A ritual approach to deterrence: I am, therefore I deter
| Author | Maria Mälksoo |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066120966039 |
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120966039
European Journal of
International Relations
2021, Vol. 27(1) 53 –78
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066120966039
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E
JR
I
A ritual approach to
deterrence: I am,
therefore I deter
Maria Mälksoo
Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent, Belgium
Abstract
How can ritual help to understand the practice of deterrence? Traditional deterrence
scholarship tends to overlook the active role of deterring actors in creating and redefining
the circumstances to which they are allegedly only reacting. In order to address the
weight of deterrence as a symbol, collective representation and strategic repertoire, this
article proposes to rethink deterrence as a performative strategic practice with ritual
features and critical binding, releasing and restraining functions. I posit a ritual account
of deterrence to better grasp the performance, credibility and the presumed effect of
this central international security practice. An understanding of deterrence as a ritual-
like social practice probes the scope of rational deterrence theory, replacing its ‘I think,
therefore I deter’ presumption with a socially and politically productive ‘I am, therefore
I deter’ logic. Drawing on the example of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s
enhanced Forward Presence, the proposed conceptualization of extended deterrence
as an interaction ritual chain in allied defence, solidarity and community-building offers
novel insights about the deterrence and collective identity nexus. Extended deterrence
has much more than deterrence at stake: how an alliance practices deterrence tells
us more about the alliance itself than about the nature of threats it responds to. The
tripwire posture of the enhanced Forward Presence highlights the instrumentality of
ritualization for mediating ambiguity in extended deterrence.
Keywords
Ritual, deterrence, ambiguity, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, enhanced Forward
Presence, interaction ritual chain
Corresponding author:
Maria Mälksoo, Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent, Boulevard Louis Schmidt 2A/
Louis Schmidtlaan 2A, Etterbeek 1040, Brussels, Belgium.
Email: m.malksoo@kent.ac.uk
966039EJT0010.1177/1354066120966039European Journal of International RelationsMälksoo
research-article2020
Article
54 European Journal of International Relations 27(1)
Introduction
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO’s) enhanced Forward Presence (eFP)
in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland is frequently praised as the biggest reinforce-
ment of Alliance’s collective defence in a generation. The unprecedented forward
deployment of multinational allied forces on NATO’s eastern flank is ‘a visible demon-
stration of the Alliance’s commitment to Article V of the Washington Treaty, which
enshrines the principle that an attack against one ally is an attack against all’ (‘SACEUR
visits NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence Battlegroups’, 2018). The former com-
mander of eFP Battlegroup Lithuania, Lieutenant Colonel René Braun, has compared the
Alliance’s posture in the region to the French, British and American commitments to
West Berlin from 1945 to 1989:
In these 44 years NATO-forces might have been inferior and not ready to face an attack
of conventional forces, but through disciplined conduct, credible will to defend and
unbroken passion for the fight for freedom they were also responsible that West Berlin
was never attacked by regular forces (‘NATO’s enhanced Forward Presence Battlegroup
Lithuania Marks Its 4th Rotation’, 2018).
Yet, the Alliance’s deterrent in the framework of eFP is notably more symbolic than
the Berlin analogy of the Cold War suggests: NATO has opted but for a rotational
tripwire force rather than a capability for a more robust territorial defence in case of
an attack, regardless of Russia’s time and space advantage, anti-access/area denial
(A2/AD) capabilities, and consequent challenges for NATO to provide rapid rein-
forcements in the region.
NATO’s walking the tightrope between reassuring the exposed allies on the eastern
flank and discouraging a putative challenger by the costly signal of forward (if numeri-
cally light) deployment of forces illustrates a core concern of extended deterrence – sig-
nalling credibility while mediating ambiguity vis-à-vis different audiences. Whereas the
scholarly debate on the benefits and disadvantages of ambiguity about commitments and
prospective responses to an attack is ongoing (e.g. Benson, 2012; Crawford, 2003;
Morgan, 2003), it is generally agreed that the credibility issue (and the related dosing of
ambiguity) is trickier for alliances compared to individual states. While rational deter-
rence theory by and large treats credibility as if it is objective and measurable, the sym-
bolism attached to the presence of the American forces by the protégé states in eFP’s
extended deterrence relationship (think ‘Fort Trump’ in Poland) evocatively underscores
how the very content of deterrence is ‘neither self-evident nor automatic’ for considera-
ble socio-political effort is involved in making deterrence policies, strategies and prac-
tices ‘count as deterrents in a political sense’ (Vuori, 2016: 29).
I argue that this work is done by the ritualization of deterrence – the strategic use of
ritual features and symbolic action central to deterrence as a social practice. Building on
the calls to go beyond rational choice to other theories of international behaviour in order
to better understand how deterrence works (Benford and Kurtz, 1987; Jervis, 1979;
Lebow and Stein, 1989; Lupovici, 2010, 2016, 2019; Vuori, 2016), I develop a theoreti-
cal account of deterrence based on the core concept of ritual, understood as a ‘rule-gov-
erned activity of symbolic character which draws the attention of its participants to
objects of thought and feeling . . . they hold to be of special significance’ (Lukes, 1975:
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