they were created by the United States after its invasion of Iraq, raising fears they could become the Prime Minister’s personal army. This has not happened – when Nouri al-Maliki was doing everything he could to avoid being deposed as Prime Minister in 2014, the CTS did not come to his aid – but the fears remain. Another reason for the CTS’s political importance is that it acts as a counterweight to the Iranian-backed Shia sectarian militias that work closely with other units of the Iraqi military, which is why the CTS is favoured by Western military forces.

Australia’s Special Operations Task Group, deployed as part of Operation OKRA, has been assisting the CTS. During the Ramadi operation, Australian troops helped direct air strikes and provided remote support to at least one unit within CTS, the 1st Iraqi Special Operations Force Brigade. Australia’s role has been described as vital, but we don’t get to know much about it. The secrecy that covers Australia’s military operations (often excessive secrecy when compared to other Western democracies, which resulted in Australians rarely being able to see their own war in Afghanistan) prevents this.

Important questions are unlikely to be answered. For example, was the recent scaling down of 2nd Commando Regiment’s commitment (which provided the bulk of Australia’s assistance to CTS) a good or bad decision? How effective is Australia’s assistance in the fight against IS, can it be improved, and what would help improve it? How does Australia tackle the human rights problems involved in working with Iraq’s military? With videos and images appearing of CTS units engaging in war crimes, is it still true, as the Defence Department stated early last year, that “no instances of alleged human rights violations have been reported [internally through the ADF] since the Special Operations Task Group started co-operating with the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service”? What impact does Australia’s assistance have on the internal political fighting within Iraq’s security establishment? Does it help counter Iranian influence, and what are the risks involved in that?

These types of questions matter, because we can anticipate that Defence will continue to have a significant counter-terrorism role. The threat isn’t going away. As David Kilcullen rightly pointed out in The Australian:

As I write, Western countries (several, particularly the US, now with severely reduced international credibility) face a larger, more unified, capable, experienced and savage enemy, in a less stable, more fragmented region, with a far higher level of geopolitical competi­tion, and a much more severe risk of great-power conflict, than at any time since 9/11.

It isn’t just Islamic State; al-Qa’ida has emerged from its eclipse and is back in the game in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Syria, Somalia and Yemen. We’re dealing with not one but two global terrorist organisations, each with regional branches, plus a vastly larger radicalised population at home, and a flow of foreign terrorist fighters 10 to 12 times the size of anything seen before. Likewise, last year’s Taliban resurgence shows that as bad as things seem now, they can get much worse if the Afghan drawdown creates the same opportunity for Islamic State next year as the Iraqi drawdown did in 2012.

This will likely mean more military action by Western countries, with Australia participating. The White Paper goes into a few specifics on this: continued participation in international coalitions and building partner capacity efforts, new equipment such as armed unmanned aircraft, as well as light helicopters for special forces. But it’s hard to be optimistic about this reducing the overall threat. Military action has been able to weaken particular groups, and overthrow governments, without undermining the broader global jihadist movement. As Kilcullen points out in the same article, Western wars over the past decade and a half don’t have a good track record:

The first step is to admit that this really is, every bit, the strategic failure it seems to be. For the hard truth is that the events of 2014-2016, including the “Blood Year” that started with the fall of Mosul, represent nothing less than the collapse of Western counterterrorism strategy as we’ve known it since 2001.

After 14 years, thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, we’re worse off today than before 9/11, with a stronger, more motivated, more dangerous enemy than ever.

Despite this, it’s good that the new Defence White Paper includes this focus on terrorism. Greater recognition of Defence’s role in counter-terrorism should mean it can be more appreciated, but also more scrutinised.

I’ve recently been making notes on the fields of terrorism studies, civil war studies, and social movement studies, looking at assessments from both people within these fields and people outside of them. When looking at the internal assessments of terrorism studies, two things stood out.

• The assessments are usually very negative about the field’s methodological rigour
• They’ve become much more positive in the past five to ten years

I had already been aware of the first point. Terrorism studies has regularly been accused, by its own leading scholars, of poor research quality. As Lisa Stampnitzky has written:

It may not seem surprising that the production of knowledge about such a contentious subject would attract external critiques. What is more deeply puzzling, however, is that some of the harshest and most frequent laments have come from the practitioners of terrorism studies themselves. Terrorism researchers have characterized their field as stagnant, poorly conceptualized, lacking in rigor, and devoid of adequate theory, data, and methods.

However, I hadn’t been aware earlier of the second point, the trend towards a more positive outlook. So this post is to show how internal assessments of terrorism studies have gradually become more optimistic.

Examples of the earlier, strongly negative, assessments are easy to find. Alex P. Schmid and A. J. Jongman famously wrote in 1988 that:

There are probably few areas in the social science literature in which so much is written on the basis of so little research. Perhaps as much as 80 percent of the literature is not research-based in any rigorous sense…

Over fifteen years later, Andrew Silke reviewed the output of two core terrorism journals (Terrorism and Political Violence and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism) between 1995 and 1999, and concluded that:

Ultimately, terrorism research is not in a healthy state. It exists on a diet of fast food research: quick, cheap, ready-to-hand and nutritionally dubious…. A limited range of methodologies in data gathering, combined with a reluctance to use more rigourous analysis, has left the field with serious deficiencies in many respects. Ultimately the methods used by terrorism researchers are essentially exploratory.

In 2005 John Horgan published a book on the psychology of terrorism, extensively reviewing the literature at the time. He later reflected:

I concluded on a depressing note. The psychology of terrorism, I argued, was at best under-developed, and at worst doomed to the mercy of unrealistic expectations of those who seek quick and simple solutions to the terrorism problem. Asking counterterrorism practitioners to consider contributions from the academic literature on terrorism was, at best, a half-hearted recommendation. Yes, there was a lot of quality research out there, but the unending torrent of drivel made it ever more impossible to keep oneself afloat.

But recently there has been a shift. Within the past five to ten years, the internal assessments have become more optimistic. The same scholars who issued such damning critiques have found considerable improvement.

For example, Alex P. Schmid’s most recent review of the literature argued that:

Looking back over four decades of terrorism research, one cannot fail to see that, next to much pretentious nonsense, a fairly solid body of consolidated knowledge has emerged. In fact, Terrorism Studies has never been in better shape than now…. Terrorism Studies — despite many shortcomings — has matured.

Silke’s most recent review, covering two core journals from 1990 to 2007, also found reasons for optimism. He argued that:

There are signs that research published in recent years is less opinion-based and more rigorous in methodology and analysis…. The use of inferential statistics on terrorism data in particular has nearly quadrupled since 9/11, a trend which can only help improve the reliability and validity of the conclusions being reached by researchers.

He more recently suggested, along with co-author Jennifer Schmidt-Petersen, that terrorism studies was experiencing its golden age:

Indeed, far from being stagnant or moribund, terrorism studies is arguably enjoying a golden age. High impact articles are appearing at a rate never before seen, and the core knowledge of the area is shifting and coalescing around new research and theories.

John Horgan’s 2014 update of his 2005 study also noted the field’s improvement:

So what has changed? In the intervening 8 years, there is much to commend. For a start, the field is no longer dominated by the small handful of researchers who traditionally characterized what is now commonly known as ‘terrorism studies’ (just don’t call it a discipline). Fortunately, the increase in interest from the social and behavioral sciences has also mirrored an increase in solid, quality research output. In fact the creep of systematic, interdisciplinary research on terrorist behavior has meant that it is certainly getting easier to distinguish opinion from analysis, and snake-oil conjecture from analysis that is informed by empirical evidence.

Similarly, Peter Neumann and Scott Kleinmann recently examined the rigour of ‘radicalisation research’, which can be considered a subset of terrorism research. Their findings were also positive:

Overall, the results are not as damning as one might have expected based on Silke’s and Schmid and Jongman’s earlier surveys of the terrorism studies literature. It would not be justified, therefore, to say, as Schmid and Jongman did in 1983, that the entire field is “impressionistic, anecdotal, [and] superficial.” On the contrary, there is much to be encouraged by, not least the fact that more than half of the items in our sample scored “high” in relation to either empirical or methodological rigor, and more than a quarter (27 percent) did so in both.

They also raise issues with Silke’s critique, arguing that it uses too narrow a definition to determine rigour:

For example, Silke classifies nearly all document-based research as “secondary source,” which effectively dismisses entire academic disciplines and methods—especially historical research—as methodologically and empirically inadequate.

They also question Silke’s emphasis on the use of statistics:

Indeed, for “micro phenomena” such as terrorism and radicalization, the use of qualitative methodologies—such as detailed case studies and narratives—may, in many cases, be more appropriate and produce more valid results than the construction of large—and largely meaningless—datasets. This, of course, is no excuse for laziness and sloppy research, which—disturbingly—could be found in many historical studies in our sample. But it suggests that it would be misleading to believe that quantitative research with large datasets, which—from a strictly methodological point of view—may be cleaner and more rigorous, is necessarily also the kind of research that will produce the most relevant insights about the phenomenon that radicalization research seeks to understand. Given the “micro” nature of the subject, the lower share of studies that draw on large amounts of empirical evidence—and, consequently, the less extensive use of quantitative methods, inferential statistics, etc.—must not necessarily be a cause of concern.

So on the whole, internal assessments of terrorism studies to be more optimistic about the field today than ten or more years ago, and find huge improvement.

This view isn’t universal. Marc Sageman recently argued that the field had stagnated, prompting responses from Max Taylor, Alex P. Schmid, David H. Schanzer, Clark McCauley, Sophia Moskalenko, and Jessica Stern, followed by a rejoinder from Sageman. And all the assessments mentioned in this post still note extensive problems with the field. Peter Neumann and Scott Kleinmann’s assessment ended by noting that:

Yet, despite clusters of excellence, there remains a significant amount of research that fails to meet minimum standards of scholarly work. In most disciplines, having 34 percent of published research that is either methodologically or empirically poor would be considered unacceptable, yet in terrorism studies—and radicalization research more specifically—this state of affairs has been allowed to persist.

This all leaves the question of why, despite improvement, there is plenty of sub-par research. There’s a lot of writing on this,  I recommend three articles in particular.

The first is an external assessment, from the earlier-mentioned Lisa Stampnitzky, who is a sociologist who the studied the field itself. In this article she describes how terrorism studies, rather than functioning as a purely academic field, awkwardly straddles academia, the media and the state. The second is Magnus Ranstorp’s introduction to the book Mapping Terrorism Research, which provides a good outline of the field and some of its problems. The final one is Thomas Hegghammer’s conference paper on the future of terrorism studies, which gives good advice on how current researchers can help progress the field.