Contested Strategic Cultures: Anglosphere Participation in the Coalition against ISIS

Abstract

Abstract The study of multinational military interventions highlights the importance of four major factors to account for combat participation in US-led coalitions: threat perceptions, alliance considerations, domestic politics, and strategic culture. The latter, however, has been overlooked or uncorroborated by major cross-national accounts of coalition warfare. Building on the fourth generation of scholars working on strategic culture as well as legislative studies scholarship, we propose and put to empirical test a conceptualization of strategic culture that focuses on force conceptions, foreign policy roles, and domestic contestation of self-representations. Through a longitudinal and systematic qualitative content analysis of parliamentary debates that took place in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia from August 2014 to December 2017, the article finds that force conception and domestic contestation are best associated with variation in allied participation in US-led combat operations. In contrast, foreign policy roles are not found to shed light on allied military participation. We conclude that more cross-national and within-case analyses of strategic culture hold the potential to contribute to our understanding of the peculiarities of coalition operations.