Cowardice and Military Security: Some Heuristic Reflections
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Cowardice and Military Security: Some Heuristic Reflections Andreas Vasilache1 Received: 5 December 2019 / Accepted: 11 April 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract While cowardice is sanctioned by military law in most countries, the impact of cowardice on modern warfare and security politics is low. This might be the reason why cowardice—as notion, phenomenon, and topic—has widely been neglected in security studies. However, for quite some time, we have witnessed a revival of the word as an accusation and pejorative term that is frequently applied by Western government representatives to describe the enemy in armed conflicts. The expression of a “cowardly attack” has become quite common in political communication after attacks against Western forces in violent confrontations. Thereby, cowardice is transformed from a possible weakness of the own forces to a particular strength of the enemy. This article aims at presenting some reflections on the notion, meaning, and functional role of cowardice in situations of violent international conflict, as well as on the use of the term as a speech act in recent governmental security communication. A particular focus will be put on the normative implications of the revival of the governmental cowardice-rhetoric. Keywords Cowardice · Heroism · Post-heroic society · Security · Terrorism · Speech act
* Andreas Vasilache Andreas.Vasilache@uni‑bielefeld.de 1
Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany
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A. Vasilache
1 Introduction1 Cowardice is not given much consideration in International Relations (IR) or international security studies. In academic security discourses, cowardice plays hardly any role, neither as a concept nor as a phenomenon. When searching for the term and its derivations in current political and social sciences literature, only a few individual mentions appear, which are represented in a small number of articles and even there are marginal. The academic lack of interest in the subject of cowardice persists even though acts of “cowardice in the face of the enemy” are codified in the military law of most countries, including those in the West, and are punishable by severe sanctions. Actually, the disinterest in cowardice seems to be a general phenomenon and is obvious also when we broaden the view beyond the political and social sciences literature. Walsh (2014: 8, see also 167) undertook a statistical assessment based on the English Google books database from 1800 to 2008 and shows that over the last two centuries, the use of the words cowardice and of coward decreased by 80% and 50%, respectively. At the same time, and in marked contrast to the long-term decline of the topic of cowardice, in recent governmental communication, the term and accusation of cowardice is quite often invoked to describe the actions of one’s adversary. In situations of asymmetric conflicts or guerrilla warfare, government representatives and politicians commonly refer to the enemy’s attacks and strategies as acts of cowardice. In this context, the term cowardi
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