Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies

Michael Desch, who is leaving Harvard to become Associate Director at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky in the fall, offers a critical review of cultural theories in the field of international security studies. Desch divides the literature on cultural theory into three distinct phases, or “waves”: the World War II, Cold War, and post–Cold War waves. Assessing the influence of these bodies of work, Desch contends that cultural theories may be useful supplements to realist theories, but they are unlikely to supplant them.