Comparisons are a ubiquitous practice in global security politics. State and non-state actors routinely estimate and evaluate differentials in capabilities, power and status. Comparative assessments underpin visions of international order – for instance as a balance of power or a multipolar global order – and fuel competitive dynamics such as arms races and status competition. Comparative practices moreover describe developments in the field of global security – for instance, patterns and trends in the worldwide arms trade, in cyberattacks, in transnational crime or in maritime security. Such practices help to define security phenomena as governance objects and to make them amenable to various governance efforts, ranging from arms control through transnational policing to United Nations (UN) missions and programmes. Comparative techniques such as benchmarking and ranking are not only crucial for mobilizing political support for these efforts but often also underpin the evaluation of their implementation.
Despite the ubiquity of comparative practices, however, the field of International Relations (IR) has not so far developed a substantial interest in those that underpin and shape global security politics. Research on the subject touches upon various comparative practices, but it generally does not treat them as the main object of study. There is consequently not much systematic research done on the evolution and variety of the comparative practices that state and non-state actors use, or on the processes and politics through which certain practices and standards of comparison come to be prominent and influential in global security politics.
Two approaches to the study of comparisons
To avoid misunderstandings: we do not claim that comparisons have been ignored in the research on global security politics. This research knows and shows that comparisons are integral to most, if not all, phenomena in global security politics. Rather, the problem is, on the one hand, that this research tends to focus on aspects of these phenomena other than comparative practices, and, on the other, that when it does indeed focus on these practices, it tends to study the phenomena separately rather than treating them as part of a common research agenda. There is generally little to no debate across research streams – those, for example, on balance of power politics, status competition or the quantification of trans- and international governance – about the comparative practices that underpin the phenomena in question. In the following paragraphs, we briefly chart the research that focuses on comparisons and highlight two distinct approaches, one originating in realist research on balance of power politics and arms dynamics, and the other dominating constructivist and practice theory research on knowledge production in global security politics.
For a long time, IR understood security politics primarily in terms of military security (for a history of security studies see Buzan and Hansen, 2009). The key problematic of interwar and Cold War IR was interstate wars and their prevention. Realist approaches came to dominate the debates on this problematic and made military capabilities central to the study of global security politics. For realists then and now, world politics was characterized by a competition over power among states. States strove to enhance their power both to ensure their security and to be better able to realize their aims. States relatedly care about differentials in power and ‘spend a lot of time estimating one another’s capabilities, especially their abilities to do harm’ – that is, their military capabilities (Waltz, 1979: 131). Realist solutions for the problematic
The realist emphasis on the competition for power is de facto an argument about how pivotal comparisons are in world politics. Comparisons fuel the competition over power and also form the basis for its management. In their research during the Cold War, though, realists were more interested in the balancing strategies that states pursued than in the underlying comparative practices. Practices of power comparison were ‘generally little studied and poorly understood’, one scholar noted near the end of the Cold War (Friedberg, 1988: 3). For all their differences, nonetheless, realists shared the same approach to the effects of the comparisons: They treated the comparative practices as means through which states – sometimes accurately, sometimes wrongly – assessed a materially given distribution of power. For realists, the comparative practices shaped how states perceived, and thus reacted to, the evolving distribution of power, but they did not shape – or for that matter constitute – the distribution itself.
In other words, realists generally assumed that there was a real distribution of power that existed independently of the comparative practices through which it was assessed. Some scholars doubted this assumption, emphasizing that the distribution was elusive and open to multiple interpretations, which made accurate evaluations of ‘real’ power practically impossible. Prevalent perceptions of power, not the distributions of power itself, shaped the policies of states (see Wohlforth, 1993). Realists readily acknowledged that the distribution of power was not always easy to measure and that states could misjudge it. Although some scholars enquired into the factors contributing to these misperceptions (see May, 1984), the realist tendency to conceptualize the arms dynamics as a security dilemma resulted in a ‘focus on misjudgments of intentions rather than misjudgments of situations’ (Jervis, 1988: 677). Questions about misperceptions were at the heart of the realist approach to comparisons, not questions about the shifting prevalence of certain ways of representing and problematizing the distribution of power.
After the Cold War a broader understanding of security politics gained ground in IR. This had both empirical and theoretical reasons. The security agendas of trans- and international governance institutions became more expansive. Besides interstate wars and military security, they worked more and more on matters such as fragile states, transnational terrorism, transnational crime or maritime security. Besides, new theoretical approaches – most prominent among them securitization theory (see Buzan et al, 1998) – argued that phenomena were not inherently security issues, but became such through discursive processes. The broader understanding of security politics went hand in hand with an increasing interest in the knowledge practices and infrastructures that undergird global security politics (see Balzacq, 2008;
While diverse in its approaches, this research generally treats knowledge practices and infrastructures as co-constitutive of the phenomena they purport to describe. Knowledge practices and infrastructures turn phenomena into governance objects that are, to varying degrees, amenable to political action (see also Sending, 2015; Allan, 2017). These knowledge practices involve comparisons if they map differences among actors or seek to trace developments over time – which they generally do. The research, though, often does not conceptualize the knowledge practices as comparative ones. To give two examples: Aradau and Blanke (2018: 1) approach algorithmic practices of searching for criminals and terrorists through anomaly analysis as ‘modes of othering’1 while de Goede (2018) foregrounds the ‘chain of security’ through which this analysis takes place.
A research stream that explicitly treats knowledge practices as comparative practices is the literature on the quantification of world politics. This literature highlights the proliferation of ‘comparative evaluation techniques’ (Broome and Quirk, 2015: 820) such as indicators, benchmarks, targets and rankings over the past 30 years. Although security politics is sometimes described as a field less affected by this trend than others (see Kelley and Simmons, 2019: 494, 503), we argue that comparative practices do, in fact, also permeate security politics (see Andreas and Greenhill, 2010), one example being benchmarks in defence planning, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) goal that its members spend at least 2 per cent of their gross domestic product on defence by 2024 (see Müller, 2022). Other examples include efforts to measure the global level of crime (see Jakobi, 2020: 159–62), to determine the fragility of states or to evaluate ‘human security’ through indices such as the Human Development Index (see Homolar, 2015). In fact, security politics has a long tradition of quantifying comparisons. Notably, the use of numerical comparisons became a prominent part of balance of power politics in the 18th century (see Allan, 2018: 75–138) and has remained central to it until today. Security politics relatedly constitutes a fertile starting point for broadening the study of quantification beyond regularly published rankings – which are the main focus of recent studies of quantification (see Broome and Quirk, 2015; Malito et al, 2018; and Kelley and Simmons, 2020) – and for probing into both the variety and combinations of non-quantitative and quantitative comparisons that underpin and shape world politics.
The broader approach did not, however, displace the older, realist one. Two main approaches to comparisons thus co-exist in the current research on global security politics (see Table 1.1). They can be distinguished by their epistemological stances: the first presupposes that comparisons produce knowledge about independently existing phenomena, while the second posits that comparisons form part of the knowledge processes through which the phenomena are constructed and imbued with meaning.2 Both could, in principle, be applied to diverse phenomena, though usually only the second one is: the first focuses predominantly on the distribution of capabilities and power.3
The first approach, still dominating realist and rationalist research (see Fearon, 1995; Glaser, 2010; Lobell, 2018), understands comparative practices as mapping tools. Actors use comparative practices to make sense of the structural conditions – such as the distribution of power – which shape world politics. Comparative practices produce abstract representations of these structural conditions. The structural conditions exist prior to these representations, though the representations may trigger efforts to change the structural conditions, for instance – to continue the example of the distribution of power – through balancing practices. These efforts are usually explained as resulting from structural pressures, rather than being
The second approach understands comparative practices as ordering tools. Structures are patterned relations. For researchers favouring this approach – among them constructivist and practice theory researchers – comparative practices do not simply reveal patterns but contribute to their making. Knowledge practices make phenomena knowable by patterning them – by postulating that certain elements that form part of phenomena, for example actors, things or events, are crucial to them – and by specifying the relations among these elements. Comparative practices are a prominent mode of specifying these relations. Moreover, by framing phenomena in certain ways, knowledge practices shape the political debate about them and, in particular, foster political demands for particular ways of (re)ordering them – for example, demands that an ‘unbalanced’ distribution of power should be brought into ‘balance’. The systemic pressure is, in this sense, an effect of the knowledge practices. This research is therefore interested in how certain ways of representing the phenomena emerge, become politically dominant and for some time shape how the phenomena are debated and governed.
Two approaches to comparisons
| Mapping tools | Ordering tools | |
|---|---|---|
| Relation between comparisons and security issues | Security issues exist independent of comparative practices → if done well, comparative practices reveal the crucial patterns that characterize and shape the issues | Comparative practices contribute to the constitution and ordering of security issues → relations are patterned through comparative practices |
| Research interest | How well do the comparative practices capture the key structural characteristics? | How do certain comparative practices become central to (security) politics? |
| Typically found in | Realist research on the distribution of power and on arms dynamics | Constructivist and practice theory research on the knowledge practices underpinning (security) politics |
Comparative practices
Both mapping tools and ordering tools approaches provide valuable insights into the comparative practices that underpin global security politics. While we favour the constructivist and practice theory approach because it is
Comparisons are an object of study in various disciplines, including philosophy, literary studies, sociology and history (see Espeland and Stevens, 1998; Stoler, 2001; Epple and Erhart, 2015; Steinmetz, 2019). There is no uniform definition of comparisons, but most researchers focus on the following characteristics: (a) the assessment of two or more objects – whether actors, things, events or other entities – according to (b) one criterion or a set of criteria, in order to (c) discern and highlight similarities or differences between these objects. The objects are sometimes called ‘comparata’, the criteria ‘tertia’. Some researchers also emphasize another characteristic. The actors comparing the objects assume that the objects are comparable – that is, that they form part of a set of objects to which the same criterion or set of criteria can be applied (see Heintz, 2016: 307).
In line with this research, we conceptualize comparative practices as ways of doing and saying through which actors produce knowledge about similarities and/or differences between two or more objects. Comparative practices put objects into relation with one another, either by emphasizing what they share (object x is similar to object y with respect to feature z), or by emphasizing what distinguishes them (object x is different from object y with respect to feature z), or by a combination of both. The knowledge that comparative practices produce – which we call comparative knowledge – is thus relational. Moreover, comparative practices are selective. The actors that compare make several choices, including, in particular, the selection of the objects, the features of these objects that are assessed, and the criterion or set of criteria through which they are assessed. They also opt for certain ways of representing and communicating the comparative knowledge they acquire, for instance in the form of statistics or visualizations.
This conceptualization is compatible with both the approaches to comparisons outlined earlier. The two approaches differ on whether comparative practices reveal pre-existing relations between objects (mapping tools) or co-produce the objects and their relations (ordering tools). But they both treat comparative practices as practices that produce knowledge about similarities and differences between objects. Although the first approach usually does not use the notion of knowledge practices, both approaches conceive of comparative practices as elements of knowledge production processes regarding international phenomena, whether power shifts, arms races, fragile states, transnational crime or cybersecurity.
Comparative practices are a particular type of knowledge practice. They assess objects and are, in this sense, distinct from knowledge practices that
Comparative practices are thus not the only knowledge practices through which politicians, diplomats, scholars, civil society activists and other actors make sense of international phenomena. But we would nonetheless argue that they are integral to many, if not all, knowledge production processes. Both in security politics and beyond, the debate about and governance of international phenomena generally involves at least one and often several of the following forms of comparative knowledge:
Distribution assessments describe the relation between objects in terms of bigger/smaller shares of some features that are deemed important. Examples are analyses of differences in the military capabilities of states, the classification of states as types of powers (for example superpowers, great powers, middle powers and small powers) and the mapping of the number of cyberattacks on different states.
Trend assessments emphasize continuities or changes in objects over time. Examples are diagnoses of power shifts in world politics and analyses of the number of wars or the level of transnational crime in different years.
Scenario assessments are planning practices that imagine different (future) situations to evaluate which strategies work best to achieve certain
aims. Such practices combine two sorts of comparison: they analyse the implications of variations in the possible future development of a phenomenon and evaluate the viability of different political strategies for dealing with the phenomenon as it evolves. An example is the wargaming of anticipated military conflicts. Performance assessments evaluate how good or bad actors are at dealing with a phenomenon. They describe the relation between the objects in terms of better/worse performances. Examples are the Human Development Index, state fragility indices and the ranking of NATO’s members according to how well they fulfil the alliance’s 2 per cent goal.
A framework
For all its differences, the diverse research on comparisons in global security politics shares an interest in the same set of questions: How is comparative knowledge produced? How does it become politically relevant? How does it shape global security politics? We therefore propose to organize the study of comparisons in global security politics around these three questions. We now discuss each question in turn and outline the contours of a joint debate across the various streams of research.
How is comparative knowledge produced?
The cast of actors studied by research on comparisons has expanded over time. Realist research on power comparisons has retained its traditional focus on the political elites shaping the foreign policies of states, in particular, the most powerful states. In the past two decades, however, research drawing on global governance, constructivist and practice theory approaches has argued for a much broader perspective. This research shows that a variety of actors are involved in the production of comparative knowledge on matters of global security, including, besides states and foreign policy elites, international organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks and companies.
As already mentioned, this broadening reflects an empirical trend, an expanding security agenda in global governance in the past decades. Does it also reflect a change in the mode of knowledge production? The two models of knowledge production that Friedberg (1988: 12–17) distils from realist research on power comparisons are a useful starting point for tackling this question. The ‘calculative model’ assumes that states continuously collect and analyse data, often in statistical form, about the capabilities and power of other states that they regard as relevant to their own fate. The statistics reveal systemic developments – for example changes in the distribution of power – and provide for a constant updating of comparative knowledge.
This distinction points to two themes for exploring changes in the modes of knowledge production. The first theme is institutionalization. The calculative model presupposes ‘epistemic infrastructures’ (Bueger, 2015: 2), that is, institutionalized arrangements for the regular production of comparative knowledge on an issue. Friedberg (1988) – in line with most research on power comparisons – describes the two models with national epistemic infrastructures in mind. For a number of issues, however, there are also trans- and international epistemic infrastructures, and these – whether international organizations publishing rankings on matters such as state fragility, regional networks and centres for tracking piracy incidents, or cybersecurity companies compiling statistics on changes in cyberattacks – have gained in prominence and importance in global security governance in the past decades. For which security issues do such epistemic infrastructures exist and for which not? How has the nature of these epistemic infrastructures changed over time?
The second theme is the interplay between quantitative and non-quantitative modes of knowledge production. The calculative model is a reminder that quantification – that is, the use of numbers to depict and analyse phenomena – has been an important part of the production of comparative knowledge for quite some time. Statistics were, for instance, used to rearrange the territorial balance of power in Europe at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, fuelled the naval arms race of the late 19th century and were integral to 20th-century arms control (see Allan, 2018: 75–138; Albert and Langer, 2020; Müller et al, 2022: 14–21). At the same time, the perceptual model is a reminder of the salience of non-quantitative forms of comparative knowledge. Narratives of the rise and fall of powerful states are one example (for example Hagström and Gustafsson, 2019; Zarakol, 2019). When ranking military powers, to give another example, some analysts combine quantitative as well as qualitative factors (see Giegerich et al, 2018). In addition, diplomats have what Pouliot (2016: 72–79) calls a ‘sense of place’: a tacit knowledge about the relative standing of their states. Research usually focuses on explicit forms of comparative knowledge, but such tacit forms matter as well, and should receive more attention than they currently do.
While the expansion of epistemic infrastructures contributes to the further quantification of comparative practices, it does not necessarily entail a decline
Besides the evolving modes of knowledge production, there is another dimension to the question of how actors produce comparative knowledge: the conditions that influence their comparative practices. Some conditions have constraining effects: Disputes among states over the governance of issues can hamper the establishment of international epistemic infrastructures. Moreover, the characteristics of some issues make it difficult to compile reliable data on them. Examples are the opacity of transnational crime and the secrecy regimes that some states build around their military capabilities. Other conditions, by contrast, have enabling effects. In particular, the more comparative knowledge there is already available on an issue, the easier it is to produce new comparative knowledge. Davis et al (2012: 85) note, for instance, that the ‘use of indicators may be a self-reinforcing phenomenon: as more indicators are produced, aggregations of indicators become more reliable, more indicators are used, more indicators are produced and so on’. Moreover, there may be isomorphic effects at play that make the practices of the various actors producing comparative knowledge more similar (see DiMaggio and Powell (1983) for an influential discussion of different processes of isomorphism). To give but two examples: epistemic infrastructures may establish standardized procedures for producing comparative knowledge on a given security issue. Actors may copy the comparative practices of other actors that they deem to be good at initiating and shaping debates about security issues.
How does comparative knowledge become politically relevant?
Comparative knowledge can be said to be politically relevant when it influences the debates about security issues and the ways in which they are governed. But how does it become politically relevant? To structure the joint debate, this question can be divided into two subquestions: the first is whether comparative knowledge is produced in response to security issues or to producing the security agenda. The second is why some representations come to dominate the debate on a given security issue.
One answer is that security issues prompt the production of comparative knowledge and shape the evolution of comparative practices. This answer
The converse answer is that comparative practices shape which security issues matter. This argument is made notably by constructivist and practice theory scholars. For them, knowledge practices shape which developments are regarded as politically relevant and important and which not. These knowledge practices are comparative: development a is more important than development b, phenomenon c is more threatening than phenomenon d and so on. These assessments are susceptible to contestation and political debate. And they change over time. Arms dynamics – especially the East–West arms race – were widely regarded as the key problem in global security politics during the Cold War. The broadening of the security agenda after the Cold War can be interpreted as a re-evaluation of the relative importance of security issues, with arms dynamics remaining an important item on the agenda but losing their dominating status and becoming one item alongside several others such as transnational crime, terrorism, maritime security, cybersecurity and pandemics. In short, comparative practices are involved in the ordering of the security agenda and this ordering in turn shapes the salience of comparative practices such as assessing differentials in military capabilities or tracking the frequency of cyberattacks over time.
This answer implies that political battles over the governance of issues, rather than systemic pressures, shape which representations come to be dominant. The battles are likely to involve struggles over comparative practices, with actors promoting those that they deem beneficial to their aims and contesting those that they deem detrimental (see Pouliot, 2016: 79–82). As Wohlforth (1993: 303) stresses in his study of power comparisons: ‘[S]ince many interpretations are always possible, state leaderships in a competitive situation will tend to interpret particular changes opportunistically’. In
In these battles, two types of authority play a role (Zürn, 2018: 50–3). One is political authority. The actors that control the institutions that govern the issues are in a crucial position to choose certain representations of the issues over others and to establish them as the basis for the governance of the issues. The other is epistemic authority: the recognition by other actors that some actors produce and possess special knowledge – expert knowledge – with regard to a phenomenon. Actors consequently ‘compete with each other to be recognized as authorities on what is to be governed, how, and why’ (Sending, 2015: 11). Being a publisher of well-known comparative statistics can be an asset in this competition. But what counts as good and relevant comparative knowledge can also become a point of contention, for instance when there is a debate about whether accurate statistics can be compiled at all (for the case of transnational crime, see Jakobi, 2020: 159–62) or if some actors claim to have better, ‘more relevant’ knowledge than other actors (see Krause, 2017: 91).
These answers, to sum up, outline two mechanisms by which some representations, rather than others, come to underpin the governance of issues. The answer favoured by realists emphasizes the isomorphism-fostering and innovation-driving effects of a common competitive environment that shapes the prevalent repertoire of comparative practices. The answer favoured by constructivist and practice theory scholars instead emphasizes political battles that give rise to temporarily dominant representations. The two mechanisms, though, are not mutually exclusive. As mentioned, realists acknowledge that there are limits to the effects of the competitive environment. If, however, multiple interpretations remain possible and plausible, then political battles can erupt over which representations are most relevant and the distribution of political and epistemic authority will be key to the outcome of these battles. Furthermore, the two mechanisms are probably not the only ones. Representations can become dominant through competitive processes, with some actors winning the competition over authority, or cooperatively through negotiations in which actors develop a shared set of comparative practices. Arms control is an example of such negotiation processes.
How do comparative practices shape security politics?
At first glance, research on comparisons in global security politics seems to be divided into two camps with contrasting perspectives on the effects of
At a second glance, therefore, while research on comparisons disagrees on whether or not comparative practices also co-produce the phenomena they observe, there is agreement that they have (at least indirect) effects on these phenomena. The joint debate can be structured around which effects occur under which conditions. Besides the turning of phenomena into governance objects, we propose to distinguish between at least three effects: the promotion of policies, the shaping of distributional outcomes and the manipulation of competitive dynamics.
Comparative practices can, first, influence whether and how issues are governed. They play a role in both agenda setting and the promotion of policies for dealing with security issues. By publishing statistics on, for instance, inequalities in the distribution of military capabilities, increases in piracy attacks or cyber incidents, political actors can both problematize these issues and raise public attention for them. Such statistics, moreover, help these actors to substantiate calls for political action, for example more military capabilities to redress the inequalities, more resources to combat piracy or new cybersecurity policies. These attempts are successful when they increase public attention for the issues and lead to changes in their governance.
Comparative practices can, second, shape the distributional outcomes that the governance – or non-governance – of issues generates. Governance involves the allocation of rights, duties and resources to different actors (see Fehl and Freistein, 2020) and comparative knowledge such as statistics are routinely used to decide on this allocation. Examples include the allocation of permanent seats to the group of great powers when the UN Security Council was established, the use of state fragility indices to decide on the distribution of development aid and the establishment of limits and ratios
Comparative practices can, third, underpin and shape competitive dynamics. Competitions are central to the study of global security politics, whether in the form of rivalries, arms races or status competitions (see Mahnken et al, 2016; Renshon, 2017; Myatt, 2021). As contests over scarce goods, competitions would not work without comparative practices that represent the distribution of these goods. The effects of comparisons on competitive dynamics merit further research, though. For a start, some comparative practices seem more prone to fuel competitive dynamics than others. Notably, relative standards of comparisons are more likely to generate competitive dynamics than absolute ones (Towns and Rumelili, 2017). Moreover, while comparisons may drive competitions, they may also contribute to their taming. A prime example is arms control. Arms control agreements involve various kinds of comparison, from the evaluation of the stability and mutual acceptability of different distributions of military capabilities to the fixation of limits and ratios to the monitoring that the actual distribution of military capabilities stays within the agreed parameters.
These effects can occur in combination. When actors problematize a distribution of military capabilities by pointing at ‘imbalances’, they may generate political support for armament policies which in turn may give rise to or further escalate an arms race. When non-state actors shame the arms control policies of certain states, this may influence the reputation and status of these states which, in turn, may prompt them to adapt their policies in order to have a positive influence on their reputation and status (for the arms trade, see Erickson, 2015).
Before proceeding to outline the structure of the book, and in order to avoid misunderstanding, we wish to also emphasize what this book is not about: it is not a book about comparative methods, understood as either a general analytical tool across a wide range of disciplines (see Ragin, 2014), or more narrowly as a subdiscipline-defining tool such as in comparative politics (see Caramani, 2011). While some of the individual chapters draw on comparative methods to varying degrees, the book as a whole is not about them, but about the uses and effects of comparisons as a practice in security politics. This is where this book’s novelty lies.
The structure of the book
Comparative practices and their effects may vary across both time and issues. Given how ubiquitous comparative practices are in global security politics, a book can only cover a sample of them. The present volume accounts
The book is structured in three parts. Part I outlines several ways in which comparative practices can be analytically teased out and traced. Part II highlights that comparisons are not merely ‘aspects of’ security governance, but in fact constitute specific security governance objects. Part III shows how comparisons are not static practices, but reshape competitive dynamics. Needless to say, many contributions also address issues pertinent to the other parts of the book; their inclusion in one specific part rather than another simply reflects their primary focus.
Part I, ‘Teasing Out Comparative Practices’, starts with a chapter by Paul Beaumont that proposes an approach for grasping and analysing the comparisons that underpin status politics. Arguing that status research in IR tends to map status hierarchies rather than study their construction, he proposes to shift the analytical focus to the socially negotiated rules that underpin status competitions. Reconstructing the US debate on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) nuclear arms control negotiations in the 1970s, he highlights how assumptions about status comparisons were instrumental in the US shift from an acceptance of unequal numerical limits in SALT I to an insistence on equal numerical limits in SALT II.
In Chapter 3, Bastian Giegerich and James Hackett provide an insiders’ account of the production of comparative knowledge on military capabilities. They discuss the history of one of the key publications on military capabilities, namely The Military Balance issued annually by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. They unpack the methodological questions underpinning the calculation of military expenditures and the counting of weapon systems. Moreover, they reflect on the drivers of the changes in comparative practices, highlighting, besides technological developments in weapon systems and geopolitical changes, the possibilities that new technologies offer for developing more sophisticated comparative practices, such as digital databases enabling quicker and more complex comparisons.
Gabi Schlag, in Chapter 4, turns to the visual dimension of comparative practices: the charts and maps that are used to visualize the distribution and deployment of military capabilities. She conceptualizes these visual representations as technical images and proposes a visual discourse analysis for probing into how they are used and (re)shape the discourse on security politics. To illustrate the approach, she analyses the visual elements in two pamphlets NATO published in the first half of the 1980s to substantiate its
Chapter 5 proposes an experimental survey approach to teasing out politically relevant comparative knowledge. Paul Musgrave and Steven Ward study status comparisons in the field of space exploration and politics. They demonstrate how research on comparative practices can move past a focus on political elites and how an experimental survey approach can help to explicate the status comparisons of political audiences. Their findings suggest that status comparisons are influenced by a set of general and field-specific status markers and that they differ among groups within audiences.
After outlining the wide range of approaches through which comparative practices can be found in the security field, Part II, ‘How Comparisons Constitute Governance Objects’, demonstrates how objects of security governance are actually ‘made’ through comparative practices. In Chapter 6, Christian Bueger argues that the increasing political attention paid to maritime security is closely related to the emergence and proliferation of epistemic infrastructures that produce knowledge about trends in maritime incidents such as piracy. The databases that these epistemic infrastructures assemble form the basis for comparative practices that identify, analyse and emphasize trends in maritime incidents. There is, however, little standardization and consolidation taking place between the various epistemic infrastructures, which contributes to a messiness of the available comparative knowledge about trends in maritime incidents.
State fragility is another security issue that has gained considerable political attention in the past decades. In Chapter 7, Keith Krause shows that comparative practices have been integral to the discourse on the subject. Analysing four prominent attempts to map state fragility, he highlights how the related comparative practices promote and reify certain understandings of stability and fragility, thus contributing to the construction of state fragility as an object of security governance. In addition to ordering security politics, comparative practices have also had an impact on development politics, reshaping the patterns of development assistance.
In Chapter 8, Anja Jakobi and Lena Herbst explore the use of statistics in global crime governance. They show that the production of various forms of quantitative comparative knowledge has expanded over time, driven by a turn towards evidence-based policy making. Yet, the very nature of the governance object – the opacity of most crimes – makes it difficult to impossible to produce accurate statistics. The result is an array of inaccurate and incoherent statistics which often do not realistically map the crimes or the effectiveness of measures to combat them. The statistics are nonetheless used politically to order the governance of the crimes, including for decisions on which crimes are the most pressing problems and in need of more political action.
Part III, ’How Comparisons Reshape Competitive Dynamics’, zooms in on another key effect of comparative practices besides the constitution of governance objects: the impact on competitive dynamics that comparative practices have had in various historical periods. In Chapter 10, Kerrin Langer explores the comparative practices underpinning the naval arms competition in the late 19th and early 20th century. Focusing on Great Britain, France and Germany, she shows that comparative knowledge about the capabilities and relative standing of the various naval powers was used strategically to legitimize and delegitimize naval armament policies. The outcome was that naval power came to be regarded as a crucial status marker and, as a corollary, that concerns over relative standing fuelled naval arms competition among the great powers.
Chapter 11 looks at how comparative practices were used to tame competitive dynamics at the end of the Cold War. Hans-Joachim Schmidt teases out the comparative practices underpinning the negotiations for, and the renegotiation of, the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He shows that the conclusion of the treaty involved a standardization of the comparative practices for the assessment of the conventional military balance in Europe. In addition, he highlights an interplay between comparative practices and geopolitical change. During the negotiations, the comparative practices were reworked – notably by replacing an alliance-to-alliance balance with national limits as a comparative framework – to manage the politico-military implications of reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Soviet Union.
Nike Retzmann in Chapter 12 explores how comparative practices contribute to the framing of technological developments as matters of competition. She focuses on recent US debates about the security political implications of the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) to highlight the interplay between narratives and comparative practices that imbues technological developments with competitive dynamics. For that purpose, she reconstructs the narratives promoted by the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and discusses their impact on subsequent US policy
The concluding chapter reflects on the insights provided by the various chapters. It summarizes and synthesizes the arguments made by the chapters with regard to the three guiding questions. Taken together, the chapters show that traditional security issues and newer ones are – for all their differences – not so dissimilar in their production of comparative knowledge, the dynamics through which that knowledge gains political relevance and the effects that comparative practices have on global security politics.
This is not to say that ‘modes of othering’ are not comparative. They are inasmuch as they are enacted through distinctions – and hence comparisons – between actors.
Desrosières (2001) offers a useful discussion of different epistemological positions on the relation between comparative knowledge – in his case, statistics – and reality.
For research using the second approach to study comparative practices in the context of the distribution of power, see Albert (2016), Guzzini (2009), Allan (2018) and Müller and Albert (2021).
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