Intrastate cultural and socio-political influences and the realisation of national security: A two-level correlational analysis

Dimitrios Pantazis

doi:10.35467/sdq/140391

Abstract

This paper aims to examine how specific domestic social, political, and cultural motives impact national security agendas’ formation and implementation. The following assumptions drive this essay’s research rationale: Security-making processes are considered non-similar among states due to different domestic political processes, cultural discourses, and socialisation patterns. Therefore, national security agents are constantly being guided by various intrastate settings, which construct attitudes that are ultimately reflected upon policy formation and implementation through strategic behavioural manifestations. Thus, the realisation of national security is dependent on each state actor’s existent strategic culture, and given that, choices cannot be contemplated strictly under rationality. The methods of literature review and multi-layered analysis are applied throughout this study. In particular, this text’s reasoning is based on contextualisation, identification, categorisation of variables, and correlational implications. Concerning findings, the theoretical examination of the objects assessed provides adequate clarifications on the interaction among the domestic motives, decision-makers’ perspectives, and strategic cultural manifestations. Specifically, it was critically identified that the two last concepts may complementary function during security-making processes; hence, producing unique outcomes for each state actor. Consequently, this paper wishes to contribute by giving direction for future research and broader methodological implications on the role of intrastate socio-political and cultural motives as sources of strategic culture and determinants of national security-making attitudes; without ignoring that other factors can respectively affect the aforementioned schemes.

Highlights

The need to interpret and predict the interaction between global system actors remains a constant scholarly debate in International Relations (IR) and Security Studies (ISS)
Contemporary conceptual analyses, tend to supplement traditional theories with more multi-dimensional approaches in order to diagnose the variety of factors that lead to specific fundamental strategic behavioural indications at the interstate and intrastate level
This essay seeks to answer the following research question: By what means do domestic cultural and socio-political schemes influence the accomplishment of national security agendas

Summary

Introduction

The need to interpret and predict the interaction between global system actors remains a constant scholarly debate in International Relations (IR) and Security Studies (ISS). Modern researchers have tried to diagnose the international system’s complexity rather than clinging to a rational, but restrictive, structural understanding of the world This condition expedites the need for further and more detailed examination of policy and decision-making processes for each actor in the prism of national security agendas. State, security strategies tend to follow a relatively universal pattern, being summed up in the initial requirement to safeguard national interests, leading to institutional imprints of respective policies and, eventually, to the implementation of particular objectives This entire procedure relies on decision-making processes. This essay seeks to answer the following research question: By what means do domestic cultural and socio-political schemes influence the accomplishment of national security agendas Given the above, this text initially delves into the concept of strategic culture, which is assumed to explicate the essence behind state security behavioural expressions. The final chapter draws upon the entire text, tying up the previous theoretical and critical strands aiming to (i) introduce the above influences into the context of strategic culture, (ii) assess the process by which they interface with the realisation of national security agendas, and, eventually, (iii) evaluate their significance

Theorising Strategic Culture as the General Research Context

Conclusion