Abstract
This chapter walks the reader through the development of the Cultural Topography Analytic Framework (CTAF), describes the analytical shortcomings it is meant to remedy, and explains the process of employing the framework as a research method. At the core of the CTAF is the goal of isolating the key identity factors, values, norms, and perceptual lens of the state contemplating crossing a nuclear threshold, and then designing a tailored set of traditional and nontraditional foreign policy levers for interlocutors to use to impact that decision. The chapter briefly introduces the field of strategic culture and its early contributions to the nuclear policy literature and highlights continuing deficiencies within this methodological field that the CTAF model is designed to remedy—including failures to account for shifts in national behavior and the inability to identify which of several, often competing, national security narratives will dominate a regime’s nuclear decisionmaking.
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Notes
- 1.
Portions of this chapter previously appeared in Jeannie L. Johnson and Matthew T. Berrett, “Cultural Topography: A New Research Tool for Intelligence.” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 55, No. 2 (June 2011).
- 2.
Johnston, “Thinking About Strategic Culture,” 32–64; Glenn, “Realism versus Strategic Culture: Competition and Collaboration?”; Greathouse, “Examining the Role and Methodology of Strategic Culture.”
- 3.
Bloomfield, “Time to Move On: Reconceptualizing the Strategic Culture Debate”; Greathouse, “Examining the Role and Methodology of Strategic Culture.”
- 4.
Haglund, “What Good Is Strategic Culture?”
- 5.
Snyder , The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations, 8.
- 6.
See Waltz, “The Anarchic Structure of World Politics,” 29–49.
- 7.
Ken Booth , “The Concept of Strategic Culture Affirmed,” in Carl G. Jacobsen, ed., Strategic Power: The United States of America and the USSR (London: Macmillan Press, 1990): 125–126.
- 8.
An exception is Meyer’s work on the EU as a superstate structure: “The Purpose and Pitfalls of Constructivist Forecasting: Insights from Strategic Culture Research for the European Union’s Evolution as Military Power,” 669–690; “Convergence Towards a European Strategic Culture? A Constructivist Framework for Explaining Changing Norms,” 523–549.
- 9.
Twomey, “Lacunae in the Study of Culture in International Security,” 338–357.
- 10.
See Jeffrey Knopf’s critique of the first generation of strategic culture scholarship, Rationality, Culture and Deterrence, PASCC Report Number 2013 009.
- 11.
Johnson and Berrett, “Cultural Topography: A New Research Tool for Intelligence,” 2.
- 12.
See discussion in Maines, M., and Danks, J., et al., Cultural Analytic Framework, Appendix A, 41–42 (University of Maryland, 2011).
- 13.
See Johnson, J., & Berrett, M. (2011), Cultural Topography: A New Research Tool for Intelligence Analysis. Studies in Intelligence, 55(2), 1–22.
- 14.
Peter Wilson’s article captures the research philosophy and data-extraction process pursued within the CTAF and offers a strong argument for attention to the interpretivist method, Grounded Theory , and the English School for future analysis in international relations: “The English School Meets the Chicago School: The Case for a Grounded Theory of International Institutions.” International Studies Review, 14 (2012): 567—90. See also Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm L. Strauss. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1967; and Chap. 1 “Know Thyself: Turning the Strategic Culture Tool Inward,” in Jeannie L. Johnson, The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture: Lessons Learned and Lost in America’s Wars (Georgetown University Press, 2018).
- 15.
Nye, J. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. Introduction, page x and 5–10. Public Affairs, Perseus Book Group, 2004.
- 16.
Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Future of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2011).
- 17.
See Hillary Clinton’s confirmation speech before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, delivered on January 13, 2009.
- 18.
Nye, J. The Paradox of American Power (Oxford University Press, 2002): 8–9.
- 19.
Maines, M., & Danks, J., et al., The Cultural Analytic Framework, Appendix D, 46–50 (University of Maryland, 2011).
- 20.
See Rublee, M.R. Nonproliferation Norms: Why States Choose Nuclear Restraint (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2009): 16–19, for a more detailed discussion in terms of social psychology on the difference between the terms “identification” and “persuasion” in regard to acceptance of nuclear norms.
- 21.
Ibid. 16–19; see also Alastair Ian Johnston, “Treating International Institutions as Social Environments,” International Studies Quarterly, 45 (2001): 487–515.
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Johnson, J.L., Maines, M.J. (2018). The Cultural Topography Analytic Framework. In: Johnson, J., Kartchner, K., Maines, M. (eds) Crossing Nuclear Thresholds. Initiatives in Strategic Studies: Issues and Policies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72670-0_2
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