The cultural variable in foreign and defence policy
Cultural awareness – whether in the form of training or briefings – has become a part of military pre-deployment routines. The need to understand culture became an operational necessity during the war in Afghanistan. This lesson was not integrated into planning immediately, but later rotations of Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) formations did include established academics serving as advisors to commanders. In the United States, the military employed social scientists as part of their Human Terrain Teams in both Iraq and Afghanistan, recognizing that getting culture right is crucial for successful military operations (Kassel 2015). This approach proved controversial, especially as scientists voiced ethical concerns, but the spirit of the effort endured through Cultural Support Teams, where female service members were deployed in support of United States Army special operations combat forces. Through this initiative, the American mission was able to reach the local female population, an important demographic, which had previously been ignored in counterinsurgency operations (von Hlatky 2014). Culture is also important when different countries and organizations work together. In the context of multinational operations, cultural interoperability is as important as technical interoperability (Rubinstein et al. 2008). Alliances and partnerships preserve the institutional memory of cultural interoperability by representing a forum for socialization, joint training and mutual influence. While these examples illustrate how culture impacts the security realm of international politics, how have scholars integrated the cultural variable in their analyses? Is it possible to study culture in a systematic way to address empirical puzzles about war and military cooperation? The articles in this special issue take up this challenge and demonstrate the various ways culture factors into the implementation of major foreign and defence policy decisions. This introductory article will examine how culture has been theorized and operationalized in the field of international relations (IR), focusing more specifically on foreign policy analysis and security studies. Although culture transcends disciplinary boundaries, receiving substantial scholarly attention, we argue that there is greater potential for cultural analyses in IR to inform foreign and defence policies. While there is a sense that culture is important, scholars must take pains to empirically demonstrate how cultural variables influence the outcomes that are central to the security and defence community of practice: outcomes such as war, international cooperation, military intervention. How can we improve our analytical tools to better account