Strategic cultures revisited: reply to Colin Gray

Abstract

As the old blues song goes, ‘if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all’. Same goes for scholarly attention. So I am grateful to Professor Gray for his article.

Despite his frequent use of adjectives about my work which suggest a desperation to inoculate future generations of scholars against it, we actually agree on a great deal. We share a basic ontological understanding of international relations and security studies in particular. We agree that strategic cultures—which admittedly we do define very differently—are none the less critical explanations for the way different groups of people think and act when it comes to the use of force. We also agree that these strategic cultures are not epiphenomena of unitary states acting under anarchy and constrained by material power structures, but are independent of these structures, influenced perhaps by both domestic and international normative structures (though I am not sure Professor Gray accepts this latter possibility for reasons I will return to in a moment). I think we also agree that rigour is better than confusion. Indeed, Professor Gray notes that ‘from the perspective of methodological rigour, it is hard to fault’ my work.