Comes from the very ambiguity in the word security.
If you think about security, it's a very funny word.
Sometimes it means an objective, notably safety.
And there's a huge literature about whether we are talking about the safety of the nation,
the safety of the individual, safety in the society, the safety of the planet.
And with different recipes for what should be done. And at the same time, in ordinary parlance, it refers to security practices,
whether we're talking about door locks, insurance, police, military forces.
And that spawns a whole lot of different literature, including, for example, the securitisation of high performing security.
I remind you of the importance of the state, which is protecting here.
So if we go back to the military forces analogy by having exercises in the German plane during the Cold War,
it reminded us that a Third World War would be the worst thing that could possibly happen, and therefore we trusted our state to keep it safe.
So what a security culture does is to bring together both objectives and practices more or less harmoniously.
And oh, gosh, I was going to actually read you a definition.
My definition, but then not taking too long to find it, I forgot to get it out.
I wanted to read you a formal definition of how I've defined the security cultures.
It may just mean I think it's just too difficult to find it in my tablet and on a piece of paper.
But basically what it does is it brings together objectives and perhaps it was, but it is quite concrete.
It brings together narratives, tools, apparatuses, infrastructure,
which tend to shape both ways of thinking and ways of doing things and norms about what's right and what's wrong.
Every security culture, for example, has its own set of rules,
and understanding how the narratives and the rules are actually embedded in the practices helps to explain why we go on always doing the same thing.
Why do we always go on having airstrikes against terrorists when actually they're not very effective way of dealing with the problem of terrorism?
And in the case of new wars, why do armed groups go on fighting when they have very little chance of winning?
So how do these persistent ways of doing things keep going?
That's what I'm interested in and what I think it's quite useful just very briefly to distinguish it from a term that's used in strategic studies,
which is strategic culture.
So strategic culture was kind of invented by the RAND Corporation because the Russians didn't act the way that game arising expected them to act.
They expected them to respond to several moves and they didn't.
And so they started to explain it in terms of what they called strategic culture.
And that spawned a huge literature which I won't go into here.
Colin Grey is probably the most famous exponent of strategic culture, but I just want to say it's quite useful to talk about that,
to explain why my concept is different and why is my concept different.
First of all, it's not necessarily military.
I'm interested in security cultures which I've engaged with, engage in, or try to address political violence.
And so some security cultures, maybe more policing or what I call the liberal peace, the UN type peace agreement type security culture.
It's not necessarily a military culture. So that's the first way it changes.
Secondly, and this is probably more important, it's not national.
Instead of being about the way in which military culture is imbued with national characteristics.
It's about a way of doing culture.
So if you think about cultures as having boundaries,
then you can think that the man in the Pentagon usually is a and has more in common with the man
in the Russian Ministry of Defence than he does with the peacekeeper or the humanitarian work.
And so it's about ways of doing things rather than about it's a functional definition of culture rather than a national definition of culture.
And the final difference, although not all strategic culture, serious concern with the difference is that for me, cultures constructed.
So what's interesting about the concept of culture is how gets reproduced and how it's constantly changing.
Whereas the old strategic culture theatre has tended to be a bit essentialist.
So they would say, Well, Britain has a navy because it's surrounded by sea and it's always having.
So that's a cultural explanation as to why Britain put so much emphasis on the Navy.
Whereas this kind of explanation, we would have to understand how is it that you get in a constructivist approach?
How is it that you somehow choose some traditions and not others, and which traditions do you choose to reproduce?
And in the book, I define four cultures and I discuss each of them, and I talk about their genealogy,
their history, how they evolved to become what they are that compete on today's landscape.
And my point really is that whereas we tend to think, whereas in the Cold War,
we actually had a single geopolitical security culture, that was the Cold War culture,
and everybody sort of agreed that the level of military spending and the number of military forces was a kind of measure indicator of how much power.
And because everyone shared that culture and there was a set of beliefs that underpinned the role of military force if it was a rather stable system.
And that helped you identify the hierarchy of states.
And instead today, I think we have for I broadly define them, but they overlap and change competing cultures and my culture's geopolitics,
which is the heritage of the Cold War, which still dominates defence budgets,
new wars, the war on terror, and the Liberal piece which is the US and the EU.
The EU and each of these cultures are deeply embedded in forms of political authority.
So geopolitics is very much about the nation state, about blogs, about great powers.
The war on terror is very much about US exceptionalism,
although other countries are following the liberal pieces about the emergence
of international institutions and how they how they legitimise themselves.
And new wars, which I'm going to talk about, is very much about what in the literature is referred to as hybrid authority,
new types of formal and informal local authorities.
So that's broadly my introduction to what I mean by security campuses.
And now I just want to explain a little bit about new wars as a culture.
So that's the next thing I'm going to do. And in terms of the genealogy, I think if I want.
To say that New Orleans is the culture involved.
It's a form of irregular warfare and irregular warfare being only defined when regular ones were defined.
So although there are much alien to irregular warfare,
it really came into being in the 17th and 18th century and with the rise of formal states and militaries, the rise of geopolitics.
But I think in a lot of the literature, new wars are said to be civil wars, which I've always rejected,
because I think new wars are a contrast both to inter-state wars and the civil wars of the 17th 86 to the seventies and eighties.
But I think that New Wars evolved very much out of the interplay between revolutionary warfare and counterinsurgency.
That's the origin, which was counterinsurgency, largely international and revolutionary warfare.
So there were, if you like, internationalised civil wars.
And actually, I just came back from Colombia and was talking to a nurse about it.
And it's fascinating in the light of the evolution I'm going to talk about,
to think about Colombia in this light, because the Colombian war is the same.
It started as a classic left right civil war, but gradually took on new war characteristics.
So just very briefly, the story of this evolution.
Revolutionary warfare began after the Second World War as a way of getting around concentrations of massive shows.
The revolutionaries knew they could never win if they directly opposed the state because the state was so much stronger, more powerful.
So the only way they could win was politically wrong of the military.
They could win by controlling more and more territory politically.
And so how did they do that? They established safe havens in the border areas, in jungles, on mountaintops, and even in cities,
as was the case in Algeria, where they had the support politically of the local population.
And from there, they carried out attrition attacks on the strategic coast.
And the idea was they would wear down the enemy and eventually they would win politically.
Actually, Mao and the Vietnamese theorist whose name I could never pronounce,
did actually think at the end you would require conventional warfare, as indeed was the case in both the Chinese and Vietnamese wars.
But in general, the idea was that you won politically.
Well, counterinsurgency developed in response to these wars, and you have the experience of the Portuguese in Mozambique,
the British in the that the French and Americans in Indochina, the French in Algeria.
And you always had a division among counterinsurgency theorists between what nowadays is called the enemy century,
more coercive approaches in which you try to kill as many revolutionaries as possible,
and you try to extract information through horrible forms of torture.
And all sorts of techniques were developed in this enemy centric,
including population displacement, so that the people could no longer support the revolutionaries.
They would poison the city for the fish. Mao always said the guerrilla was the fish in the sea and the people in the sea and sieges,
the use of area destruction, weapons to destroy crops and the things that people lived by.
And what pretty Dickensian corporate pseudo governance which you developed in Kenya.
Also the French guerrillas, counterinsurgency theories, troops that had these maps in Algeria, who was sort of fake insurgents.
I won't go into the population. I actually all of these wars.
The other approach was to try to compete through winning hearts and minds, and that was the approach supposedly of Templar in Malaya.
Although wherever, if you look closely at all of these wars, you always find coercive tactics as well.
So I think a very key moment was the 1980.
With the low intensity conflicts of the 1980s,
what you got was sort of the multiplication of a few like student gangs of fermenting sectarianism was another mechanism used as a form of insurgency.
And, you know, if you're talking about the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the Contras in Nicaragua, UNITA in Angola,
the paramilitaries in Colombia, they kind of they were local non-state actors who adopted the techniques of counterinsurgency.
And I think it's out of that evolution that comes new wars now, along with that evolution.
There's another element that you have to take into account, which is the changed economic and political circumstances.
These were conflicts fundamentally about whether revolutionaries were opposing colonial or oppressive regimes.
In in the context of the 1980s, you had the opening up of authoritarian regimes, both economically and politically.
And that process of liberalisation created new factors which also contribute to the.
One is the way that the state greatly enriched ends,
whether it was through privatisation or whether it was through access to aid contracts or whether it was through bribery related to all sales.
There were a whole lot of new mechanisms through which some kind of relationship with the state could lead to enrichment.
My colleague Alex, while talks about the political marketplace really to describe the monetisation of clans mystic relations,
most of these authoritarian regimes were based on client relations, but it became literally based on money.
After the 1980s and competing for funds meant competing for access to the state.
And in order to get access to the state, you actually needed the money.
So even if you weren't fundamentally corrupt, you wanted some good program to introduce.
Actually, you needed to have a political budget as part of your bargaining process in the government.
And of course, this was also leading to high unemployment and high inequality in many of these societies.
Along with that, you had political liberalisation and new demands for democracy.
And what you notice is that many of the new rules actually begin as democracy movements, whether you're talking about Ukraine, Bosnia, Syria.
They start as democracy amendments, which are often addressed to these new rich elites, and they get transformed into sectarian conflicts.
And that's part of the new war process, which I'll come to in a moment.
So these are the kind of conditions.
And if I now talk about how did new wounds differ from the civil wars of the 5670s, it'll give you more of an idea of what I'm talking about.
So, first of all, obviously, the goals as I said, the goals of the revolutionaries were social transformation.
They had programs. They wanted to introduce socialist programs.
They wanted to get control of the whole state in order to carry out different policies.
Whereas the goals of the new war actors are very much access to the state because it's access to reform,
and so it's access to the apparatus of the state.
You don't actually need to even control the state. And in fact, you probably benefit from the state being weak.
Secondly, you just.
The actors who were the actors. So the actors in the Civil Wars were basically guerilla revolutionaries who very much regard themselves as soldiers.
I was told by someone who was going through the archives of the Red Cross that they found a letter from Che
Guevara asking how he should be treating his prisoners of war according to international humanitarian law.
So they very much regard themselves as an army in warning to the actors in the new rules on networks of mercenaries, warlords, paramilitaries.
But I think there's one very important difference, which William Renan, who writes about war in Africa, draws attention to.
In the fifties and sixties,
some students sitting in the classroom would dream of being a left wing guerrilla and would go to the mountains and stop their movement.
So the revolutionary movements were very much led by young intellectuals.
After 89, those same students wanted to become civil society activists.
They wanted to be support movements for democracy and the warlords.
Rebels very often came out of the government themselves.
They became they were much more war lords. It was a different type of leadership altogether.
They might become a criminal gang. And as mafia types or local warlords, they were the ones who didn't want to lose their positions.
And they often allied with what William Reno calls parochial rebels, vigilante gangs, local, local, armed groups who join in with these networks.
So the actors and of course, they are linked in various ways to global networks, which I can talk about in a minute.
So the actors are different. Thirdly, the narratives are different.
This is where we come sectarianism.
And I think sectarianism was the manipulation of sectarian narratives has been very much a way of dealing with the democracy movement,
as you see it very clearly in the centre.
And we also saw it very clearly in Bosnia that whereas the democracy movements were, they called themselves civic movements,
they called themselves the multi, multi, multi movements, multicultural, multi-religious, multi, linguistic.
And the people who took part in the democracy protests were by and large not the same people who took part in the war.
The war was fought very often by poor,
unemployed young men who were drawn into the Bosnian army of the Croats or so and so saw joining the militia as a source of income,
and also often came from the countryside where the sects were.
The sort of idea of belonging to a particular sect was much stronger than in the towns.
And you see exactly the same thing happening in Syria.
In the demonstrations there were lots of slogans, same in Ukraine.
We are one where anti sectarianism, we believe in a political state.
And then you got these sectarian entrepreneurs and it's very often funded by the
government creating these militia groups who again consisted of poor young men,
often from the countryside. While the protest movement, like the protest movement in Bosnia, turned themselves in to civil society,
they started providing humanitarian aid, negotiating ceasefires, this kind of thing.
And then I think what happens is that sectarianism is constructed through violence.
And this is a very important part of my argument. All of us have multiple identities.
The fact that we belong to West, we're Croat, we're Muslim,
we're Hindu is not usually are most predominant against we're scholars, we're mothers with grandmothers.
We're also we're British, we're whatever.
And it's only when somebody is trying to kill you and you're threatened with death because of who you are,
that sectarianism becomes the most dominant narrative.
And I think that's what's really happening,
is that you start with sectarian killings and gradually people turn to the side that's most likely to protect them, which is people of their own.
And they gradually getting. With sectarian cartoons.
And tactics again.
The big change in a lot of the literature on irregular war is a distinction drawn between guerrillas and terrorists and guerrillas.
Direct attacks on strategic targets, terrorists, direct attack attacks on non-combatants.
New wars are definitely terrorist. New wars gain political control that like the guerrillas, very, very name is political control.
But unlike the guerrillas, they gain their political control by usually by forcible displacement,
by getting rid of anybody who challenges their political control, whether it's civil society groups or people of a different ethnicity.
And forced displacement is the most typical tactic of new wars,
whether it's through whether it's through a whole series of tactics, killing a few people so that other people run away.
Sexual violence, the destruction of cultural heritage.
All of these are the typical tactics of new wars, and I've written a lot about that, so I'm not going to go into it.
But one thing I want to add is about technology,
because there's a lot of discussion about how technology is changing the way of war and how the introduction
of information and communications technology could bring about a revolution in military facts.
And the question is, what about new wars? Are there technologies?
And there definitely are to billion, which is associated with new wars.
And information and communications technologies are very important,
very important in an obvious sense that new wars are fought by news networks that are really held
together by the narrative and that are able to communicate in general through the new technologies,
whether it's mobile phones or social media.
So communication is very crucial for the new networks.
But also there are all kinds of tactics that are copied from war to war, like, for example,
the use of improvised explosive devices news which have improved in lives as new wars learn from each other.
And they do actually make news, even though I tend to call this vernacular high technology,
because it's about using everyday available materials for military purposes, whether it's fertilisers or plastic bottles or whatever.
But they often use very sophisticated triggering devices like mobile phones.
So the new technology gets combined with these everyday and available materials.
And of course the final difference is economic, which is that the civil wars by and large were financed by income from the socialist block.
They got support from China, the Soviet Union and Cuba, and also taxation in the areas that they controlled both of those sources.
Well, the first source dried up after the end of the Cold War.
And the second source, taxation becomes incredibly difficult.
And in the context of economic liberalisation, tax revenues to the state dropped dramatically.
Public spending drops. And in the context where control is maintained through maintaining disorder, it's terribly difficult to raise taxes.
So what are the new sources of income?
Of course there are external donors and this is very obvious in Syria where you're getting external private donors very often from the Gulf.
But you multiply that money by all sorts of domestic economic activities which are linked to violence.
So it could be very obvious activities like loot, extortion at checkpoints, hostage taking.
It can also be smuggling. And most wars have their own characteristic commodity that struggled, that smuggled drugs for Colombia or Afghanistan.
Oil and antiquities in Iraq and Syria.
Diamonds and. In Angola so that when you bring all these characteristics together,
what you get is the establishment of what I might call we might call hybrid authority
local authorities based on armed groups whose authority depends on perpetual disorder.
And it's reproduced through the incentives to the armed groups.
The reason why the armed groups go on fighting, even though they can't win, is because they actually benefit from the violence.
And they benefit from the violence either politically because it helps them to promote
a sectarian narrative which most people don't accept outside the conditions of fear.
Some people may do, and they benefit economically because after a while the economic activities become an end to the incentives.
And I think you saw these changes in the Colombia case,
both in terms of the nature of the revolutionary leadership and in terms of the economic sources that funded
the wars and in terms of the change in tactics which became much more violent and civilian once said.
So let me just I should really end very soon, shouldn't I?
I wanted to say a little bit about how new wars are changing, and I'll do that in a headline.
So I think what I was interested in my book was how it interacts with the other security cultures.
And one one thing I've developed is the idea of hybrid peace,
which is not exactly the same as that developed by Oliver Richmond and Wigginton, although it's not inconsistent,
which is what happens when you impose liberal peace, i.e. an international top down international peace agreement,
just the sort of thing in that study with new wars.
And what you get is a kind of entrenchment of the culture with less violence.
They manage.
In a way, the international community is guaranteeing hybrid authority and local levels, which allows them to continue their predatory activities.
So that time I could expand on that.
But Bosnia is the perfect case. Then you can talk about hybrid war, which I think is both Ukraine and Syria,
where you get either the geopolitics or the war on terror, intervening to greatly exacerbate violence and the level of casualties.
And I won't go into that.
And then the final one is the is the combination of the war on terror within the wars, which was typical of Iraq and Afghanistan,
and in my view, which is probably quite controversial, it actually produces jihadism.
So I see ISIS is actually a product of what was effectively a new war in Iraq superimposed on the war on terror.
And we could and I sort of speculate in the book about whether this represents yet a new culture,
because I'd sister rather different from other new world groups.
But I won't talk about that now. I just want to conclude by saying something about what is the utility of a country's approach?
Why is it worth doing? Well, in a very obvious sense,
it's an alternative to the contest approach in which the only answer is either winning or losing or imposing a top down political agreement.
But also, I think once you see it as a culture,
you can identify contradictions and dilemmas and irritants in the culture that might offer you different pathways for getting out of the culture.
So for example, if we think about new wars, I mean,
I think one of the contradictions arises from the fact that they are integrated and we can't insulate ourselves from them,
whether it's refugees, whether it's terrorism,
or whether it's things like London property prices,
which have risen so dramatically because it's breeding money in so many of the
most expensive houses in London and New Orleans and the Russian oligarchs.
And so these cut these kinds of effects on our own society to force us to think not just to treat them as something over there, but force us to think.
A second way in, which is that actually predatory activities have limits in the sense that predatory activities are unproductive.
So once you've taken the assets of one particular area and you can't do it again and you have to move on.
And so there are limits to how long you can sustain predatory activities.
And that may mean that you have to shift to more productive activities, which then would shift the incentives.
And the third is just public awareness that I think was terribly important in
understanding why the march of violence in Iraq in the leg in 2008 to 9 came to an end.
And public weariness, I think, is also linked to what I might call irritants in the culture.
And what do I mean by irritants? Well, I mean the heritage of those democratic movements,
the civil society groups who are often the first to be targeted and who often get weak as a result of me was nevertheless what you find.
All of these wars. A key characteristic, in a way, is that it's very fragmented and very decentralised,
and it's always possible to find alternative places where the war has hardly touched.
And there may be reasons for this. It may be that local people have negotiated ceasefires.
It's extraordinary how many ceasefires have been negotiated in Syria, according to one count, 44 in the last year alone.
It may be because, particularly in times, people are absolutely desperate for clean water,
electricity, fuel, and they have to negotiate military agreements to reach that.
It may be just local people who are worried about the education of their children.
There are all kinds of elements of what I call civic civilians that are to be found in
was always but we never focus on them because we always focus on the violent events.
I'm actually trying to think about and trying to map things might be an alternative way of trying to develop alternative cultures.
And so I think the interesting thing about the cultural approach is that it gives you a
whole different take on how you navigate away from traditional approaches to contests.