In our article for EJIS, “Communities of Practice, Impression Management, and Great Power Status: Military Observers in the Russo-Japanese War”, we build on a broader return to the study of military diplomacy in international relations. In doing so, our intervention traces the sources and purposes of an odd institution in modern diplomacy and security: the military attaché or observer.

From a conventional perspective on international politics the role of attachés or observers is initially puzzling. Why would states admit, indeed welcome, practitioners of what one scholar has called “sanctioned spying” and what explains the initial institutionalization of this role? This is the question we broadly take up in our EJIS article. In doing so, we argue that the more obvious answers, including reciprocity and alliances, are limited—they tell us little about how the role emerged and why it often arises even in neutral relationships. These broadly functionalist explanations also run the risk of obscuring the underlying political dimensions of this inter-state practice, as well as the nuanced imperatives that military attachés may operate under.

In the paper, we find answers to our sets of question in two places: attachés’ professional culture and receiving states’ desire for an audience. The role was largely established and fleshed out by early attachés themselves. These were largely self-motivated individuals who carved out and defined the role for themselves, often with little more than the acquiescence of their superiors. Receiving states tolerated observers—at least in the case we consider—because they understood military observers as constituting key audiences for performances of statehood and especially of great power status. The role thus emerged not (or not just) from existing diplomatic or military life, but also at the intersection of individual officers’ entrepreneurship and great powers’ jostling for prestige.

Where can we assess these claims? What context best illuminates the dynamics that shaped the emergence of this practice? Attachés seem most contentious in their roles as wartime observers: third country officers posted directly to an ongoing conflict. Since our study is an exploratory or theory-building first cut, we focus on a case where, one, the role was relatively new, two, observers were plentiful on the ground, and three, the dynamics of great power status politics were in play in the unfolding of the broader inter-state practice. We do so by turning to the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), where observers were deployed in unprecedented numbers by a wide range of states. Both sides of the war were ambitious great powers, with Russian and Japan bidding (to varying degrees) for increased prestige in the Eurocentric international system.

As we note in our analysis of this moment, the belligerent states welcomed large numbers of observers, but did so quite differently. Japan staged an extensive performance of great power wealth, capacity, and skill, hosting extravagant feasts for observers on arrival and carefully curating their access to the front—ensuring their reports home would be laden with accounts of Japanese battlefield success. Russian officials were polite, but little more; they readily allowed observers access to success and failure alike. The reports sent home by British, French, American, German, and other observers reflected Japanese efforts. The observers reported Japan’s emphatic 1905 victory as a well-earned inversion of (often explicitly orientalist) expectations. Japan’s status in the West rose accordingly, while Russia’s declined. At the same time, the experiences, observations, and actions of attachés were themselves shaped and conditioned by the dynamics of the respective transnational communities of practice they came to constitute among their hosts during the course of the war.

Or, at any rate, this is the argument we make in our paper. With that in mind, we briefly turn to some implications for how this kind of study can and should be conducted in IR.

Attachés and observers have received relatively little attention to date. Tarak Barkawi has written on them, as has Patrick Porter, dealing directly with our case. Miriam Kreiger, Shannon Souma, and Daniel Nexon have written on contemporary US military diplomacy. We’re also heartened to see an article, by Jun Yan Chang and Nicole Jenne, on defense diplomacy in the same issue of EJIS as ours. But generally, it’s an under studied subject in the field. Why?

Possibly, attachés have simply fallen between an assortment of disciplinary poles. To realists, exchanging attachés likely presents as a form of cheap talk—diplomatic window dressing for the pursuit of power and strategic advantage. For liberals and mainstream constructivists, attachés could look like an embellishment or finer point of security politics—just not the kind of institutional actor they generally study. Similarly, for more critically minded scholars, attachés may reflect the kind of traditional “high politics” in which they take relatively little interest; military observers were frequently drawn from national elites that seem to represent the opposite perspective of a ‘view from below’ on relations of power in global politics. Strikingly, however, it is largely a nexus of realists (like Porter) and critical scholars (like Barkawi and others) who have produced the modest literature on attachés in IR to date. Their work – in different ways – draws attention to the agency of attachés in inflecting (and simultaneously shedding light) on the broader dynamics of international politics during key moments. This suggests that military observes may stand at a distinctive and perhaps important nexus of ideologies and power.

It may also be that studies of this kind present unique barriers and challenges. In our approach to understanding attachés we gained purchase in taking a historical and contextual approach by focused on attaché communities instantiated within a single case. This led us to foreground the dynamics and micro-politics of the observe communities themselves – which were informed, but not fully determined, by the larger geopolitics of the moment. We found this illuminating and productive for the sorts of questions we were interested in exploring, but are fully aware of the limitations and difficulties of our approach. The first concerns generalizability of the sort prized by macro-level theories of international politics. The Russo-Japanese War is neither a conventionally “crucial” case nor a typical one. It is simply an important instance of our topic—an inflection point where we can, so to speak, see the wheels turning. Second, our theory has several moving parts. This makes for thorny evidentiary standards. We rely on published observer reports and on secondary history, but this leaves us to infer (for example) the revealed Japanese and Russian intentions. In short, it’s a lone case with a lot going on.

At the same time, we believe our efforts help position attachés as an important subject for scholars of international relations. For instance, we believe this sort of analysis helps advance our understanding as scholars of the scope and potential for community of practice building even under pressure from wartime exigencies. Communities of practice appear to extend to intelligence collection in times of war. Indeed, we suggest that such communities may thrive under difficult conditions to which they are specifically adapted. Finally, it indicates that communities of practice may sometimes flourish because they are useful to those outside the boundaries of the group, as vessels for disseminating preferred impressions of the events over which the community has epistemic authority. We hope IR journals (security and otherwise) will be open to more studies like this.

– Kiran Banerjee, Department of Political Science, Dalhousie University

– Joseph MacKay, Department of International Relations, Australian National University

The authors’ EJIS article can be accessed free of charge until the end of November 2021 here.