Public argument-driven security studies.

• Author: Mitchell, Gordon R.
• Position: Review Essay

The topic of global security has recently received considerable attention in the field of argumentation studies, with public argument scholars engaging a host of vexing issues posed by the tumult in world affairs triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall (Broda-Bahm 1999; Dauber 2001a; Dauber 2001b; Leeper 2002; Mitchell 2000; Mitchell, Ayotte & Helwich 2001; Newman 2002; Winkler 2002). A trend in international relations (IR) mirrors this development, with a growing number of IR scholars drawing on the concept of argumentation to explain global events that resist snapping snugly into the tidy templates of Cold War power politics. This moment of intellectual convergence suggests that argumentation may be working as what rhetorical critic Leah Ceccarelli (2001, p. 5) calls a "conceptual chiasmus" -an interdisciplinary bridge connecting different scholarly communities working on overlapping subject matter.

The North Carolina-based Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS) has facilitated academic interchange along these lines through its scholarly conferences and publications. (1) For example, a 1998 TISS conference on Bridging Gaps in the Study of Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy featured a roundtable discussion that put political scientist Ole Holsti in conversation with public argument scholars David Cheshier and Erik Doxtader (Cheshier, Doxtader & Holsti 1998). This dialogue, which centered on Holsti's (1996) groundbreaking book, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, hints at how the lens of argumentation can bring sharp focus to security studies that treat public opinion and deliberative practice as constitutive dimensions of global politics.

The overlap between public argument studies and IR scholarship becomes clearer when one compares Thomas Goodnight's (1998) call for study of "argument formation[s]" in world affairs with Thomas Risse's (2000) insight that by attending to "arguing in the international public sphere" (p. 21), IR scholars can effectively bridge rational choice theory and social constructivism. (2) Building on Goodnight's work and echoing Risse's suggestion, Cori Dauber & David Cheshier (1998) locate public argument-driven security studies in a conceptual middle space that foregrounds the iterative relationship between material conditions and discursive practices: "[T]he political scene in any polity will be shaped by complex interactions between public arguers, where the realities of geopolitics and culture will shape both arguer and audience and in turn be made the topoi and evidence of their claims" (p. 40).

It is notable that Dauber & Cheshier position their public argument approach to security studies as an alternative to Samuel Huntington's (1993) realpolitik "clash of civilizations" thesis, much the same way that IR scholar Marc Lynch (2000, pp. 309-16) uses public sphere theory to ground his critique of Huntington. This overlapping emphasis on argumentation challenges the deterministic underpinnings of Huntington's pessimistic worldview by illustrating how the global milieu is marked by moments of rhetorical exigence--opportunities to color with words and images what some paint as the inexorable march of history toward cataclysmic conflict. It also responds to two of IR realism's explanatory weaknesses--difficulty in accounting for the heightened efficacy of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as actors on the world stage (Keck & Sikkink 1998; Payne 2000; Payne & Samhat 2002; Samhat 1997, pp. 350-56), and descriptive myopia resulting from reductive formulations of communicative action in global affairs (Ri sse 1999, pp. 8-14; Risse-Kappen 1995). On a normative level, the public argument approach opens a critical aperture for commentators to articulate visions of world affairs where international disputes are resolved and complex problems solved through border-crossing dialogue oriented toward mutual understanding, rather than strategic deployment of force via power, money, or arms (Association of German Scientists 2000; Bohman 1999a, pp. 95-99; Bohman & Lutz-Bachmann 1998; Payne 1996, p. 376; Linklater 1998).

IR scholars who feature argumentation prominently in their theories face several challenges in explaining international events using theoretical terms usually reserved for analysis of deliberation rooted in domestic public spheres of democratic states. Most basically, transnational deliberations present unique logistical hurdles: "[S]evere time constraints and the sheer complexity of practical problems in international life are bound to prevent real discourses from achieving anything other than an approximation of the idealized presuppositions of argumentation" (Haacke 1996, p. 285). Even when such logistical obstacles are surmounted, common opinions forged in international public spheres often prove difficult to translate into policy change given the lack of decision-making authority currently invested in international institutions (Bohrnan 1999b, pp. 506-7). In addition, standard criticisms of deliberative democracy levied in domestic contexts tend to have even greater purchase when applied to internationa l public spheres. For example, the exclusionary effects of grounding discourse to the counterfactual assumption that domestic interlocutors share homogeneous background assumptions (see Zulick & Laffoon 1991) may be magnified on an international level, where the cultural, social, and religious heterogeneity of discussants is likely to be even more pronounced.

Just as powerful actors manipulate discussion in domestic public spheres, "norm entrepreneurs" can strategically engineer frames for international public dialogue that serve narrow special interests and frustrate unfettered collective will formation (Payne 2001). Finally, the same media filters that distort democratic deliberation in domestic public spheres are likely to corrupt argumentation even more insidiously in transnational public spheres, where interlocutors often separated by great physical distances must rely on technologically mediated communication to share ideas. All these factors make it unlikely that international public sphere dialogues will come to resemble so-called ideal speech situations. Whether there is still value in research that explores how communicative interaction enables and constrains will formation and policy-making in the international milieu remains an open question, one that is broached in the pages that follow.

The title of this review essay proposes a shorthand label for the interdisciplinary nexus linking security-based argumentation studies and argumentation-based security studies. I explore this nexus by reviewing four recent books that fit loosely under the rubric of public argument-driven security studies. Part one examines how the proposed globalization of public sphere theory plays out in a study on Cold War superpower relations. Part two pursues a similar vector of analysis in the context of Jordanian foreign policy from 1988 to 1998. Part three considers how recent technological developments and political trends complicate efforts to cultivate critical public discussion on security matters in entertainment-saturated spheres of public deliberation.

TRANSNATIONAL ACTIVISM AND THE COLD WAR ENDGAME

Stuart Croft and Terry Terriff's edited volume, Critical Reflections on Security and Change, is a collection of essays that are designed to revisit Cold War history, reflect on methods and approaches to studying security policy, and speculate on how future trends are likely to shape the practice and study of international relations. Some of the most useful chapters provide introductions to the IR subfield known as critical security studies. In one of these overview chapters, "'Change and Insecurity' Revisited," Barry Buzan traces the roughly 20-year history of this subfield and situates it vis-a-vis realism, IR's dominant paradigm. For Buzan, a defining feature of the critical security studies research program is that instead of accepting realism's theoretical categories (such as threat, security, and state interest) at face value, it shows how these categories are "socially constructed" through various security discourses (p. 3). Here, the way rhetors represent material conditions in the world becomes as im portant, if not more important, than material conditions themselves. As Buzan points out, this emphasis on discourse and representation simultaneously opens up security studies to diverse research methodologies and places a host of new normative questions on the table. These questions include "what should and shouldn't be constructed as threats" and "whose interests are served or damaged by particular processes of securitization and desecuritization" (p. 3). The title of Steve Smith's chapter in the same volume, "The Increasing Insecurity of Security Studies" signals that this is an academic field in a state of flux. Smith provides a panoramic survey of the various approaches to security studies that have taken root amidst the shakeup of IR's dominant paradigm: the Third World security school; the "Copenhagen School"; constructivist security studies; critical security studies; and poststructural security studies.

During the Cold War, talk of the "socially constructed" nature of security threats was often dismissed in the academy and beyond as little more than Pollyanish bluster. However, as Edward Kolodziej points out in his chapter, "Security Studies for the Next Millennium": "The sudden and unexpected implosion of the Soviet Union and the abrupt end of the Cold War prompted a probing, if not always fruitful, debate about what is--or what should be--security studies" (p. 18). Part of this debate played out in the context of discussion about what caused the Cold War to end. Commentators partial to the realist paradigm of power politics explained the Soviet Union's demise as an act of capitulation to overwhelming US military superiority...