ABSTRACT
Attempting to theorize culture and identity is a difficult task under any circumstances. But in the case of security studies the endeavour is perhaps particularly challenging. Traditionally, security studies appears to have had little place for questions of identity, or for broader forms of theorizing practice. In the theoretical vision that dominated security studies as it developed in the period after the Second World War, and that arguably continues to do so, states are taken as both the primary objects and agents of security. These states are held to be rational actors, deploying an essentially instrumental rationality as their primary form of decision-making. Power is understood largely in terms of material capability, while the anarchy of the international system provides the central context structuring security relations. In many eyes, these assumptions continue, for better or worse, to form what Colin Gray (1982) once called the ‘bedrock’ of strategic studies, and culture and identity are largely absent from and irrelevant for security analysis.
