The Habitus of Power
Why Existential Imperative Realism Rejects Rationalist Models in Favor of Embedded Strategic Identity
“Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.”
— Pierre Bourdieu
Introduction – The Memory That Moves Strategy
In 2022, as Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine and the world recoiled, a familiar narrative took hold in Western media: the war was an irrational act of imperial aggression, a delusional fantasy of lost empire by a paranoid autocrat. The logic seemed clear—why invite sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and economic collapse for the sake of disputed territory?
But in Moscow, the calculus was different. To many within the Russian strategic elite, this was not aggression—it was preemption. A final, necessary move to halt the encroachment of a Western military alliance toward a border long considered sacred. It was not merely a political decision, but an act of historical continuity—a move made inevitable by centuries of encirclement, invasion, and cultural alienation. It wasn’t just about NATO or Donbas. It was about memory, myth, and the inherited logic of survival.
This disconnect—between how a decision feels from within, and how it looks from without—is at the heart of this article.
We often imagine states as rational actors: detached, calculating, utility-maximizing players in a global chess match. But this model fails to explain the behavior of real powers. Why do some nations cling to territory that offers little economic value? Why do others escalate conflict over symbolism? Why does one actor interpret a diplomatic gesture as a threat, while another sees it as appeasement?
The answer lies not in logic, but in habitus.
Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus describes the internalized, preconscious system of dispositions that guide behavior. It is a kind of social and historical memory—not stored in archives, but embedded in perception, reaction, and instinct. Habitus is how a people, a regime, or a civilization learns to interpret the world—not abstractly, but experientially. It is the reason why certain strategies “make sense” to one actor and appear senseless to another. It is why behavior that seems irrational from the outside is often deeply rational within the worldview of the actor performing it.
In the framework of Existential Imperative Realism, habitus plays a central role. EIR posits that all actors behave according to their imperative to survive. But how that imperative is understood, felt, and expressed depends entirely on the actor’s inherited frame of reference. Survival is a universal pressure, but its interpretation is culturally encoded. Habitus is the lens through which the existential imperative is read—and misread.
This article explores how habitus shapes strategic form. We will examine why strategic behavior is not simply chosen, but reproduced; how states, like individuals, inherit dispositions from histories they did not design; and why understanding geopolitics requires more than mapping interests—it requires decoding embedded identity.
Because in the end, no actor begins on a blank page. Every move is a repetition of a pattern, refined or distorted by time.
What Is Habitus? – Bourdieu’s Forgotten Law of Motion
Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus offers a foundational challenge to conventional models of decision-making, both in human behavior and, by extension, in strategic statecraft. At its core, habitus refers to a system of internalized dispositions, produced by long-term exposure to particular social, historical, and cultural conditions. It is not a belief system or ideology, but a set of deeply ingrained tendencies—ways of seeing, evaluating, and acting—that become so natural to an actor that they rarely rise to the level of conscious reflection.
As Bourdieu describes it, habitus is “a system of durable, transposable dispositions” that shapes practice without requiring deliberate thought or explicit reasoning. Agents do not weigh their every move against a cost-benefit scale; instead, they act in accordance with what they perceive as obvious, sensible, or necessary—all categories determined by the structure of their social formation. This is as true for individuals as it is for political collectives. States, too, are bearers of habitus—structured by the histories they’ve inherited and constrained by the identities they reproduce.
This presents a direct challenge to the assumptions underlying Rational Choice Theory and classical Game Theory, which tend to model actors as utility-maximizers with stable preferences and clear strategic options. Within that framework, strategic decisions are the product of deliberate optimization. But habitus implies a very different kind of behavioral logic: one that is conditioned by memory, pattern, and a field of possibilities that is neither universal nor symmetrical.
Existential Imperative Realism integrates this insight by rejecting the notion that survival behavior is formulated in an abstract vacuum. While the existential imperative applies universally—all actors must persist—the interpretation of what survival requires is heavily mediated by habitus.
What one actor perceives as an existential threat, another may interpret as a manageable risk. For example: The expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe offers a clear illustration. From the standpoint of Washington and most Western European capitals, NATO enlargement was framed as a matter of deterrence, stabilization, and integration—primarily a technical and diplomatic extension of security norms. It was treated as a manageable risk, unlikely to provoke serious backlash. Yet from Moscow’s perspective, that same expansion represented an existential threat to the coherence and strategic depth of the Russian state. Informed by a historical pattern of invasions from the West—Napoleon, Hitler, and perceived Western betrayal in the post-Soviet period—Russia's strategic elite saw NATO’s advance not as policy drift, but as encirclement. The divergence in perception did not stem from miscommunication alone, but from structurally different habitus formations: one rooted in a self-image of liberal order-building, the other in a civilizational memory of siege.
What one regime considers a red line, another sees as a negotiable position. For example: A similar asymmetry can be seen in the U.S.–China relationship over Taiwan. For Beijing, the question of Taiwan is not merely a territorial or diplomatic matter—it is a red line embedded in national identity, sovereignty, and regime legitimacy. The “One China” principle is not a policy preference; it is an existential cornerstone of post-1949 Chinese statehood. Conversely, many Western governments, particularly the United States, have historically treated the Taiwan issue as a delicate but ultimately negotiable matter—an area where ambiguity can be strategically sustained and policy lines blurred. The difference is not simply geopolitical; it is rooted in radically different historical narratives and internalized worldviews. For China, Taiwan represents historical fracture and incomplete national restoration. For Washington, it has functioned more as a pressure valve within a broader contest of influence—a vital interest, but not an untouchable one.
These divergences are not necessarily strategic errors or propaganda—they are the result of internalized historical experience shaping the field of perception itself.
Bourdieu articulated this clearly in his analysis of practice: agents are not free-floating rational calculators, but participants in structured environments that are themselves shaped by previous actions and inherited logics. The relationship between habitus and field is recursive—habitus both adapts to and reinforces the structures it inhabits. This means that strategic behavior cannot be fully understood without reference to the background conditions that have produced it. Strategic form, in this view, is not simply a response to present conditions, but a reproduction of accumulated social history.
In applying this to geopolitical behavior, it becomes evident that models which treat all actors as interchangeable decision-makers fail to capture the density of historical encoding embedded in their actions. To study strategy effectively through the lens of EIR, one must account for this embedded structure—how identity, culture, trauma, and narrative have shaped the lens through which existential imperatives are perceived and enacted. Habitus provides the theoretical language to make that account intelligible.
The National Habitus – Strategy Through Inherited Form
While habitus originates at the individual level, it scales—gradually but powerfully—into collective identity. Entire nations, regimes, and civilizations inherit sedimented forms of perception and behavior, shaped by their unique historical trajectories. These national habitus formations do not merely reflect culture in the broad sense—they embody strategic orientations that endure across time, often surviving regime change and ideological shifts. In this way, national strategy is never composed on a blank canvas; it is painted over old strokes, within a frame handed down through generations.
Russia provides a particularly illustrative case. Its strategic behavior in the 21st century cannot be understood through material indicators alone. It must be read through the structure of its national habitus—an ethos formed by geographic vulnerability, Orthodox civilizational self-conception, imperial rise and collapse, and a long-standing ambivalence toward the West. From the Mongol yoke to the Napoleonic invasion, from the trauma of World War II to the perceived betrayal of the post–Cold War order, Russian memory has been shaped by repeated exposure to encirclement, cultural intrusion, and sudden reversals of fortune. These experiences have produced a strategic culture deeply attuned to the risks of openness, the value of ambiguity, and the legitimacy of preemptive power projection.
This is not merely historical context—it is behavioral conditioning. It informs why Russia responds to peripheral instability as if it were a core threat, why symbolic losses provoke disproportionate reactions, and why it maintains an enduring suspicion of multilateral liberal norms. These patterns are not reducible to ideology or individual leadership. They are consistent with the deeper logic of Russian habitus: a logic that views survival as a function of resilience, depth, and control, rather than integration.
The concept of national habitus also clarifies why states facing similar structural pressures may respond very differently. For example, consider the divergence between Germany and Israel in their approaches to security and sovereignty. Both have experienced existential trauma in the 20th century—one as perpetrator, the other as victim—but the strategic consequences are sharply distinct. Postwar Germany constructed a habitus oriented around pacifism, institutional constraint, and supranational alignment. Israel, by contrast, built a survival logic centered on autonomy, deterrence, and military preemption. The difference cannot be explained solely by material variables—it is the result of how each nation internalized the memory of vulnerability, and how that memory structured their enduring strategic instincts.
Habitus thus operates as a kind of encoded strategic memory—a nonverbal logic through which a society “remembers” how to respond to pressure, competition, and opportunity. It is transmitted not through policy documents, but through education, ritual, narrative, and repetition. Over time, it produces national reflexes that appear deeply coherent from within, even as they are misinterpreted or pathologized from outside.
In the framework of Existential Imperative Realism, the national habitus is what gives form to a state’s interpretation of its existential conditions. Scarcity, vulnerability, and competition are objective forces—but the way they are perceived, prioritized, and acted upon is mediated by inherited structures of meaning. Understanding this dynamic is essential for any serious geopolitical analysis, because it reveals why seemingly irrational behavior is often the most structurally consistent action available to an actor within the logic of its own formation.
Habitus as the Lens Through Which Imperatives Are Interpreted
Existential Imperative Realism posits that all actors operate under the pressure of survival—material, institutional, and symbolic. Yet while these imperatives may be universal in structure, they are never experienced or executed in a uniform way. This divergence emerges from the interpretive filter of habitus. It is not the existential imperative itself that varies, but the way in which each actor perceives, prioritizes, and acts upon it. In this way, habitus does not contradict EIR’s core premise—it operationalizes it by demonstrating why imperatives express themselves differently across civilizational contexts.
Two states may face similar environmental pressures—resource scarcity, encroaching rivals, or shifting alliance structures—and yet behave in radically distinct ways. This is not necessarily because one actor is more rational than the other, but because each processes those pressures through its own historical memory and encoded identity. Habitus conditions perception. What is seen as aggression by one state is often seen as defense by another; what is interpreted as strategic ambiguity by one is read as weakness by the other. These misunderstandings are not superficial—they are embedded in the cognitive field shaped by inherited experiences.
For example, both China and the United States are navigating what they perceive as threats to their strategic sovereignty in the Indo-Pacific. Yet their responses are structured by incompatible habitus formations. China, rooted in a civilizational history of centrality and humiliation, approaches the region with a strong emphasis on restoring lost prestige and securing buffer zones. It interprets foreign naval presence near its periphery as a historically charged violation of its sphere. The United States, shaped by a maritime empire and a habitus of global presence, sees forward deployment as a normative tool of balance and freedom of navigation. Both actors believe they are maintaining the order; each views the other as disrupting it. The clash is not only geopolitical—it is epistemological.
This is the interpretive strength that habitus adds to EIR. It explains why universalist models of behavior—particularly those rooted in game theory or rational optimization—frequently fail in geopolitical analysis. These models presume that all actors share the same risk calculus, information processing logic, and hierarchy of values. But habitus reminds us that interests are not calculated in a vacuum; they are constructed through experience. Survival strategies emerge not from abstract deliberation, but from patterned perception.
This is why diplomatic miscommunication is not always a failure of language or intelligence. It is often the result of habitus misalignment. When one state expects another to respond “rationally” to an incentive or deterrent, it is often projecting its own strategic disposition onto an actor whose interpretive framework is entirely different. Without recognition of this dissonance, diplomacy becomes theater, and strategy devolves into circular escalation.
For example: This dissonance was evident in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War. The United States, operating within a liberal-democratic and hegemonic habitus, expected Saddam Hussein to respond “rationally” to diplomatic pressure, inspections, and threats of force. From Washington’s strategic disposition, rational behavior meant compliance, transparency, and regime compromise to avoid war. But Iraq’s Ba’athist regime, shaped by a habitus of postcolonial paranoia, regional prestige politics, and brutal internal consolidation, perceived displays of weakness as existentially dangerous. Hussein calculated that appearing defiant—even under the threat of overwhelming force—was preferable to demonstrating vulnerability, which could invite domestic rebellion or regional encirclement. The U.S. interpreted this behavior as irrational obstinance, while Saddam interpreted compliance as a pathway to regime collapse. The result was a catastrophic misreading of incentives on both sides. Strategic escalation followed not from misunderstanding facts, but from the irreconcilability of interpretive frameworks grounded in incompatible habitus.
Within the EIR model, the existential imperative remains constant—but the expression of that imperative is irreducibly contextual. Habitus is the structure that determines how an actor reads the field of threat and opportunity. It conditions which risks are tolerable, which compromises are possible, and which futures are even conceivable. Without this lens, no theory of survival can account for the variation we observe in actual behavior.
To interpret strategy without reference to habitus is to risk mistaking form for deviation. What appears irrational from the outside is often the most coherent path from within. It is not enough to know what pressures an actor faces. One must understand how those pressures are understood.
Destined Agency as an Extension of Habitus
While Bourdieu’s concept of habitus reveals how strategic behavior emerges from deep-rooted dispositions, contemporary theorist P.N. Wong offers a valuable extension of this insight through the idea of destined agency. In his study of small-state strategy, Wong argues that states do not merely choose actions from a rational menu of options; they enact behaviors consistent with their embedded narrative identities. Strategic decisions are shaped not only by constraints, but by a state’s internalized sense of who it is—and what it must do to remain coherent in time.
This view reinforces a central tenet of EIR: that strategic action is not only a reaction to structure, but a performance of identity under existential pressure. Whether a regime chooses preemption or restraint, opacity or alignment, its options are filtered through historically patterned logics. In this sense, Wong’s notion of “destined statecraft” is not fatalistic, but expressive—a framing that closely aligns with EIR’s claim that strategy is a reenactment of memory, not a neutral calculation of utility.
States like Iran or Singapore are illustrative: their policies may seem misaligned with conventional cost-benefit logic, yet within their civilizational frameworks, these strategies reflect consistent imperatives. Destined agency, like habitus, explains why some actions feel compulsory from within even if they appear counterintuitive from without.
By integrating this performative layer into strategic analysis, we see even more clearly that survival is not only calculated—it is interpreted. And the interpretive field is never blank.
Why EIR Rejects Rationalist Prediction Models
A central implication of integrating habitus into the Existential Imperative Realism framework is the necessary rejection of standard rationalist models for predicting state behavior. The prevailing traditions in international relations theory—particularly Rational Choice, Neorealism, and formal Game Theory—rest on the assumption that actors are utility-maximizing entities operating under stable preferences, full information, and shared rules of interaction. These frameworks presume that, when faced with a set of constraints, all rational actors will converge on similar strategies if their conditions are materially alike.
But this presumption collapses once habitus is acknowledged as a structural force in shaping perception, preference, and behavior. If actors inherit not only material constraints but also socially encoded dispositions, then what appears to be “irrational” action is often simply rational behavior within a culturally specific logic. The failure is not in the behavior itself, but in the model used to interpret it.
EIR holds that survival is the root imperative—but how survival is pursued depends on how the actor understands itself, its field, and its available repertoire of action. These are not deduced from pure logic; they are the product of historically conditioned identity. A deterrent that seems effective in theory may trigger escalation in practice, not because of a flaw in the instrument, but because the receiving actor interprets it through a completely different schema of threat perception. Game theory assumes a shared understanding of payoffs and penalties; habitus ensures that these understandings will often be asymmetric.
One of the clearest historical embodiments of this rationalist paradigm is the strategic doctrine developed by the RAND Corporation during the Cold War. As documented in Alex Abella’s Soldiers of Reason, RAND pioneered what is now recognized as the Rational Choice Model—a framework that treated states as utility-maximizing agents making decisions through formal, deductive logic. Drawing heavily on game theory, systems analysis, and mathematical modeling, RAND sought to optimize strategic outcomes by reducing human behavior to measurable inputs and strategic outputs.
This model assumed stable preferences, coherent information processing, and predictable cost-benefit tradeoffs. It underpinned theories of nuclear deterrence, escalation dominance, and Cold War containment. While it produced influential constructs such as second-strike capability, credible threats, and mutually assured destruction, it also systematically excluded the cultural, historical, and psychological dimensions of state behavior. As Abella observed, “If a subject could not be measured, ranged, or classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational.” This epistemological exclusion led RAND to misread key political actors—from Vietnam to the Soviet Union—whose behavior did not conform to the formal logic of its models.
This tendency reflected what Canadian political theorist C. B. Macpherson called possessive individualism—the ideological assumption that all actors, whether individuals or states, behave as self-contained entities driven primarily by the maximization of self-interest and the protection of internal holdings. RAND's models mirrored this liberal ontology, presuming that strategic action could be mapped through preference optimization and quantifiable incentive structures. As Macpherson argued, this framework erases the role of culture, belonging, and identity in shaping motivation. Within RAND’s worldview, what could not be reduced to measurable strategic calculus was dismissed as irrational, or simply omitted from consideration.
Existential Imperative Realism identifies this as a fundamental limitation. Strategic actors do not emerge from nowhere, operating on neutral terrain. They are conditioned by memory, culture, and perception—factors that cannot be reduced to inputs in a utility function. The EIR framework asserts that what RAND treated as a rational baseline was in fact a culturally bounded abstraction, shaped by Western liberal individualism and Cold War technocracy. It is precisely this abstraction that EIR seeks to move beyond.
For example, rationalist deterrence theory struggled to explain why North Korea pursued nuclear weapons at enormous economic and diplomatic cost, even under sustained pressure from vastly superior powers. But through the lens of EIR and national habitus, the behavior is clear: the North Korean regime interprets external pressure as an existential signal, rooted in a postcolonial siege narrative, generational memory of U.S. devastation during the Korean War, and a dynastic ethos of revolutionary autonomy. Within this interpretive field, strategic isolation and nuclear development are not irrational—they are internally coherent expressions of a regime’s survival logic, embedded in its habitus.
Similarly, attempts to impose universal governance norms on radically diverse political cultures—such as liberal constitutionalism in post-invasion Iraq or democratic transitions in post-Soviet space—have repeatedly failed not only due to institutional limitations, but because they ignored the embedded strategic memory of the societies they aimed to reshape. Strategic behavior does not operate independently of the cultural and historical field. Habitus ensures that behavior emerges within that field and often reproduces it, regardless of external interventions.
This is why EIR does not attempt to predict behavior through mechanistic models of strategic calculation. Instead, it offers an interpretive framework grounded in structural realism, but enriched by sociological depth. It views states not as interchangeable rational agents, but as historically situated actors whose survival logic is filtered through inherited identity structures. These structures do not remain static—they evolve—but their inertia is strong, and their patterns are resistant to disruption from outside modeling assumptions.
EIR is not concerned with whether a given actor is “rational” by external standards. It asks: What does this actor perceive as necessary for survival within its historically shaped worldview? That question cannot be answered by static formulas. It requires attention to memory, structure, symbolic meaning, and the deeply embedded logic of action that habitus encodes.
In rejecting rationalist prediction models, EIR embraces a realism that is not less rigorous but more complex. It asserts that power does not operate on a universal map. It operates in fields structured by inherited belief, fear, and form. To understand why actors behave the way they do, we must trace the contours of those fields—not just count their resources.
Conclusion – Strategy as Repetition, Identity, and Adaptation
Existential Imperative Realism begins with the premise that all actors are driven by the necessity to persist. But persistence is not a blank or neutral pursuit—it is shaped, filtered, and performed through identity. The concept of habitus offers the necessary bridge between structural imperatives and strategic behavior by showing how actors inherit not only their positions in the world but also their patterns of response to it. Strategy, in this view, is not designed in isolation—it is reproduced within a logic conditioned by memory, trauma, pride, and repetition.
National habitus operates as a structured field of perception. It determines which threats are legible, which alliances are trusted, which sacrifices are acceptable, and which futures are even conceivable. It explains why one regime responds to vulnerability with stoicism and containment, while another reacts with aggressive escalation. It clarifies why certain policies are pursued even when they appear economically costly or diplomatically isolating. In many cases, those costs are not miscalculations—they are consistent with a deeper logic of identity preservation that cannot be captured by external modeling.
This does not mean that actors are incapable of change. But within the EIR framework, adaptation occurs not through abstract recalculation alone, but through internal transformations of habitus itself. A system adapts when it reinterprets its imperative without betraying its own coherence. This form of strategic adaptation is slower, messier, and more rooted in historical context than rationalist frameworks are typically designed to handle. But it is also more faithful to the way real actors behave in the world.
The integration of Bourdieu’s theory of habitus—and its extension through Wong’s destined agency—offers a vital corrective to flat models of geopolitics that ignore the density of social formation. It equips EIR to analyze not just how power operates, but why it manifests in the particular shapes it does. It accounts for the profound inertia of identity, the ritual logic of survival, and the embedded structure of belief that underpins strategic form.
To understand power in the 21st century, one must understand not only what actors face, but how they have been conditioned to see it. One must understand how their present behavior is shaped by the weight of their own becoming. Strategy, in this light, is not only a response to the world—it is a reenactment of what the actor believes it must be in order to remain intact within it.
Existential Imperative Realism rejects the idea that geopolitics is merely a game of moves and countermoves on a flat board. It understands the board itself is tilted—by memory, by culture, by symbolic structure—and that every move carries with it the echo of past injuries and imagined futures. Habitus is the form in which those echoes endure. And strategy, more often than not, is their amplification.
References
Abella, Alex. Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire. Harcourt, 2008.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford University Press, 1990.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford University Press, 2000.
Johnson, Chalmers. “Review of Alex Abella’s Soldiers of Reason.” TomDispatch, 2008. Link
RAND Corporation. Behavioral Model of Rational Choice. RM-654, 1953. RAND.org
Wong, P. N. Destined Statecraft: Eurasian Small Power Politics and Strategic Cultures. Springer, 2017.