Anarchy and Culture: Insights from the Anthropology of War

The end of the Cold War has given rise to hopes among many international relations scholars and public activists that a dramatic transformation in world politics is now unfolding. They contend that changes in norms, ideas, and culture have the power to tame the historically war-prone nature of international anarchy.1 This analysis and the prescriptions that follow from it exaggerate the autonomy of ideas and culture in shaping behavior in anarchy. A rich body of research on war by anthropologists suggests that ideas and culture are best understood not as autonomous but as embedded in complex social systems shaped by the interaction of material circum-stances, institutional arrangements, and strategic choices, as well as by ideas and culture. Cultural prescriptions that ignore these multifaceted interactions will pro-vide a poor road map to guide strategies of global change. Those who foresee substantial opportunities to transform the war-prone interna-tional system into a realm governed by benign norms contend that “anarchy is what states make of it.”2 In their view, culture, defined as shared knowledge or symbols that create meaning within a social group, determines whether behavior in th