Anthropology and international security

Maintaining international security and avoiding nuclear war requires both technological and social understanding. This chapter describes some of the common themes in the anthropological literature related to peace and war and indicates some of the ways that the resulting anthropological data provide important information for international security studies. When anthropologists seek to contribute to discussions of peace and international security they enter a community of practitioners who share a common paradigm. Anthropological analyses of situations of environmental deprivation and stress can add an important human dimension to discussions of the consequences of the effect of nuclear war. Anthropologists learn about a group’s system of implicit meanings by looking at what the group does and listening to and observing the ways the group expresses itself in relation to its environment. The international security community uses linguistic symbols to maintain an inadequate conception of the complexity of human culture and society.