Strategic culture as a meaning-making system: towards a social semiotic account of multimodal cultural constraints in international relations

Abstract

The article reconsiders the notion of strategic culture using fundamental categories of general and social semiotics, which make it possible to systematise and instrumentalise this concept while preserving its broad scope. The proposed framework suggests a relationalist reconceptualisation of strategic culture based on Charles Peirce's semiotic theory, thereby helping to transcend the existing controversy about how culture-as-ideas, culture-as-artefacts, and culture-as-behaviour are related to each other in strategic culture. The suggested approach helps to clarify the problematic aspects of the notion of strategic culture by redefining strategic culture as a logonomic system (a system of rules of meaning-making) that constrains interactions in strategic affairs. Such reconceptualisation helps to study how strategic cultures are reproduced not only through verbal discourse but also through other artefacts and actions. Semiotic categories also make it possible to account for important distinctions between various elements of strategic culture and formulate principles that can guide the studies of this phenomenon. The article provides some examples from the Russian strategic culture to demonstrate how the proposed framework can be applied.