Theory Talks

Theory Talk #48: Cynthia Enloe

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Tue, 22 May 2012 20:38:00 +0000

Cynthia Enloe on Militarization, Feminism, and the International Politics of Banana Boats

While gender is not part of the core of International Relations as a discipline, it most certainly both structures and is structured by the practice of international politics. Since the 1970s, feminism in IR has stirred up what is normally silenced, back-grounded and relayed to the margins, by starting from the seemingly simple question: ‘where are the women’? For 40 years, Cynthia Enloe has shown that answering this question is not so easy—it requires localizing, unpacking and unsettling much IR takes for granted. In this magnificent Talk, Enloe discusses, amongst others, the politics of textile factory design, how global relations need to be structured for bananas to become normal consumption items in our households, and the contemporary global militarization of our life-worlds.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the principal challenge or central debate within IR and what would be your position vis-à-vis that challenge or in that debate?

What I think is the most interesting current debate is probably not what most people think. The reason we have a feminist theory section in the ISA and a women's caucus is because we think that the debate should be different than a lot of other people doing IR think the debate should be. What one chooses to see as the main debate is itself a position.

One of the questions I wish more people would engage with in the whole IR enterprise—anyone who's teaching or writing about IR—is: ‘Does gender matter?’ That is, do the politics of masculinities and the politics of femininities matter for the ways in which people experience international politics and the way that people with power try to shape international politics? That's the debate I wish were going on. What actually happens is that there's a non-debate, which means that all of us who think that it matters, try to persuade people who don't even want to debate whether it does. So it's a funny debate, with the debaters trying to get the non-debaters to at least engage with that question. I obviously think that the politics of masculinities and the politics of femininities have to be paid close attention to in order to understand not just the way states operate, but the way all sorts of groups of people operate internationally. I keep trying to get people to engage in the debate! Also, what I like about thinking about it as a debate is that I remember a time when I didn't take any of that seriously. I have written too many books—I don't know, six books?—without feminist curiosity. What were they like and what was I like, when I thought that it didn't matter? I try to remember that. But that's what teaching is for—helping other people to take that same step.

I'm perhaps more then other people interviewed on Theory Talks engaged with what we should be concerned about in the real world. The academic debates matter, but I never think that they matter the most. That may just be my own limitation, but I never think that academic debates are what really shape the world. Now, some academic debates do, obviously, but for me, now, in 2012, what I think about the most and worry about the most and puzzle out the most, is why militarization has become so rampant, what are its consequences and what are the possibilities for rolling it back.

Militarization is a process that is happening at so many levels. It's happening at the individual level, when a woman who has a son is persuaded that the best way she can be a good mother is to allow the military recruiter to recruit her son so her son will get off the couch. When she is persuaded to let him go, even if reluctantly, she's being militarized. She's not as militarized as somebody who is a Special Forces soldier, but she's being militarized all the same. Somebody who gets excited because a jet bomber flies over the football stadium to open the football season and is glad that he or she is in the stadium to see it, is being militarized. So militarization is not just about the question ‘do you think the military is the most important part of the state?’ (Although obviously that matters). It's not just ‘do you think that the use of collective violence is the most effective way to solve social problems?’—which also a part of militarization. But it's also about ordinary, daily culture, certainly in the United States—not in every country, thank goodness—which is one of the reasons that it's so important that people in the United States think about alternative cultures, because then they can see how absolutely peculiar the United States is for its relationship to combat. It is not as if it's only in the United States, however: I work with Feminist Now in Sweden, who are very concerned about what they see as not just creeping, but galloping militarization in contemporary Sweden.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?

Well, it's a long process and, of course, it's continuing. The first thing, for me, a lot has had to do with the kind of students I've taught. I teach a lot of students from different countries and students always have a big impact on me, both graduate students who are doing their own investigations, from which I learn, but also younger students—undergraduates—who bring puzzles and assumptions to my courses that are brand new to me. So, I think being a teacher really has had a profound effect on me. I think that in all this time, if I had been ‘just’ a researcher, my thinking wouldn’t have progressed as far as it has.

The second thing is, I was very affected when I was an undergraduate student by reading Hannah Arendt. Now mind you, when I was studying, she was still writing. I got to hear her twice as an undergraduate. I remember that day: she had just written Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and the faculty members at my college brought her not because we the students had ever heard of her, but because they had. I can still picture her up on stage, speaking a very German-accented English, and to tell you the truth, I took notes like mad, I don't think I knew what she was saying, but I knew that it was intellectually exciting. I just knew that what she was talking about mattered. And I can remember running to the university coffee shop after it was all over and I re-read my notes and I tried to put them in order; it was so exciting!

Now, Arendt was not a feminist theorist by any means—she was simply not interested in gender at all. But, she taught me how to think about historical development and how to think about the relationship between cultures of authoritarianism and authoritarian states. I think Arendt is one of the reasons that I'm very interested in those creeping processes of cultural change—of negative cultural change, unfortunately.

Then, when I went to Berkeley as a graduate student, I worked with a political theorist named Sheldon Wolin, who was also very affected by Hannah Arendt. So I continued to read Arendt and, at the point, she was writing in The New Yorker magazine, with ads down the side, and she was also writing in the New York Review of Books. I subscribed to both of them. It was so important because at that time, around 1964-1968, she was one of the few women writing at either of these very male-dominated magazines. She was writing theory in a weekly news magazine, or a weekly book review magazine, which is where political theory should be happening; it should be happening with ads running down the sides, not because I am for advertisements, but rather to put the debates right in the middle of the public sphere. I kept every Arendt article that appeared in those magazines. Sometimes when I'm teaching Arendt, I come in and I show students and say: ‘Look, that's where political theory goes on.’ It's not just in university press journals, though I'm glad they publish them; it doesn't just happen at exclusive sites of cultural production. It's in the public sphere.

One of the people who affected me deeply later, in my post-Arendt life, was Adrienne Rich. She was an activist, a poet, and a feminist thinker. I can remember the first book of hers I read. People were recommending it, saying ‘Cynthia, you are a little behind, here’, referencing my feminist development; I was never an anti-feminist, but I was a little backward. This was the '70s and I had friends who were much more feminist than I was; if you become a feminist, you should always have friends who are much more feminist than you are to keep pushing you and showing you books to read. So, one of the formative books was Adrienne Rich's book called Of Women Born(1976). It was a deconstruction not just of motherhood, but of women's roles in society and how potent that kind of construction was. I got to meet her and I got to listen to her talk, but also read poetry. I'm not a poet, but through her, I realized that there are so many different ways to express feminist thought.

The other thing that really affected me was that I was doing most of my research outside of the United States. The first time that I spent time abroad was in Germany, not too long after World War II, and I stayed with a family who lived in what they still called ‘the British-Occupied Zone’. They compared the British Occupied Zone with the American Occupied Zone. There they were, comparing post-war experiences within the same country, and that really stuck with me. My closest in age within the family was a fellow named Gerd, who has gone on to become a professor of American Studies in Germany, and he pulled me out of my shell, out of my American parochialism, because Gerd was very sure of himself, and very smart. I got to see what American life looked like from his vantage point.

I did most of my research before I became a feminist in Malaysia, Malaysia was not considered a great power, and it still isn't, but it meant that I had to take seriously a country that almost nobody else took seriously if I was going to write my dissertation. That really stuck with me: what happens when you try to make sense of the world from a position in the world that is considered peripheral? I love that, being on the periphery! I love trying to make sense of things from the wings of the stage.

My dissertation was on the ethnic politics of Malaysian education, although my visa couldn't say ‘ethnic politics of’, so my visa said I was looking into ‘education and development’, which didn't sound as scary. But this and the fact that the country was so ethnically divided meant that I never presumed that ethnicity didn't matter, and the first book I wrote after the Malaysian book (Police, Military, Ethnicity: Foundations of State Power, 1980) was on ethnic conflict and political development. Again, I still had a lot to learn about feminism. But it meant that I was constantly looking at marginal perspectives. For instance, what did the Vietnam War look like from the perspective of what the French called the montagne-yards, the mountain ethnic minorities? How would you look at the same Vietnam War from the most marginal of Vietnamese ethnic groups?

Now the pivotal moment I started looking at feminism doesn't exist—I guess there is about two or three of them, and they happened gradually. I subscribed to the very first issue of Ms. Magazine, an insert that was put into New York Magazine, which people now read to find out where the plays and movies are showing, I was getting New York Magazine because I was teaching in Southern Ohio and I was kind of homesick for the bright lights of New York, and here came this insert called Ms.! And Ms. was just beginning to be used by some people, not by me yet, and this insert had a whole way of looking at politics that was totally new to me.

Then the other thing that happened to me is that I was put on a presidential search committee for my university as one of just two women on the committee, a graduate student and myself. Her name was Gail Hornstein and she was a graduate student in psychology. Well, she took me aside after the first two meetings. Everybody else in the committee was nice, but she said ‘Cynthia, you have to say something or we're going to end up with an all-male shortlist.’ Of course we were! She said ‘It's your responsibility because as a graduate student, no one's really going to pay attention to what I say’. So even though I was a junior researcher, I can't remember if I was tenured, she said ‘it's your job. You have to speak for this.’ And really, it was the first time that I was asked, if you will, to make a feminist point, and to persuade other people of its importance.

Finally, the real big turning point was that we had a very major sexual harassment case at our university at a time when almost nobody had ever heard of the term ‘sexual harassment’. It divided the peace movement in Boston, it divided my university, and it divided students and faculty. Meanwhile, I had to figure out what I thought about it because I was trying to be one of the main supporters of the women who were bringing the charge. And again, they kind of said ‘you have to do this, you have to explain to people what this thing called 'sexual harassment' is and why it matters and why it's a violation of labour rights’. So it was good; I've always been pushed.

To be a feminist, there should definitely be some sense that there are wrongs to be righted, or there are injustices to be understood and to be rolled back. I think sometimes that in the middle of that sexual harassment case, it was anger, but I was angry on behalf of other people. I find that if it's just anger that motivates me, I'm not very effective in persuasion, and I'm constantly in these positions (like so many of us) in groups or in organizations and I have to be able to persuade. If my own internal anger is the main thing they hear—some people can be effective, but for me, it doesn't work.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR?

As far as thinking about other people who are trying to have careers in academia, I think one thing is to try and pursue things you genuinely find interesting, which means listening to your mentors and advisors, but pursuing investigations on topics you care about. ‘Care about’ doesn't mean necessarily that you immediately see the injustices that you want to address, it can mean that you just find something really exciting and/or really puzzling and you've always wondered about it. We, for instance, are talking just about 100 yards away from a great big container ship stacked high with Dole Corporation fruit containers, going or coming from all parts of Central America and probably the Philippines and Hawaii. Well, I can imagine somebody at this conference looking out there and thinking ‘so, what's going on here?’ and really finding that a wonderful puzzle—about how Dole operates its own ships, and where these fruits and vegetables are coming from and where they're going and who is working on these ships. I can imagine that just being absolutely intriguing. So I guess one of the main things is don't just pursue something that someone else says is worth pursuing, because you won't have your juices running; you won't have your own internal drive. Pick something that you care about—something you just find wonderfully intriguing.

Another thing is, put yourself in uncomfortable positions. It can even be within your own society by exploring the parts of your society you feel uncomfortable in or unsettled by. Make sure that you're in positions where you can't just assume everything. Again, that doesn't necessarily mean going to a place that somebody else says is exotic. It can really mean doing research on a part of town you never go to, or with people who you're not very comfortable talking with. Try to shake up your presumptions, but also develop new skills: skills of empathy, skills of communication, and skills of questioning—including yourself—that you otherwise would not have done. It makes you realize you have assumptions that you never knew you had.

Does gender make the world go round? If so, in which ways? The question stems from the observation that IR is a world that seems inhabited by white men of a certain age group.

I think what I mean by ‘gender makes the world go round’ is that it motivates people's own ideas or anxieties about their own masculinity or people's own aspirations for their own femininity or what they hope will be see as their own feminine respectability. That whole cluster of ideas about gender drives decision-making, drives alliances, and drives hostilities; it allows for certain kinds of structures to seem normal and therefore unchallengeable—until a feminist comes along! It makes certain kinds of hierarchies—racial and class, both race as gender and class as gender—to seem as though they are efficient, either internationally or at other levels. Take Chinese women's factory labour: ‘of course’ it should be cheaper than a Swedish factory woman's labour, or so the common wisdom goes. Those sorts of normalizations of those hierarchies make the world go round. That normalization is a political process that is driven—not entirely, but in large part—by assumptions of politics and decisions around masculinity and femininity, and that's what we mean by ‘makes the world go round.’

Let's go back to this Dole California ship in the background. That’s a gendered ship! Let’s look at some of the gendered aspects involved in this banana boat. Who produces Dole bananas? It’s women that are working on the banana plantations in Central America. And what about the ship’s crew? It's a small crew because it's a container ship—but they aren't simply ‘men’. I would guess they are Filipino men navigating bananas from Central America to California. And they have relationships at home; they're sending money home. Dole, moreover, has a whole executive hierarchy that, in my guess, are male and probably they don't look anything like the crew on that ship, let alone like the plantation workers. And it is here in San Diego feeding the American public—through shopping done by women. So, that ship is definitely making the world go round. It's definitely key not only to what we eat for breakfast, but also to globalized capitalism. You can't explain that ship in its entirety without asking which men, why those men, and what their relationship is to which women.

That's one of the things that I learned—I read a lot of history and, going back to what I was affected by, when I was first becoming a feminist in my academic work, the people I was reading were overwhelmingly historians and that has been so good for me. Amongst the first historians that I read were historians of the globalized textile industry. One of the things that I learned from a historian named Judy Lown, who is British, was that the early textile entrepreneurs requested—informed—their engineers to create textile looms—the technology with levers if you will—so that they could be worked by children and women. This then gets naturalized to ‘Oh, the textile industry is perfect for women, because look at the machinery!’ But in fact, it was the entrepreneur who said, ‘no, make these machines usable for women’, because at that point, if you could get farm girls off British farms, you could pay them less than the skilled male weavers.

So structures matter, but it doesn't mean that gender doesn't matter. There's an assumption, maybe by people who don't do gender research, that actually gender is all in the area of culture. Gender is structured and is made structured, because structures are human-made. Conducting gender research means to always ask ‘What role is masculinity playing, and what role is femininity playing?’ Where are the women, where are the men, why are they each there, who gains from them being in those places?—and you're off and running. Pick the topic and you're ready.

It is true that the legitimation of many structures is the process by which we are persuaded that these structures are natural. That is the idea that the labour market is the invisible hand. But that's why I look for decisions in history because if I can find the decisions, meaning the decisions made one way rather than another way, then there's evidence that that structure actually not only was created in the first place, but has to be maintained every day.

What does the fact that history has been written by men for thousands of years do to political theory and IR?

Well, of course those men see each other as their prime rivals, so it's more to say that it is men who have written the most published theorizing. Still, that doesn't mean that men see the world alike, and I certainly don't want to reduce masculinity to men. But it is true that a certain kind of male theorizing, a certain kind of masculinized theorizing about the world and to what extent it's open to cooperation and to what extent it is infused with threat, really has had an impact, and it has an impact on women as well. It has helped to create this larger presumption that women should feel themselves protected and should act gratefully about being protected whereas men, and even those who don't want to, should be encouraged—pressured—into thinking that their main role in the world, this dangerous world, is as a protector.

But the protector is the one who gets to know the outside world. If you're protected, you are domesticated. And you're in the private sphere, and you're definitely in the local, domestic sphere—and you're grateful. If you are the protector, you're presumed to have to know about the greater world, because how else could you be the protector? So even if you are not worldly, there's pressure on you to act as though you are able to assess the threats. That just sets up the whole political hierarchy. If the protected is feminized and the protector is masculinized and the protector is supposed to be worldly and rational and strategic and the protected is supposed to be nurturing and grateful, you have patriarchy. Patriarchy can take so many different forms. It can fit a lot of different personalities and a lot of different structures, so you can have patriarchies that are quite comfortable. I oftentimes think that patriarchy, as a particular way of ordering human life, wouldn't work if a lot of women weren't persuaded that it was good for them.

Finally, politics is much more complex than most of the conventional theorists can imagine. I remember there was a wonderful documentary that maybe you've seen called ‘The Fog of War’ about Robert McNamara, which is a quintessential object of IR theorizing. There was a moment in the documentary about whether his wife agreed with him—by this time, he was defence secretary—about his approach to the Vietnam War in the late 1960's. She clearly did not, as the film shows, but then the documentary filmmaker just kind of moved away from that. But I thought ‘we want to know more!’ Was she at all persuasive? Was he embarrassed when he couldn't persuade her? I don't actually know anything about her political theory, I don't know anything about her political outlook or her ways of acting, but I just thought ‘Tell me more!’ And it made me think that McNamara was himself in a web of relationships, and they weren't just relationships with the powers that be in Washington at the time.

What kind of methodologies do you use or help you to tease out these sets of questions and issues?

I think that one of the great contributions of feminist researchers is to figure out a way to study silence. To develop a methodology for studying what is not said. I don't mean that all women are silent, but certainly silencing women in the political sphere is one of the ways that the current structures of politics are sustained, which means that you've got to be able to study silence. I think it is one of the great contributions of feminist researchers to say ‘We are going to figure out a way to study silence.’

I tend to use a multiplicity of methodologies. I find that one set of methodologies is just not revealing enough because I think that the world and the social relationships that make up international politics are so complex. So, I use discourse analysis: I read and re-read between the lines, and watch for which kinds of symbolism, analogies and metaphors are used. I also use a lot of interviewing whenever I can. I use quantitative research in the sense that I'm really into distributions. I don't use a very high level of abstract quantitative work, but I do count! We say that, in American Congress, liberals don't know how to count. But feminists count all the time; we count all the time. And then we ask the questions. What does it mean, how did it get that way? I also do a lot of historical research. As I said, I've been so affected by historical analysis because I want to have a longer view of how things got to be the way they were. If you can look historically, you can find where decisions were made. And as soon as you find decisions, like’ let's take those women to Australia,’; ‘let's use those women for this purpose’—then, in fact, you immediately break up the idea that it's natural, that it's normal, and that it's apolitical. People who do institutional sociology also affect me. I'm really interested in organizational cultures, institutional sociology, and the history of institutions. Because, again, historians will tell you about turning points, and that really explodes the idea that this is the only way this could have been.

Finally, it always kept me in good stead, I think, to be a Comparative Politics person: it makes you much more capable of seeing complexities in the conduct of international relations because you are always concerned about the complexities of the local. You never can slip into saying ‘the US talks to Russia.’ A Comparative Politics person says ‘Well, what's going on in Russia? Which Russians?’ In fact, in my own work, I never say ‘Russia’, I never say ‘the United States’, I never say ‘Sweden.’ I either say ‘the Swedish government’ or the ‘Swedish peace movement’. The thing that really distinguishes the Comparative Politics analyst is that we are always trying to break open the state. You always presume, not that the state doesn't exist, but that the state is not monolithic. If you watched its development, you would never take it as a given, because it's not a given. Plus, you always know it's contested and you always know the actors themselves are contested. Even if there's a political class—and the French always talk about ‘the French political class’—it's not an easy, monolithic group. So I think it's an enormous benefit to come to International Relations out of Comparative Politics. Or, if you're in International Relations, to make sure that you put one foot, one curious foot, into Comparative Politics.

Why do you focus on the international? Is there anything specific about the international that you want to disseminate to certain types of audiences?

I speak to lots of different kinds of audiences. Most of the speaking that I do as invited lecturer are usually a combination of Women's Studies, Global Studies, and Political Science, but oftentimes the people who actually bring me in are the Women's Studies people. So the audiences that I'm speaking to are always multidisciplinary. Therefore, I can't assume—and I don't want to assume—that they come in already convinced. Moreover, for some of them, it's the first time that they've come to a lecture by somebody who actually is identified as a feminist—and I like that! I like not being presumptuous and sort of figuring out where their scepticism is.

But for the international, I think again, having been to Malaysia, a country that is so vulnerable to all kinds of regional and international—not to mention colonial (British colonial)—decisions has really set me up right from the beginning to think on an international scale. If you're a rubber plantation owner on a Dunlop plantation, you may think your world is very small. You live on the plantation, you're trying to raise your kids, you're trying to have a good marriage, and you're trying to have a little bit of a community. But in fact, you know you are part of Dunlop and Dunlop is part of the British capitalist economy. You are very aware!

People living in the US are much more tempted to imagine that they live in their own world. Unfortunately, since 9/11 but even since the beginning of the Cold War, Americans have been encouraged to think first of all that they live in their own world. If they expand beyond that to see the larger world, they see it mainly as a world of threat. There is an ethos here that has been infused in American foreign policy, but also in American individual thinking, that we just don't have to deal with the world. Now but then we wouldn't have any bananas! There are no bananas growing on American territories, but according to most Americans, it would be worth it because the world out there is one of threat. I don't think that's how people in most other countries think. So, I think that spending that time in Malaysia and always keeping Malaysia as one of my references, even though I'm not a Malaysia specialist anymore, has had a big effect on me. I can't imagine the private, the local, or the national not being infused with the international.

That said, I never envisioned ending up in IR. What I did know is I wanted to stir things up. Now, that's not necessarily something to be proud of, but that just means that when I wrote Bananas, Beaches and Bases (2000), I was just trying to shake things up. I first wrote it as a non-academic book; it was published in London at a trade press called Pandora, and only then got picked up by the University of California Press. What happened is that the women inside of the IR camp, picked it up and they did the hard work of using it to break open some discussions. Spike Peterson and Ann Tickner, people who were already ‘inside of’ IR, said ‘We will take this and use it.’ Then, they kind of adopted me and brought me into IR.

Finally, moving to your current work, what, in militarization, captures your fascination so much?

Well, I don't think militarization is new. I think we're more aware of it, partly because it's being challenged. Sometimes we're not even aware of a process that's going on until someone says ‘that's damaging and not natural and not automatic.’ I think that there are several things fuelling militarization now. One is the model of a certain type of masculinity and holding up that kind of masculinity as the most modern, the most protective, the most technologically sophisticated, and/or even the most threatening. If certain kinds of manhood are thought to be the most threatening, then you have to pay the most attention to it.

I think the second thing that is going on is that there is an increasing diffusion of military ideas into popular culture and into social workings. So, for instance, it's not uncommon to imagine nowadays in the U.S. that one of the best people to be a school principal is an ex-army person. That is certainly not accepted by all local communities, but it's an increasingly favoured idea. Or: the proliferation of video games, which are highly militarized and attract both boys and girls, but especially a certain kind of boy who likes to play war games. Now, there have always been war games, and there have always been tin soldiers, so it's not as if the militarization of child's play is brand new, but now it's so powerful and it's so profitable, and that, certainly, is new. Then, I think, there is the proliferation of weaponry: certainly the British and the Americans, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the Germans, all distributed arms when they were colonizing and trying to build local armed forces. But now, it is such big business, both regarding state-to-state arms transfers and private arms dealers. It's big corporate business, and that makes a huge difference. So much of foreign aid now is in the form of military transfers, especially American foreign aid.

I think this is happening more often now because a lot of state elites feel insecure. They feel insecure for the wrong reasons: they don't want to give up power, they don't want to share power, they don't want to live in a more multipolar world. There are all kinds of incentives for feeling insecure that most of us would say are actually healthy, including having a more porous idea of yourself and a less elitist, predictable elite. Then, these civilian, innate, notions of their insecurities are played out as if they are not theirinsecurities, but as if all of usshould feel insecure. That then becomes a great justification for this kind of militarization. The other thing is that this kind of militarization is supposedly more ‘modern’ because it's more technologically sophisticated, i.e., it has more advanced weaponry.

One could instead imagine security services through the more realistic notion of ‘providing security’. What would it comprise? You would have all kinds of health professionals, all kinds of educators and environmentalists, climate change, sea level rise experts and so on—and they are providing security. But it's this narrow definition of what security is—military security—combined with a capitalist profit mode, combined with states not wanting to be directly responsible for, but wanting to have some kind of direction over, armed security forces, and they're all masculinized. If you take the Swedish armed forces, the American armed forces, the Canadian, the Australian, the New Zealand, South African—and they have now anywhere from 6% in Britain up to 17% in New Zealand of women in the armed forces. Even the Russian military, because so many guys go AWOL, is up to 10-12% now, whereas the private security forces—they have secretaries, so it's not as if they don't have feminized jobs—are overwhelmingly male, at least as far as the people out there performing the security functions are concerned. So, the privatization of security entrenches militarization even further, not a blanket masculinity, but a certain kind of masculinity in the name of making the world more secure.

Cynthia Enloe’s career has included Fulbrights in Malaysia and Guyana, and guest professorships in Japan, Britain and Canada, as well as lecturing in Sweden, Norway, Germany, Korea, Turkey and at universities around the U.S. Her books and articles have been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, and German. She has written for Ms. Magazineand has appeared on National Public Radio and the BBC. Enloe’s twelve books include Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (2000), Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (2004), and Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link(2007). Her newest book is Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (forthcoming from University of California Press, spring, 2010). In years past, Enloe’s feminist teaching and research has focused on the interplay of women’s politics in the national and international arenas, with special attention to how women’s labor is made cheap in globalized factories (especially sneaker factories) and how women’s emotional and physical labor has been used to support governments’ war-waging policies—and how many women have tried to resist both of those efforts.

Related links

Faculty Profile at Clark University
Read Enloe’s The Globetrotting Sneaker here (pdf)
Read Enloe’s Sneak Attack: the Militarization of U.S. Culture (chapter in Reconstructing Gender, 2005) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #47: Jean-François Bayart

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:57:00 +0000

Jean-François Bayart on Globalization, Subjectification, and the Historicity of State Formation

Debates on globalization tend to assume an analytical tension between economic dynamics on the one hand and the nation-state on the other—an assumption shared by both liberal IR theory and its critics, who for instance see nationalism as a backlash against globalization. Jean-François Bayart, well known among Africanists, has always argued against such a zero-sum interpretation of state and market—as a historical sociologist of state formation, he challenges this core narrative within IR. In this Talk, Bayart—amongst others—explains how the development of capitalism and the nation-state are part of one and the same movement, argues for an event-focused approach to comparative analysis, and elucidates the notion of subjectification in global politics.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge or principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge or in this debate?

I would say that a central challenge (if perhaps not the most interesting to me personally) is whether the overall process of ‘globalization’ as they call it, undermines state sovereignty, and, more broadly, if the international system will remain organized as a quintessentially territorial state-system, or whether by contrast it will lead to the emergence of a deterritorialized, global, empire.

In that, I take a stake with for instance Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. They point towards a deterritorialized, hegemonic, empire as the most salient future, placing themselves in a line of theorizing building on Foucault and Deleuze. But me, I’m not convinced of this idea of empire, for reasons which I will come back to later. But the debate is in a sense interesting, because my own work, too, is by and large influenced by Foucault and Deleuze, which is why I can fully understand the concern with the problematique of globalization, but, contrary to Hardt and Negri, I think we will remain in a territorial, inter-state system—even if the US are naturally not the only producers of globalization, the system remains highly skewed in favor of a territorial configuration in which the United States, or perhaps eventually another state power, will remain pivotal. This is a core theoretical debate, including from a more practical standpoint, because according to one reply or the other—that is, deterritorialized empire or state-driven, territorial, system—the practical implications in terms of political commitment, public policy, activism or philosophical criticism, will be radically different.

One of the theoretical reasons why I think the international system will remain not only territorialized but asymmetrically territorialized—that is what I tried to demonstrate in Le gouvernement du monde, translated as Global Subjects—is that for the last two centuries, the state is a product of globalization, and in that observation I differ from most IR theorists. For me, not only does neoliberal globalization not undermine the state, but more fundamentally, for two centuries, it is indeed globalization that spawned the universalization of the nation-state as a mode of political organization. More precisely, the universalization of the nation-state and the systematization—if I may say—of the international political system is a dimension of globalization, and not contradictory to globalization.

Let me give two examples to illustrate this thesis, that there is generally a strong correlation between the acceleration of economic globalization on the one hand, and the crystallization of the nation-state on the other. For example in 1848, we see the triumph of free trade, the development of railway lines and telegraph lines and intercontinental submarines, and simultaneously 1848 is the ‘hot spring of political action’, that is, a whole series of national and nationalist revolutions not only in Europe but also with repercussions in Latin America.

Another interesting example: the collapse of the Soviet Union, the integration of the former Soviet economies into the global capitalist system has not occurred in par with the dissolution of the Soviet space in I don’t know what kind of political and non-state no man’s land, but rather with the creation of a whole series of states which vindicate their nation-statehood, even though we know that these nations are very recent and by-products Stalinist theories of nationalities at that. So it represents a dramatic tendency very similar to the creation of the nation-state in the wake of colonial empires. Just as the colonial empires have created nation-states, the Soviet empire has created nation-states, and the integration of the economic space in the capitalist economy has been accompanied by the emergence of a regional system of nation-states, whose matrix was communism.

One can find this dialectical relationship between globalization and the universalization of the nation-state in the international communist movement that was a matrix of globalization, most notably by generalizing a specific kind of industrial civilization, for instance in Central Asia. The international communist movement has led to nationalist revolutions, or was composed with the help of nationalist and socialist revolutions in for example China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia… So I find that the correlation is still very evident.

It reminds us of that old rule formulated so eloquently by Fernand Braudel: capitalism is not the market economy; it is the market economy plus the state. And we know very well how the universalization of capitalism through the extension of free trade in the 19^th century was carried out at gunpoint. It was of course the military force of England that imposed free trade on a range of countries and even continents. So yes, I think we should rediscover this obvious self-evidence so well articulated by Fernand Braudel, this dialectical relationship between market and state.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about global politics?

I am a political scientist—nobody’s perfect—and my tribe is the historical sociology of the state one, which means I look at processes of state formation. So I was early in my career influenced by scholars like Bendix, Barrington Moore… My PhD was on the state in Cameroon but I worked in a comparative perspective right away, confronting an African trajectory of state formation with a Latin American one. I think the main goal with writing The State in Africa: the Politics of the Belly in ’89 was to redress the imbalance in historical sociology of state formation in terms of the complete silence around the state in Africa. A lot of books appeared on the state in Western Europe, in North America, but also on Latin America or Asia—see The Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship—but nothing on the state in Africa! Yet to focus on the African state was somewhat of an uncomfortable anomaly in the field—where ideas that Africa doesn’t have a state, that it is outside history still prevailed at the time—so my main goal was to reintroduce Africa as an interesting site of study for historical sociology of state formation.

I have had a bit of an eclectic trajectory (some say), or perhaps a bit baroque. I am a French researcher, which inevitably inscribes my work and research center in a certain intellectual tradition, but I hasten to add that this intellectual tradition is not isolated, does not constitute a kind of isolation that would cut me off from the rest of the world. Some of my favorite French authors are widely read and very widely translated in North America, such as Foucault or Deleuze, and vice versa, I am myself a very large consumer of works published in North America and a big reader of Max Weber, although I unfortunately do not read him German, but in French, thanks to the excellent French translations that were made over the past twenty years.

With my training in political science, my first fieldwork was in Cameroon, and working in Cameroon, I was very quickly—especially because my subject was the historicity of politics in Cameroon—working hand in hand with anthropologists on the one hand, and historians on the other. So in the very beginning, I developed a multi-disciplinary understanding of political science, or rather, I would speak not of political science, but rather of social sciences of the political. I always tried to mobilize the full scope—within the bounds of my abilities—of social sciences to fully understand an object normally quite circumscribed, that is, the political, not only the terms of the state but all things political, what Gramsci would call the integral state, that is, a dimension of hegemony, which evolves through common sense.

Very quickly I was faced with this kind of theoretical issues, which actually led me to reflect theoretically on the definition of the political. That kept me busy during the early 1980s, and led to me emphasizing the ‘politics from below’. I tried to show how the political is primarily the result of efforts of enunciation on the part of actors, that is to say that all actors in a given system do not forcibly share the same ideas as to what is or is not political, and working on the State, I was led to take into consideration on the one hand the dimension of material culture, and on the other techniques of the body in the sense of Marcel Mauss, which are inseparable from material cultures. And I was also brought to work on the imaginary, imaginary figures that inevitably accompany techniques of the body or practices of material culture. We cannot even say that one "accompanies" the other as, by definition, a technique of the body or an element of material culture springs from imagination. And one cannot think about materiality without at the same time understanding our imaginary production. Our imaginary production is always connected with materiality. Working on these issues, I preferred, at least initially, authors such as Michel Foucault and Michel deCerteau, to authors such as Pierre Bourdieu or Derrida, Lyotard. Even in the French theoretical field, it is probably quite particular that I’m not a Bourdieuan. A historian who was very close to Foucault, Paul Veyne, is an important reference to me.

From the 1980s to the 1990s, Deleuze was very important to me especially in understanding deterritorialization and I used his concept of ‘rhizome’ working on Africa: the African state is a rhizome state. I also drew inspiration in his reflection on repetition and difference. And from the late 1980s, early 1990s, new translations of Max Weber came out in French. The previous were very poor, and some of them were not even translations from German, but from the very bad translations by Talcott Parsons. In his translations a variety of concepts, such as routinization, which were translated from Talcott Parsons, which were absolute nonsense. Not until the translations of the early 1990s did we see that routinization was nothing but a figment of Parsons, when in reality Max Weber spoke of veralltäglichen which has became translated very laboriously in French as "quotidiennisation" [everydayization], which is not at all the same as routinization. So there were very interesting discussions about the translation of Max Weber’s concepts, and these new French translations of Max Weber gave me a lot to think about. There is another important reference which is Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘l’Institution imaginaire de la société’ (‘The imaginary institution of society’) that helped me write the Illusion of Identity and to conceptualize this particular dimension of imagination. That's basically my theoretical influences.

Besides that, the generation I am part of obviously shaped me as well—the condition of a generation, to speak with Karl Mannheim. To me it is clear that, having been born in 1950, I am a child of May ‘68 that has not been directly involved in May ‘68 and it’s obvious that the interest I found in Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault is very closely tied to that particular moment in French society. All my early adult socialization took place through this literature, these theoretical references and all surrounding mobilizations. I was quite close—not in terms of activism, but ideologically or in terms of sensitivity—to a movement which was called ‘Tout’ ["Everything"] and whose motto was "we want everything right away," a movement that was not at all Maoist. Gramsci was very popular in France in the 1970s, in the context of the union of the left, of Eurocommunism… And I of course I was also very influenced by Marx. But Marx has been read and brilliantly interpreted by a philosopher—in this case a Christian, unless I am mistaken—called Michel Henry, who wrote a huge book called Marx, a superb reading of Marx, based on the finding that Marxism is the sum of misinterpretations of Marx. Which amounts to a very anti-Marxist position; in France there is this difference between being a Marxist, that is, being an adept of the Marxist-Leninist dogma, and being a ‘Marxian’, that is, having read and using Marx, including the young Marx. Michel Henry said that everything is already in the young Marx and the Marx of the second period, the period of The Capital, did nothing more than reworking, rewriting, but Michel Henry rejects the idea of a second Marx who tears apart his earlier mistakes, his illusions or his earlier idealism. So obviously it strongly marked me.

Besides the books, backpacking as a student in Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan in 1969-1970 left a strong impression. I also went to East Asia, but I liked it less. I have always had very strong affinities with the world of Central Asia, what we called Asia Minor. I was, and still am, very sensitive to the music of these countries. I think that my aesthetic taste for modal music has certainly influenced my social science theorizing. These personal experiences in Asia Minor certainly contributed to a number of theoretical choices.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR?

In terms of basic techniques, there is of course firstly the issue—now commonplace, but it was less obvious before—of multilingualism. It’s a great pleasure to see that the younger generations of researchers are much more linguistically plural. Maybe one should insist, for students of international relations, the need for them to learn languages other than Western languages. English is obviously essential. Yet it's already much better if one can speak German, Spanish, Portuguese… But I think international relations theorists of today should absolutely invest in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, etc.. This is certainly a challenge for theorists of international relations, which can be confined to the certain comfort of the perfect command of English as their language of communication. But obviously, it prohibits their understanding of what I call the historicity of African societies.

Secondly, I think the field is absolutely essential. And the crucial, serious mistake in my opinion is of IR theorists not going to the field but to go from one conference to another, without being confronted with the complexity of societies. If they do not face the complexity of societies directly through fieldwork, if they meet nothing but their scholarly alter egos, be they yellow with slanted eyes, or black, they will never understand much about the real functioning of the international system.

I believe that a third recommendation I can make is that of humility, because when you look at the changing world and confront it with theory of international relations, we have to recognize a certain gap. If IR theory wants to provide the means to understand the world it purports to decipher, it can only do so by working on specific societies, not just by working on the global pidgin whereby these societies seem to exchange and express themselves.

Fourthly, I think that anger, political anger is a scientific engine. Me personally, when I worked on international relations, the foreign policy of France, I did it from a certain political or civic anger, for example with regards to the immigration issue or the question of what is called—I think a great big misunderstanding—Françafrique, that is, the African policy of France. I think political passion is not necessarily a bad advisor when it is mediated by theory, by conceptualization, by problematization.

Finally, what is the added value comparative politics to me? It’s not to compare, but to share interrogations, to share problematics, to share references, books, questions—in the definition of Paul Veyne, a French historian working on ancient Rome and Greece—comparison is an operator for the individualization of historical situations. That is, it allows theoretical imagination to deepen our understanding of the specific and contingent richness of particular historical configurations—even though we work on very different situations.

Your work is always singularly characterized by a wealth of historical data. Why this emphasis on history?

This encompasses a theoretical point more important to me than the one I mentioned before—even if it is less disputed in academic debate and that is not unrelated to my answer to your first question—is to understand the historicity that characterizes societies. Gilles Deleuze introduced a very specific and clear heuristic distinction between essence and event. For him, a concept has to encompass not essence but event. The historicity of politics is not about the essence of cultural politics in Africa, but rather to understand the event of state formation. So historicity means accepting the singularity of historical configurations of all societies, polities, political struggles and cultural representations of politics, that we have to however apprehend with universalized tools and concepts—without having a normative definition of the state (that is, knowing it’s essence). The state, or civil society, cannot be understood as essences but only as events, processes of formation. Public space is not an essence but a process we have to understand in terms of very concrete practices—the public sphere is formed day after day by micro-social struggles and practices. Struggles, practices, are for me more important than essentialist and universalist notions. And that’s historicity.

On the one hand, we have an international system that is increasingly becoming systematized, or, so to speak, globalized, a phenomenon comprising a compression of time and space, the development of the capitalist economy, the search for what they call global governance, and so forth. On the other hand, the political sociologist that I am is aware that this process of world unity does not contradict the historicity of societies, both Western societies or other ones. So I think a fundamental theoretical challenge is to provide tools that allow us to understand the historicity of the societies encapsulated by or embedded in this process of global unification. Unification in the sense of German and Italian unification, in the sense of the constitution of a national market under the auspices of a unified state, these processes do not translate into an eradication of diversity in the political societies concerned. We know that the Länder in Germany or the Mezzogiorno or different regions in Italy have kept a very high specificity, a specificity that only their many—plural—histories provide an understanding of in the context of German and Italian unification. Most recently, and German reunification after the end of the Cold War has only illustrated this process, since the Ost-Deutsche Länder [Eastern German States] retain a very strong cultural specificity.

My first objective in studying the state in Cameroon was to understand the inherently own historicity of polities, politics and societies in non-Western countries. I had to struggle against on the one hand the liberal developmentalist conceptions of politics—people like Verba, Easterly who explain politics from a very evolutionist approach—and the so-called dependency-theorists on the other, Latin American political economists that had to insist on dependency to explain state formation (or, in the case of Africa, Samir Amin). Both approaches—the one liberal, the other neo-Marxist—occulted the very historicity of state-formation in Africa, forcing me to develop a double critique against them. Yet what I didn’t manage to forge into the book were discussions on culture, ethnicity and identity, the conceptions of which had hitherto troubled me. I did that in l’Ilusion Identitaire (1996), or the Illusion of Cultural Identities. There I try to understand the relationship between the cultural dimension of life and politics, the historicity of politics, in a non-culturalist way. It has always been my problem: how to think about the relationship of dependence without being a dependency-scholar; how to think about the relationship between culture and politics without being a culturalist—a bit of an ambivalent position I must admit. In the Illusion of Cultural Identities I denounce the concept of ‘cultural identity’ for those of enunciation and imaginaire, political imagination. In the book I explain that we cannot imagine the latter without also understanding material culture and vice versa in relation to processes of political subjectification (a Foucaultian concept).

I expand exactly on that latter point in the next project, Global Subjects. The underlying challenge was: what can a political scientist whose main topic has always been the historicity of the state say about this suddenly popular globalization process which is supposed to weaken or eradicate the state? A contradictio in terminis! I tried to understand globalization in terms of the historical sociology of state formation. Marx, Tocqueville, Max Weber, Otto Hintze, Barrington Moore, Fernand Braudel—globalization was a central preoccupation for them, and yet they conceive of it not in terms of a tension or trade-off between economic globalization and state power. For Braudel, for instance, capitalism is not just the market economy, it is the market economy and state formation. Here we have a huge tradition to interpret what we now call globalization in terms of state formation. Yet this tradition has been completely sidelined by political scientists, especially those working on globalization, and I wanted to reconsider this. I propose to interpret globalization in terms of the Foucauldian governmentality, and more precisely, in terms of subjectification. Subjectivity for Foucault is a meeting point between techniques of domination and techniques of the self, the latter itself being a point of encounter between material culture (consumption) and imaginaire. Subjectification, as an expression of governmentality, is a kind of combinatory between practices in the field of material culture and the repertoire of imaginaire. Both books are comparative and largely built on African social material.

So how does one ‘do’ historically aware analysis of political process?

Let me indicate some avenues of inquiry. The first is this link between empire and nation-state that I mentioned in regards to Western colonial empires or Russia and the Soviet Union. In fact, this is a much more general process, and we know for example how the military defeat of the Habsburg Empire or the Ottoman Empire gave birth to nation-states. By some sort of anachronism—we are somehow trapped in a teleological view of things—we always tend to say that these empires have died by the blows of nationalism; and we often have a very essentialist vision of nationalisms in Central Europe or the Ottoman world. In fact, historians of the Ottoman Empire have shown in recent years that the Ottoman Empire died of military defeat, not of the centrifugal forces of nationalism. This is very clear in the case of the Albanians. The Albanians have developed ‘Albanianism’, the sense of being distinctly Albanian, because they saw their Ottoman protection disintegrate, and because they were caught between the Serbians and the Greeks and had to affirm their particularity. Obviously, one has to nuance this argument for one Ottoman province to another because each province had its own historicity. But I think that this line of inquiry of the historicity of societies requires that we need understand that in the transition from empire to nation-states, empire is the real matrix of the nation-state. And this is one aspect, one facet of this synergy between globalization and nation-state that I mentioned earlier.

There is a second aspect which is very important. This is that we have to arrive at the understanding that the societies that we analyze—and especially the formerly colonized societies—are constituted by a plurality of time-frames [durées hétérogènes], in the Braudellian sense of the term. First there is the longue durée of these societies that colonization has not ended, and there's the medium durée, that is, the colonial moment—or rather, colonial moments plural, because each specific colonial moment has its own historicity. And then there's the most recent, after-colonial, durée. And I say after-colonial rather than post-colonial for reasons that I will come back to. Now theorists of neoliberal economic globalization focus solely on the short durée of after perhaps 1980, while neoliberal IR theorists focus on the post-1989 world to argue for an essentialist understanding of a new—flat?—world. This for me is denying that exact historicity of societies (the longer durées), which lends significance to whatever short-term phenomenon might occupy a central spot in popular cultural preoccupation. Globalization, in the same vein, is an event that has been taking place in the concatenation between the 19^th and 20^th centuries, an event that has always involved both the universalization of the nation-state and the capitalist economy.

With regards to these different time frames, we need to develop the theoretial tools to apprehend the way these different durées are constituted and the effects of conquest of nations from one period to another. You can not get away with simply saying that there is a kind of pre-colonial past which overdetermines, in the historicist meaning of the word, the medium, colonial, and recent, after-colonial durées. Things are much more complicated, because long-term tendencies have themselves been reshaped and refashioned by events of the middle- and short-term. It constitutes a dialogical effect in the sense in which Bakhtin would use the term, a dialogical effect of which the invention of tradition, in the way in which Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger understand it, are a manifestation. We clearly see how the invention of tradition, a tradition which is sometimes said to be perfect, was the result of a joint venture between the orientalism of western and colonial scholars on the one hand, and the erudite work of literates of the societies militarily occupied by the West. This is most clear in India, Java, and in some way also in Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance in the way Denise Paulme or Marcel Griaule worked with the literates such as for example that of the Dogon. So we can see that in this process of invention of tradition, there is a kind of synergy and dialogical relationship between the long and medium durée—the colonial—and of course Africanism, the studies that do nothing but prolong, and perhaps scientifically refine, this kind of interaction between different durées.

There might be a third theoretical aspect which would imply that we resume anew the dialectic between Macht and Herrschaft in Max Weber or between hegemony and coercion in Gramsci. These are things I have recently tried to develop, particularly in an article on the use of the whip, that is, the whip and flogging in Sub-Saharan Africa. I think we have somewhat of a simplistic vision of the concept of hegemony in Gramsci, which goes as follows: the more of hegemony, the less coercion, and the more coercion, the less hegemony—a sort of zero-sum game between coercion and hegemony. And I believe that things do not work like that and I tried to show in this article on flogging in Africa how practices of physical coercion—there is nothing more physical than coercion by the whip—can be vectors of hegemony. This theoretical questioning of the relationship between coercion and hegemony is at the heart of the contemporary debate on the colonial and post-colonial, but it is a much more general problem: neoliberal hegemony, for instance, goes hand in hand with the development of highly coercive practices that are evident in the fight against terrorism, with the rehabilitation of torture by Western states and the fight against illegal immigration with all kinds of practices of expulsion. Take for instance the institution or restoration in very westernized countries like Singapore and Malaysia, of flogging as a form of discipline of immigrant labor. So this relationship between coercion and hegemony is more generally visible, also outside the specific context of colonialism. Take for instance the debate that historians of subaltern studies had among themselves: shouldn’t we speak, in the case of British colonialism, about domination without hegemony—which is roughly Guha's thesis—or should we rather speak of a true hegemony in a colonial context of which nationalism is a mere manifestation—which is roughly Chatterjee’s thesis. On the theoretical level, it is this insistence on the historicity of politics, which forms the red thread that weaves together of all my work since my PhD thesis, and which takes me to adopt a highly critical stance vis-à-vis post-colonial theories. I tried to expand on that critical position in the small book Postcolonial studies: an academic carnival.

Last question. What do you think of the relationship between French and American academia? It seems that there is some antagonism sometimes a misunderstanding, or it's another way.

I do not think there is any antagonism. When it does seem to exist, it is often very artificially constructed, sometimes by the Americans, sometimes by the French, but concretely, these worlds are strongly intertwined. It is true that 30 or 50 years ago, French researchers may have read little English, but that’s surely a thing of the past. Most debates that are supposed to be cleaved along national lines between America and France, are actually divided within each of these entities. For example: one can easily say that France is hesitant towards postcolonial studies and interpret this in terms of a cleavage between France and the United States, but in truth, postcolonial studies is criticized both within France and the United States, and there are also French defending postcolonial studies. I think this thinking is a fashion item: this emphasis on the French cultural exception, the provincialism of French universities, but I don’t like it. Moreover, one of the major influential writers in the U.S. is French. Neither can we say that the U.S. is closed towards the French intellectual tradition.

The only thing I want to draw attention to, especially that of English readers, is that there is a tendency at present in the United States, a kind of imperial provincialism. And I am struck by how Americans work more in isolation, and this is a very recent phenomenon, I think largely created by bibliometrics. And now you have people who only cite among themselves, a very curious sort of phenomenon, a phenomenon French authors naturally complain about, but increasingly the British as well. I have British colleagues telling me "you say you are no longer cited, but neither are we." There is a phenomenon of imperial provincialism, which I think is very dangerous for the vitality of social sciences in the United States. But that is fairly new, and I think it has nothing to do with a kind of Franco-American conflict, it's more a perverse effect of bibliometrics and the general evolution of our business. By contrast, the real criticism you can make against social sciences in France, is that they completely lack any knowledge of what their counterparts in other European countries such as Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain are doing.

But we still feel clearly how all of this mediated by translations. For financial reasons, there are increasingly less translations then before. For example, back in the 1980s, the microstoria were immediately translated into French. If today we’d see the same effort in terms of translations from Italian to French, I’m not quite sure. So I think that French social science aren’t too open, essentially for linguistic reasons, towards what people are doing in other European countries. And even more so with regards to cultural or linguistic spaces such as Turkey, Japan and China… Obviously, the specialists in those countries will speak their languages. French historians, for instance, completely ignore the enormous production available on the Ottoman Empire, while the existing body of literature is extremely rich. They rely solely on the body that is available in English, German, or French—but whatever is written in Turkish and not translated into these dominant languages, escapes us. I think in France, the opening towards the English language is complete—but the rest remains more problematic.

Jean-François Bayart is director of studies at the Centre nationale de recherche scientifique and professor of African politics at the Institut d'études politiques in Paris. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including The State in Africa: Politics of the Belly and The Criminalization of the State in Africa.

Related links

Read Bayart’s Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion (African Affairs, 2000) here (pdf)
Read Bayart’s Comparing from Below (Sociétés Politiques Comparées, 2008) here (pdf)
Read Bayart’s Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition? (Public Culture, 2011) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #46: David Lake

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:39:00 +0000

David A. Lake on Declining American Hegemony, Dyadic International Hierarchy, and the Seductiveness of Open Economy Politics

International order is a core preoccupation within International Relations, and the empirical configurations of international power relations have principal objects of study in the U.S. and beyond. Questions of how international hierarchy comes about and is maintained, and how one can understand the role of the U.S. in determining that structure, are subsequently at the heart of the discipline. On both core questions, David A. Lake has made powerful and lasting contributions that both challenge conventional wisdom and engage the most difficult questions. In this thoughtful Talk, David Lake—amongst others—explains how international hierarchy can best be conceptualized, relates this to shifting great power relations and U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and comments on the seductiveness of Open Economy Politics.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge or principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge or in this debate?

I’m not sure there’s a principal debate these days. We’ve moved away from the paradigmatic debates that seemed so central in the 1980s and 1990s, and I actually think that’s a good development for the field. I never found those sorts of existential debates very useful. Are states unitary? Are they rational? Do they pursue wealth? There’s no answer to those types of questions. So, they’re fun to argue about, and you could argue at great length about them, precisely because there’s no definite answer to any of those questions. I think it’s a very productive stage in the development of the discipline to begin moving beyond debates about first principles to address more substantive empirical questions, and that’s where I think we ought to be focusing our ambitions. We should be looking at contingent, mid-level theories that address particular problems and issues in international politics, and trying to develop theories that are tailored to the specific problems we are trying to understand. We should be moving away from some grand theory that is supposed to cover the discipline of international relations, and focusing our energies on building contingent theories that will explain, for instance, global climate change and the lack of cooperation there, human rights compliance, the financial crisis, and so on. There’s no reason to believe there’s going to be a single theory, or a single core set of paradigmatic assumptions, that’s going to apply equally well to all topics. And so, moving to this midlevel range I think is going to be a very productive move within the discipline. This takes us away from these huge challenges, or major debates in the field, down to much more specific debates: What’s the best model to understand this problem? What’s the essence of the political problem that makes environmental cooperation so difficult to achieve, for instance? I think it focuses our attention in a more productive way.

That said, I do think there is a central epistemological cleavage in the field that’s not so easily bridged, or not so easy to go beyond. This divide is characterized in different ways, but one set of labels would be a nomological versus a narrative form of explanation. A nomological form uses the hypothetico-deductive method to state theory in logical form, derive hypotheses with empirical implications, and then test those hypotheses in the most rigorous way possible. Narrative forms of explanation are much more historical and much more sensitive to the conjunctures that arrive simultaneously to produce a particular event that the scholar might be interested in. These are two ways of understanding the world around us, and they’re not easily reconciled. I can’t give you a principled reason why one would be better than the other. I think a lot of it is driven by intuition: What is satisfying to you as scholar? What kind of explanation do you find satisfying in some deep way? I read a lot of history—I read more history than political science to be perfectly honest—and I get a lot out of it. But I don’t find histories satisfying as causal explanations because of all the intricacies. How do you judge one narrative as better than another? The literature on any war is voluminous, for instance, and how you compare narratives of a particular conflict is a very difficult problem for me. My own intuition is that I want to have a general theory that produces a set of hypotheses that can be tested in a more rigorous way. I find nomological explanations more inherently satisfying than narratives. But, that’s a personal taste. I can’t give you some long, principled reason why we should prefer one over the other. With that in mind, this is a divide in the field. It harkens back (most people don’t read it now) to the second great debate in IR between Hedley Bull and J. David Singer in the late 1960s. We’re now in the same debate, forty years later, and we’re tapping into many of the same themes that drove that second debate. We haven’t moved that much beyond the old positions, and I don’t think we will. This is a divide on which different people will come down in different ways.

So, is that a great debate? Is that a principal challenge? No, I just think we need to learn to respect each other on both sides of this divide and find value in what different scholars do, even if you or anyone else doesn’t find one epistemology wholly satisfying. I think we have this epistemological debate, and that’s a challenge, but in terms of grand theories I’m glad to see we’ve moved away from that.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I don’t like the term “arrived!” It’s not quite accurate, in the sense that one does not arrive, instead you evolve, you muddle through, you get to a particular understanding of the world. I like to think I have some distance to go before I’ve arrived anywhere, so we’ll punt on the concept of arrival. I take this as a question about how I came to focus upon hierarchy in international relations, which we’ll talk about in more detail later I gather. I’ve always been interested in questions of international order. That’s a substantive theme that runs through most of what I’ve done: How it arises? What makes it stable? Why does it collapse? When I was in college and grad school in the mid-1970s, living through the so-called crises of the 1970s, I started thinking hard about macroeconomic policy coordination and inflation. As I was moving towards the dissertation, I got taken pretty heavily by Hegemonic Stability Theory (HST, pdf). I have always had this ambivalent relationship with HST, part of my ambition was to clarify its logic, re-found it upon more rigorous, deductive terms. But at the same time, I was always a bit of an outsider, or critic, of the theory, because many of its intuitive propositions were actually not quite correct. As it turned out, HST was not a particularly fruitful path for any of us to have been going down.

The turning point from that general interest to beginning to think about hierarchy was probably more in the mid-1980s, when I was reading a couple of things in close proximity to each other. One was Richard Ashley’s “Poverty of Neorealism” (read here, pdf) (which many people might find surprising). However, it was a decisive intellectual piece in my own development, as it took mainstream IR theory at the time to task for not having a theory of the state. Almost side by side with that, when I was teaching at UCLA, we had a wonderful political economy reading group that used to meet every Tuesday for lunch and we spent some time reading Oliver Williamson’s The Economic Institutions of Capitalism on markets and hierarchy (read chapter one here, pdf). It stimulated me to think about hierarchy and political authority in different ways than I previously understood them: Here’s a completely different theoretical approach to these issues that had not at the time come into political science very deeply. Reading those two pieces in a relatively short period of time sort of sucked me down the rabbit hole and sent me back to the old literatures on imperialism, sovereignty, and state formation that had not been on the IR reading list for a while. I began to think about Why is the world organized politically in the way that it is? That was a huge topic that I was never going to get my mind around, so instead I pulled one thread out of that, which was to focus on international hierarchy, opening up the state as a sovereign unit and beginning to look for authority relations between states.

I’ve now done two different books on international hierarchy. One was the Entangling Relations book that I published in 1999, which was very Williamsonian in approach. It was a theory of variations in hierarchy, and drew pretty heavily on his work on opportunism and governance costs to explain how countries organize their relations with one another. I thought I was done with that until the Iraq war. In the run up to the war, the main topic/question—the word—that was on many people’s lips was legitimacy. How was the U.S. going to maintain its legitimacy if it acts alone? If it ignores the UN? What puzzled me about that was everyone was talking in terms of legitimacy, but very few of us in IR theory had written anything extensive on legitimacy at the international level. Constructivists had dipped their feet into that pond, but it was more the legitimacy of norms, the way norm entrepreneurs could legitimate particular values and diffuse them throughout the international system. But the question of the legitimacy of state policy at the international level had not been a central topic, so I wanted to think about legitimacy in the context of these hierarchical relationships that I had written about in the Entangling Relations book. That led me to a much more social conception of hierarchy. The Entangling Relations book is very economistic, drawing its intellectual foundations out of economics rather than sociology. Hierarchy in International Relations, published in 2009 (2006 manuscript of the full book here, pdf), is much more framed around a social view of authority, wherein both ruled and rule have to understand the relationship that they’ve entered into. So, in terms of where I am now, I describe it as a much more social view of hierarchy than what I had ten years ago, and that really grew out of trying to think hard about this issue about what makes something legitimate. What do we mean by the concept of legitimacy?

Now I want to stress that when I theorize legitimacy in a more social way, it’s social without ideas. This is a crucial difference. At heart I'm still a materialist. It’s the old Marxist in me! Back in my undergraduate days, when I first began thinking about political problems, the first tool in the toolbox I pulled out is: “what is the individual, or group, interest here?” And those interests are largely defined by the material structure. My intuition about politics is that people pursue their material interests pretty well. They know their material interests and how to structure their environment to bring about the realization of those material interests. So the struggle for me was coming to a position where I could understand legitimate authority as a social phenomenon, but still ground it in a view of politics that is strategic, materialist, and largely rationalist. Marrying those two up was the difficult part in trying to bring legitimacy into the theory of international hierarchy in a useful way.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR?

Everyone comes to IR with a different set of interests and different backgrounds. What I think a student needs is first and foremost a sense of curiosity, a deep desire to know why the world works the way it does. If you have that, then everything flows from it. Some people come in with a pre-existing theoretical commitment of some kind or another, and this inhibits their intellectual development. Foremost, come in with a profound sense of curiosity.

The second thing I think students need to have is a deep knowledge of history. I think of myself as a theorist, and most of my recent work uses large-n quantitative methods, but I still fervently believe that all our work needs to be disciplined by a knowledge and understanding of history. You need to discipline your theory: Does this make sense in the world that I know? If you find a relationship that jumps out at you as statistically significant, that doesn't mean that it is right. You still have to say: “Does this relationship or action fit with my understanding of this country's policies, with this particular historical period that I'm looking at?” An historical perspective is missing particularly, I think, in how we are training our graduate students these days.

Further, students should be able to work at a theoretical level, typically formal theory. A new emphasis these days is on agent-based modeling, which is a useful platform that hasn't been explored in IR as much as it could be. But you have to have some set of theoretical skills. You also need a working knowledge of statistical methods, if only to understand the work being published in the field, and certainly the ability to use it in appropriate ways in your own research. The final thing I think all good students should know is something about research design. That is the underdeveloped part of IR these days. Many other parts of political science have moved forward and developed a set of research designs that can give you greater leverage over causal inference, and we in IR are not exploiting these as much as we should. So, if students want to develop a skill set, a greatly undeveloped area is research design.

Let's talk about your more recent work in hierarchy. You're asking students of IR to challenge the older formal-legal model that says legitimate authority resides inside the state, whereas outside the state there is no legitimate authority, and is therefore anarchical. You claim we should see relations among actors as predicated along a continuum of relational authority. I was hoping you could talk about how this proposal alters the way that students should understand world politics.

This is a good question to ask about my work on hierarchy. First, I think that this traditional approach, this way of thinking about variations of hierarchy in the international system, really negates the focus on world politics itself. It suggests that world politics really isn't a separate area of inquiry, but is part and parcel of politics in general. There are elements of hierarchy in international relations, and this dissolves the divide between domestic and international politics. Once you open up that door and start to walk through it, the difference between these arenas really sort of blur together. The same processes that give us domestic politics in these sort of “more hierarchical” systems should be found in international politics. Not necessarily in the same way, but they can be modified depending on other variables in the environment; we want to look for more subtle variations than we have in the past. At the same time, it challenges scholars who work on domestic politics. What makes hierarchy stick within a country? We take for granted that it’s the constitution. The constitution, however, is nothing more than an anarchic agreement, right? Who enforces the constitution? Internationally nobody, and all of the parties are bound to the constitution only by the extent by which they accept its rules. On both sides it tears apart that dividing line between what used to be understood as domestic politics and international politics.

The other way an understanding of hierarchy affects the way we think about world politics is that sovereignty becomes a variable. All recognized states today possess some quality or quantity of sovereignty, but it varies quite dramatically and, I think, in rather unexpected ways. The more issues a state regulates, the greater its sovereignty. The more issues one state regulates in another state, then the more hierarchical the relationship. This becomes a continuum, not just a single condition that we assume is absolute, and it changes the old way by which we think about sovereignty.

Finally, it opens up the question about how these variations matter: How do they matter for policy? How do they help us explain IR? The variations are quite important. In Hierarchy in International Relations, I tried to show that subordinate states spend less on defense, they trade more with other subordinate states, they are more likely to join the dominate state in multilateral coalitions, and so on. Dominant states, in turn, are more likely to come to the aid of subordinates in a crisis, they are less likely to abuse the authority that they have been granted. Hierarchy creates a very different dynamic in relations between states and within the system that we haven't appreciated in the past.

Where in contemporary international politics do you see a lot of relational authority and where do you see areas that are still on the anarchical side of that spectrum?

I think that we have to recognize that international politics isn't all of one piece. Just to continue the previous point, it's not an anarchic or a hierarchic system, but actually a variegated tapestry of varying relationships. There are hierarchical relationships out there—the United States and Central America is a paradigmatic case. Russia and some of the states of the former Soviet Union is another. But at the same time, there are lots of relationships between states that are essentially anarchic. Relations between the US and China today, for instance, are in a condition of pure anarchy. As I've tried to operationalize hierarchy, the U.S today probably has some degree of hierarchy over roughly half of the states in the world. These are clustered mostly in Central and Latin America, Europe and Northeast Asia, and with some scattered examples in the Middle East. There is tremendous regional clustering to these patterns, even though theoretically I treat them as dyads. This means that with half the countries in the world, the U.S. has relationships that are at least partly hierarchic. The other half of these relationships are still essentially anarchic, and this includes relations with many of the non-European great powers, such as Russia, China, and the BRICs more generally. A lot of what we think we know about international politics is still relevant to these anarchic relationships. We still expect relations between the US and China and the US and the BRICs to be characterized by self-help, balancing, the difficulty of making credible commitments, and all of the things we traditionally think follow from anarchy. But, in more hierarchical relationships, the nature of politics and the policies that countries adopt within those relationships are quite different. They are not so dependent on self-help, balancing, and all the rest of it. There is a syndrome of policies that follows from hierarchy that we haven't recognized yet, that I think are quite important.

You've talked about hierarchy as a dyadic relation among states, but we can also talk about international organizations and other types of non-state actors as also forging hierarchical relationships.

Most certainly! The concept of international authority and variations in hierarchy generalizes out to other actors. My own interest here, and what I focus on, is a particular kind of international hierarchy, which is state-to-state. The reason why I did that is because in my mind it is the most challenging area to show that there is in fact hierarchy, that there is authority at play. It will still be a contested position, no doubt, but I think it is a bit more intuitive that there are areas of world politics in which authority is wielded by international organizations—certainly in the case of the EU, some issue areas by the UN, particularly international trusteeships and failed states. I think it'll be relatively easy to show that there are elements of hierarchy, authority and legitimacy at play in those relationships. And so I wanted to start with the more difficult area to show that even in relationships between states in a post-colonial/post-imperial world, there are still these authority relationships at play. But certainly, the argument is general. In fact, several of my graduate students—Chad Rector, Kathleen Hancock—have looked at more supranational forms of authority, taking some of these same arguments and extending them to federations. I think we can expand this further and look more generally at patterns of authority by other sorts of actors. I tried to show what that agenda might look like in my ISA Presidential Address (read it here, word doc) on rightful rules. There, I tried to extend some of the arguments I developed on state-to-state hierarchy to supranational organizations and also private authorities, focusing particularly on credit rating agencies.

We've talked about the decline of American hegemony for 40 plus years, but today, the signs of U.S. hegemonic decline are quite pronounced. I was wondering, thinking about your framework, how might the U.S. have to renegotiate its hierarchical exchanges as it continues to decline while the BRICs and the rest of the world rises?

The United States is clearly going to have to renegotiate its hierarchical contracts over time. The core of relational authority, which I develop in the hierarchy book, is the exchange of social order, which is provided by the dominant state in return for compliance from the subordinate state. It is a kind of a contract, an exchange, where the subordinate gives up just enough of its sovereignty and autonomy in order to get the dominate state to provide enough of the social order to make it worthwhile. I think as U.S. power capabilities decline it becomes more difficult for the U.S. to continue to provide the same degree of social order that it did in the past. As the degree of social order declines, it reduces the benefits of the subordinates, so they’re going to be willing to give up less of their sovereignty because they are getting less in return. These relationships will change. There will be a pressure from the subordinates to renegotiate the deal. In turn, I think the U.S. still gets a pretty good bargain from its provision of social order. We benefit from this as well, which is, I think, not sufficiently recognized. As the pressure from the subordinates builds to renegotiate these contracts, the U.S. can redistribute some of these gains back to the subordinates, to keep the degree of hierarchy at the same level in equilibrium. But that will have the effect of reducing the benefits to the average American of providing social order. There will be push back from the taxpayer and the average American for continuing to carry this hegemonic burden. So, it’s going to get squeezed from both sides—from the subordinates who feel they’re getting less protection and want a better deal and from the American taxpayers who are getting less out of the relationship than they did in the past. What this emphasizes is that hierarchy is not a constant, it’s a variable. It’s a dynamic, evolving thing that changes through time, and so what authority is exercised by whom over what is going to change and be tested—it’s being tested now and it will be even more contested in the future. So, this is a very fluid relationship that evolves as the interests, abilities, desires of the parties themselves change over time.

In a way, I’ve come back full circle to a modified HST as I think about these issues. HST was looking at the underlying power capability of states, and I actually think that focusing on structure turned out to be a blind alley we went down there. Thinking about the nature of authority relationships between countries, however, brings us back to the same insights that strong states provide order, subordinate states benefit from that order, and this is the glue that holds it all together. As material capabilities decline, it changes the nature of the hierarchical relationship, so I worry about the long-term consequences, just as we did back in the 1970s in thinking about HST. As American power erodes, the nature of the international order becomes more fragile, more easily contested, and will eventually be scaled back with unknown consequences. I think American leadership has been important in sustaining international order over the last six decades, and as that begins to erode order will become more fragile and problematic. We’ll have to see how that works out.

Let’s talk about Open Economy Politics (OEP). You’ve written about the paradigm itself and given some support to it, while also critiquing it a bit. Why do you think it’s an appealing paradigm, especially for current IPE students?

I find it very amusing to have somehow gotten billed as the spokesperson for OEP. This started when I was asked to write a review essay for the Oxford handbook on the state of the art of IPE (pdf here). That was the genesis. I surveyed the field and, at least in North American IPE, it was pretty clear that there was an emerging approach to thinking about questions of political economy. And so I tried to sketch out what that approach was, how it worked, and what it meant. I went down the road of trying to articulate what OEP is, and have been interpreted as a defender of it. I do not consider most of my own work to be a part of OEP. It takes a much more social view, and I’m much more interested in issues of authority and legitimacy that are outside the approach. So, it’s ironic and somewhat amusing to me to be in the position of defending OEP.

Recognizing the irony, I think it’s a very attractive approach because it allows us to deduce interests from prior economic theories that predict the distributional effects of international economic openness. Interests are the building blocks of all politics, as I know it. How values are allocated authoritatively is the core problem of politics, and so OEP begins from economic theories of the distributional implications of exchange, and then it predicts the interests of this factor or that sector based on those economic theories. The attraction is that it escapes the tautology that lies at the core of most other approaches to thinking about interests. Most of the time when we ask “what is the interest of this actor?” we have to infer it from their behavior. “This group wanted tariffs because it lobbied for them” or “called for them in the public domain.” In all cases, when we look at behavior and try to infer what the interest of the actor is, we’re only seeing the strategy they adopted, not in some sense what they really wanted. You’ll ask for, or lobby for, what you think you can get given the political environment, not for what your real interest is. So, at the core of all these more inductive approaches is a sort of a tautology, particularly if you want to use interests to explain outcomes. Drawing upon economic theory allows us to break the circle, if you will, and say we’re going to assume that the interests of this factor of production are defined by economic theory. From that, we can then say something about what their preferences might be in an issue area. By building off of economic theory, OEP has a rigorous way to deal with the question of interests that I find lacking in most other approaches.

The other advantage of OEP is that it’s proven to be remarkably broad in the range of policies to which it can be applied. It provides a good first cut in explaining trade policy, monetary policy, international financial policy, foreign direct investment, etc. From the same core theory we can predict a lot of policy preferences over many different issues, which is an enormously powerful thing to be able to do. So for me, the attractiveness of the theory is its focus on interests. Within that, it can then build in institutions, international bargaining, and so on. But there’s nothing particularly unique about OEP in terms of understanding that political institutions play a role in aggregating interests and that interstate bargaining occurs within and without institutions. It’s truly this focus on interest that is unique to OEP, and I think it’s greatest contribution.

But, as you said, I have gently critiqued OEP. There’s a lot that can be improved, as it has become clearer and clearer over time that the economic theories that, at one level, make this approach so attractive also limit it. Other things seem to go into the preferences of individuals and groups as they think about trade policy, monetary policy, and so on. Gender and religion matter a lot in individual-level surveys about preferences over foreign economic policies. So, we need to open up and go beyond these economic theories, although I think they’ll still be a good foundational place to start. Also, OEP takes the state of the global economy as exogenous—the world is open. From that exogenous characteristic, then they deduce what the interests of the particular factor/sector will be, but in fact the state of the global economy is a product of what states did in the past, it’s a product of their policies. This makes interests themselves endogenous, something with which OEP has not yet come to grips.

What you’re working on now?

I’m working on a variety of things. I’ve got a book project underway with MatMcCubbins, a former colleague at UCSD, on causal inference and research design in political science, which is why I’m emphasizing that in IR. I have a collaborative project with one of my graduate students, Danielle Jung, on agent-based models of markets, networks, and hierarchy. There we’re trying to study the origins and functions of these three basic forms of social organization. This is inspired by IR and what I’ve done in the past, but we intend this to be a more general model of social interactions.

The next step in the hierarchy project is to begin to think about the domestic politics of hierarchy, particularly in subordinate states. Central to the exchange relationship I was mentioning earlier is the presumption that the subordinate state is made better off as a whole by buying into the social order, and that’s clearly a simplification. As I begin to think about that more deeply, it may well be that the country as a whole may be better off; but it’s certainly the case that different groups in that society are going to benefit to different degrees. And so I’m trying to understand what it means to have a distribution of preferences and gains over the social order. Social orders are hierarchically constructed and are not neutral in their rules. I know I have had a tendency to gloss over this point in my earlier writings, but I’m very aware that social orders are always in the interests of dominant parties. Dominant states write rules that are to their benefit, up to the limit to which they can get support from subordinate states. The content of these rules are going to affect different groups within subordinate societies in different ways, and we can expect to find variation within societies and variation between societies. Establishing a hierarchical relationship with a country with average preferences that are very different and distinct from the dominant state is a more difficult and costly enterprise. The gains from the relationship have to be larger in order to offset those costs. What does that look like? How does that play out? How can we begin to think about this? I suspect how the gains from hierarchy are distributed is an important determinant of the nature of the regime in subordinate country.

Let’s think about the hierarchies that were created after World War II and endured between the U.S. and Western Europe. The U.S. and Western Europe are different and distinct, yet have relatively similar preferences over the nature of the international order. The benefits were very large, so they could buy all groups within Europe into a consensus around an American-led international order. And the relationship with the U.S. was consistent with democracy; the medium voter within subordinate European states could sign on to the system, so to speak. That’s not true in other subordinate countries, particularly if you begin to think about the American effort in Iraq and Afghanistan today. We’re extending a hierarchy over these countries, and it’s not clear that the benefits of hierarchy are very large for anybody. The preferences of these subordinate societies are also very different and distinct from those of the U.S. So, what we’ve done there is take our very limited gains and sought to buy off and keep in power elites that are willing to rule in our name over their countrymen, who may not want to have a hierarchical relationship with the U.S. That sort of relationship is inconsistent with democracy, and the only way to sustain it is through some sort of autocratic rule. To play out the implications of this: how do the benefits vary? How do the preferences of domestic society vary? How does that lead to different hierarchical relationships? Essentially, how do we unpack the subordinate party to these hierarchical relationships?

Whether or not the hierarchies now in place in Iraq and Afghanistan are sustainable over the long run is going to be an interesting question. What is certainly true to my mind is that U.S. domination is not going to be compatible with democratic rule. This puts the U.S. in a real bind. Are we going to support subordinate elites who will comply with the American-led international order, or are we going to back a more democratic movement in these societies, which may be more legitimate on their own terms within their states? This is a real trade-off. Whether or not we can sustain it over the long run is an open question, but it’s pretty clear to me that we will not make a hierarchical relationship compatible with a democratic regime within the subordinate countries of Iraq or Afghanistan.

David A. Lake is the Jerri-Ann and Gary E. Jacobs Professor of Social Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He has published widely in international relations theory and international political economy. Lake's most recent book is Hierarchy in International Relations (2009). In addition to over seventy scholarly articles and chapters, he is the author of Power, Protection, and Free Trade: International Sources of U.S. Commercial Strategy, 1887-1939 (1988) and Entangling Relations: American Foreign Policy in its Century (1999) and co-editor of ten volumes including Politics in the New Hard Times: The Great Recession in Comparative Perspective (2013) and The Credibility of Transnational NGOs: When Virtue is not Enough (2012). He is also a co-author of a comprehensive new textbook on World Politics: Interests, Interactions, and Institutions (2009, second edition 2013). Lake has served as Research Director for International Relations at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (1992-1996 and 2000-2001), co-editor of the journal International Organization (1997-2001), chair of UCSD’s Political Science department (2000-2004), and Associate Dean of Social Sciences at UCSD (2006-2011). He is currently serving as Acting Dean of Social Sciences at UCSD. He is the founding chair of the International Political Economy Society, was Program Co-Chair of the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (2007), and is past President of the International Studies Association (2010-2011). He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984 and taught at UCLA from 1983-1992.

Relevant links

Faculty Profile at theUniversity of California, San Diego
Read Lake’s Open Economy Politics: A Critical Review, (Review of International Organization, 2009) here (pdf)
Read Lake’s International Political Economy: A Maturing Interdiscipline (Prepared for Barry R. Weingast and Donald Wittman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy) here (pdf)
Read Lake’s The New Sovereignty in International Relations (2003, International Studies Review) here (pdf)
Read Lake’s Fair Fights? Evaluating Theories of Democracy and Victory (International Security, 28(1), 2003) here (pdf)
Read Lake’s comment The State and International Relations (Oxford Handbook in International Relations, 2009) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #45: Qin Yaqing

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:14:00 +0000

Qin Yaqing on Rules vs Relations, Drinking Coffee and Tea, and a Chinese Approach to Global Governance

Since the end of the Cold War, IR has been preoccupied with the rise of China, yet most analyses of, and theorizing around, China is the product of western scholars; more generally, IR theory is profoundly biased towards western interests, institutions, and ideas. There are however other conceptions of international relations. Much discussed for instance is the so-called ‘ASEAN way’, the success of which seems to hinge more on relations than on rules. In this Talk, the eminent Chinese IR scholar Qin Yaqing not only expands on the oriental or Chinese approach to IR, but also engages the western bias in IR and, in extension of Chinese values, and argues that any approach to theorizing global governance needs to be first and foremost balanced.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge or principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge or in this debate?

I think in present IR in terms of debate the most important thing for me is whether we should continue this domination by the Western discourse in IR in particular and in the social sciences more generally. The debate worldwide, it seems to me, is moving toward more pluralistic and plural interaction, so that when people talk about theory or theories, culture or cultures, civilization or civilizations, they tend to use more and different approaches, so that we can see that we have so many theories, cultures, civilizations, ideas in the whole edifice of human knowledge, rather than only one. I myself am always against the idea of any debate arriving at the truth; instead it must be plural and pluralistic. In this kind of situation I think Chinese ideas, Chinese cultures, and Chinese narratives can make contributions to the knowledge edifice of IR and the social sciences. So I think this is an important debate to which the Chinese ideas and narratives can contribute. That does not mean that they will replace others, they simply add something new, something non-Western, so that we can enrich the whole knowledge of IR and the social sciences.

Inside China, this debate is also going on as to whether knowledge is universal, whether social theories are universal, or whether they are not that universal and to some degree they are all particular. My argument is that social theories must sustain some level of universality but their origin is local, that is to say, they start from practices of a particular community over a long course of history and are accumulated by actors, agents living this social and cultural setting. This is basically my concept of the social sciences, IR, and knowledge in general. Once we have all these things put together, of course we need some kind of integration, but overall it’s based on the practices of various communities in the world, rather than on only one community.

If you look at the current theoretical debates, you can see some people thinking about IR in a pluralistic way—including some scholars from Europe, the United States and from other countries—many people think this is the right direction, but in practice—in empirical research—the domination by the Western discourse is still very, very strong. Yet as different communities, different narratives can contribute to IR theory, different practices and different narratives can also offer an alternative way of understanding empirical reality. It is true that human beings are in many ways similar, but from different cultures we do have some distinct ways of thinking.

Let me give an example: In my IR work, I put an emphasis on the importance of relationality, and I believe that what the Western dominant theories and paradigms—especially the three paradigms realism, liberalism, and constructivism—miss is that when they discuss IR, they don’t discuss relations: they miss a most important part of it. Mainstream constructivism is a little better, but in its essence it is still very close to rationalism, rationalism in disguise. Rationality is an important concept, and it has encouraged so many research achievements that have developed over three or four hundred years, beginning from Europe; a very systematic framework, with concepts, with definitions, and so on. But this approach doesn’t apply equally everywhere. I believe one can divide societies into two main different types: there are more individual societies and more relational societies. So while rationality is a very interesting and important concept for all societies, it is particularly so for Western society, which seems to me more individualistically oriented. As for Oriental societies, like Confucian societies, it’s more about relations, so I would like to use the concept of relationality at an ontological level. We can see governance more in relational terms, rather than in purely rule terms, as I argue in the article Rule, Rules and Relations. (introduction here, html)

In it, I put forward the idea that rules are very important for governance, rules including international institutions, international regimes and so on, but if you go to other areas, you’ll find examples which cannot be explained by a rationalistic approach. Let me give an example. Over the last few decades, huge transnational firms rose first in Japan to then branch of into Korea and then into China. This practical development forced Asian scholars to focus their attention on relational governance. Unfortunately, this realization has so far been limited to the business management field. In IR, if you discuss individualistic rules and so on, your stress is on the interests, how people can trade off their interests, and how peoples can nurture their interests. But if you go to relational societies, you can observe relational governance; the unit of analysis is no longer individual actors, but relations among them; and the key force is the coordination and the harmonization of relations. So this is the key difference between our different practices. This is an example only.

In my article, I want to show that maybe a more practical way to talk about local governance is the synthetic model of both rules and relations. We cannot avoid using rules, but at the same time, in any culture and in any society, relations are pivotal, too. The difference is that in Oriental societies maybe this is more conspicuous, or more accepted. China has practiced what I term ‘partnership diplomacy,’ which can be traced back to an underlying cultural emphasis on relations. My argument is not to use relational governance to replace rule-based governance, not to displace all the concepts of the already existing IR theory. All these theories provide insights, very interesting and useful insights, but I don’t think that’s enough: there should be pluralism and diversity—that’s the key point of my argument.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I completed my education in Political Science in the United States, so when I went to the United States, basically I knew nothing about IR. When I was in China, my major was English, and I was trained by the United Nations as a simultaneous interpreter—a very different career. Then I went to the United States. I soon found that I like interpretation and translation as a hobby, but I did not want to take it as a career, because I think that it challenges your practical skills, but it doesn’t challenge your thinking. So when I went to the States I decided to study something more theoretically challenging, and I began to study IR. I immediately became a follower of Waltz (Theory Talk #40). My PhD dissertation (and first book) is a quantitative study, using a regressional model combined with hegemonic stability theory, and the whole dissertation relies very much on structural realism, the relative power of different countries and how this works into hegemonic stability. It’s highly positivist, highly quantitative, and highly Waltzian. But before I left the United States, in 1993 or so, I began to read more works in different fields, in IR, in sociology, and also in philosophy. When I came back to China, in the first few years what I did was mainly to introduce Western IR theory to China. That’s where translation came back in: I wrote Chinese introductions to and translations of almost all the major western IR theories.

During this time, I began to participate in East Asian regional integration. Not as a scholar, but as a Track II practitioner, so I attended all these negotiations and talks towards ASEAN, of ASEAN +3, etc. In 2004 I began to be a key figure in NEAT, the Network of East Asian Think Tanks (http://www.neat.org.cn/english/index.php). During this whole process, I realized I found something important when I recognized that the questions raised within the major western IR paradigms are so limited; they are not the questions I found to matter in the practice of East Asian regional integration. So my first paper, in fact, which indicated a turning point for my thinking, was about East Asian regional integration. That was in English, and included in a book edited by Robert Ross and Zhu Feng, where I speak about process-oriented regional integration. I asked a question: Why has East Asia experienced more than 30 years’ peace and economic development? Western IR would have difficulties explaining this. I argued that it is the regional processes that produce dynamics socializing powers and spreading norms. And Wang Zhengyi took that into his textbook as part of Chinese scholars’ thinking about International Political Economy. I think we need to emphasize first that this dynamic is process-oriented; secondly, that it is led by small countries, they set the norms and institutions, and third, that it’s informal: you don’t have treaties, you have only declarations.

This process would either escape or seem flawed to western theoreticians: they use very strong rule-based, rule-oriented governance models, they think East Asian regional institutionalism isn’t integration. Take for instance Joseph Keohane (Theory Talk #9). In a discussion with him, I said ‘Professor Keohane, I think what we see in East Asia is soft institutionalism, it’s informal.’ It’s a very different picture from the institutionalized integration process in Europe, as imagined by Keohane and other people, yet it is a converging or integrating dynamic. So from here, I wondered why it is that East Asian nations have taken a different way. The ASEAN States wanted to set up a kind of binding document, which they called a Code of Conduct on the South China Sea, but after repeated discussion, they added something to it: ‘Declaration on the Code’, to reduce its binding force, to increase its flexibility, and many Western scholars then think this type of regional process is not in fact regional integration.

But I then raise the central question: if you say it’s not regional integration, if you say it’s not regional cooperation, then how can you explain that given the fact that East Asia is so diversified—it’s even more diversified than Europe, especially if you think about the political systems—then why since 1967, when ASEAN first started, there were no wars between its member states? Then came ASEAN +3: despite many disputes, they stuck to this framework without, avoided war with each other, and, even during the period of very tense China-Japanese relations, economic relations continued to do fine. So this I think is very different.

My trajectory was then strongly influenced by reading, firstly, Chinese philosophy and the Chinese ideas about society, and secondly, Western philosophy. The Chinese way stresses informal relations, processes, non-binding consensus: non-binding consensus is part and form of the Chinese concept of tendency, 势shi. So for example all these leaders, they have meetings, they don’t reach binding documents, but they show some consensus, then they create this shi. They believe that within this shi, it is easier to achieve their goal, without the legal precision. In my thinking, I also draw a lot on Western theories but including Chinese and Oriental considerations. I try to find key dynamics underpinning the Chinese way, integrating Oriental ideas and concepts, reinterpreting them in the light of established IR theories and problems. The reinterpretation is based upon a Chinese understanding, a Chinese way of thinking, or a Chinese worldview.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR?

When we designed a new campus, the chief architect asked us to provide him with some ideas about how to design it. I provided a version, which represents my understanding of education. As we also invited international biddings, we needed an English version, and I gave them three G’s.

The first is Global Vision: the Chinese that grow up in IR must have a global vision, rather than a mindset limited only to Chinese affairs.

The second G is Great Learning, from the classical Chinese text, the 大学 Da Xue, or Great Learning. The Da Xue is one of the Six Books of the Confucian tradition. Great Learning means three things, I told the architect: the learning should be significant—it must not be small, mean, and narrowly defined learning; second, according to Confucius, it must be ‘real-world-relevant’ learning, that is, your learning should be to some extent useful for the world; third, learning needs to be inclusive, not exclusive, learning should be a blending of different ideas, different thoughts, like in the Confucian era, you had one hundred contending schools of thought. That is the second G.

The last G stands for ‘Grand Harmony’, which is taken from the major hall of the Forbidden City, which I changed a little bit: it’s called the ‘Great Hall of Harmony’ which I changed into Grand Harmony, so as to avoid repeating the word ‘Great’. It’s a Chinese concept which has been passed on for generations. I understand Harmony 和 he, in IR as the ideal harmony of interstate relations. Western scholars find it very hard to understand this Harmony, so they say it’s an empty word, only an empty slogan. I think for some leaders it’s really empty or utopian, but for Chinese it’s not, because we have all these steps to realize harmony in traditional Chinese society, for example the so-called 君子 junzi, the scholar-gentleman, such as the profound Professor Tu Weiming, and his moral metaphysics. So when I teach my students, in fact I teach a lot of Western theories—but at the same time I encourage students to study Chinese narratives, see what inspiration they can get from it.

These Three G’s are not only academic abstractions but also embedded in practice: for instance, why do the Chinese like to go for mediation, rather than legal procedures? An example from Taiwan: I had a classmate when I was doing my PhD in the United States, he had a car accident which was not his fault at all, and he was required to go to court, but he refused to go. He explained that local court proceedings are usually put on television, and he thought that if other Taiwanese students saw it, they would go back to Taiwan and tell other people, friends and family, they would think he really did something wrong. Chinese, also in Taiwan, usually go to a mediator, through the Local Neighborhood Committee, working it out as friends and neighbors, so as not to go to court. That is still a very common practice in China.

In one of your recent articles, International Society as a Process (pdf), you discuss theoretical challenges that need addressing in order to move beyond the ‘East vs West’ dualism in IR debates. Economic, military and political practice, however, moves ahead at an unrelenting pace according to that same opposition. Do you fear that the pressures of politics may overtake the theoretical discussion, especially within the Chinese scholarly community, and give an advantage to extreme views?

That could be a possibility in the short term, but in the long term I am quite optimistic. Chinese society is very interesting, because since the beginning of the 20th century, the Chinese society has experienced huge and chaotic changes, so now all kinds of ideas prevail. When Yan Fu translated Thomas Huxley’s work, a group of Chinese intellectuals and also many leaders believed that China was so weak because China didn’t follow the Law of the Jungle. That was very attractive during that period of time—they analyzed their own context on the basis of Huxley as follows: that is why all those people, all those reformists failed, why the revolutionaries succeeded—this Law of the Jungle was highly acceptable when the country was in a chaotic situation, was invaded and was so weak among the strong—or certainly felt it was so weak.

The Western culture definitely came into China and became quite influential since the May Fourth Movement. I think our historical experience of an accumulation of revolutions constitutes an important source of China’s modern thinking. Nowadays you see a mixture of both Western and Chinese thinking inside China, and this is in an interesting phenomenon: Chinese society is getting more and more pluralistic, and people are thinking a lot in terms of interests—yet unfortunately, Chinese society is changing so rapidly, that sometimes these interests are not confined and constrained by morality. You have a very strong thirst to satisfy interests, yet at the same time you don’t have a strong moral confinement. China itself is not prepared for such a rapid change, so what is happening could even be dangerous. But at the same time, if the Chinese could manage both domestic and international—but especially domestic relations—they might go through this time of change and reach a more stable period of political and social progress. So I think this is both an interesting and a critical period for China.

In Chinese history, if something lasts for forty or fifty years, that’s not really very special, as Chinese history is so long. In the long run, there are three things that could lead to the reestablishment of Chinese morality. If these three materialize, we could see a very interesting China. The first theme consists of the positive influences of global humanity, including democracy, universal values, and so on. The second theme consists of the positive elements proper to Chinese traditional values, the essence of which I reinterpret in this article: of course the well-known and sometimes problematic Chinese hierarchy is one thing, but another aspect is moral implication—trustfulness, sincerity—good things of Chinese tradition, that’s why this culture still exists after so many centuries. Now third and finally, also very important, is how contemporary Chinese should practice these abstract and ancient principles, global values and traditional Chinese values, how they can put them together. If they fail to combine the two, there can be a lot of problems, but if they can blend them in a good fashion, in a benign way, that could mean a very different future China.

The success of this development surely depends in part on the degree to which such a process, such ideas can be spread and are accepted from outside: China can change as much as it likes—after all, countries around the world are constantly changing—but if a certain rhetoric develops in the West, there is little chance for China to say ‘stop that and watch our approach’.

China cannot stop that, but there are possibilities of intervention and adjustment. Only the other day, I gave a lecture at Renmin University, and one question was whether China should overthrow the International System, or reform it. I told them I am a reformist; definitely you cannot overthrow the current system, for there is a lot of good in it. The precondition for us is that in changing the international system, we need to avoid more disorder. But you need to add and drop some things, because the international system needs reform. Within that framework, you can do a lot, like including the legitimate interests and demands of the emerging powers—a central challenge for international and global governance. So basically you don’t say ‘stop that’ but you want to blend in good things you have in your practices, in your culture, in your narratives and traditions, into the existing international system.

But in changing global governance, there cannot be excessive use of rules, as the west has it. Starting from the principle that we should all depend completely on rules, for instance, wouldn’t work as Chinese society lacks rules. That is not to say it lacks laws: there are so many laws, but many of the laws are useless, because people simply bypass laws. Much rather, they use all kinds of relations to bypass laws, and sometimes people even think this is reasonable. So how to strengthen the enforcement of rules is a big question.

Western societies depend heavily on rules, but there, too, rules aren’t everything, that’s why for instance we talk about ‘corporate cultures’. Why do corporations and businesses develop a specific culture? For although they have many rules, the rules cannot ensure every aspect of their activities. I support the argument that although we have anarchy we do not have chaos. Let me use Rosenau’s book Governance without Government: we don’t have overall government, but we do have rules, we do have governance. Keohane put it this way: even if we don’t have a hegemonic power, we still have international institutions, governance, rules and so on. I think that’s an interesting part of Western theory. Also, Helen Milner wrote, ‘there is no basic qualitative difference between domestic and international society in terms of anarchy.’ It’s only a difference of degrees, not a difference of essence. So if you depend solely on rules, you preclude so many interesting and important ways of doing.

On the other hand, if you depend too much on relations, you’ll have social injustice. So the argument is that you need to combine the two, rules and relations. In fact, in every country, every actor involved in governance, always practices both paths. Businesspeople argue, because they use a lot of economics—transactional cost theory in economics—they say that when you work on a small scale then you depend more on relations. They have done so much fieldwork in Southeast and East Asia, and have found this. But they also argue that once you move on and the business field gets larger and larger, then you must turn to rules, because relations are too costly. Relations when you are small are comparatively less costly. But I don’t agree with the idea of one replacing the other: there must be a point where the two balance each other, because you can never eliminate rules, and you can never eliminate relations, because we are human. For example, this year the United States is coming to attend the East Asia Summit in November 2011 in Bali: the norms here were set by ASEAN, and when ASEAN set the norms they included a lot of Confucian elements. So when the US comes, it must understand that in regional governance here, you have some different practices of governance, which sometimes you have to abide by. You cannot say, ‘OK, let’s use my way of governance to replace your way of governance.’ That would not be practical. So in East Asia, my theory predicts that there will be more and more combinations of Western and Eastern approaches to governance. That could be a testing ground for a synthetic model of governance. The US will come, Russia will come, and perhaps more countries will come, so this will be a fascinating area: how they will come together in terms of governance in East Asia and the Pacific?

Chinese IR scholars, including yourself, regularly quote politicians, especially Deng Xiaoping. Is this to some degree out of deference to your country’s leaders, or because perhaps they themselves are theoreticians, not just decision-makers?

What is most important for me is that they are the decision-makers. When leaders make decisions, consciously or (most of the time) unconsciously, they reflect some of the Chinese culture because they live this culture. That’s for me the most important thing. But usually, for my English articles, I don’t quote them a lot. For example, Deng Xiaoping, the leader of the Communist Party until 1992, got a lot of ideas for his reforms from the West, but also from Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore between 1959 and 1990. Lee Kuan Yew is a very interesting person for having tried to practice some Western ideas, while at the same time holding some East Asian values. He always tried to combine the two, but in his heart he perhaps thinks Chinese philosophy is most useful, once he even said something to the effect that if in Singapore 90% of the population were Chinese, it would be a much better society (Currently, approximately 70% of the population of Singapore is of Chinese ethnicity). Currently Singapore’s policy is to increase China’s influence, not to reduce the proportion of the Chinese in Singaporean society. So these decision-makers reflect some ideas, just like common Chinese people in their everyday behavior. The same is true for me: in my behavior I have a lot of Chinese elements, even though I studied a lot Western theories. For example, I like to drink tea, I enjoy the whole tea ceremony. I like Chinese calligraphy, and I can recite many, many passages of Chinese literature. That is however not to say I dislike coffee, nor the occasional glass of whisky or cognac.

Once I made the opening speech for the Chinese Association of IR and I had been asked to tell them what my approach to IR was, and I said that while much of my reasoning was from the Western theories, the aesthetic spirit is Chinese. I wrote a book together with my wife, a History of American Literature, from the beginnings up to the 20th century. But I also like Chinese literature, and in Chinese literature you can also see very, very beautiful things, so that’s what in my theoretical work I call 审美 shenmei, aesthetics or ‘spiritual beauty’. That part I think I try to get more from the Chinese tradition and narratives. That’s basically what I do. Whether I can be successful or not, that’s a different question, but that’s what I’m doing. The good thing for me is that I don’t have many utilitarian goals; I don’t have to get a career promotion, nothing of that sort. What I want to write, I write.

You tend to be inclined toward the English school of IR. which focuses more on international society than on inter-state relations. Is this as much to do with its approach – international society and institutions – as with its national identity?

First let me give you this background: Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35) and I, we have known each other for many years, and I think I know his ideas fairly well. We have debated and discussed in Jilin, in Britain, in Beijing, and in many other places, and we are good friends. And I admire him very much. But I think that Barry Buzan, deeply in his heart, is very Eurocentric. It doesn’t matter what he says. After I wrote my article International Society as a Process, he wrote me a long comment, and he said that he tried to be a good man, but ended up being a villain. That was a joke, but anyhow.

In the United States, a very close friend of mine is Peter Katzenstein (Theory Talk #15), and between these two excellent scholars, I think that my idea is closer to Peter Katzenstein’s – more plural, more pluralistic. I talk with Peter often, and I think of one thing above all: his understanding of the inter- and intra-civilizational conflict, his idea that any society could go to the extreme, which may go back to his German background. So that tells me, and I’m not quite sure maybe also tells him, that if you always believe in just the One Authority, the One Leader, the One Truth, that would create disaster. Intellectually, it’s the same. So you need to open your eyes to different things and different practices, recognize these things as they are, rather than use dark glasses, or to see the world through your own lens.

Finally, to take a broader view, can one speak of something like a Chinese school of IR, or at least an emerging Chinese school of IR, and how should it be characterized?

Then we come to this question of a Chinese school. I think Western IR theories are already established and influential—even taken for granted!—and Chinese IR theories are almost nothing. So we should change this kind of marginalization. Let the good values of the Chinese culture and tradition become part of IR ideational edifice. If you want to do something like that, change the intellectual status quo, you have to sometimes go to some extreme, so as to at least open up a way for it. Otherwise nobody will pay any attention to Chinese ideas. If you wouldn’t use the label, other people wouldn’t even see them. So you need to use the label. That’s the only reason I use the name ‘Chinese school’. I don’t think it’s entirely correct to use a nation’s name to for an intellectual school, but if one uses it, it is more as a symbol to express something, there is no harm in that. Although there is no obvious coherence let alone unanimity among Chinese IR scholars, it may be necessary at this stage to speak of it in this way.

And what is a Chinese school as an idea? Nobody can use only the resources of your own tradition to establish a school nowadays. You cannot separate yourself like that. That’s why I don’t agree with Professor Zhao Tingyang who claims to draw solely from Chinese traditions. Even his work is not pure in the end! Yet on the other end, I don’t agree with Professor Yan Xuetong either, as I don’t think that IR Theory is always universal. It should attain some degree of universality, but locality, the local practices, are important. The Chinese have debated for over one hundred years the thought 中学为体西学为用 zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong – ‘Chinese learning as the essence, Western learning as the practical means.’ But I am always against that, so I wrote a short article entitled 世界为体全球为用 shijie wei ti, quanqiu wei yong – ‘the world as the essence, the globe as the platform for practice’. This has only been published in Chinese. That is, I continue with my idea of a global vision—even in establishing the Chinese school of IR, you cannot avoid using a lot of things you learn from the Western theorizing, approaches, and their ideas, their concepts, yet at the same time you need a modern, contemporary reinterpretation of traditional Chinese narratives. If you don’t have this, then you continue to be Western. If you have this, then you may add some value to the Western thought. So that’s what I’m thinking about.

Qin Yaqing is Executive Vice President and Professor of International Studies of China Foreign Affairs University; Vice-president of China National Association for International Studies; and China Country Coordinator for the Network of East Asia Think Tanks (NEAT). He was on the resource team for the UN High Panel for Challenges, Threats, and Changes (2003) and worked as Special Assistant to the Chinese Eminent Person, China-ASEAN Eminent Persons Group (2005). He served as member of the editorial board of Global Governance and sits on the international advisory board for the policy analysis series of the West-East Center, USA, and He got his Ph. D. in Political Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA and received training in international economy at the Antwerp University, Belgium. Qin has published extensively, including translated IR classics such as Twenty Years’ Crisis, Social Theory of International Politics (2003), and Perception and Misperception in International Politics (2003).

Related links

Read Yaqing’s Why is there no Chinese IR Theory? (International Relations of the Asia Pacific, 2007) here (pdf)
Read Yaqing’s International Society as Progress (Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2010) here (pdf)
Read Yaqing’s National Identity, Strategic Culture and Security Interests: Three Hypotheses on the Interaction between China and International Society (SIIS Journal, 2003) here (html)
Read Yaqing’s Power, Perception and the Cultural Link (Asian Affairs: An American Review, 2001) here (html)
Lecture by Yaqing on Northeast Asia: Peace or War? (RSIS Distinguished Public Lecture, February 16 2011), audio and video

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #44: Patrick Thaddeus Jackson

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:54:00 +0000

Patrick Jackson about IR as a Science, IR as a Vocation, and IR as a Hard Board

IR is a scientific discipline, but all too often the 'science' in IR is used to discipline. As a result, many less orthodox approaches to inquiry in IR are—especially in the United States—relayed to the sidelines of the field. Mainstream is separated from ‘the rest’ by invoking criteria of scienticity borrowed from such philosophers of science as Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos. Patrick Jackson takes a stake with this tendency by engaging heads-on the philosophy of science underpinning the conduct of inquiry in IR. In this Talk, he—amongst others—discusses the scienticity of IR, explains how seemingly incommensurable conceptions of science in IR can still talk, and how hard a board the vocation of IR should be.

Print version in pdf

What, according to you, is the central challenge or principle debate within IR and what would be your position within this debate or towards that challenge?

There are two answers one can give to this question. First, there’s the empirical observation: what do I think the actual debate is at the moment? And then, second, the question ‘What do I think the debate actually should be?’ And given that the philosophy of science stuff that I’ve been doing is not exactly the central debate, most of my thinking has been about the second answer to that question, particularly since I think that talking more about what we’re not talking about—philosophy of science, methodology broadly understood—will make that first discussion richer and better. In terms of what I think the actual debate is right now, I think the big question in IR at the moment is what makes IR a field? I think that the field has gone in so many different directions, there are so many research topics and so many theoretical controversies, it’s been a lot harder for people to figure out what makes something ‘IR.’ And I’ve noticed this as a book series editor and as a journal editor, as well as just a scholar reading other scholars’ papers. I will often see people saying ‘well, that’s not IR,’ but not being very well able to articulate why.

So the question of exactly how the field is bound together is, I think, a really significant one. Part of the problem is that the question is not being debated within certain sub-fields and academic cabals, and instead we’re getting unsupported assertions. In particular, you don’t get those sort of discussions in more mainstream U.S journals because they are much more interested in just doing technical exercises. And that’s fine, but they’re not posing the bigger question, which is kind of unfortunate.

The two examples that suggest themselves to me most strongly are, on the one hand, you have the school of Open Economy Politics, you have this sort of rationalist study of international and domestic political economy, and in the recent special issue of RIPE they talk about this as the ‘American School of IPE.’ What’s interesting there is that if you look through a lot of that work, you get not only a lot of substantive claims about the economy and the relationship between economics and politics, but you get, even though it’s not normally discussed as such, a very strong commitment to a particular way of studying political economy that involves formalization, quantification where possible, hypothesis testing, a preference for large nomothetic generalizations rather than case-specific configurations—even though that is not logically entailed by an approach to political economy that privileges the self-interested action of more or less rational actors. But the two almost always go together as if they somehow were conjoined, and I find that kind of puzzling. The other example that strikes me is the interesting fact that ‘qualitative methods’ folks in IR are also largely neoclassical realists, as if there was something about a certain kind of neoclassical realism that entailed small-n case studies—and I find that equally bizarre. Not that small-n case studies and neoclassical realism are somehow incompatible, but that they would be so necessarily joined together that somehow the only way to study the state interactions from the neoclassical realist perspective would be to conduct several detailed qualitative case studies…those links don’t often get thematized; they don’t get talked about much.

And so we end up with the idea, and I especially see it among graduate students, if I’m interested in subject X, I have to study it in this way. And I just don’t buy that. Because philosophically I don’t think there is that there is an inevitable and necessary logical connection between object of study and methodological way of studying it. And in fact a lot of the interesting scholarly innovations that we’ve had (not just in IR, but in the sciences in general!) come when people combine theory and methodology in novel ways. But because we don’t talk about this, we end up with a field that is subdivided by topics as if somehow everybody talking about a particular topic had to talk about it in a particular way. It really cuts down the variety of perspectives that we can bring to bear on problems, and it cuts down on the kind of insight that we as a scholarly field can generate, I think.

So I think that’s really the big question: what holds IR together as a field of study? The subordinate question to that—if we have some sense of IR is what is, what are we supposed to be as IR scholars?—isn’t one that we can really ask unless and until we talk more about the relationship between theory and methodology. One of my colleagues recently asked how many articles had there been in International Organization in the last several years about the global financial crisis, and he couldn’t find a single one. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, but that’s a question—should we be interested in this or not? In the work some colleagues and I have done on pop culture and IR, the question is always, this is a big deal globally, Harry Potter sells lots of copies, is this something IR should be interested in? We perpetually wonder about the limits of IR as a field, but we don’t have good or defensible answers.

So that’s kind of the really big question at the moment, which is what does it mean to be doing IR. But that’s the empirical observation about what we are talking about, not my sense of what we should be talking about and how we should be talking about it. And not surprisingly, given the book I just wrote (The Conduct of Inquiry in IR), I think we out to be having a lot more discussions about how we study things, a lot more discussions about methodology, because I feel like a lot of the time what we do when we’re studying world politics is conflate our methodology with our substantive theory in ways that make very little philosophical sense. So what I really think we should be doing is talking about what it means to study things like security or political economy. And that is a debate that’s not actually being conducted; the reason I wrote the book was to foreground that debate to maybe get a start on it.

So, in short, the debate that I think should be the most prominent is a debate about methodology, a debate about diversity, a more focused and philosophically rich debate about what it means to do IR and what it means to be doing IR. That debate is starting to become more common outside the United States. Within the US, there is an increasing emphasis within IR graduate programs just on kind of technical details of how one does certain kinds of research, especially hypothesis-testing. And so this big question of what exactly is IR is not being as profoundly asked, I think, in the United States as it is elsewhere.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?

The hard thing about answering this question is that I’m a relatively middle-class white guy from the United States; I don’t have some kind of extraordinary experience fueling my interest… It’s an old insight about the United States, if you’re a citizen of the US, you can kind of ignore the rest of the world—it’s the privilege of empire or hegemony. So international relations never really had a direct impact on me growing up; the rest of the world was simply out there some place, or it was the place that foreign exchange students and British sci-fi shows like Doctor Who came from. Living in the US, you don’t have to confront the world in quite the same way, particularly not during the time I was growing up, the ‘70s and ‘80s; you didn’t necessarily have Cold War drills where you’re hiding under the desk in case of a nuclear assault, so IR was a distant phenomenon. I didn’t start out with world politics; world politics was kind of a consequence of what I became interested in, which was really diversity of knowledge claims and the encounter with the idea that different people and different groups of people know things differently. And some of that for me came from just seeing the variations within the United States which, from the outside, look all the same. But within the US, there’s a difference between being on the East Coast and being in the Midwest. This struck me as weird! Different things sort of are true in these different places—not necessarily that they contradict each other but it raises the question of translation in interesting ways.

Probably the thing that cemented me in doing IR the most was the fact that while an undergraduate I was a research assistant for a political theory symposium; it was an outfit called the ‘Symposium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy’, run by very Straussian political theorists, and the year that I was the research assistant for it was the year that they were doing an entire sequence on the ‘End of History’ debate sparked by the famous—or infamous—Fukuyama article. And so Fukuyama came in to inaugurate the series and then other people came in, Joseph Cropsey, Richard Rorty, and this guy from Harvard by the name of Sam Huntington. And I had not read any of Huntington’s stuff at this point and what he presented was the working version of what was going to be the Foreign Affairs piece, ‘The Clash of Civilizations? (pdf)’ And I remember listening to him present this and then talking to him about it afterwards and thinking two things simultaneously: On the one hand ‘This is wacky! How can anybody possibly argue that there is one unified western way to do things, or a single Confucian one!’ But then the other thing that occurred to me was, ‘wow, there’s something really interesting about this.’ Not about his formulation, but the fundamental differences which are not as clear-cut as he makes them out to be in the article or in the book…but there is a sort of Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblance’ between things that he puts together in civilizational terms and there’s something profound about that. There’s something fundamental about those issues he identified and how they cut across these state boundaries and other kinds of political arrangements. And I thought, he’s put his finger on something, but I didn’t like his solution at all.

And the other thing that I really liked about what Huntington was doing was that is was broad, it had policy implications—but it wasn’t about that: it was about how we understand the world and how we deal with the fact that, at some level, it’s not all made up of people who see things the same way. In a way, a lot of what I did in my career for the next 10-15 years was to try to figure out a better answer to Huntington’s challenge. My first book is all about the social construction of the notion of Western Civilization and I take apart the idea that civilizations are all discrete. And for me, that’s kind of my backdoor entry into IR. I was never personally concerned with specific substantive issues; for me, IR is a domain in which I can explore certain kinds of philosophical and intellectual issues.

Besides that, I have to mention that the work of Max Weber really had an impact on my understanding of IR. And it’s interesting because my first uses of Weber were actually not as a theorist but as a primary source because I was interested in ways in which different people had conceptualized western civilization and Weber seemed to be one of the important figures in this. But the more I grappled with this formulation, the economic ethics of the world religions and a couple of the different versions of the ‘protestant ethic’ argument, the more I was impressed I was with Weber’s methodological style of singular causal analysis, of trying to explicate case-specific historical configurations rather than being so concerned with nomothetic generalization. And Weber’s way of posing the distinction between science and politics. So when I re-read Weber’s vocation essays in this light, they just kind of floored me. I was like, ‘Wow, someone understood this stuff about the different kinds of callings and the way in which knowledge and practice intersect, and understood this a hundred years ago.’ So I can go back and re-read Weber’s vocation essays and have many, many times.

In addition to Weber, I would say, there’s a little book by a discursive psychologist named John Shotter called Cultural Politics of Everyday Life; it was a book I read in grad school when I was kind of struggling to figure out some way to express myself—I was interested in post-structural critique of the Ashley/Walker variety, but I wasn’t happy about either the full version of that critique or Wendt’s (Theory Talk #3) sublimation of that critique into something that was a little more normal science-y…. And then I read Shotter, and Shotter’s way of talking about the problem of social order and social meaning just absolutely grabbed me. And from Shotter, I went on to read more MacIntyre and Wittgenstein, and they became very important for my way of conceptualizing stuff. It wasn’t until later on that I discovered that Onuf and Kratochwil and Alker were there already, so by the time I really encountered their work it was more like finding unexpected allies than anything else.

In your opinion, what would a student need in order to become a specialist in IR?

Well, I think the first thing they would need would be about scholarship and about academia, because the advice that I always give my students is the same that my wife got when she entered seminary: if you will be happy doing something else, then go do it. Because the extrinsic rewards of being an academic compared to other fields of human endeavor are somewhat ephemeral. We’re not particularly well-paid for our level of education, the work conditions are not as good as they could be in many ways, the workload is odd, you know Weber has that allusion about politics being the strong and slow boring of hard boards and I think scholarship is the even stronger and slower boring of even harder boards! Because you can work all day, all week, all month on something and not get anywhere. I remember Nick Onuf mentioning to me at one point: wash the dishes every evening, because then you can at least say you accomplished something that day. Which I think is great advice! Because I think you need, in order to be able to do this kind of work, that temperament of the longer term, of not being so wrapped up with immediate gratification, because, let’s face it, most of the immediate feedback is negative, because you get things rejected. We’re trained as academics, as scholars, as disciplinary intellectuals, we’re trained to take each other’s arguments apart so most of the exchanges we have are ‘let’s point out flaws in other people’s claims.’ So you really have to focus on the longer term, on the broader horizon. And you have to be okay with that. That’s just not for everyone, and I think the most important prerequisite for being able to survive doing this is that kind of academic vocation—and I use the word ‘vocation’ very deliberately. This is that argument that Weber makes (Pdf), this is the kind of calling that kind of comes on you, and you discover it in yourself. And the parallel to the seminary education is, I think, quite appropriate because seminary is also not for everyone either. And there’s no shame in it, it’s not a good or a bad thing, it’s just—not everybody is content to do these kinds of things, so I think that’s the first thing that one has to grapple with.

But on a more positive, or perhaps less negative, note, I think that probably the most important thing for a budding IR scholar is to look more broadly than whatever the methodological tradition of your own context is: realize that there are these places like China and the IR there doesn’t look like the way you do IR. My colleague Amitav Achyra in one of the earlier Theory Talks (#42) talked about this quite a bit. Although, I think he’s placed more on the substantive diversity of IR across different kinds of polities, whereas for me it’s more about the methodological diversity of what truth is. But I think that these are certainly complementary positions. So I think that what one needs to do to get the intellectual background for this kind of IR is read more broadly, read broadly in history, in sociology and social theory – and be familiar with, at least, the major debates and philosophies of science and what we do and what the implications of that are for how we ought to communicate claims that appear to be contradictory or at least in tension to each other. That’s important stuff.

And then I guess the other thing I would say, if I were designing my ideal PhD training program, I would make sure that people go to actual conferences. There’s nothing quite like the dislocating experience of a conference; the first conference you go to outside your local or national setting, everything is different. Particularly a conference in another country. Even just the basic, basic things like how registration works and how the conference itself is organized is not quite the same thing as you are used to and that’s really interesting. You go, ‘Wow! Wait a minute! I’m in a different place now and this is very strange!’ That feeling of being a little bit outside of one’s self is where I think the interesting scholarly and intellectual insights actually come from. If you’re too comfortable, you’re just reproducing stuff. You don’t want to be comfortable; you want to be challenged.

I think that this existential insecurity is particular for IR, because other fields of scholarly inquiry have a much clearer sense of their own self-identity and their differentiation from other things. The puzzle or the challenge that’s posed in being in those fields is more about dialoguing with an accepted canon or about filling in gaps in existing sets of explanations—it’s a different kind of scientific work where you can do sociology, you can do anthropology without incessantly worrying about what sociology and anthropology are. You can do economics without incessantly worrying about what economics is. It’s a lot harder to do that in IR. It’s interesting because in U.S. Political Science, you can sort of do political science without worrying too much about what political science is as long as you’re basically doing American politics, you’re doing studies of electoral returns and more or less rationalist models of interest bargaining and so on. And then you can basically bracket these sorts of field identity questions. But when you deal with IR, you can’t really ignore it too long because IR purports to be global and it purports to be in that sense universal, so that means there are, by definition, a huge variety of voices. And IR at least globally purports to be interdisciplinary, and that opens an much larger can of worms where other kinds of ways of thinking about things can show up. So I think in order to be able to survive in IR, one also needs to be comfortable with that kind of existential messiness and realize that whatever kind of solution you come to is probably not going to be universally shared by other people who call themselves IR scholars—and you’re probably going to have this discussion of what IR is for the rest of your scholarly career.

Yet for someone interested in theory, this inherent messiness has a positive side as well. One of the things that’s interesting about IR is that so many of the fundamental issues are much closer to the surface; we are still pondering and we are still leaving them open. It’s a lot harder to go into physics and biology and say ‘What is science, anyway?’ because that’s not really a live question. But you go into IR and ‘should we be studying the world scientifically?’ is a very easy question to pose because that’s actually really what William James might call a live concern, that’s actually something that’s really available to us. And that’s a great benefit to be able to engage those kinds of issues. The other great benefit is the fact that, because IR has a set of claims about being global, about being open to the whole world, about basically encompassing everything within itself to some extent, it allows the possibility of thinking some of these big questions that other fields might have a hard time grappling with. So where else can one think about humanity as a whole? Where else can one think about big questions about history and the way in which global politics works itself out, or politics has global effects? There’s not really a lot of other places you can grapple with these really big questions. And I think that’s a huge benefit. The challenge is to hold open the space for that and avoid being dragged into micro-level policy commentary and forsake the soul of what it means to be an IR scholar. So there’s a temptation to forsake that particular calling, and we have to be vigilant in not giving into that temptation.

What separates good IR theory from bad IR theory?

Oh boy, that’s a hard one, and it’s particularly hard because I think the answer varies an awful lot based on how one tries to cash out what theory means—and since that’s not a settled question within IR, there are a plurality of different answers based on what we think theory is for, what we think theory is supposed to do. But let me back off that for a second to answer your question sort of obliquely. The kind of IR theory that I like, the kind of IR theory that speaks to me, is IR theory that has a real sense of the tragic gap between what is intellectually pure on the one hand and what is practically possible and enacted on the other.

I think of politics as a concrete struggle in which actors try out or situate themselves between different types of forces. That to me is what we should have, that to me is what IR theory sort of should be—to try to foreground and inform these sorts of configurational studies of how provisional solutions to thorny perennial questions get worked out in practice. The rather facile generalizations that sometimes pass for IR theory bore me; I’m not too sure what the point of yet another correlation is. I think what’s interesting In IR, in politics, is not the approximate covariation between factors, but the very interesting and unique ways that actors find solutions to things; the way they kind of muddle through and shape and structure—maybe ‘envision’—their worlds.

So I guess that leads into the other thing that I look for in a piece of IR theory: that it leaves space for human creativity and agency. So theory that is too deterministic sort of depresses me, and it depresses me in a kind of Nietzschian way. I am referring here to that line of Nietzsche’s that if there were gods, there would be no freedom… What Nietzsche tries to get at there, is the insight that when we have something completely solid and irrevocable that limited what people could do even in principle, concepts like ‘agency’ and ‘creativity’ would be very problematic, because the fact that there was one limit would spill into others and you would have a situation where you would just have a deterministic set of social relations and that just does not strike me as a particularly useful way to think about things.

And so Nietzsche’s understanding of apparent generality as being imposed by a sort of epistemic will to power captures much better what’s going on with a lot of that stuff. And that’s not a project that I’m particularly interested in… But when I first read Nietzsche, I thought: good theory is leaving space for that kind of creative agency, instead of trying to establish fixed constraints—which is not to say that good theory is indeterminate, but that good theory is about disclosing historical possibilities in their specificity instead of being about erecting untransgressable barriers. And theory that doesn’t do that, regardless of the methodological style in which it’s articulated in, strikes me as problematic.

I think that even a cursory examination of work in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of inquiry suffices to demonstrate that there are multiple different kinds of ways of producing knowledge; and different ways have different standards. There’s no universal answer to what constitutes good theory or good IR scholarship except for certain formal criteria which are the ones that I build into my broad definition of science, things like internal consistency and rigorous connections between premises and conclusions. The idea that a scientific claim has to be public, that it has to be something that not just my own internal introspection, it has to actually be phrased in a way that is common to a relevant group so then that group can engage with it and critique it hopefully for the purpose of improving it in some way. And then science has to be worldly in the specific sense that it has to be about the world, not about things that are kind of trans-worldly and only accessible through contemplation or revelation or something similar. Which is not to say that those things don’t exist and that they are not important—but, you know, the contemplation of higher planes of existence is not really the same thing as trying to make claims about empirical cases of stuff that is, in some sense, measurable or able to be tangibly grasped. (I’m trying to avoid the word ‘observable’ here because there’s such a weird ambiguity about the world ‘observable … critical realists claim there are unobservables, but when you try to break that down they’re actually conflating several different meanings of what it means to observe. The critical realist claim is true for certain kinds of things that are not observable in principle; it’s not true for things that are not observable because we haven’t seen them yet. There’s no special epistemic problem presented by a planet that’s too far away to be seen with the naked eye that can be seen with a telescope; you don’t need a deep theory of unobservable deep structures to talk about that, you have to just say we didn’t have the right tools yet.)

I think that what we end up with is a variety of different kinds of work. Each kind has its own set of criteria for what makes it good. I think that that kind of internal validity is absolutely essential for any kind of social science, but at the same time, you also have to accept the inevitable diversity of claims: they don’t all necessarily go together. I don’t think those claims would contradict each other as much as people schooled in the badly misleading version of Thomas Kuhn we are familiar with in IR would suggest, so I just don’t understand that claim that there’s no way to communicate between perspectives. Donald Davidson made this argument a long time ago: there’s no such thing as a frame of reference in a loose conversational sense because that conversational sense of a conceptual frame of reference is that you have a set of concepts, and somehow they’re self-contained. So my set of concepts exhaustively defines my world and your set of concepts exhaustively defines yours and there’s no overlap. This is bad Kuhn. I have to point it out because it’s kind of silly, and the reason this is silly is because, if I can make a statement in my framework which is well-verified within my frame, and if I can translate those terms into your frame of reference, the claim is still going to be well-verified in your frame of reference. Two scheckels plus two scheckels is still four scheckels, even if you’re not a Babylonian. As long as we can translate, it’s fine. Where things get interesting is when you have untranslateability; when you have ways of worlding that are so different from one another that I can’t take what you’ve said and re-code it in terms that make sense to me.

This is what Thomas Kuhn’s later work is actually all about. He threw out the idea that what he called paradigms were hermetically sealed. But if you actually look back through the history of science, you find these moments of untranslatability (strictly speaking) and zeroing in on those moments is insightful: Aristotle uses the word ‘motion’ in a very different way than modern physicists use ‘motion,’ which doesn’t mean you can’t understand Aristotle, but you can’t understand Aristotle in terms of modern physics… Does that mean in Aristotle’s physics you can fly and in modern physics you can’t? No. It just means that there are statements that you can make in one approach that you cannot make in others, which doesn’t mean such statements are false out of their context, but that they are meaningless out of that context.

I think that happens in the study of IR sometimes: you look at the debates between neo-positivist and critical feminist security scholars about security issues and often those debates look to me to revolve around fundamentally different understandings of different concepts and terms, not that they’re contradicting each other, but that there’s a certain incomprehensibility. A fundamental ‘Wow, that statement you just made doesn’t make any sense to me.’ And those are the best and most valuable moments because if I as a scholar wanted push the limits of knowledge I need to look for a moment where a piece of work is well-valued within a different research tradition but I can’t make heads or tails of it… well, that’s fascinating! I think if we’re really precise about what the different standards are, that’s what gives us as a scholarly community the ability to really zero in on those moments, those points of tension. There’s a way in which the whole scholarly field, organized by having diverse modes of inquiry and everybody equally sharp about what their precise understandings of validity are, allows us as a whole to disclose those moments, those sticking points, those kinds of fundamental dillematic commonplaces that we keep wrestling with but we don’t come to a firm or final understanding of.

And that’s, I think, where some of the most interesting scholarship comes from, is the attempt to translate, knowing you’re going to translate badly, to fail in the attempt to translate perfectly and therefore gain insight (a perfect translation, after all, would just preserve the original insight, not add to it). Paul Feyerabend commented that you need ‘disproven theories’ floating around because otherwise, how are you going to come up with discrepant evidence against which other things can be evaluated? You need to have this mass of discredited stuff. I think that’s true. So I guess—it’s a long answer—but my sort of final answer is to what makes a really good theory is theory that acknowledges the limitation of its own standards and tries to push beyond those standards without losing sight of the demand for internal rigor. I think that’s the most interesting work, to play around in that tension and say ‘What sense can I make of this’ without throwing your hands up and saying ‘there are no standards.’ Trying to mediate between the tension between those two claims is what makes for interesting theory, in IR or otherwise.

In your latest book, you argue in your context of inquiry in IR, you argue that the claim of scientificity has a disciplining function. What do you mean by that?

That kind of disciplining function, which is wrapped up with the word ‘Science’, is… It’s interesting, we see it very rarely in print, which is why I think that the ISQ exchange between Tickner and Keohane (Theory Talk #9) is such a good source for this (read Tickner's response to Keohane here, pdf). Where you more often see it is at the level of dissertation committees and article reviews when articles will come back and the reviewer will say ‘This isn’t science’ or ‘If you want to make a scientific claim, you have to…’ and then promptly elaborate a whole variety of things about hypothesis testing. So the term ‘science’ gets used as a disciplinary commonplace in those situations a lot more often. And it will show up in mission statements and in statements of editorial intent. But I think where it gets mobilized is exactly these moments where in effect, what is being said is, ‘The only way I know how to engage with you is if you do things on my terms. And if you don’t do things on my terms, I don’t have to acknowledge what you’re doing as a legitimate enterprise.’ And it saddens me that that is way ‘science’ gets used—not just in IR, but in the social sciences more generally. Because the whole endeavor of doing science was precisely to be an antidote to ‘You have to do it this way’ due to certain power structures or certain types of traditional standards or whatever, and saying no, we’re not going to do it that way! And the closing up of those potentials by the really firm definition of what it means to be scientific is a disciplinary move that I don’t find particularly healthy. I don’t think we should ever be using a term like ‘science’ as an excuse not to deal with somebody’s work. You want to take somebody’s work and say it has problems, please! Tell me what its problems are! But in the first instance, you should at least read it, you should try to look at it on its own terms, and say ‘What is it actually trying to do? What is the epistemic origin for these claims?’ It may not be your epistemic origin, but what is going on in this article? What are they trying to do? And then, did they do it well? And only afterwards can you ask the question, ‘and is it useful that they did this? What’s the value of this endeavor afterwards?’

I think this is in many ways what was at stake when Weber tried to re-articulate the notion of objectivity in that famous 1904 piece of his that obviously also gets so badly translated into English that people somehow presume that he’s talking about objectivity in the classical sense, when he’s not. Weber’s really arguing in a lot of ways in that piece that there are ways in which we can appreciate the technical correctness of other arguments without buying their substantive core. So I have a set of value orientations and I turn them into an ideal-type and I go forth I use them to do something, but you don’t have to buy my normative commitments in order to appreciate the value of my results.

I feel this a lot when I read Marxist work because I, quite honestly, I just don’t buy the starting point of a lot of Marx class analysis stuff. Part of me not buying the starting point I’m sure has to do with the fact that I’m American and famously, there’s no classes in America, and everybody in America’s middle class. We can sociologize why the notion of class doesn’t grab me, but it’s sort of not relevant for the purposes of this example; the point is it doesn’t. But I can still look at a good piece of class analysis—Van der Pijl’s (Theory Talk #23) analysis of the trans-Atlantic bourgeoisie, for example—and say ‘Wow! There’s a neat set of insights here!’ Then I look at that and go ok, I wouldn’t cash it out that way - I’d probably talk about it more in terms of professional socialization networks and circulation; then I’d reach back to C. Wright Mills and okay, fine! Now I’m in a different place in thinking about this issue which isn’t the same place that the Marxist analysis started, but those insights were only sparked for me if the analysis was good on its own terms, even though I don’t buy its initial terms.

That to me is kind of what the endeavor of social science ought to be about: That we can say ‘I don’t think you should start there but given that you’ve started there, I think you did a good job, and that sparked me thinking about something that you may not necessarily agree with, but give me a minute to take it through my version and I can have an insight and we can sort of talk about the tensions or the possible complementarities between those different types of insights.’ In many ways, what that requires us to think less in terms of persuading of other people and more in terms of generating insight about the world because I’m never going to persuade a committed Marxist, and I’m not going to try. What I’m going to say is, in this instance that you’ve done this, I don’t understand what the analytical value is of the apparatus of class struggle and alienation that you’ve brought to bear on this problem. If you can explain that to me, that’s cool and then I can understand your work, but I’m not going to convince you to give that up because that’s part of what you are.

The great ethnographic insight is that in some sense, the researcher is the research instrument; it’s not just true for people who travel to villages. People who do statistical work, who really do statistical work, have a kind of inner feeling for the rectitude of that work. And if they didn’t, then they wouldn’t do it very well. Just because some methodology is enlightening to you doesn’t mean it’s going to be enlightening to me, and I object to the claim that there is no other way for me to generate any valid insight unless I do it your way. And I think that’s the disciplining use of science, the vague use of science that I wrote the book against—so that we can say ‘No, we can still be scientists.’ And parenthetically, there are IR scholars that aren’t scientists by my definition, and I don’t think they should be run out of town, but I do think that there’s a difference between social science and, say, normative critique of existing social institutions. Which I try to make a case for in the book.

The field of IR is often characterized as composed of a set of Kuhnian paradigms or like Lakatosian research programs (see Theory Talk #32). But that’s a very common part of many of the social sciences and you take stake with that issue. Why?

As I describe in the book, there are two problems that I have. One of them is just a question of technical language. Both Kuhn and Lakatos have some pretty clear criteria in mind for what constitutes a research program or a paradigm; arguably Lakatos’ research program criteria are more clearly spelled out than Kuhn’s, because as I said Kuhn kind of changes his mind as his career goes on. But regardless, even in the first edition of Structureof Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn still has pretty definite understandings of what a paradigm is; it’s just that there are 30 of them or whatever it is… The problem is that none of those criteria actually apply to IR because you need a level of internal consistency and a level of everyday normal science practice that we don’t have. Neither Kuhn nor Lakatos wrote anything designed to make an aspiring science more scientific. There’s a reason their work is mostly about physics; it’s taking an existing science that nobody really doubts the scienticity of or the value of or the insight gained through it, and coming up with transcendental conditions under which it works. Kuhn’s puzzle in SoSR is not how do we be a science; his puzzle is, given the old linear account of progress doesn’t seem to match up with the history of science, how the hell does science work? And then Lakatos’s problem is, given that the old version of scientific progress doesn’t work, but also given that Kuhn’s version of things is oversimplified and causes its own problems, how do we simultaneously have internal diversity of ways of understanding and something like progress? So then you have this ingenious solution of Lakatos’s involving retrospective reconstruction, which is great if you have successes to retroactively reconstruct rationally. The thing about IR (and as far as I know, the first person who made this claim publicly was Fred Chernoff) is that IR doesn’t have this problem! We don’t have outcomes that have to be explained in terms of scientific progress. In physics, airplanes fly and Skype works; in IR we don’t have that. We don’t have the equivalent of airplanes flying and computers working, so we don’t need that apparatus. So I think that part of my objection to it is just on those technical grounds: this is a mis-application of what these guys were up to.

The other problem is the sociological function of paradigm-speak. Because of the way that Kuhn articulates the notion of paradigm and because of the way, especially in SoSR although not in his later work, he sometimes talks about paradigm shifts as incommensurable jumps between two inconsistent things, it opens itself up to a plausible but I think ultimately indefensible mis-reading which would say that to have two different paradigms is to not be able to speak to one another at all. I don’t think that’s actually what Kuhn is saying; I think it’s a lot more subtle than that, having to do with particular terms and contexts that he analyzes later in his career, but the sociological function in the field of IR of the notion of ‘paradigm’ does something very similar to what the notion of ‘science’ does when sort of deployed vaguely, which is to say ‘I don’t have to deal with what you’re saying because it’s different, and I’m doing what I’m doing and it’s ok for me just to do what I do.’ Ok, it’s true, you don’t have to deal with every single argument, but to say that everybody should live in their own little ‘paradigmatic’ boxes doesn’t help anyone. But that’s the way that Kuhn gets deployed a lot: as an excuse for ignoring counterarguments and inconvenient contrary evidence.

So I think my other objection (besides the technical/philosophical one) to the use of ‘paradigm’ and ‘research program’ language in IR is that it further sub-divides the field and relieves us of the awful burden of actually reading work that’s outside of our comfort zone. If I can claim the high ground of ‘I’m just doing normal science within my paradigm,’ I can basically work in a vacuum. The people who say this, of course, tend to be neopositivists and can say things like ‘I don’t have to read Alternatives, I don’t have to read Millennium. They don’t do my paradigm! You can go and do your whatever-it-is over there but I won’t read your stuff, and I sure as hell won’t hire any of you into my department. It will disturb my students greatly if they start trying to do the kind of work that you people do.’ So I think that the real problem—it’s a real problem for students, because most graduate students entering graduate school don’t have a clear enough sense of the intellectual landscape to know exactly what they’re going to be disciplined into in what they choose to study—is that paradigm-speak insulates researchers from one another.

And my two objections are related. There’s the philosophical problem, which is what I try to address in the book by demonstrating that no approach to the producing knowledge is so universally accepted that you would be on solid ground using that approach to knock out everything else and saying this is the only way to do things, particularly but not exclusively in a social science where we lack great accomplishments that have to be explained transcendentally. So nobody can claim the philosophical higher ground. This in turn means that it’s not philosophically legitimate to wall ourselves off into our ‘paradigm’ secure in the notion that eventually we’ll make scientific progress, which in turn means that this language may have a sociological and disciplining function but it doesn’t have a philosophical leg to stand on. Maybe by surfacing it explicitly we can advance a discussion about these things.

I also think it’s deeply problematic because the world faces a huge number of global challenges, and it’s the height of arrogance to assume that a particular approach is going to be sufficient to meet those challenges, particularly when we’re talking about something like the neopositivist analysis of inter-state inter-actions; that’s a particular tool that’s used for particular thing, and it would be a real tragedy if we cut ourselves off from another kind of tool that is out there because we had a diluted understanding or misunderstanding of ‘paradigm’ and said ‘Oh, they’re just working in their tradition, which I can safely ignore because it’s not mine.’

Now, there’s a caveat to this. There’s certainly an awful lot of very good scholarship that ends up just working within its particular tradition and I don’t want to say that that work is not valuable; it is. But the expectation that that should be the kind of work that we all aspire to is what reduces our scholarship—I can put it in more grandiose, almost theological terms, as I do in the conclusion of the book, but I won’t, I’ll just put it in personal terms—it’s boring. I’m struck by Robert Keohane talking a little bit about how he's looking for things that are more interesting. Robert Keohane, the central figure in academic IR for the past several decades. A lot of the really specific detail-oriented work that fleshes out of some particular hole of well-established way of doing things, that can be useful technical work, but it’s not the most exciting stuff and it’s … to say that somehow that’s the kind of work we should all be doing really means that it’s a lot harder to generate any kind of knowledge that dialogues with the wider world in any way. So, I really worry that either the disciplining of 'science', vaguely understood, or the disciplining of 'my paradigm', is going to cut that stuff down.

When I teach, certainly when I teach undergraduates, I’ll talk about ‘isms’, I’ll talk about realism and liberalism and constructivism and feminism and post-colonialism, because it’s a useful pedagogical move: you say ‘Ok, here’s some sort of core assumptions about what these arguments mean and there’s a lot of stuff in the debate around the edges, but this is the basic stuff that people adhere to, albeit not perfectly.’ But that’s only appropriate for people’s first entry into the dialogue. I don’t know that that’s the best way for us to organize our actual scholarship. Those kinds of simple theoretical typologies strike me as a pedagogical exercise that you pass through and say okay, this theoretical tradition is helpful, but there’s no reason to stay over here in this box exclusively and if my insights pass over there, I have to go follow where the investigation leads. Weber has this great claim in ‘Science as a Vocation’ that to do science is ‘to serve only the thing,’ to only be true to the subject-matter itself. And it leads you to all sorts of directions and you have to trust yourself and go with that, no matter which kind of boundaries you end up traipsing over. The attempt to gate-keep and hold these things intact strikes me as really short-sighted: philosophically illegitimate, pedagogically harmful, and stifling to thinking.

So, to sum up: If IR is about real-world events out there, traditionally the relations between states, then why should we pay attention to philosophy?

Well, I think that the thing that philosophy does for us—and by ‘us’ I mean IR scholars broadly understand, those of us who are in some sense interested in global affairs—we’re interested in producing knowledge of global affairs that is in some sense valid. I think that’s a really important qualifier because there are lots of people that are interested in global affairs primarily so they can go out and change it. I have lots of students like this, who want to study (for example) what’s going on in sub-Saharan Africa so they can go out and improve people’s lives, which is excellent work and they should go do that, and if they do it well they’ll make an excellent near-term impact. But if they’re interested in knowing things and generating knowledge about global politics that is in some sense valid, that’s another matter. A lot of things are packed into the phrase ‘in some sense’ because there’s diversity in things can be valid. And I don’t think this is what philosophers find useful in the philosophy of science. What the social sciences should find useful in the philosophy of science, or in philosophy in general, is that the exercise of elaborating the logical structures and the preconditions of the assumptions of particular modes of knowing can provide some useful clarity for those of us that are mostly engaged in our everyday work in grappling with the stuff of the social world. Philosophy allows you to pull back from that stuff a little bit, reflect on exactly what it is that you’re doing. There’s a way in which the study of philosophy or the reading of philosophy can serve as a moment for methodological and theoretical reflection.

Now I know this is not what philosophers of science think they’re doing, because they’re not particularly interested in providing moments of reflection for IR scholars or other social scientists. Ok, fine, but we’re not in philosophy, we’re here in IR, so we have to just sort of operate from where we are. On that basis I think that it’s useful to read philosophy—it’s useful for any sort of social-scientific field, but it’s particularly useful for IR to have that kind of moment of reflexivity—methodological reflection—precisely because in our very subject matter itself, which is global, there are diverse answers to those questions. This is not to say that we necessarily have to always adopt the perspective of people we study or to say that we have to ignore the perspective of people we’re studying, but it’s to say that we should need to probably confront the question of what we’re doing when we make sense of the world and how it relates to what the people we’re studying are doing in making sense of the world.

This is not a question that has to be posed quite as rigidly in other fields: most physicists do not spend an awful lot of time worrying about what quarks and gluons think they’re doing. Some philosophers do: Alfred North Whitehead did, Karen Barad does in her feminist approach to physics. But for the most part, they don’t do that, but we do; it’s a more pressing issue for us.

Richard Feynman has a great line that goes something like ‘Scientists need philosophy of science like birds need ornothologists’ —and he’s right. Perhaps scientists don’t need to know the philosophical criteria of what they’re doing, they just kind of need to do what they’re doing. But the difference is, as far as we know, birds don’t carry around a theory of ornithology in their heads or in their praxis. They might, but we don’t know that. But we do however know that those of us in the social sciences do carry a philosophy of science either in our heads or our practices (arguably natural scientists do too, but that’s material for a longer discussion elsewhere). More likely than not, given the way that the field works now where most people are not trained in philosophy of science, more likely than not we carry those things tacitly in our practices. And I think there’s value to making those tacit assumptions explicit so we can reflect on them and say exactly what their value is.

But it is definitely the case, at least for me, I have no interest in turning IR into a field which is all about philosophy and philosophizing about world politics. We’re social scientists, we’re making claims about the world. I think philosophy is useful toward that end and helping us figure out what we mean by ‘claims’ ‘about’ ‘the world’, about all the terms of those claims about the world… and what it means to make a good claim. This is all too often talked about as if we’re a nascent science, as though it’s too bad we have to wrestle these issues all the time. Actually, I think it’s a benefit: this stuff is closer to the surface, we haven’t resolved it yet. We have the great privilege of getting to wrestle with these issues, unlike within the strains of academic philosophy in which primarily what you have to do is relate what you’re doing to what other people wrote and compare footnotes to footnotes. We get to relate them to actual ongoing empirical pieces of research, which is pretty damn exciting! There, I think, that’s one of the great benefits of doing IR: precisely the fact that those issues are closer to the surface. They’re still live, possible things we get to grapple with. If I wanted to do philosophy, my career would have been very different. But I wanted to use philosophy to inform an endeavor of knowledge-production, which makes IR a great place to dwell.

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson is currently Director of the General Education Program, and Associate Professor of International Relations in the School of International Service, at the American University in Washington, DC. He previously taught at Columbia University and New York University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University in 2001. In 2003-4, he served as President of the International Studies Association-Northeast; in 2012-2013, he will do so again. He is presently Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Relations and Development, and Series Editor of the University of Michigan Press' book series Configurations: Critical Studies of World Politics.

Related links

Faculty Profile at American-U
Read Jackson's How to think about civilizations? (in 'Civilizations in World Politics, 2009) here (pdf)
Read Jackson's article What the philosophy of science is not good for here (html)
Read Jackson's Critical Humanism: Theory, Methodology, and Battlestar Galactica (2011) here (pdf)
Read Jackson's Social Science as Vocation here (pdf)
Check out The Duck of Minerva, a blog to which Jackson frequently contributes

Print version in pdf

Theory Talk #43 - Saskia Sassen

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 10:06:00 +0000

Saskia Sassen on Sociology, Globalization, and the Re-shaping of the National

Globalization has been a key feature of contemporary IR, but nobody has challenged our understandings and misunderstandings of that contested concept as eloquently as sociologist Saskia Sassen has. For over twenty years, she has contributed to IR theorizing by vigorously arguing for a sociological view on the shifting relations between the national and the global. In this Talk, Sassen, amongst others, discusses global cities and the differences that sociological approaches to IR make, and elaborates on the constant and multiple re-articulations of the national and the global.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

Good question…but to answer it, I need to expand it to include much more than IR. IR is one formalized knowledge vector. There are others. I found it interesting to read the Theory Talks interview with Keohane (Theory Talk #9): Here is a foundational IR theorist who tells us also that he needs a broader framing and, in that spirit, proceeds to speak of global politics. Wendt (Theory Talk #3) also agrees. I think there is a historical reality out there that is pushing us to recognize the need for more encompassing frameworks.

IR, narrowly defined, can keep producing good work that adds to our knowledge. But eventually it will be dealing with a smaller and smaller segment of global politics. At one time –the height of the modern inter-state system—the 20^th century-IR captured most of what there was to be said with regards to formal international politics, especially in terms of formal actors and institutions.

That no longer holds. The domain of global politics has expanded to include a growing diversity of other actors and vectors –it now includes, besides the familiar actors, such diverse entities/ideas/manifestations as the politics of Tahir Square in Cairo, the informal jurisdictions that the Somali pirates have carved out, and the power of global financial institutions over national state policy even in the most powerful states. Indeed, Keohane and Joseph Nye (Theory Talk #7) wrote an early book on transnational relations, which they defined as international processes that are not government-to-government relations—such as the activities of multinational corporations or international tourism. I was at the center at the time, at Harvard, and added irregular international migration as a section of all transnational migrations.

In my own work, I have sought to generate disciplined concepts and analytic strategies to capture this transformation. Pivotal in my research is that that the global—whether an institution, a process, a discursive practice, or an imaginary concept—both transcends the exclusive framing of national states, and also partly emerges and operates within that framing. Seen this way, globalization is more than its common representation as growing interdependence and formation of self-evidently global institutions. It also includes sub-national spaces, processes, and actors (as I have argued in this article). The global gets partly structured inside the national—and this process entails a denationalizing of what was historically constructed as national.

Denationalization, by which I refer to this fact that much of the global gets constituted partly inside the national, has three consequences. First, it means that much of the global is dressed in the clothing of the national, even though it is not national. The national is gradually becoming a different condition from what it used to be up until about 20 years ago. Second, this process of denationalization can coexist with ideological nationalisms; in fact, the insecurity it brings about might well fuel passionate nationalisms. But, in the meantime, history continues to re-position the meaning of the national in the deep structures of society and political systems. Third, understanding the global must then focus in greater detail on what happens inside the national. It is not only about counting the number of global firms and foreign investors. Immigrant communities and high-level foreign professionals, and international artists are also part of this process.

This is largely absent from the most widely accepted definitions of globalization. I agree with that definition in many ways, but I think it leaves out those critical parts of the global that get constituted inside the national—and thereby leaves out the consequences of this for the state, for citizens, for norm-making, for the definition of what is “national security,” and further, for what is membership in the “nation”. Moreover, it leaves out the potential internationalism that is brewing deep inside the national, no matter the ideological nationalism.

In this context, IR is one component of global politics; it leaves out multiple, less formal international processes as well as the creation of global politics inside nation-states.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I have come to recognize that one succinct way of understanding my trajectory as a scholar/researcher is that from the beginning, when confronted with a powerful explanation, I was immediately on alert, and wanted to understand what was actually being obscured/hidden by that explanation. So, when the study of globalization began in the 1980s and then really took off in the 1990s, I found myself interested in, and researching, the counter-intuitive elements that one can find in that or any complex other situation.

You can see this in what I think of as my three “big” books, each of which took me about 8 to 10 years (that is why I love doing little books; they keep me sane). In the first (The Mobility of Labor and Capital, 1988), I went against established notions that foreign investment in the global south would retain potential emigrants. In my research I found that it can actually raise the likelihood of emigration if it goes to labor-intensive sectors and/or devastates the traditional economy. In the second (The Global City, 1991), I went against established notions at the time that the global economy transcends territory and its associated regulatory umbrellas; in my research, I found that leading global firms, far from being placeless, need very specific territorial insertions, and that this need is sharpest in the case of highly globalized and digitized sectors such as finance.

In the third (Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton University Press, 2008), I went against established notions about globlization, e.g., that the stronger the global, the weaker the national state. In my research, I found that today’s foundational transformations consist not only of globalizing dynamics but also of denationalizing dynamics. By the latter, I refer to a) in my reading, much of the global gets constituted inside the national, b) it does so at a price: it denationalizes the national as historically constructed. This denationalizing can happen in economic, criminal, governmental, cultural, subjective, and many other domains. I also think that even with these developments, the national continues to be probably the most significant and encompassing condition, but that the imbrications of global, national, and denationalized will proliferate and begin to produce overall dynamics we have not yet seen.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

I hear two very different questions here. To become an IR person… On that one, I would say you have enough IR people answering that question in Theory Talks—they probably have said it all, though let me add that some IR scholarship is far more rigid or strict; I would argue that IR is precisely that which global politics is not. I can see this in my own research.

What it takes if you are doing my kind of research is probably far less familiar than standard IR. Let me develop this idea. Rather than national states and the inter-state system, you focus on transversal flows that cut across existing units. For instance, I have developed and constructed empirically emergent geographies of centrality, especially among global cities that connect across old divides. Another instance of these transversal processes are operational spaces, for instance WTO law allows firms to bypass national states and deal directly with local jurisdictions—that is a constructed operational space for global firms. WTO also gives formal, cross-border, portable rights to professionals hired through WTO, which are recognized in all signatory countries—that is another operational space. One of the aspects I emphasize in my work is how national governments have been critical for the making of a global operational space for firms: there is no such legal persona as global firm, but there is that operational space that allows them to conduct themselves as if they were a global firm established as such in law (that is, as a legal persona). I only mentioned economic actors and spaces here, but this also holds for other domains, especially civil society and the new types of cross border arrangements amongst various groups of states that have proliferated over the last 15 years—anti-terrorism agreements, drug trade policing agreements, etc.

To make that explicit, doing this kind of research requires going beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries: you need to mix not just the empirical information about technologies, jurisdictions, transnational firms, the specific national laws of countries governing the diverse domains you might be covering –from economy to civil society. Beyond the empirical, which in a way is not so difficult—though it takes a lot of time—there is the challenge of developing conceptual framings that allow you to accommodate these fragments from diverse disciplines. In my experience one has to construct a kind of conceptual architecture that encompasses (as does a building!) many diverse elements. The critical challenge here is the organizing logic.

With its bias towards the state, cities are not a widely studied unit of analysis in IR. What’s the big ‘selling point’ of cities; that is, how do cities help us understand dynamics such as globalization in ways that studying states can’t?

The city can make concrete what can otherwise remain rather elusive. For instance, what we call “global governance challenges” become material and urgent in cities. Additionally, I think that the critical dimension is transversal cross-border geographies that connect cities, and scalar dynamics: Much of what happens in the global cities of the world is already global phenomena [that is cloaked in the guise of the national] as I mentioned before.

It becomes clear that ours is a multi-polar world through the proliferation of global cities. This multi-polarity is wired into the functioning of just about all of our cross-border systems. It might become far more consequential and “real” than the G2 notion (China and the US). Already you hear people talking about how the G20 is the real entity, even though it is informal!! The multi-polarity of the diverse cross-border networks of global cities is also informal. I think these formats are the future, not the big, slow-moving heavy dinosaurs of leading nation-states, such as the US and China...

To borrow a title from an existing article: “Is globalization today really different than globalization a hundred years ago?”

Indeed, I have devoted some very serious research time and writing time to this question. I find there are major and significant differences: the surface resemblances are not enough to support the comparison. I also focused on a more recent period the Bretton Woods agreement, which is often seen as the beginning of the global era—it was not. Nor was the era of the big transnational banks of the 1970s the beginning.

All I can give you here are brutally short answers. The late 1800s contained many of the capabilities with think of today as necessary for a global world. But the larger organizing logic was one of empires in the traditional historic/geographic sense of the concept. There were enterprises that operated globally; there were agreements between firms to collaborate on certain massive projects in mining and transport; and there was an international (largely among the major European powers, of course!) regime of patents and property rights. This is a fascinating history that I develop at some length in Territory, Authority, Rights.

Secondly, the Bretton Woods system that dominated the international political economy up until the 70s was definitely an international agreement—but at the heart of its internationalism as developed in the post WWII years, was the notion of the need for such an international agreement to protect national states from excessive fluctuations in the international economy; there was an effort to strengthen national states in their capacity to govern their economies. This is the opposite from the global era that takes off in the 1980s (though it begins to develop in embryo already in the 1970s). I develop this difference in chapter 4 of Territory, Authority, Rights.

Thirdly, the transnational corporations (TNCs) of the post war era operated in a period of massive protections—sure there were tariffs on exports and imports, but there were also the major European powers privileging in ways small and big, their TNCs. Again this is different from our current global neoliberal era.

In your most recent book, A Sociology of Globalization, you explain that globalization consists both of global institutions and of local accommodations or agency. Hasn’t the first pillar of globalization, global institutions, received a blow since the year 2000? The United Nations seem increasingly incapable to warrant international peace; global financial institutions have difficulties dealing with the unfolding financial crisis; and the growth of the BRICS relative to the US-EU-Japan triangle seems to predict multi-polarity. How deeply institutionalized is global agreement on economical and political cooperation?

I see other alignments. The IMF and the WTO have done their jobs, but they matter less in this phase, even though there was a bit of a resurgence in response to the 2008 financial crisis. But, to interpret this loss of power as meaning ‘less globalization’ is not quite right: they have done their job, they matter less now. The work is done.

Further, global institutions are different from the supranational system you refer to, which is centered in national states, even though sometimes they operate as if they were global institutions. Strictly speaking, we have very few global institutions and global laws. So, much globality gets constituted inside the supranational system in the zone of international relations, and inside the national, including certain branches of the national state itself.

Again, with the current wide-spread economic crisis, unfettered globalization seems to be subject to the elasticity Karl Polanyi was talking about—is the liberal restructuring of the state you wrote about now finished, or is this crisis yet again an impulse to restructure state-market relations?

I have a sense of the decay of the liberal state. Decay is different from responding to new challenges and thereby contributing to the future of the institution. What you describe was the case over the last several centuries in the history of the west, but now the west is seeing the decay of this algorithm. There is much to be said about finance and the hyper-financialization of our economies; it has certainly contributed to this decay of the liberal state (at least that is my view). To give an example: in the most extreme sites, we were seeing the disassembling of the middle class: some strata became richer than they ever expected, forming a high-income professional class, a tendency most extremely visible in global cities; but, it also created a more provincial form of this upward mobility. However, the more modest sectors of the middle class became impoverished, ceased to be, as I like to put it, the historic subject that constituted Keynesianism—with its vast incorporation of people as workers and consumers given mass production, mass consumption, mass construction of suburban housing, etc. The future renovation/reinvention of the state may lie elsewhere—in Morales’ project for Bolivia, in Indonesia’s effort to develop an electoral system that is also a Muslim state…

How does a sociological approach to international relations differ from a political-science approach?

One key difference is the notion that the global gets partly structured inside the national—and this process entails a denationalizing of what was historically constructed as national. This is mostly not part of the most widely accepted definitions of globalization—which focuses on the growing interdependence of the world—with which I agree only partly. Why only partly? Because I think it leaves out those critical parts of the global that get constituted inside the national –and thereby leaves out the consequences of this for the state, for cities, for citizens, for norm-making, for the definition of what is “national security,” and for what constitutes membership in the “nation”. These are all either deeply social/sociological questions or, if not (e.g. national security) they taken on a very different form and content when examined through sociology.

More generally, I would say we have created the technology of globalization, the economics, the politics, and the culture—perhaps not as aptly as possible, but we have done it. What we have not done is the sociology of globalization… This is a project under construction. The social is far more elusive, in a way, than technology. Where the national and the global begin when it comes to the social is an empirical question, which is not as easily an a priori as you could have with real politics.

Final question. Can you help us to make methodological sense of contemporary global relations?

Theory is critical: we need to grasp that which we cannot reduce to empirical measures. Empirical data to document globalization is important, but it is not enough. We are dealing with new interaction effects, new scalings, and new subjectivities; my denationalization notion is but one example. Let me use the rise of organized religions to illustrate how I think at least some of us should be working the empirical materials of our period.

The rise of organized religions is structurally part of our complex global modernity, even when their doctrines are not modern. I make a similar argument about a range of very diverse contemporary trends that we experience as regressive or as belonging to the past. This argument rests on my research (2008) about the partial and often highly specialized post-1980s disassembling of the nation-state as historically constructed in the West. That disassembling produces structural holes, or blank spaces, in the older (secular) fabric. A key outcome of these tendencies is that “the center,” as constructed in modern history, holds less today than in the 20th century. That “center” found its most complex instantiation in the modern state. The disassembling made room, so to speak, for the rise of older complex assemblages that had been pushed out of diverse spheres of the polity and of social life through the expanded power of the secularizing modern state. Organized religions are a major example of this possibility. They are also heuristic in that their high visibility helps us understand how old formations can resurface as part of new global organizing logics. Insofar as this rise is linked to large structural transformations that produce structural holes in the older secular fabric, I see this rise as part of our modernity. Whether this is good or bad is a separate matter.

This disassembling of the national as the dominant condition of early modernity also enables the emergence of novel types of assemblages at both the global and sub-national scale. Among these are global financial networks that have little resemblance to traditional nation-state-centered banking. A very different example is that of the complex organizational architectures we see in global civil society struggles, with Oxfam, Amnesty International and Forest Watch as examples of diverse causes. The key organizational feature is the link between multiple local (non-cosmopolitan!) struggles that take on global projection through the existence of a major organization with worldwide recognition. The rise or global expansion of old and new organized religions also follows this pattern.

In sum, conceiving of globalization must not occur only in terms of interdependence and global institutions, but also as inhabiting and reshaping the national from the inside, which opens up a vast agenda for research and politics. It means that research on globalization needs to include detailed studies and ethnographies of multiple national conditions and dynamics that are likely to be engaged by the global and often are the global, but function inside the national. This will take decoding: much of the global is still dressed in the clothes of the national. Deciphering the global requires delving deeper into subsumed phenomena and structures, rather than simply considering the self-evident.

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Her research and writing focuses on globalization (including social, economic and political dimensions), immigration, global cities (including cities and terrorism), the new networked technologies, and changes within the liberal state that result from current transnational conditions. She serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities. She has received a variety of awards and prizes, most recently, a Doctor honoris causa from Delft University (Netherlands), the first Distinguished Graduate School Alumnus Award of the University of Notre Dame, and was one of the four winners of the first University of Chicago Future Mentor Award covering all doctoral programs. She has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek International, Vanguardia, Clarin, the Financial Times, among others.

Related links

Read Sassen’s The World’s Third Spaces (openDemocracy 2008) here (html)
Read Sassen’s Globalization or Denationalization? (Review of International Political Economy, 2003) here (pdf)
Read the first 10 pages of Sassen’s first book, The Mobility of Capital and Labor (1988) here (pdf)
Read the introduction of Sassen’s 2006 book Territory, Authority, Rights here (pdf)
Read Sassen’ The Global City: Strategic Site/New Frontier (American Studies, 2000) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #42 - Amitav Acharya

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:44:00 +0000

Amitav Acharya on the Relevance of Regions, ASEAN, and Western IR’s false universalisms

Today’s IR in its many variants is still, very much, a western social science. The claims it makes are however of universal purport. Amitav Acharya challenges western IR as predicated upon a false universalism. In his work, Acharya tries to undercut this problem by amending western IR theorizing with subaltern views on international politics. If IR theory is to remain relevant throughout the 21st century, Acharya argues, it needs to draw in the variety of pathways and experiences from outside the western world. In this Talk, amongst others, he discusses ‘subaltern universalisms’, how we can understand the international politics of ASEAN, and the importance of the Bhagavad Gita for IR theory.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principle debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / debate?

The biggest challenge today is how to make the study of IR more inclusive by moving it beyond its American-centrism or Eurocentric biases. IR theory as it stands now marginalizes the histories, voices and experiences of the non-Western world.

The debate is not so much on whether these biases exist, as I think that few people would dispute that, but regarding the genuine disagreement on how to address these biases.

There are some scholars that believe that the mainstream theories of realism, liberalism or constructivism are flexible enough and can be adapted to capture the voices and experiences of the non-Western world. They argue that we should use these theories and test their ability to adapt, and if there is anything missing, that we should revise these theories. For them there is no reason for anything new beyond what we already have.

Another point of view is that we really need to reject the premises and approaches of existing IR theories and methodologies and adopt radically different theories and methodologies.

My own position is somewhat in between, I don’t think we should demolish or reject existing theories of IR whether be it realism or liberalism or constructivism, simply because they are derived from Western philosophy and a Western version of international history. What I argue is that we can bring in new theories, methodologies and approaches from the South and the non-Western world and these new approaches should be allowed to interact and compete with what we already have.

The key goal for me is for everyone to feel at home and something to share in the house of IR. I should also probably stress that it is not my intention to promote a grand debate, like those between realism and idealism or rationalism and constructivism. I also recognize that the categories of Western and non-Western that I use are not homogeneous – conversations and debates occur inside those camps as much as they occur between them. What I would like to see is that the tendencies and biases that underpin Western IR to be recognized and overcome.

To elaborate, I am talking about four biases here.

The first bias is ethnocentrism. This is the tendency to theorize about key principles or mechanisms of international order derived from mainly a Western vantage point, using Western ideas, culture, politics, historical experiences and contemporary practice. Conversely it is also reflected in the marginalization of non-Western experiences – culture, politics, historical experiences and contemporary practice. Part of this ethnocentrism can be attributed to a sense of superiority of Western ideas and Western experiences over non-Western ideas and experiences.

The second bias is the false universalism in IR theory. There is a tendency to view Western practices as a universal standard while non-Western practices are viewed as particularisms or aberrations or something that is in some way inferior. Much of what happens in IR theory today is an extension of European diplomatic history and contemporary American foreign policy. These are considered to be the universal standard that everyone should try to emulate. We are told that the contemporary state system or regional/international order (such as the European Union’s approach to regional integration) which is derived from the European model is the one that everyone should follow.

Third, there is a disjuncture between various elements of IR theory (derived from the Western experience) and what actually happens in the non-Western world. . You have hegemonic stability theory, or theories of interdependence which are supposed to capture the entirety of the world experience, but many simply do not fit or describe what happens in the non-Western world. A key example of disjuncture is seen in the concept of ‘national security’, which framed security studies for much of the Cold War. What you saw was a key concept which places a strong emphasis on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state from external military threats. This concept therefore had very little to say about the key security dilemmas of most developing countries which arise primarily from their domestic sphere. Thus there was a significant disjuncture between the main security discourse in West during the Cold War and the experiences of the Third World.

Finally I would identify agency denial as a strong current that runs through mainstream IR Theory. This involves denying the agency of non-Western societies in international relations. Thus, principles and mechanisms of international order building– e.g. democracy, state sovereignty, human rights - are seen as fundamentally Western contributions. The role or agency of non-Western countries or societies is seen as marginal or inconsequential. To give you an example, the idea of sovereignty and the related norm of non-intervention is generally identified as being directly linked to Westphalia. What is missing from the picture is the way these norms were regionalized and adapted in Asia or Latin America or Africa giving rise to different types of regional orders.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

My work on IR has been shaped by two key factors, geography and people.

I have a broad interest in IR, encompassing Southeast Asian politics and IR, Asian regionalism, constructivism (norm diffusion), non-Western IR theories, comparative regionalism, Third World IR and global security including human security. My work straddles disciplinary IR and area studies (Southeast Asia). It also combines theory (especially constructivism) and policy relevant analysis. Each of these areas can be linked to the specific locations I have found myself in over the past few decades.

Growing up in India, I was always attracted to liberal internationalism, perhaps due to the influence on Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Indian Prime Minister. As long residence in Southeast Asia (where I was neither born nor educated) was very important in giving me a taste for research in the tradition of area studies, especially through the work of scholars like Michael Leifer and Muthiah Alagappa.

But my work was shaped by a very eclectic and diverse group of scholars, majority of whom are not IR theorists, or even IR scholars. They include several distinguished historians of Southeast Asia, Wang Gungwu, Anthony Reid, Anthony Milner, all of whom I came to know personally, and the writings of the late O.W. Wolters of Cornell University. It was the late Singaporean anthropologist of Southeast Asia, Professor Ananda Rajah, who got me started in Southeast Asian studies through a series of conversations (often over a beer at the local hawker food centers) and collaborative writings.

Teaching at York University in Canada exposed me to critical theories, especially those of Robert W. Cox (Theory Talk #37) and his take on hegemony’s material and ideational dimensions. Some of my work is policy-oriented, the foundations of which were laid through my collaboration with Canadian scholars with a similar orientation, notably David Dewitt and Paul Evans.

A stint at Harvard, where I worked closely with sociologist Ezra Vogel and IR and China scholar Alastair Iain Johnston, got me interested in constructivism, especially the importance of socialisation. Peter Katzenstein (Theory Talk #15), who was neither my professor nor colleague, became a central influence on my work on regionalism and norms. I could not but be inspired by his openness to alternative viewpoints, his own ability to move across theoretical paradigms and weave different regions and themes into his work, all this with his generous mentoring of relatively younger and relatively unknown scholars like myself. He is the one of the best defences that the American IR community can provide against the charge of being a parochial and closed shop.

I must also mention Richard Higgott, who back in the 1980s convinced me that an academic career in IR would be both intellectually satisfying and fun (he was right on both counts), and whose own work on Asian regionalism shaped my own thinking. Mohammed Ayoob, with whom I share both a place of origin (Orissa, India), and alma mater, Ravenshaw College, now Ravenshaw University, was really the scholar who got me inspired by his pioneering work on Third World security, while Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35), who really belongs at the very top of the pantheon of IR scholars worldwide, has been an wonderful collaborator in my work on non-Western IR theory.

So it is geography and people, rather than the grand traditions of IR, which have influenced my thinking. I have never instinctively been a realist or a liberal or a constructivist. I never became rigidly socialized into one way of thinking, but rather I was exposed to a number of very interesting people, many of whom were from disciplines other than IR.

What would a student need (disposition, skills) to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

Four things: First, to accept that IR is more than an American or Western social science. We need to seek out other approaches to generate a more accurate world historical perspective. We need to consider alternative worldviews and locations of IR knowledge – for example to consider what IR theory would look like had come from the classical Indian Ocean maritime regions and the Asian heartland, rather than the classical Mediterranean and modern Europe and then test this against the biases I mentioned above.

Secondly, to develop a deep knowledge of one or more global regions. The traditional distinction between IR and area studies is irrelevant today. When I started my journey into IR, I felt that the most interesting scholars of IR are those who combine theory with empirical knowledge of one or more regions. This has become increasingly evident today. I started studying IR Theory from both and have kept a firm foot inside both doors. This also explains why I grew up preferring inductive to deductive approaches. I have little time for the Waltzian disdain for inductive work (see Theory Talk #40). I would alternatively find myself to be a discipline-based regional scholar or a region-based disciplinarian of IR. Moreover, I found the study of comparative regionalism to be especially useful. I was attracted to theories and cases which attest to the agency of the weak and the local, or what I might call the local constructions of global order, whether in norm making, institution-building and global governance.

One should not think of studies of Europe or America as the stuff of IR and that of Asia and Africa or Latin America as area studies. This is nonsense. As Steve Walt (Theory Talk #33) found out when relying on Middle East case studies to explain the origin of alliances, international relations scholars have long relied on historical cases and quantitative data drawn from European diplomatic history without being accused of a narrow geographic, temporal, or cultural bias. Why should not one be allowed to build IR Theory out of the Middle East or Asia or Africa?

Third, is to be firm and even brutal in breaking down traditional disciplinary boundaries. For any scholar, some of the best and most creative ideas are likely to come from another discipline, rather than from rehashing the established and received wisdom of one’s own. After an initial while, the latter becomes stale and boring. For me a lot of insight comes from historiography.

Fourth, one should look to frame questions fairly broadly – think about ideas of global heritage- try to find the meaning of ideas from different cultures or different parts of the world – for example, democracy – it is not easy but it is very important. Amartya Sen argues that dialogue and debate so fundamental to democracy is not unique to the West but is a global heritage. For example, the Indian practice of democracy grows out of a long and written-up argumentative tradition in India. Yet, we think and write international relations theory as if it springs almost entirely from an exclusively Western heritage.

You have written a great deal about the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) as an organization. Internationally there is an increasing flow of power to and within Asia, what sort of pressure has this put on an organization like ASEAN? How do you think this will affect ASEAN in the future?

For many IR scholars, ASEAN is an anomaly. It is a group of weak states that has managed to gain the attention of all the major powers. If you look at the list of ASEAN’s dialogue partners, which includes all the great powers of the day: China, United States, Japan, the European Union, Russia, India and middle powers like Australia and Canada. This is really unprecedented, for a regional institution to engage all powers in this way. For realism it really is a structural anomaly; weak powers are supposed to be objects rather than subjects of great power attention. But in reality ASEAN has demonstrated the power of socialization rather than the alleged omni-relevance of power politics.

Long, long before there was anything called ASEAN, the societies of Southeast Asia were exposed to the cultural influences from India and China, but somehow managed to retain an identity which is very different from those of India and China. They did not blindly accept the cultural hegemony of these two powerful civilizations, but localized Indic or Sinic ideas that were relevant to the local context and helped legitimizing and empowering local societies. While deeply influenced by both India and China, South East Asia became quite distinctive and different from either of them. I have been developing a concept, what I call subaltern universalism (discussed below), which is an extrapolation from my study of Southeast Asia’s past and the more contemporary agency of Southeast Asian societies. They speak to the possibility that the weak have agency; that they can construct regional and global order.

I would argue is that despite the rise of power in Asia, particularly that of China and India, ASEAN will survive if it manages to maintain a certain degree of cohesiveness. The major powers of Asia do not trust each other enough to develop a Concert of Powers, instead these powers, including US and China, have accepted ASEAN’s centrality in the regional security architecture. But ASEAN will be doomed if it loses its unity and takes sides with one great power against another. So ASEAN will need to provide the role of honest, neutral broker particularly when the great powers do not trust each other.

You have seen the ability of ASEAN to shift and adapt over the past few years. ASEAN in recent years has departed somewhat from its non-interference doctrine. It has adopted a Charter and it has developed mechanisms for dealing with transnational challenges and regional conflict. It has come out on the side of political reform in Burma, when traditionally it was very hands off, and has begun a limited regional mechanism for human rights. It has also developed mechanisms for engaging all the great powers of the world as we discussed above. So ASEAN is adopting and adapting but the questions is whether it can adapt enough to keep up with the fast moving economic and political transnational environment – is ASEAN going to be too slow? At this stage it really remains to be seen whether it will be overtaken by events or whether it will be able to adapt.

Do you think that ASEAN as a form of imagined community has shaped the way in which the individual members of ASEAN or indeed other international fora based on the ASEAN base (like the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) or the East Asia Summit) have responded to the growing power of players in the Asia Pacific region, particularly China and India?

ASEAN is a very diverse group of countries in terms of size, wealth, power, culture, political systems, etc. But despite this it has survived for 45 years. This is a very important point about ASEAN as an imagined community – there is nothing natural or given about the ASEAN community, it has to be constructed through socialization, through interactions. This is why constructivism fits well with ASEAN.

When it comes to the wider Asia Pacific regional architecture, ASEAN faces challenges because of the rising power of both China and India. Around the time when ASEAN was established in 1967 China was in deep domestic turmoil and India after its 1962 border war with China had withdrawn into itself. Neither India nor China was a major economic player at this time. So ASEAN had space to grow and an opportunity to come into its own when its two largest neighbors were down and out. But now these two neighbors are back: where does this leave ASEAN? Will they squeeze ASEAN out? Here again, ASEAN’s future depends on the quality of its socialization. If it remains cohesive and manages to engage all the relevant actors without taking sides in the rivalry this is possible. Now, these are big ‘ifs’, but they are not inconceivable either. If this happens then I don’t think that ASEAN will be marginalized in South East Asia simply because of the rise of China, Japan and India.

Your work often engages with different security lenses, particularly that of human security. Do you think that security threats from less traditional sources, for example natural disasters and food security will create more space for approaches which engage with human security?

To an extent, non-traditional security and human security are very closely linked, as both cover issues like environment, natural disasters, poverty and underdevelopment, food shortages, pandemics and so on. But there is one major difference. Human security is people oriented. Its main referent is the human person. Non-traditional security, the way I understand it, can be state centric or regime centric. It is a label that can be adopted by governments to enhance their authority in relation to a number of threats to protect their own survival. For example the Chinese government is increasingly using the phrase non-traditional security but not human security. Unless you bring the human individual to the centre stage, the non-traditional security framework that we increasingly hear about will not have the same meaning as human security. In fact, it can have the opposite effect. For example a military dictatorship could use the phrase non-traditional security to expand into areas it had not operated in previously. Especially in non-democratic states the phrase ‘non-traditional security’ can be a very powerful instrument for the regime and there may be a conflict between human security and non-traditional security.

In your work you emphasize neither being overly pessimistic regarding the rise of China nor engaging in blind essentialism or orientalism, particularly in relation to the adoption of hierarchies or ‘the Asian way’. How are these views affecting IR currently?

Among realists, there is a tendency to view the rise of China by comparing it to the rise of Germany. But the conditions between these two periods are very different. Many of the European rivalries in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century were spurred by a competition for overseas colonies; this is not the case today. On the other hand I reject the essentialist view that Asia and Asian identity or culture will come to the fore and save the region from any severe conflict. There is a view that Asians are more hierarchical by nature and would naturally bandwagon with China to make peace with this rising behemoth. I think the key to stability would be a combination of forces, while cultural norms matter, economic linkages, political interactions and even a balance of power among the key players will be critical to Asia’s future stability. The emerging configuration of these forces suggest that Asia may evolve in the direction of power-sharing, rather than power maximizing behavior as predicted by “offensive realism”. My work on norms, institutions and socialization tells me that the rise of China can be tempered by these forces as well as by economic interdependence and the rise of a democratic neighborhood around China - China will be constrained by these forces.

Given your earlier discussion on the current biases that exist within the discipline of IR Theory, do you think that if IR fails to engage in a more integrative and inclusive approach that its relevance will be increasingly sidelined in key issues of international debate?

If your question implies that IR needs to take greater cognizance of world history and the varieties of pathways and experiences from outside the Western world, then I would say absolutely. I have already suggested that IR scholars cannot really understand the implications of the rise of China and India by pulling out categories and concepts from the European past and the rise of Germany. If you say that everything that is happening in Asia has already happened in Europe you will not be able to convince a lot of people. To make sense of what is happening in China and India today you have to understand the local context, the local culture, the local history – and although comparative insights are helpful, the primary point of reference has to be local. This goes back to my earlier point that IR has to be inclusive and integrated otherwise it will be marginalized and sidelined.

Given this, what should the IR community do in response to this?

The first is to recognize what makes IR parochial. The other is to take steps to address this parochialism. What I propose may be the direct contradiction of Kenneth Waltz (Theory Talk #40) who was supposed to have said, ‘Denmark doesn’t matter’. I would say that Cambodia does matter, so does Timor Leste, Burma, Africa, the Middle East, South America, Central Europe – they all matter. One could derive IR theory from all parts of the world, not only the great powers. This is what I might call ‘subaltern universalism’.

So this is not merely an expansion of scope of our investigation to look at the middle powers, but rather the inclusion of even the smallest actors on the international stage.

Yes. And while I disagree with Kenneth Waltz I also disagree with elements of the post-colonial thinking in IR being the other extreme. Spivak famously asked – can the subaltern speak? I would say yes, the subaltern can most surely speak. I am reminded of James Scott’s (Theory Talk #38) classic book, derived from a localized Southeast Asian rural backdrop: Weapons of the Weak. It outlined the varieties of forms of resistance to authority. In relation to norm diffusion, the subaltern do have profound agency. If you do not have a great deal of material power, you may still rely on moral or normative agency.

To sum up there are two things that can be done to make IR more universal. The first is that we can construct IR theory from all locations: Denmark, Burma, everywhere. The second is that all local actors have agency in the global order making; it is not only the preserve of great or great Western powers.

To turn to more recent events, the beginning of 2011 has been notable in the uprising of Arab peoples against long standing dictatorships, with Tunisia and Egypt being seemingly successful examples and with the future of other countries like Libya being less certain. Do these movements reinforce the universality of IR or human rights theory (and undermine essentialist arguments?) What impact (if any) do you expect these kind of regional movements will have on other regions, in particular the Asia Pacific?

I speak here as an IR scholar, not as a specialist in those regions. What has been happening in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East does attest to the universality of the desire for freedom as you suggest. Though the question I ask is what kind of universalism or whose universalism is it? In the United States, some George W. Bush era neo-cons are celebrating that this is a vindication of their democracy promotion agenda of the kind that gave us the war in Iraq. Others see the uprisings confirming Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis. Both claims are ridiculous and if this is the kind of universalism we are talking about we are really doomed. One of the things about the Arab Spring was that it was a bottom up process; it was sought by the people of those states and societies. Its origins were local. They were not the outcome of the end of the Cold War or any other major global shock. This is what I mean by subaltern universalism.

The Arab Spring offers a powerful reason to dismiss the tendency to view everything about the West as universal and everyone and everything elsewhere as particular. If you look at the historical relationships between the dictatorships that are under popular challenge and the West – between Egypt and the US, Libya in relation to Italy and Britain, Tunisia and the French –the then French Foreign Minister was holidaying in Tunisia when the uprisings started and offered French security support to deal with the unruly crowd –you get a sense of my question: whose universalism are we talking about here? The Arab Spring is a perfect example of the subaltern universalism I have referred to. You see people (most if not all) cherishing and upholding democratic values against local regimes which had been backed in the past by the powerful ‘protectors of universal values’ in the West. This is not an example that vindicates George W. Bush or Francis Fukuyama – it is an example of the agency of people and shows how the subaltern can speak and act.

I think that the movement towards democracy will happen in Asia but it will happen according to local circumstances – hence the importance of studying regionalism. Asia is not the same as the Middle East – the drive for democracy has longer roots in Asia, notwithstanding China, North Korea and Burma. Southeast Asia invented the notion of “people’s power”. But further democratization in Asia may not happen in the same way as in the Middle East or North Africa because the local circumstances are different. Many Asian regimes have done a much better job than the Middle East in providing economic growth. That is not to say that Asia is going to remain authoritarian because of economic growth. But significant economic pressure opens to the door to more evolutionary forms of political change. . Subaltern universalism recognizes that the agency of the local actors may vary from region to region depending on local conditions. This is not a one size fits all kind of perspective.

In exploring ideas for the expansion of IR as a more inclusive discipline you have proposed the inclusion of a wider range of ‘legitimate sources’ including religious texts in your writings. Can you explain how you would seek to integrate these sources?

I am not a scholar of religion. I look to religion as a source of new ideas about IR, as a source of new IR knowledge. Sometimes we dismiss religious texts because they are unscientific or other worldly. This is very wrong. I see, for example, Hindu or Buddhist texts as examples of discourses in philosophy, politics and metaphysics and even statecraft. For example, the Bhagavad Gita, Hinduism’s most sacred scripture, has many secular and rational elements as well as metaphysical and “otherworldly” elements.

In some of the key religious texts you can find different concepts of universalism and political organization that can compliment and challenge each other. For example, one might see the teachings of Islam as unsuitable territory for IR theory because it speaks of a caliphate, rather than a nation state. We think of Westphalian state as being the only possible political unit around which IR is, or should be based. We are beholden to Westphalia so strongly that we often fail to think of other possibilities. What might a caliphate look like? We may not think the outcome as being very pretty but an ability to recognize such alternatives can bring significant shifts in the way we think about statehood, statecraft or international relations.

The line between religious knowledge and Western philosophy, metaphysics and social science has been historically been a thin one. The philosophical texts that develop around the world’s great religions, and not just the core scriptures like the Bible, Quran, Gita, or Tripitaka, carry important clues about epistemology, or how knowledge is produced, which is perfectly applicable to social science disciplines like IR. They represent conceptions of universalism that can either compliment or challenge the insights from Western philosophy, from which much of existing IR theory derives.

Amitav Acharya is currently a Professor at the School of International Service at American University where he is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Chair of the ASEAN Studies Center. Previously, he was Professor of Global Governance at the University of Bristol, Professor at York University, Toronto, and at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Fellow of the Harvard University Asia Center, and Fellow of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

His books include The Quest for Identity: International Relations of Southeast Asia (Oxford University Press, 2000), Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order (Routledge, 2001), Crafting Cooperation: Regional International Institutions in Comparative Perspective, (co-edited,Cambridge University Press, 2007), Whose Ideas Matter? (Cornell, 2009); Beyond Iraq: The Future of World Order (co-edited, World Scientific, 2011); Non-Western International Relations Theory (co-edited, Routledge, 2010); and The Making of Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2011).

Related links

Faculty profile at American University
Read Acharya’s ‘Why Is There No NATO in Asia?’ The Normative Origins of Asian Multilateralism (2005 Harvard Working Paper) here (pdf)
Read Acharya’s Seeking Security In The Dragon’s Shadow: China and Southeast Asia In The Emerging Asian Order (2003, working paper) here (pdf)
Read Acharya’s Will Asia’s Past Be it’s Future? (International Security 28(3), 2004) here (pdf)
Read Acharya’s Nonhegemonic International Relations: a preliminary conceptualization (2008 working paper) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #41: Mark Duffield

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Tschirhart) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 01:12:00 +0000

Mark Duffield on Human (In)security, Liberal Interventionism and Fortified Aid Compounds

How can we explain that Western aid, which goes back as far as the colonial ‘civilizing mission’ in Africa, has not led to substantial development? Is Western aid really beneficial for those targeted by it? How can we understand the shifting relationship between aid and security governance? Is development aid about bettering peoples’ lives or about governing them? Mark Duffield has long taken issue with the changing nature of liberal interventionism, provoking those concerned with development and global governance to think critically about good intentions and western interventions. Pivotal in his work has been the ‘security-development nexus’, that is, a focus on the uncomfortable tensions that accompany the contemporary aid industry and Western presence at large in the ‘Global South’. In this Talk, Duffield, amongst others, discusses how neoliberal thinking has affected how we view human security, sustainable development and the connection between Northern accumulation of wealth and Southern poverty. A long-time expert on the Sudan, Duffield also discusses future prospects for the newly formed Republic of South Sudan.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the central challenge or principal debate in global studies? And what is your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?

I think the biggest challenge is to see the world as a purposefully interconnected system.

This may sound odd—given that we are always hearing about how the world is radically interconnected. This particular imaginary however comes from network theory and tends to see the globe as interconnected through the randomness of events. It’s the imaginary of the butterfly that flaps its wings in Australia—or wherever—and causes a hurricane in America. This view underpins our contemporary understanding of global insecurity—for example—drought deepens poverty which increases conflict which, in turn, encourages economic criminalization and international displacement. Our understanding of dangerous climate change falls directly within this imaginary—climate change acts upon poverty as a force-multiply having the potential to deepen global insecurity through the radical connectivity of events.

It is this type imaginary of random global interconnectedness that we need to challenge. It feeds directly, for example, into current conceptions of national security, which elevate the principle of uncertainty to centre-stage. Security specialists would have us believe, for example, that the world today is a much more uncertain and volatile than it was during the Cold War. So uncertain, in fact, that we cannot fully understand or protect ourselves against the multiple and emerging threats that we face. Security today is about adapting and preparing ourselves for a life of constant uncertainty. Key to this constant adaptation is the idea of resilience—the ability not only to rebound after shocks but also to maintain system functionality in the face of permanently changing threats.

My view of resilience is that it represents the exhaustion of the liberal project. Liberalism is no longer concerned with changing the world. Ideas of progress have been displaced by the need to simply adapt to an international terrain that policy makers tell us they no longer fully understand and at every turn, they find threatening. Resilience is about the collapse of the liberal frontier and a retreat—as it were—from the external world. Rather than expansion, a more apt term would be bunkerization.

In trying to address this impasse we have to restore a more dialectical as opposed to networked understanding of international relations. Back in the 1970s, we still held such beliefs. In particular, that the way capitalism created wealth and advantage for some, was directly implicated in the dispossession and impoverishment of others. Growing vulnerability—and the disproportionate toll that disasters were taking in the so-called underdeveloped world, was widely understood as an effect of uneven capital accumulation. The neoliberal crusade and the current wave of globalization have broken this connection. We now see the poor themselves as responsible for their own poverty and exposure. Through their own ignorance, they have made the wrong choices in life—that’s the main problem.

Where to I stand regarding this debate? First, I’d like to think that it was a debate—that the Arab Spring—with its call for material and political advancement—reflects a wider movement for real advancement in the global South. And second, that I can help in some way to change the world and make it a better place.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about global studies?

This question is as much about life history as it is about moments of intellectual discovery. If I had to mention just one event it was my work as Oxfam’s Country Representative for Sudan during the latter half of the 1980s. During the mid 1970s, I completed the fieldwork for my PhD in northern Sudan. I was looking at the growth of agrarian capitalism. In common with most of my academic peers and Sudanese colleagues at the time, I adopted a neo-Marxist approach that was concerned to map the material basis of peasant life and the nature of agrarian class struggle.

However, when I returned to Sudan as Oxfam’s Country Representative a decade later, the ideological landscape had radically changed. Critical Sudanese academics had either been politically marginalized or had left the country. At the same time, the aid invasion of the mid- 1980s had completely changed the collective worldview. Rather than class struggle, we were now concerned with the peasant—no longer as a peasant—but as a member of a generic caste of rural poor. We were no longer interested in the wider relations of inequality and exploitation that characterized—and still define—Sudan. We were only concerned with the behavior and attitudes of the poor as individual agents. Our efforts went into trying to make the poor somehow self-reliant while leaving the structural conditions of their poverty and vulnerability intact. Since this is impossible—twenty-five years later—Oxfam is still there trying to pull off the same old trick.

This was a formative period as it taught me a lot about how the aid industry works and the wider changes international relations that fed into the post-Cold War period. Despite the altruism and professionalism of aid workers in Sudan in the 1980s—many of whom I count as friends—I always felt that we were part of something bigger, something that could only be glimpsed at the edges. Moreover, this something—which involved the changing nature of North-South relations—could not be found in the day-to-day work of saving lives and bettering others.

What would a student need to become a specialist in global studies or understand the world in a global way?

Given the changes in academic funding—in the UK at least—the short answer to this question would be ‘a lot of money’. More seriously however, I am a great believer in fieldwork, involvement, exposure—getting mud on your shoes—or whatever you want to call it. Moreover, languages are vital in getting this exposure to other countries and cultures. Today, there is a growing instrumentalization of PhD research. Helped by increasing risk-aversion, fieldwork periods are shortening, the time devoted to methodology is increasing, and fewer students are learning languages. In many respects, our knowledge and experience of the underdeveloped world seems to be contracting. This is the paradox of the information age. The more information there is in circulation, the more ignorant of actual conditions on the ground we seem to become. How else could the current national security policies of liberal states come to resemble—as they have—exercises in national paranoia?

Foreign aid is commonly seen as something good, somewhat removed from politics and reflecting the will to help. You take issue with that line of thinking.

Liberal regimes of development, of which foreign aid is part, have always (at least since the nineteenth century) experienced the country or person to be developed or improved as somehow lacking in something. This could be access to resources, lack of skilled personnel, inappropriate economic policies or, at an individual level, the absence of health, environmental or gender awareness. There is always something missing that is stopping that country or person achieving maturity and leading a full and independent life. Development has always functioned as a moral trusteeship. It is a relation of external tutelage and educational direction aimed at making what is incomplete—and as such, potentially dangerous to itself and others—whole and functional.

There is a strong element of paternalism in development: even the NGO battle-cry of ‘putting the last first’ requires an external moral agency to sort out who is last, and then to ensure that they are put first. Moreover, making the object of development complete and whole usually requires the adoption of desired behavior patterns and attitudes. In other words, development functions as a means of governing others.

Today, a strong neoliberal ethic underpins Western foreign aid. Development seeks to make people whole and safe by integrating them into local and international markets, ideally as small-scale entrepreneurs responsible for their own self-reproduction. To see foreign aid simply as good-in-itself is to miss its real importance. It is a strategic tool through which the West is restructuring North-South relations and, more immediately, attempting to manage the collapsing liberal frontier.

Your work hinges crucially on the now current term ‘security-development nexus’. Could you explain a little about that term? And why does it seem essentially contested?

The idea of the development-security nexus, in its present form, emerged during the 1990s. It emerged out of debates within humanitarianism around the alleged role of international assistance in prolonging civil wars. This was the time in which Mary Anderson’s book Do No Harm became influential. (See an interview with Anderson on a related project here.) The flip side of the Do No Harm debate was that if humanitarian assistance can prolong civil war then, if properly managed, it could also do the opposite: it could be used to selectively alter the balance of power between social groups in the interests of peace. The 1990s was a time of rapid expansion for the aid industry. At the same time, the Do No Harm thesis enabled international aid to rediscover itself as a strategic tool of conflict management and prevention. During the mid 1990s, at the time of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, many NGOs reinvented themselves as conflict resolution agencies and donor governments redefined their aid programs accordingly.

Based on this groundwork by NGOs, by the end of the 1990s—beginning clearly with the intervention in Kosovo—donor governments had begun to consciously define international assistance, including humanitarian aid, as legitimate tool of foreign policy. This was reflected in the debate around the ‘new humanitarianism’ and, especially, donor calls for greater ‘coherence’ between aid, trade and politics in securing desired international outcomes. It was around this time that the idea of the ‘development-security nexus’—as a new and innovative departure—entered the popular debate. This is reflected in the often repeated policy slogan that you “cannot have development without security and security without development is impossible”—or something to that effect.

This self-reinforcing and seemingly benign and enlightened interconnection between development and security can be contested at many levels. For example, while its exponents often present the nexus as somehow a new discovery, the connection between development and security is not only long-standing, it is intrinsic to liberal regimes of development. During the Cold War, for example, the fear that increasing global poverty would alienate peasants and increase the drift to urban slums, thus increasing the pool of potential converts to communism, was a powerful factor driving Western aid. Although it operated differently compared to today—through states rather than the UN system and NGOs—the development-security nexus was alive and well.

Perhaps the main point of contention surrounding the development-security nexus, however, is that, in its present form, the role of aid as a relation of governance and tool of foreign policy is clearly revealed. Within the development-security nexus, foreign aid is far from being removed from politics, as an earlier question suggested.

I have already mentioned that, during the 1990s, NGOs reinvented themselves through the Do No Harm debate as strategic actors able to manage and resolve conflict. Since the end of the 1990s, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, this strategic role accorded aid has morphed into counterinsurgency. Foreign aid is now an essential tool for ‘winning hearts and minds’ in contested political environments. While this has caused NGOs much consternation, and one often hears the claim that aid has been politicized, I think it’s more the case that militaries have adopted the techniques of conflict management that NGOs had been developing since the mid-1990s. The blurring of identities between military and aid actors is more than the former handing out humanitarian assistance or electric generators; it’s about the military taking over technologies of governance that were themselves pioneered by NGOs.

I think we can be safe to assume that there are more Europeans and Americans in Africa than there were at any time during colonialism. How much of that would you see as continuity, and what are the major elements of change?

This is an interesting question. You say that it’s “safe to assume” that there are more international workers in Africa than during the colonial period—I would agree but stress that it is an assumption. The aid industry is notoriously bad at keeping comprehensive personnel data. Studies have shown that it’s impossible to give an accurate figure, even for the number of international humanitarian workers that are currently deployed both globally, and even within particular complex emergencies. This is aside from the total number of aid-related workers worldwide.

In this respect, it should be pointed out that estimates suggest that around 90% of all aid workers are locally recruited. In terms of its workforce, since the 1980s, the Western aid industry has been largely indigenized. Given the lack of data I have just mentioned however, in terms of numbers of people both directly and indirectly employed (both international and local), we don’t really know how big the aid industry is. In the underdeveloped world, the aid industry could easily be one of the biggest global employers. Certainly, in many African countries—outside the capital city—the aid industry is probably the biggest non-traditional employer. Indeed, I tend to think that it’s this ancillary feature of international aid (the direct and indirect employment and economic opportunities that it has created) that is the most concrete and material of its effects.

However, to come back to the spirit of your question—can we see the material and spatial growth of the aid industry as a continuity with colonialism? While the Western ideologies and moral frameworks continue to dominate, there is a break with how these ideologies and frameworks are being operationalized.

If we can talk about development in during the colonial period, especially late colonialism, it had a strong modernist inflection. That is, using the state to build public and economic infrastructure. This modernist approach to development and economic catch-up with the West was carried over into the early post-independence decades. Since the 1980s, however—as I mentioned in my opening comments—we have moved away from modernism and broken any meaningful connection between the accumulation of wealth, on the one hand, and the appearance of poverty, on the other.

This paradigmatic shift, which now focuses on changing the behavior and widening the choices of the poor, coincided with and helped facilitate the current expansion of the NGO movement. The growth and indigenization of the aid industry, together with all the employment it has created, is largely made up of an army of local aid workers trying to change the behavior and widen choices at the community level. Colonialism never had this vast, therapeutic structure geared to trying to change attitudes.

What is biopolitics, and how does it help us to understand the nature of human security?

In describing the preoccupation of the aid industry with changing behavior and attitudes, we have already been talking about biopolitics. At its most simple, if geopolitics is about security seen through the lens of inter-state relations, then biopolitics is security seen in relation to the capacities, deficiencies and potentialities of the people living within states. Biopolitics divides populations according to such capacities and potentialities—it seeks to learn from these differences—not only to enhance the life and productivity of people, but to also manage them better in the interests of security. Liberal development—as I’ve described it so far—is a paradigmatic example of biopolitics. Human security—with its focus on the security individuals rather than states, is axiomatic of the contemporary biopolitical turn in international development.

Mary Kaldor (Theory Talk # 30) suggests that your idea of human (in)security is overly negative. She argues that human security represents a middle position between imperial intervention and global revolution. Is human security a wholly coercive or negative concept?

In answering this question, it is instructive to look at the wider political context in which the concept of human security emerges. Human security as a term enters policy discourse in the early-to-mid 1990s. It does so in the early years of the post-Cold War era, following the initial ‘humanitarian war’ phase of liberal interventionism. Compared to the Cold War—in which security was essentially an inter-state affair—for the first time since the colonial period Western governments found themselves with a responsibility (both direct and indirect) for the welfare of peoples living within the global South’s weak and failed states. It was a time of optimism regarding the possibility of a ‘new world order’ and human security emerged as a way of problematizing this new responsibility.

If human security is a midpoint between imperialism and revolution—which I’m not sure it is—it’s a compromise position. Human security builds on earlier ideas of sustainable development and self-management. Today, sustainable development reflects the neoliberal ideal of integrating the poor into international markets as local entrepreneurs responsible for managing their own social reproduction. Having its origins in sustainable development, human security as a regime of social reproduction does not move beyond the idea basic needs in health, education, water and nutrition that the West deems affordable and appropriate for the underdeveloped world.

Since human security concerns the various social, economic and political conditions that can threaten or damage self-management, it also functions as a way of mobilizing the aid industry and creating the necessary divisions of labor to provide the necessary support. At the same time, it offers a blueprint of the minimal state functions that would be required to deliver human security. Basically, human security is a vision or ideology of global governance that emerged in the early years of post-Cold War period. In practice, the amount of hot air and deforestation produced by human security outweighs its effects on the ground. The War on Terror, for example, has undermined the more comprehensive plan of global poverty management that human security embodies.

My main concern with human security—as a vision of global governance—is the poverty of its aims. It’s not about significantly reducing the life-chance divide between the global North and South. With its emphasis on sustainability, basic needs and self-management, it’s more a plan for stabilizing and managing poverty beyond the walls of Fortress Europe (or Fortress America, or Fortress Australia for that matter). We’re back to the starting point of this discussion—liberal development as a moral trusteeship for the ‘rest’.

In this respect, I think the demands for genuine material and political progress emerging in the South, go beyond the limited governmental vision of human security and liberal development. People in the South want to live in the type of houses we do, drive our cars, have similar jobs and access the sort of health care and pensions we can, and move around the world just like us. We cannot assume otherwise.

In Global Governance and the New Wars you mention that most donor governments and aid agencies view conflict as a form of social regression. If this is wrong, then how can we view conflict, as you suggest, as systems of social transformation?

The social regression view of conflict provides an essential and enduring moral justification of liberal interventionism. Conflict, however—as we know from our own World Wars—is more complex and formative, both in terms of technological and socio-political developments. The World Wars developed productive systems and had a powerful emancipatory effect, including hastening decolonization. Since the end of the Cold War, however, we now see ‘their’ wars as different, as wholly destructive, as irrational and the opposite of development. At a structural level, internal wars have all the characteristics of emergent and adaptive socio-political systems. This is why many of them continue for so long. They continually rejuvenate themselves, drawing in new players and accessing and developing new means of provisioning. They often become sites of experimentation in the art of survival beyond states and the aid industry. That is, sites of ‘actually existing development’. The point that I have always tried to make in this respect is empirical rather than theoretical. Once one begins to actually scratch the surface of warlord entities or shadow economies, you soon discover how adaptive and innovative they can be.

What do fortified aid compounds tell us about North-South power relations?

The development-security nexus is now in crisis. Buoyed by ideas of human security, the rediscovery of the interconnection between development and security in the mid 1990s was a time of optimism and expansion within the aid industry. However, this began to sour with redefinition of aid as a tool of Western foreign policy and, since 9/11, its morphing into counterinsurgency.

Since the end of the 1990s, the number of aid workers deliberately attacked or killed has been growing. Apart from the spread of field security training and the growth of risk aversion, within the UN system and among the larger international NGOs, growing insecurity has also led to the appearance of the fortified aid compound. Protected by double walls, razor wire and often armed guards—enclosing office, residential space or combining both—the fortified aid compound has become the signature architecture of post-interventionary societies. Even in locations that are more secure or stable than others, because of insurance requirements, fears over litigation and the spread of risk aversion, the international aid industry is becoming increasingly bunkerized.

However, I think that it’s important to put this into its wider context. Since the 1980s, there has been a growing global phenomenon of what some have called ‘neoliberal urbanization’. That is, the gentrification of parts of cities, the emergence of gated communities, exclusive shopping malls, the growth of private security, and so on. Urban space is fragmenting and polarizing between privileged private space as opposed to degraded public space. This global phenomenon is also apparent in post-interventionary cities such as Baghdad, Kabul, Khartoum and even Juba in South Sudan. Within so-called ‘complex emergencies’ the aid industry is an important player in the process of urban fragmentation. It has massively contributed to the inflation of urban real-estate prices and, in competition with local elites, it’s expanding demand for gated-communities, segregated living and private security.

Aid as a contributor to urban fragmentation is under-researched. The spatial implications for the aid industry of such fragmentation, however, are significant. In Kabul, for example, international aid workers live and work within a protected archipelago of international space made up, basically, of a series of fortified aid compounds and guarded amenities linked by secure transport corridors. An urban dystopia that—but for its overt militarization—is comparable to the fragmentation and privileging and protection of elite modes of life in other global cities. Rarely able to move outside these secure bunkers, aid workers in Kabul use remote management techniques to communicate with local aid workers on the other side of the wire. I have already mentioned that, since the overwhelming majority of aid workers are locally recruited, since the 1980s international aid has become indigenized. That is, through its operational dependence on local staff and communities, it has been absorbed into the local employment and community fabric. It has become part of the economic basis of the societies involved. Attempting to manage such aid at a distance to produce security outcomes has proved difficult. While Afghanistan is an extreme, it would be wrong to see it as an exception. The urban and spatial patterns that can be discerned there are more widely applicable.

What does the fortified aid compounds tell us of North-South relations? I think they are a visible symptom of the exhaustion of the liberal project. They do not radiate confidence and a conviction of being to make the world a better place. They reflect a security mentality that now sees everything as a potential threat. Fortified aid compounds are defensive structures reflecting both a retreat from the world and the need to shore up a collapsing liberal frontier.

What does mass consumer society have to do with security and development on the ‘global borderland’? And how is this part of a broader global civil war?

Unlike during the colonial period, the West no longer manufactures the cheap shoes, clothes, household goods, personal items and means of transport that people in the global South are increasingly demanding. This demand is being met by Asian capitalism. Even in Britain, we are dependent upon the emerging economies for most of the goods and food we consume and for debt-financing to enable us to do this. Much of what’s left of our diminished manufacturing industry assembles components produced elsewhere. Like much of the West, we are a post-industrial consumer economy and have yet to fully understand the global implications of this.

At the start of the discussion, I mentioned the need to move beyond the dominant national security perspective which is framed by uncertainty and seeing everything as a potentially interconnected threat. I think this is, essentially, the vision of a consumer society: a society that produces little of its own and is therefore dependent upon distant economies, markets and supply chains, and is vulnerable to the changing conditions that can affect these distant sites. This is why, I believe, the need to protect critical infrastructure now plays an important role in the liberal security imaginary. Its critical urban infrastructure that supports the circuits of human, energy, information and commodity circulation—both local and global—upon which consumer societies are dependent. Unlike civil defense during the Cold War, national security is no longer really concerned with protecting sites of production because they have been hollowed out. I think consumer society, its needs and vulnerabilities, give us a context in which we can at least locate liberal interventionism.

At the same time, the non-material basis of development—with its emphasis on changing behavior and attitudes, and producing new forms of self-management within the confines of basic needs—is an essential component of the global dispensation that consumer society seeks to impose. Continued consumption for some is dependent upon abstinence and reduced expectations among the many. As I’ve said, neoliberalism breaks the connection between the production of wealth and the existence of poverty. Reconnecting that dialectic, and accepting some order in place of unconnected randomness, gives us a different view as to the likely success of this liberal dispensation. At the same time, it suggests that the global rebalancing that is taking place as production moves east has serious implications for the long-term sustainability of consumer society.

I’d like to illustrate some of these tensions by mentioning a trip I recently made to the village on the Blue Nile in Sudan where I did my PhD fieldwork in the mid 1970s. This was the first time in 35 years that I’d been back. Back then, apart from the few houses of the rich, the village lacked electricity. Most of the 250 mile journey from Khartoum was on unsurfaced roads that became impassable at times during the rains. Water was drawn straight from the river and, again, excepting the rich, no one had TV sets or refrigerators.

In the intervening years, this village—like its neighbors—has changed dramatically. A surfaced road now connects it to Khartoum and it has grown in size. It even has its India-style rickshaw scooters for local transport. Like much of northern Sudan’s central region, most compounds now draw 24 hour electricity from the grid. While mud is still the major building material, within many households TV sets, refrigerators and even washing machines are common. Water comes from artesian wells and, as with the rest of Africa, everyone seems to have a mobile telephone. Compared to 35 years ago, the increase in the material standard of living is evident and striking.

The first point that I would like is that little—if any—of this material improvement has come from Western development assistance. Its main driver has been the Sudanese state and Asian capitalism that has brought a whole range of cheap consumer goods within the reach of even low-income Sudanese. This material improvement has also changed social attitudes. In Khartoum, for example, compared to the past, the offices are full of working women—at least half of all university students in the capital are women. In order that the emerging middle class can become part of the consumer culture, men and women must now work. To accommodate this trend even women’s fashions have changed. The elegant if ungainly one-piece ‘tobe’ has been replaced—Egyptian style—by the more practical fitted skirt, blouse and head scarf.

These cultural changes are also beginning to feed into politics and growing secularism within the Islamist state. I think the Arab Spring is symptomatic of these material changes and the emergence of new class forces and, importantly, aspirations for material and political progress. At every level—political and environmental—post-industrial consumer societies sit uneasily with these demands. If there is a global civil war, these are some of its contours. Certainly, as the demands for material improvement grow in the global South—and this is a big pent up demand —it will be Asian capitalism that will be supplying it. In contrast, the West seems most adept at exporting violence. At the same time, the Western model of development is increasingly confined to disaster zones and fragile states—and even there, as the phenomenon of the fortified compound suggests—it is going through a crisis of acceptance.

In your work, there is a real mixture of approaches. You apply concepts across the national-international divide, also incorporating historical and philosophical perspectives. Can you tell a little about how you see theory and levels of analysis?

While I began with Marxism, I’ve increasingly come to borrow from Foucault and other post-structuralist writers. However, looking back I’ve always, almost instinctively, applied a genealogical approach to my work. That is, not taking conventional wisdom or policy frameworks—like human security—at their face value. That is, as reflecting real conditions or realities. Few things are how they seem. Instead, I’ve always favored trying to look for the social and political conditions that allow those statements and pronouncements to attain the status of ‘truth’ and ‘common sense’. In this respect, I try to let pronouncements speak for themselves and, in so doing, give away their own secrets and hidden power effects. This has meant adopting a variety of approaches, including giving due attention to history.

With regard to levels of analysis, I’m a great believer of it not being important where you begin. Many students researching disasters, for example, want to look at the most recent, or the biggest, or the one that’s been most controversial. I don’t think these things are that important. Any disaster, even relatively minor or forgotten, will reveal similar assumptions, relations of governance and forms of objectification. Even seemingly trivial customs or relations can be deconstructed to reveal their power effects.

Last question: South Sudan is becoming independent soon, and most people interpret this in line of a positive teleological narrative. Yet the country-in-becoming has a serious addiction to both oil (98% of regime budget) and to aid (90% of service delivery). Given your extensive experience in the Sudan, what does common analysis miss, and what are some of the scenarios you envision?

South Sudan has always been a zone of exception. During the nineteenth century it was a slave raiding area and under colonialism, it became a closed district. On the eve of independence in 1956 the first civil war began. When this finished in 1972, it again became an exception. Pleading poverty, the northern government took the unprecedented step—for the early 70s at least—of inviting the UN and international NGOs to help reconstruct and develop the south. This externally supplied ‘peace dividend’ was part of the Addis Ababa Agreement. At the same time, however, given the state-led welfare provision then existing in the north, it was tantamount to the government turning what was then its own citizens living in the south into refugees in their own country.

This invitation to the aid industry began what is now a forty-year history of international aid in South Sudan. During the second civil war—from 1983 to 2005—and continuing this theme of exceptionalism, South Sudan became one of the first of the UN’s post-Cold War ‘negotiated access’ humanitarian operations. Effectively, this meant the northern government ceding its sovereignty over the South to the UN system. During the war years the aid industry played a formative role in the development of the nascent welfare organs or the rebel movement. At the same time, it monopolized the provision of health and welfare services.

This close, almost symbiotic relationship, was maintained during the period of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which will expire this coming July with the formal separation of South Sudan. At the same time, the CPA gave the new Government of South Sudan, access to half of the revenues from the oil that been discovered in the 1990s. Since most of these reserves lie the South, following formal independence, the Southern government will increase its share of these revenues.

The independence of South Sudan will see the emergence of a socio-economic entity that has few international comparisons. Highly dependent on the aid industry for basic services and administrative capacity, and lacking few readily exploitable resources, yet it has inherited a functioning set of oil wells. At the same time, lacking a strong modern sector of its own, for consumer goods, food, construction services and skilled labor, the South has become a dependent part of the regional economies of Uganda and Kenya.

Given that land laws have yet to be codified, despite impending independence, the South is attracting a lot of outside speculators and carpetbaggers. At the same time, as the aid industry has to relocate to Juba, a real-estate boom and already described process of urban fragmentation and bunkerization is in underway. As with the North, the effects of the long civil war have been to militarize southern society. Responding to the growing demands for security services that these developments have created, one important local growth industry, staffed largely by demobilized soldiers, has been the growth of elite controlled private security companies.

In many respects, South Sudan has all the appearance of a ‘plural society’ as first described by Furnivall in relation to colonial Burma. (See a review on Furnivall’s plural society here.) That is, a society relying on a mix of outside ethnic groups to supply all the essential construction, administrative, economic and welfare functions—all living separately and only meeting in the market place—while the ordinary Burmese, excluded from these plural structures, just had the role of onlookers. For Furnivall, only Burmese nationalism could provide a solution. In the case of South Sudan—given the hype and expectations surrounding independence—there is a lot of room for disappointment. Tensions are already rising over the current regime’s unwillingness to share resources more widely.

Rather than yet another aid fix—which deepens pluralism—perhaps the answer lies in a Southern nationalism of sorts. If we can see the struggle against colonialism as the first generation of independence struggles, then the effective re-colonization that has taken place as a result of the present phase of globalization is, in effect, producing a new generation of independence struggles. This time, however, the stakes seem higher and the objectives more difficult. Whereas the anti-colonial struggles had to remove the colonial state—today’s struggles for independence and material progress have to compete with the demands of Western consumerism and the needs of an international aid industry that has grown fat on the back of global poverty.

Mark Duffield is Professor of Development Politics and Director of the Global Insecurities Centre at the University of Bristol. He has written extensively on topics of human security, biopolitics and liberal interventionism from a critical theory perspective. His major publications include Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Polity, 2007) and Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (Zed, 2001).

- Read Duffield’s Risk-Management and the Fortified Aid Compound: Everyday Life in Post-Interventionary Society (Intervention and Statebuilding, 2010(4)) here (pdf)

- Read Duffield’s Global civil war: The non-insured, international containment and post-interventionary society (Refugee Studies, 2008(21,2)) here (pdf)

- Read Duffield’s Human Security: Linking Development and Security in an Age of Terror (European Association of Development Research & Training Institutes, 2005) here (pdf)

- Read Duffield’s War as a Network Enterprise: The New Security Terrain and its Implications (Cultural Values, 2002) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #40 - Kenneth Waltz

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 18:21:00 +0000

Kenneth Neal Waltz – The Physiocrat of International Politics

Sometimes a Theory Talk needs no introduction. This special issue of Theory Talks with Kenneth Waltz, who has been hailed recently as the ‘King of Thought’, is such an occasion. He describes his own work as an attempt to understand the impact of the invention of nuclear weapons on international politics, but his influence reaches far beyond that specific issue. A historical analogy is in line. Systemic thinking in economy started with the physiocrats, who conceived of a structure of economics independent of actors and constituting their behavior. Before that, no systematic theory of the economy existed, and the economy could not be seen as a ‘field’. Much in the same way and based on economic thinking, Kenneth Waltz developed a structural theory of international politics. Kenneth Waltz is the godfather of modern theory of international politics.

In this Talk, Kenneth Waltz discusses, amongst others, the economic origins of his thinking about international politics, what good theory is, the impact of nuclear weapons in the contemporary world, and if the United States is behaving in accordance with what realist theory would predict.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the central challenge or principal debate in International Relations? And what is your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?

For me, the central question is how to contain and moderate the use of military force by the United States. This is certainly not the only big issue but it is one of the big issues. The United States has been—not unexpectedly—a very war-like country ever since it became a world dominant power. As Alexander Hamilton said, a country disposing of dominant power cannot be expected to behave with moderation, and the United States certainly bears that out. Historically, it is hard to think of a country disposing of dominant power that did behave moderately for any large period of time. The United States fits neatly into the category of dominant powers that have not behaved moderately.

There is only one way that a country can reliably deter a dominant power, and that is by developing its own nuclear force. When president Bush identified the countries that he said constituted an “axis of evil”—namely, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—and then proceeded to invade one of them—namely, Iraq—that was certainly a lesson quickly learned by both Iran and North Korea. That is to say, that if a country wants to deter the United States it has to equip itself with nuclear force. I think we all have seen that demonstrated very clearly.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?

Well, I suppose Hans Morgenthau in the modern period has been more widely influential than any other single author. And I was influenced by him, surely, as most people were.

Regarding important events, I think the most powerful shaping event occurred in August 1945 with the dropping of two atomic bombs. That was a world decisive event. The impact the bombing of Japan had on my thought about international politics was pervasive. Even though it was a world transforming event, I am not sure if that is now fully appreciated, although we act in accordance with the world- transforming effects—“transforming” meaning that everything changes, and all truths become false, all beliefs become irrelevant, and axioms that we used to lived by are turned on their heads. All those things are implied in a world-transforming event, if we use the word “transforming” in its true meaning. There are so many illustrations of that, that it boggles the mind.

Just to think of a few, it has always been very difficult to fight limited wars, historically speaking. That is, one can start and try to fight a limited war, but it is hard to continue to observe the limits. All this, in a conventional world… In a nuclear world, you can only fight limited wars, since it is impossible to fight all-out wars. When we talk about “nuclear wars” we are using words very loosely. As Desmond Ball, a considerable expert on nuclear weapons, and an Australian commentator, said: “it’s impossible to fight a nuclear war after nuclear warheads numbered in the tens have gone off, nobody will be knowing what’s happening. And if no one knows what’s happening, then you cannot fight a nuclear war.” The ‘fog of war’ that Clausewitz referred to is nothing at all compared to the fog of war that would ensue even if only a few nuclear warheads were exploded.

So if you can only fight nuclear wars, and if it is very difficult to keep wars limited, because they tend to escalate, the question becomes: why fight wars at all? And, again, countries with nuclear weapons would behave according to that thought. If you do not have nuclear weapons, you can fight wars just as in the old days. But once a country has nuclear weapons, these weapons strongly deter other states. In fact, one cannot make “never-statements” when thinking historically, but one can with nuclear weapons. Never, in 65-plus years, have countries having nuclear weapons or enjoying their protection, fought each other. That is an astonishing statement, and it is true. So in sum, my work, in a way, has been an attempt to theoretically deal with the implications of the invention and application of nuclear weapons.

An alternative adage to the Kantian one, that Liberal states do not go to war?

Historically, all kinds of states have gone to war. Whether they were democratic or authoritarian, they have all fought wars, and the great powers especially—wars we all know, like French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, wars like World War I and World War II, wars “to end all wars” but that in fact never ended conventional war.

Now, with the invention of nuclear weapons, countries that possess them or enjoy their protection have never fought one another. The implication would be that, if you love peace, you should love nuclear weapons. I do not think that this fact is well appreciated because not many people seem to love nuclear weapons; but they have been awfully good for the world. It is rather anomalous that some people—like for example president Obama—look forward to the abolition of the weapons that have, in fact, abolished war.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

I think one obvious prerequisite is high intelligence, and also a good sense of history. Without knowing what has happened in the world in the past it is very hard to understand the present. I think that in the study of international politics it is especially important to be aware of why wars have occurred, how they have developed, what has caused countries to fight bloodier wars, less bloody wars… One has to contemplate these things and all kinds of other things in order to understand the international politics of the past, and to be able to understand the difference between conditions that have promoted war in the past and those that work against the fighting of wars in the present. So I would say that first, a good sense of history is required. So I would certainly advise reading the classics. My idea of the classics is, I think, most people’s idea of the classics. I do not want to be accused of forgetting the names, but it all began with Thucydides—at least in the Western world—and proceeded with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and later, of course, Morgenthau. It is a pretty impressive literature. It is very important for students of international politics to read, and read carefully, those old warhorses. They stood the test of time and they are certainly among the books most worth reading carefully.

There are other pivotal issues, as well, that a student should pay close attention to, like the role of technology and its importance in warfare, the relevance of economic capabilities, the importance of leaders of all sorts, and the conditions under which deterrence will—and will not—work.

And does the same go for theorizing, or does that require a different set of skills?

As I put it at the beginning of Theory of International Politics, theory is a picture of the world that one is concerned with—but it’s not the whole world. For example, in the world of international politics, as in our case, one has to develop a mental picture of that world and then identify the major variables at work and the principal connections among them. That is something that is both difficult to do and rarely done.

There isn’t much theorizing going on in international politics. And the word “theory” is so loosely used that people begin to think that anything that is not directly empirical or factual must be theory, and that is certainly a misconception. To develop a theory is difficult, and all the more difficult if one defines theory as it should be defined. For example, as Einstein said, there is no inductive route that leads to theory. That is, simply knowing more and more, having more facts at one’s command, does not lead one to the ability to develop theories. That is something that many students of international politics have not understood. As J. David Singer put it, “we”—that is the people who were working on the dimensions of war approach to understanding warfare—“decided to go very far down the inductive route before we try to develop theory,” as though more and more induction would somehow get you closer to theory. And that is exactly the opposite of what Einstein saw and understood, that is, there is no inductive route to theory.

In 1979 you published perhaps the most cited handbook of International Relations Theory, Theory of International Politics. How has the state of IR theory changed since the publication of Theory of International Politics?

Well, as I said, there is almost no theory written or developed. It is very rare to find real theories in any field, and certainly it is very difficult to find them in the study of international politics. So only by a very loose use of the word “theory” can one say that there is any development or advance in the realm of theory. And one shouldn’t expect it. I mean, theory is a pretty rare thing and one seldom finds it in the social sciences, outside perhaps of economics. I would say that one of the great social science theorists was Durkheim, and once one recognizes this, one gets the sense of how rare it is to find theories of society or, as in our case, theories of international politics. But one would expect that: theories don’t grow on bushes.

So in sum, in IR as in any field, one expects theory to be scarce. So most of the work done is empirical work; one hopes it is informed by theory, but often it is not. Most people don’t have a real sense of what theory requires or might look like. It is difficult for a lot of people to grasp theory. And that accounts for a lot of the problems among theories of international politics.

If you were to write the book again, now that bipolarity has come to an end, what changes—if any—would you make to it?

I certainly would add something about unipolarity. I wrote about multipolar systems and bipolar systems, that is, structural changes that produce changes in behavior. I identified these two different kinds of structure. And it did not occur to me that we would move from bipolarity to unipolarity, which of course we did with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In any kind of balancing system, the major players have to continue to exist as major players for the system to remain unchanged. You cannot have a bipolar balance without two parties being the participants in that balance. So, as soon as the Soviet Union disappeared as a great power, the bipolar balance collapsed, just as the multipolar system of balance collapsed with the fighting of World War II, and the emergence from that war of two—and only two—great powers. The balancing takes place within a structure; when the structure changes, the type of balancing, or whether or not there is any balancing, is directly affected or determined, in fact. So I would have written, or added a chapter, on what a unipolar world might be like, and what the advantages and disadvantages of such a world were likely to be. I have written quite a bit about the implications of the dominance of the United States, so though it is not in the form of a chapter, I think I have written a good deal about that.

How do you respond to critics who say that if Theory of International Politics is right, then IR cannot undergo meaningful change, and that the belief that such change is impossible is a major impediment to making a better world?

I certainly believe that, as long as the world continues to be anarchic, the theory that I developed will maintain its direct relevance. One cannot expect the world to change unless the structure of the world changes. That is, structure affects behavior directly, and as long as the world remains as it is—anarchic—that is going to condition the behavior of the states that exist within that world. Although not directly, the behavior is strongly influenced or shaped by the structural condition within which the behavior takes place. So, one will not expect profound changes in behavior, or important changes in behavior, until—and unless—the structure changes. As long as the world is anarchic, it perpetuates certain kinds of behavior by the major players within the anarchic arena.

Why do you think Theory of International Politics became such a lightning-rod for criticism?

That is one of the things good theories do, they attract a lot of criticism. It’s not surprising and I am not surprised by it. Of course, a lot of the criticisms are made by people who fail to deal with theory as theory, and rather deal with some of the other things I said, many of which I see as following from the theory, but many people don’t think that way. I have never been bothered by the criticisms at all. I expect theories to be criticized, and they should be. I wish the criticisms were even more telling than they have been, but that is beyond my power of influence.

One of the most original and enduring contributions of Theory of International Politics is the concept of “structure,” conceptualized as a “positional picture” that abstracts from “every attribute of states except their capabilities.” The three definitional components of structure are (1) ordering principles, (2) the character of the units, and (3) the distribution of capabilities (Chapter 4). In your response to Robert O. Keohane’s critique in Neorealism and its Critics (1986), you contrast structural theory with “the behavioral mode of thinking.” Can you please explain how these way of thinking about world politics are different? And what advantages you seen in the structural approach?

I think one can see it very clearly, very easily and very directly if one contrasts Hans Morgenthau’s work with Theory of International Politics. Hans Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations was a great contribution; it was the major book on the first half of the twentieth century in the field of international politics. I have great respect for it. But Hans Morgenthau, in his search for what he sometimes called a “rational theory,” was able to deal only with how the acting units affected the outcomes produced. In other words, his approach to international politics was in the mainstream of political science in its day, in the sense that it inferred from the acting units what the outcomes would be. There was nothing but the acting units to shape those outcomes. In other words, there was no concept of a structure of international politics because he had no concept of the structure of international politics. That is, he only saw the behavior and the interacting units, and did not see them within some kind of a structure, so the outcomes inferred had to depend directly on the qualities of the actors. And that is where we got these typical statements that “good states produce good outcomes,” or “democracy produces peace.” That is inferring from the quality of the actors what the outcomes will be, and those are the only causal conceptions within the theory that Morgenthau developed. There can be no cause other than the causes that are found in the principal actors.

Now the advantage of the structural approach is that one sees the effect of the environment—precisely defined—on the acting units and how this precisely defined environment affects the outcomes we are concerned with, so that one gets away from the kind of causal thinking that Durkheim satirized when he gave such examples as the question: why did the Greeks produce all of that immensely impressive philosophy? And the answer typically given is that the Greeks were a very philosophic people. Or why did the Germans produce all of that magnificent music? Well, the answer given is that the Germans were a very musical people! In other words, the cause is found in the acting or behaving units. That is entirely behavioral! Structural thinking breaks away from that. It is a very difficult jump to make for a lot of people; very difficult. As Henry Kissinger said, “moderate and legitimate states produce moderate and legitimate systems of international politics.” That is exactly the kind of thinking Emile Durkheim was satirizing.

Given the fact that Liberal theories are often associated with an economic view of the world, in which way does your background in economics influence your perspective and the way you theorize in international politics?

I think it is a very direct and important influence. Economists, especially classical and neoclassical, have a very keen sense of how the structure affects behaviors and outcomes. Economists call it “the market.” And the market is the structure—in my terms—in which the units are acting and behaving, and producing what seems to be their outcomes. But their outcomes are very much conditioned by the structure—in this case the market—in which the behavior occurs. So, the market shapes the behavior and shapes the outcomes. One can understand this very easily in economics, but it is harder to understand it in politics, because in politics, there was no clear conception of a structure. Morgenthau, in his groping for what he called a “rational theory of international relations,” was not able to come up with that notion because he could not see anything beyond the behaving units.

Another pivotal influence from economics on my understanding of international politics is the competition among a large number of roughly equal units, which can be contrasted to the behavior of firms in oligopolistic settings. Those are the direct counterparts of states in international politics, for if you have a world of many great powers you will expect different kinds of behaviors and outcomes than what you would find in a world where there are only two competitors. Or whether there is no competitor at all and there is just one! That would be a monopoly, of course. So the analogy between economics and international politics is very interesting. When the conditions in international politics approximate the conditions in economic theory in important ways, then the analogy holds; if they don’t, it doesn’t.

How does your theory relate to the rational actor assumption? Are states rational actors, or should they be?

I do not even know what “rational actor” means empirically. A rational actor assumption may enter into a theory but has no direct, empirical representation. One can define rationality only within narrow settings, as for example in game theory, where one can define what a rational actor is and work out some outcomes under assumed conditions. Of course economists presuppose that economic actors are rational. People of course in a very loose sense prefer to do less work and get higher rewards. That is a good way of putting it now, but there is no reason in economics to think that a bunch of actors are going to be rational. Some of them are going to do better than others; some are going to be a lot smarter; some are going to be a little bit luckier than others; some are going to be better at cheating than others. All those things affect outcomes, but rationality—in its empirical form—has really little to do with it. The notion of rationality is a big help in constructing a theory, but one has to go back and forth between the theory and what goes out in the real world. But in the real world, does anybody think “I’m rational, or you’re rational”? Let alone, that states could be rational? It has no empirical meaning.

What are the principal writings in economics that influenced your dealings with the field of international relations theory?

I think that one of the biggest influences was the contrast between pre-physiocratic and pre-Adam Smith economics, and the kinds of economic notions, concepts, and theories that developed first with the physiocrats and then with Adam Smith. In fact, Adam Smith was very much indebted to the physiocrats, who we now kind of dismiss as people with very peculiar ideas. Some of their ideas were indeed peculiar, but they were the first ones to grasp the idea of an economy as such. That is to say, an economy made up of identifiable parts and an economy experiencing repeated behavior.

In one of the editions of a physiocratic book, maybe in the first edition, there was a picture of “an economy,” (the Tableau économique by François Quesnay, 1759, see image below) and of course it is a picture of the unseen and the unseeable, but it starts in the soil—that is the origins of wealth are conceived as being in soils and mines that produce gold, metals, and agricultural products. The picture then traces how these natural resources are worked up from that beginning into machines and items that can be bought, sold, used and reused, exchanged, eaten and all that.

And then, they introduce the notion of “circulation” in the economy. Basically, the idea that this process is constantly repeated, causing a system. That is the very beginning of the conception of the economy—one has to have a notion of a domain for that activity. In other words, one has to be able to identify the domain, mark out the borders, identify the important variables within that domain, the interconnection of those variables, and the kinds of outcomes they produce. The physiocrats were the first people within the social sciences who did that. They invented the concepts they needed, such as “propensities,” “to consume” and “to produce,” and all that. It was a great contribution. Very few people have an appreciation, as Adam Smith did, of how the physiocrats developed a system, and what that meant, compared to the sort of household economy concepts that were applied to a larger scale before. If you read the pre-physiocratic literature and compare it with what came later, the contrast is very, very sharp. It was entirely un-theoretical before, and became a theoretical literature with the physiocrats around 1760.

In 1981, you argued that “more nuclear weapons may be better,” as having nuclear weapons will deter countries from behaving aggressively. Is this still reflected in the post-Cold War situation?

Some few people take that to mean “the more, the better,” and I am probably somewhat guilty of having encouraged that view by using the subtitle “more may be better.” But the question is: how many more? I do not think that anybody believes that it would be great to have a hundred nuclear powers, or two hundred nuclear powers. I meant “more may be better” as not just two but maybe five or, as we have now, around nine nuclear states. I do not see much prospect for that number to increase dramatically. We had a maximum at about twelve, I believe, when the Soviet Union broke up and some of its parts were states that were “born nuclear”, that is, they inherited the nuclear weapons. But some of them, of course, got rid of those weapons, leaving the count at about nine nuclear states. I do not see that we are likely to have, all of a sudden, twenty or thirty, as president Kennedy was so worried about. Every now and then, we have an additional nuclear power joining what remains the world’s most exclusive club. After all, Sweden got rid of its nuclear weapons, although—as I understand it—Sweden still has the capacity to build a nuclear weapon.

Anyway, it is quite natural that countries that worry about deterring the United States would turn to nuclear weapons. I mean, when a president identifies an “axis of evil,” names three countries, and then invade one of them, the other two are bound to think: “Hey! We better have nuclear weapons because it is the only way we can deter the United States.” That is apparently what Iran began to do, and maybe already did; and that is exactly what North Korea did—and we know North Korea did it. So, the expected effect was realized in practice, at least in the case of North Korea.

Could it be fair to say, then, that having Iran as a nuclear power might be not that bad because as its position in the structure becomes different, its behavior will adapt accordingly, and they might become somewhat of a more responsible power?

Yes. It is hard for people to understand that every new nuclear state has behaved exactly the way the old nuclear states have behaved. One can describe the way all nuclear states have behaved in one word: responsibly. When the United States contemplated the Soviet Union one day having its own nuclear weapons, we were horrified by the prospect. How could we live? How could the world live with such a country as the Soviet Union—which we saw as bent on world domination—having nuclear weapons? And when China developed its own nuclear weapons, we repeated the same way of thinking—“My God! China? China is crazy!”

But in fact, if you think of the Cultural Revolution, China took very good care of its nuclear weapons. They ensured that they would not fall under the hands of the revolutionaries and came through that horrible ten-year period. The fact is that people worry that a new nuclear country, once it gets a nuclear shield, would then begin to behave immoderately or irresponsibly under the cover of its own nuclear weapons. Well, that has never happened. Every country that has had nuclear weapons has behaved moderately. If you think of the Soviet Union and China, both behaved much more radically before they had nuclear weapons. Stalin’s bravado in the face of American nuclear weapons was extremely impressive, or depressing—depending on how you want to look at it—but once they got the nuclear weapons, the Soviets calmed down. And the same thing was true for China.

So, what people fear is the opposite of what, in fact, has happened. That is rather typical in the nuclear business: we do not look at the past and say “Well gee, every nuclear country has behaved like every other nuclear country. What do we worry about?” In fact, the effect of nuclear weapons is that it moderates the behavior of their possessors; and that is very easy to understand!

But, of course, that level of moderate behavior applies to great power interactions. Countries in possession of nuclear weapons can start behaving quiet nastily and brutishly to non-nuclear powers.

Oh, but that is repeating the old worries which have never been realized. I do not understand why we repeat those expectations. I would expect an Iran with nuclear weapons to behave more moderately, not less moderately, and to take fewer risks, not more risks. By possessing nuclear weapons, you make yourself a target, and nuclear countries are very much aware of that. They have to be because once you get into the nuclear business you begin to realize it is a real serious business, and if something goes wrong… In contrast, with conventional weapons, countries worry about winning or losing. Historically, that has proven to be bearable. Germany, for example, lost World War I and then, of course, it repeated the process—that is not a learning process, but a repeating process, which is very striking and typical for a conventional warfare-world. With nuclear weapons, countries began to behave moderately. But, as we said, people do not understand it yet. For example, when India and Pakistan both got nuclear weapons—I was paying very close attention to this, of course—the expectation by journalists, by political leaders, by academics—was “this means war on the sub-continent!” Well, what it meant was: peace on the sub-continent. We know that now, but there are some people now who say “no, that is not right, because the Indians and Pakistanis continue to fight over Kashmir.” Nevertheless, as both some Indians and some Pakistanis have said, the effect of nuclear weapons was to abolish war from the heartland, not to abolish skirmishes in peripheral areas. Now, whether or not they understood in advance, or began to understand it after both got nuclear weapons, they learnt they could no longer fight major wars. I mean, of course the Pakistanis have continued fighting over things like Kashmir after independence, and that fighting amounted to about 1.000 deaths, which makes it a war for most political scientists. But come on, 1.000 casualties is not a war, it is a skirmish! It shows they’re very careful to avoid all-out war for the risk of nuclear escalation.

States should accommodate to their position in the international system, which is determined in big part by the shifts in relative capabilities between states. Has the United States, in your view, adapted well to the position it is currently in? And if not, what system does it seem to respond to?

It responds to the situation all giant countries have responded to. And it responds in the very same way: it abuses its power, singling out poor, weak countries—that’s what we specialize in—and beating them up! That is what we do! Six wars in the twenty years since the 1980s; they were all cases in which we singled out small and weak countries like Granada or Panama, and we proceeded to beat them up. It is sad, but this is a typical behavior of powers that are dominant, or used to be dominant in their regions and now are globally dominant. The United States is the globally dominant power, and that is why there is only one way that other states can deter the United States: by acquiring nuclear weapons. Nobody can deter the United States conventionally anymore because we dispose of a military budget that is nearly the equal of all the other countries in the world combined. So, how can anybody deter the United States without resorting to nuclear weapons? They cannot.

Does it mean that, by bullying smaller countries, the U.S. has in fact adapted well to its position in the system?

That is what you would expect dominant powers to do. One does not like it; I do not like it; and I am sure the countries that experience the bullying do not like it; but it is expected behavior. That is the way countries behave when they have dominant power—globally or within their region.

In 2002, you wrote about globalization. The fact is a contradiction in terms, I would say, because globalization does not really matter much for Realism. So, why do you still feel the need to write about its good or bad attributes?

I was really writing about interdependence, which is now called globalization. There was a very marked tendency, and it was very common for people—political scientists and economists—to refer to the world as increasingly “interdependent” and to draw inferences from that supposed condition. I first developed this idea when I was the only political scientist in a faculty seminar, while all the other members were economists. That seminar was led by a person named Raymond Vernon, who was a big name in interdependence. I made some comments about how little interdependent the world was and the conception that high inequality is low interdependence. And I still believe that. I think it is a simple truth that in a world of inequality (and bear in mind that inequalities across states are much greater than the inequalities within states), interdependence is low. In other words, some states are highly independent and other states are highly dependent on those states that dispose of greater economic or military power than the others do. I think that is still extremely important, and not extremely well understood.

How does your theory apply to the dynamics one can witness on the African continent?

You know, I did not set out to be an international politics person. I started out to be a political philosopher; but there were not any jobs available, and they were in the field of international politics, so that is how I ended up in international politics. When I did, my wife and I realized you cannot pay attention to everything, so I said to myself “one continent that I am going to leave aside is Africa.” I preferred to concentrate on Europe and China. I did a pretty good deal of work on China because I saw it ripe to become one of the most important parts of the world of which I knew nothing. So, I proceeded to do a lot of work on China in order to know something about it. But Africa is kind of a blank spot for me, apart from casual observation. Even though, I would say that the whole notion of anarchy applies very well to Africa.

In fact, a criticism people used to make to me was that Africa was clearly an anarchic arena, and yet African states did not fight much among themselves. How, then, would a Realist like myself explain that? Well, I did by invoking Turney-High’s book in anthropology, which was published—I believe—in the 1920s. There, he made the very valid point that countries have to obtain a certain level of self-consciousness as being a political entity, and a certain level of competence before they are able to fight one another. Turney-High’s illustration was very clear with his study of the peoples he referred to as the “Californians,” who were such a primitive people that they did not have the ability to form groups or fight as a group. A consciousness and competence at a certain level is needed before a group is able to systematically impose on another group—whether in the form of warfare or in other ways. I think that, for a long time, Africa was in that condition, and that, as it proceeds away from that condition, African countries will be able to fight wars against one another. In a historical sense, though, that is an implication of advancement.

Kenneth Neal Waltz (born 1924) is a member of the faculty at Columbia University and one of the most prominent scholars of international relations (IR) alive today.He is one of the founders of neorealism, or structural realism, in international relations theory. Among his publications are Man, the State, and War (1959) and Theory of International Politics (1979).

Related links

Read Waltz’s The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better (Adelphi Papers 171, 1981) here (html)
Read Waltz’s Realist Thought and Neorealist Theory (Journal of International Affairs 44 1990) here (pdf)
Read Waltz’s The Emerging Structure of International Politics (International Security 18 (2) 1993) here (pdf)
Read Waltz’s Evaluating Theories (American Political Science Review 91 (4) 1997) here (pdf)
Read Waltz’s Globalization and Governance (PS: Political Science & Politics 1999) here (pdf)
Read Waltz’s Structural Realism after the Cold War (International Security 25 (1) 2000) here (pdf)
Read Scott Sagan, Richard K. Betts and Waltz’s discussion A Nuclear Iran: Promoting Stability or Courting Disaster? (Journal of International Affairs 60 (2), 2007) here (pdf)

Homepage of the Conversation with History with Kenneth Waltz by Harry Kreisler in 2003) here
On the physiocrats, read Henry Higgs’ The Physiocrats - Six lectures on the French économistes of the 18th century (2001) here (pdf)

Theory Talks would like to thank former interviewees who have contributed to this special Talk by formulating excellent questions for Kenneth Waltz. A special thanks also to Nicolás Terradas for editing and transcription.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #39: Rita Abrahamsen & Michael Williams

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 11:01:00 +0000

Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams on Private Security Companies, Global Security Assemblages, and Africa

Private security is by now a pervasive phenomenon across the globe. Within IR, the military side of this has received most attention. But the privatization of security looms larger than the ‘corporate warriors’ Peter Singer (Theory Talk #29) discusses. From Sweden to South Africa and from the U.S. to Afghanistan, security governance pervasively involves more everyday, commercial, and non-militarised forms of private security. In this Talk, Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams—whose work represents the forefront of thinking on this topic—amongst others lay bare some of the profoundly political questions that accompany this phenomenon; address some important misconceptions surrounding private security; and elegantly relate the way in which private security in Africa becomes constructed to questions on knowledge production and power in International Relations.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the central challenge or principal debate in International Relations? And what is your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?

MW I think that whilst we have worked together a lot these past years, we still have different visions concerning some of these issues. What follows is therefore my own version.

For me, the biggest current challenge for International Relations would be to translate the theoretical developments that we have seen over the past 25 years into concrete engagements with practice. Fifteen to twenty years ago in the ‘game’ of IR what mattered, what gave fulfillment, was doing meta-theory and philosophy of science. And these were incredibly important and interesting debates during the whole positivist/post-positivist turn. It seems to me that that phase of discussions is… not over, but to some extent has run its course. And the really big challenge right now theoretically is for people to translate the insights and the openings that have come out of all these meta-theoretical transformations into engagements with practice.

To explain practices is a complicated thing. I don`t think anybody needs to reduce it down to policy engagement in a direct, old fashion, sense, although I think there are some interesting questions in trying to do that; I think it`s very interesting work to try to translate what we call post-positivist methodologies into real old-fashioned governmental policy advice. But then there is a whole broader question, once one opens up the question of theory and practice, of how we can reengage with practice without pretending in a straight-forward way that theory is practice, which I think is both a naive and to some extent a self-serving way of thinking about the consequences of post-positivism. The big issues here are really tricky but I think they are incredibly important. That for me is the most exciting work and immediate challenge for the field.

I think this challenge plays out very clearly in the debate between rational choice people or rationalists on the one hand and those that engage in other forms of theorising. An example of the latter would be how constructivists try to think about security orders. Securitization theory is a very good example of how you can use an explicitly non-positivist analysis but do some very practical things in terms not only of how political situations are developing but also reflecting on real political, rhetorical practices of framing and cultural dynamics that may or may not lead to effective securitizations. Another example of non-positivist theorising is that which has been done on diplomacy. There is also interesting stuff going on in the domain traditionally occupied by strategic studies: how for example does one think about strategy in non-linear terms, or about new technologies? What does it mean to think about non-linear trajectories for scenario planning? Both these areas are intellectually incredibly challenging. These are I think great examples of work done that goes beyond simply constantly referring back into meta-theory or back into philosophical issues and rather attempts to take those philosophical and methodological openings and engage in important issues.

RA I agree with a lot of what he said, but as somebody who comes to International Relations from a very different background and has worked a long time in a field that has traditionally been engaged with more empirical issues, I have a slightly different take on the same debate. From my point of view, and from that of African studies in International Relations, the question of ‘what are the main challenges’ is very much an empirical question. I think the main challenge is something International Relations scholars have not traditionally been very good at speaking about, namely, inequality. At the same time, and this links to what Michael said, it has always been very important for me that whenever issues of inequality are spoken about, they are spoken of in a particular language that serves to reinforce the problems of inequality; it’s a prescriptive language of knowing how we can fix these problems, good governance, let’s democratise… In other words, the solution is always present and implicit, concealing the manner in which our scholarly representations are part of the power relationships and help re-inscribe these problems.

When I first started working on African politics, it was still called ‘area studies’ and the idea was that to do areas studies, theory was of absolutely no significance because Africa was not about theory and theory was not perceived as important for solving Africa’s challenges. Yet for me it has always been central to realize that the way we study Africa is in itself important. So even if area studies claimed to be devoid of theory when studying a particular region, theory was always present, even if only in selecting which aspects of such a vast region as Africa one was to study. What determines which questions are asked, and which aren’t? So in my perspective, one needs to be self-reflective about the kind of theory that one utilises. That means not simply retreating to a kind of discourse analysis and meta-theory of the study of Africa, but rather being critical about the activities you are engaged in and, depending on what slice of social world you are studying, bring that critical awareness with it.

MW To give Rita’s answer a different twist: if one accepts the broadly Bourdieuian position that one is looking at fields of practice and attempts to engage with specific fields of practice and positions of given actors in it, then the most difficult thing (and this is something that Bourdieu argues) is that academics have almost a systematic interest in denying their own particular positionality within either a field of practice that they are trying to study, or the field of practice in which they are located in their everyday lives—i.e. the academic field—and the relationship between those two fields. In other words, a scholar is never just a scholar embedded in a scholarly field of practice, but is at the same time also engaging with a set of practices that are the object of analysis. As such, a scholar of the social sciences is also a player in the very field he is studying. It`s a very interesting set of relations, depending on the particular location you are at a given time, including for instance the relationship between producing theory for an academic field of practice, and producing theory that is oriented towards a particular field of ‘practice-practice’. There are real tensions here and I do not think one can understand either the peculiarities of the academic field or the very formal relationship between academic theory and theories of practice without actually thinking about that tension. The difficulty is of course is that we do have almost a pre-disposition (an interest, as Bourdieu would put it) as academics to deny that gap, to deny it either in saying: ‘pure theory is good in and of itself, because pure theory is plain good’; or saying: ‘actually, pure theory is the same as practice. It is just that nobody recognises or believes it.’ And this ambivalence is not just an academic ambivalence; it has to do with structural conditions under which academic knowledge is being produced as opposed to other kinds of knowledge and the claim to ‘dis’-interested knowledge that is a key structural component of academic practice and its location in the wider social field. And that is, I think, something which we are often too reluctant to think about. And the more you try to engage with concrete practices and to some extent with concrete policy debates, inevitably you are going to run across trying to mediate between those two.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?

RA As indicated, I arrived at IR through African and postcolonial studies. What struck me most, was that in IR, Africa is just out there—the only task we as scholars have, is to simply go there and write down whatever it is we see, judging it by IR standards of course. This mainstream approach displays either a complete dismissal or a full-fledged unawareness of not only (postcolonial) theory but also, and quite simply, history. Reading someone like Frantz Fanon painfully reveals both: first, that contemporary Africa is literally conditioned by its colonial past, which implicates that ‘we’—and with ‘we’ I refer not only to the ‘West’ but also more specifically to IR—are part and parcel of Africa and the way it has become what it is. Second, it reveals the disfigurement constituted by popular media, policy makers, and scholars alike, which tend to regard Africa as ‘just’ Africa instead of recognizing it as firmly embedded in global relations of power.

Now part of the problem is that for IR, Africa is just visible in terms of its formal, international politics. Studying the rest of ‘Africa’ was relegated to separate disciplines such as area studies or comparative politics. Acknowledging that what is of importance are first and foremost the global relations of power shaping Africa, this bifurcation makes no sense at all—the question then becomes: how to study Africa and these interconnections despite disciplinary boundaries. Postcolonial theory takes the question of what binds all this together, the interconnectedness between what IR considers mainly as disconnected geographical units, as its starting point.

So when I wrote about ‘disciplining democracy’, what I wanted to find out, in part, was how the external—the global—is inside African democracy and how that form of power is embedded both historically, in knowledge, and in all forms of policy prescriptions. That same interconnectedness which was important here, also led us to considering private security as a similar set of issues of power, or rather, as social shifts and transformations in forms of power. How are the global and the local interconnected? How do certain actors get certain forms of power? We’ve proceeded to explore these questions, in some cases for Africa, in some cases for the global arena. That is pretty much how I would reconstruct a journey of 15 years.

Along this journey, some books in particular stand out. The first time I read work by Michel Foucault was very influential for my understanding of certain forms of power in relation to knowledge production and Africa Edward Said’s Orientalism was a big eyeopener as well and despite its shortcomings continues to be an important book in terms of how I see what I do. But closer to IR, Jean-François Bayart’s The State in Africa: Politics of the Belly was really important, as to me it is one of the first books that starts to unpack the African state, untangling it vis-à-vis the dominant assumptions in IR.

MW My trajectory is a little different as it started off very much from within IR during the second Cold War. I was an undergraduate student in the early 1980s, and actively and politically interested in the possibilities of nuclear war; questions of Euro-missiles were pretty central to anybody’s interest at that time. This led me almost immediately to an engagement with the kinds of claims that were being made about the necessity of policies and the kinds of logics within which they worked. If you were discontented with the remarkably sealed and almost circular debates and dialogues of nuclear strategy, you were prompted to study how security had come to be conceived within such relatively static and almost immovable forms of understandings. That therefore naturally led to a sort of concern with critical theory. As an undergraduate student I worked with Rob Walker, and my post-graduate studies were all influenced by Robert Cox (Theory Talk #37). The whole question therefore was about the key intellectual conditions that have made this dramatically sealed, structure of knowledge claims possible, and subsequently, how one might try to think those differently. And that involved a sort of dual movement; on the one hand going backwards, much further back into history and political feuds, to try to examine the structures and kinds of genealogies that these came from. And on the other hand forward, in terms of trying to look at what alternative kinds of analysis and practices might actually be possible. This is very much the story of broadening the content of security studies from the narrow understanding (‘strategic studies’) it had in the mid 1980s to a broader field of concerns.

In order to make this political opening possible, you had to engage in some sort of deconstructive move; but in order to keep it interesting and engaged, you had to make a reconstructive move. Staying on the outside of security studies and scrutinizing it from there, simply leaves you at a place where there is not much to gain. The principle of immanent critique still has a lot to recommend it.

As an undergraduate the most influential book that I read was E.H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, and the thing I liked was that it contained all these kinds of different ambivalences. Why I subsequently liked Robert Cox’s work, was because it picked up on the question of power that Carr raised, and took what had to me seemed a nasty realist tradition in quite a different direction than everyone else seemed to want to go. And in fact, when later on I re-read some of the classical realist work in light of Carr and Cox, I found that most of the interesting problems and discussions in Realism actually were articulated in the 1890-1950 period; in the subsequent period, Realism turned parsimonious, scientistic, and basically focussed on a very narrow set of concerns that left out some of the richness of previous realist thought. I held the same prejudices against Realism that most people still hold until I decided to embark upon the adventure of examining these parts of Realism four years after my PhD.

Underpinning this is a broader issue: the way that classical scholars and their works get appropriated and distorted by subsequent thinkers to fit the arguments they’re trying to make within their own tradition. Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx, have been represented very parsimoniously by mainstream scholars during the Cold War; it’s really a caricature that you were presented with. Only when the structure of world politics became less parsimonious itself, did IR theorists start to re-interpret or revisit the classics—that is, a big part of them. Marx is one of the classics that did not get so substantially revived in IR after the Cold War (though this is less true in historical sociology); in fact, I think that this is a great absence in contemporary IR theory debates.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

MW It requires for me at least two things: the first is obvious and I will cite Hegel, who once said: “nothing great was ever achieved without passion”. The second is the combination between a willingness to think broadly and to question fundamental categories, but to do so in a focused way, and that demands a degree of rigour rather than simply moving from point to point to point. This is why I think classical theory is incredibly useful: if you are forced to engage with the logic of Leviathan or with Hegel’s Phenomenology or with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or perhaps with Marx’s Capital, there is both an incredible intellectual journey there and a set of political questions, and lastly, there is also a commitment to a rigour of argument that I find incredibly compelling. If you’re able to operate at both levels, you come close to what I see as true creativity. And this creativity is opposed for me to simply having read, and engaging with, the latest fashion in the field.

RA I think Michael’s first point about passion is absolutely crucial. In a figure of speech, you need to have an issue which makes you angry and still does so the next morning, before you decide to do your PhD on it. Another point I want to make, is not to be afraid to play with academic boundaries. Academic studies are organized along clear disciplinary boundaries, that, once established, become policed through journals, admission committees, and other gatekeepers, to the extent that the such ‘guardians of truth’ can actually inhibit the development of sensible ways of understanding acute problems. So I would encourage, and even deem necessary, thinking across the boundaries of IR to understand contemporary global politics, combining, say, politics and anthropology, or IR and sociology. At the same time, it has to be kept in mind that this can be dangerous advice, as inter-disciplinarity is both hard work and it may not necessarily endear you to journals and hiring committees. Nevertheless, I think some of the most interesting questions in contemporary global politics require thinking across conventional disciplinary boundaries.

Your recently published book, Security Beyond the State, is subtitled Private Security in international politics. I can imagine that a realist would say: ‘private security and IR? Contradictio in terminis!’

RA Private security actors have been there for a long time. And actually, they have been recognized by the social sciences for an equally long time— think about criminology—but just not in IR. IR is only now coming to terms with the fact that one of its most important assumptions, the state’s monopoly on violence, needs to be unraveled analytically, because empirically it doesn’t make sense in most of the places most of the times. We hope to contribute to this process of ‘creative destruction’ by asking, well, what does this category of actors mean for our understanding of international relations? What are the implications, for security, for political stability, for equality, and for how we understand the state and the relationship between states?

MW The role and authority of private actors in international relations has not only been expanding but has also generally become recognized as expanding: private legal authority—for instance through corporate settlements—private economic authority—the increasing size and impact of corporations—and NGOs and international organizations are just some examples. But for the international organization of security, the role of private actors has generally not been acknowledged, or it has focused largely on the private military or so-called neo-mercenaries. In Security Beyond the State we look instead at the more everyday, commercial, and non-militarised forms of private security. At one level, the absence of these type of security actors from IR is strange, because the extent of the privatization of security is visible everywhere—I mean, Group4Securicor, the world’s largest private security company, now claims to be the second biggest private sector employer in the world! If this is not significant, please tell me what is! On another level, its absence from IR is perhaps not so strange, because all of the analytic categories that structure understanding in that field—national/global; public/private; formal/informal; criminology/security—have to be rethought in order to make sense of the implications of private security actors.

RA I think in sum, international security studies has only seen the ‘outside’ of the privatization of security; only that layer of transformation represented by private military companies, but it has often failed to see the structural transformation on the inside of the global. It is not just the allocation of last-resort violence that is privatized, it is the whole machine: decision-making, assessment, and implementation of security are all privatized. This means that social power globally is transforming and requires new thinking. So, yes, to answer your question directly, private security actors do matter for the relationships between states.

You introduce the notion of ‘security assemblages’ to describe the complex mixes of actors involved in security governance. Does this mean a departure from the status quo of assuming that states are always in the center of security governance?

RA We introduced the notion of ‘security assemblages’ to denote something which one can find in most settings, namely, a pluralization of the nature of security actors involved. Yet the specific mix of actors, their relationships, or how the field is assembled is not something one can predict or theorise a priori, but rather an empirical question that requires investigation. The more traditional approach meant, because of its Weberian heritage, that one always starts out assuming that security involves only or mostly the army or police, i.e. public actors with a monopoly of the use of force. Instead, we start out by saying that most of the time, security governance involves other actors in addition to the state, to ask, well, which actors are they, what is their relationship to public actors, and what are the implications.

In almost any setting across the globe, one will now find the army, the police, military police, customs, national and transnational private security companies, secret services, risk consultancy firms… This means we need to re-open the question of the state, of how it is being re-articulated, partially dis-assembled and re-assembled, in negotiation with private security actors. What forms of power do the different actors in such a global assemblage have? That varies, as does the role and strength of the state across different settings. You could—as we did in Africa in the book—find a whole range of different actors, different public actors, different private actors, and some actors quite surprisingly with forms of power you would not necessarily expect to find or wouldn`t even see in the traditional approach to security studies. To capture these forms of power, we work with Bourdieuian concepts of forms of capital. There is an empirical question here; we want to hold on to the idea that the state still matters and the notion of the public itself has continued relevance as a form of Bourdieuian capital in the assemblage. The security field itself, we argue, is structured by this ‘obsession’ with the public and the private, so the state doesn`t disappear—even if the state is very weak in terms of the capacity to do things, public and private actors still invoke the capital of the notion of the public to be able to do what they do and to be able in some cases restrain what other actors can do.

Last question: What are the biggest misconceptions about the subject that you are studying?

RA There are so many misconceptions about private security in Africa but at the same time private security is a big field. I think the biggest misconception is this idea that all forms of private security are more or less the same. It is the ‘Executive Outcomes’ reading of private security which constitutes one of the biggest misconceptions. This view holds that there are mercenaries running around like crazy in Africa, and other continents. Obviously, the idea of big men with big weapons still holds some truth, and this form of private security hasn’t ceased to exist but the fact is, that a most of the private security actors in Africa (and globally) are not armed and they are certainly not engaged in military or quasi-military activities. In fact, private security guards in Africa, and elsewhere too, are among the poorest paid employees you would find. Their power and impact on the security field come not so much from the barrel of the gun, but from the embeddedness of private security within broader structures of social power, both locally and globally. That is an important point that we try to demonstrate in Security Beyond the State.

MW Then there is the frequent association between increased privatisation and decreased state legitimacy, like it’s a zero-sum game. This is a very tight conceptual link, which underpins a lot of the literature on private security in IR. This whole way of thinking about politics is not always entirely wrong, but recognising the pervasiveness of private security in Sweden, Denmark, and the UK helps a great deal in getting rid of the conceptual idea that because it is private, it must by necessity and automatically mean delegitimation of the state. In fact, our research indicates that it isn’t that simple anywhere in the world. Rather than the association ‘increased private security-decreased state legitimacy’, we should pose questions about the nature of the relationship between security, the state, and other agents—and we can see that the relationship is more complicated than most of our inherent categories allows us to hang on to. In the global security assemblages that we investigate in the book, the relationships between the private and the public, the global and the local, are negotiated and complex, but nowhere can the private be said to represent a straight-forward erosion of state authority or legitimacy. Whether in resource extraction in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, or in urban security in South African and Kenya (the four empirical cases in the book), we are witnessing a reconfiguration of the public and the private, the global and the local, so that instead of a simple retreat of the state we are witnessing its re-articulation and the emergence of new geographies of power.

Related links

Faculty Profile Rita Abrahamsen at U-Ottawa
Faculty Profile Michael Williams at U-Ottowa
Read an excerpt of the introduction to their 2011 book Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics (Cambridge) here (html/pdf)
Read Abrahamsen & Williams’ Privatising Africa’s Everyday Security (Open Democracy 2010) here (html)
Read Abrahamsen & Williams’ Security Beyond the State: Global Security Assemblages in International Politics (International Political Sociology, 2009(3)) here (pdf)
Read their Beyond the Privatized Military (Human Security Bulletin, 2008) here (html/pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #38: James Scott

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Fri, 14 May 2010 22:03:00 +0000

James Scott on Agriculture as Politics, the Dangers of Standardization and Not Being Governed

How are agriculture or foot-dragging the core of the political? What if messy villages and myriads of local measures are rational? Can the well-intentioned state we take for granted as our point of departure be just as shortsighted as we are? Sometimes International Relations (IR) and political science more generally get challenged in unexpected ways. The work of James C. Scott, a Marxist inclined towards anarchism by conviction and something between agrarian specialist and political scientist in training, inspires many not only to reconsider what the realm of politics was about—but also makes resistance to state-driven schemes understandable—even for political scientists. As such, he helps political scientists seeing the state differently. In this comprehensive Talk, Scott—amongst others—gives an overview of his ideas on ‘the political’; engages the politics of political science; and explains why despite globalization the state is still very much alive.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest current challenge or principal debate in politically oriented social sciences? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

This is not a question I pose to myself often. About the only time I did was, however, some years ago. I don’t know if you know about the Perestroika Movement in Political Science? Some time ago, an anonymous manifesto signed by Mr. Perestroika appeared. It started out with the observation that Benedict Anderson and I had never read the American Political Science Review, and it proceeded to ask why—arguing that perhaps this journal and the hegemonic organization that backed it were irrelevant and indeed inhibitive of progress. Now the Perestroika Movement connected with the European Post-Autistic Economics Movement, which propagates heterodox economics as a challenge to all-consuming mainstream neoclassical economics. I was on the Executive Council of the Political Science Association because they invited me as a result of the Perestroika insurgency, and that was the only time I got actively involved in trying to think about what political science ought to do. By and large, I do what I do and let the chips fall where they may; I prefer not to spend my time in the methodological trenches of the fights are swirling around me.

As you can see, I haven’t thought deeply about how political science ought to be reformed; but I do believe that in political science, the people who do have pretentions to ‘scientificity’ are actually very busy learning more and more about less and less. There is an experimental turn in political science, consisting of people conducting what they call ‘natural experiments’ and that are carefully organized the way a psychology experiment would be organized, with control groups and so on. But the questions they ask are so extraordinarily narrow! They imagine that you answer as many of these questions as possible and you are slowly constructing a kind of indestructible edifice of social science, while I think all you have then is a pile of bricks that doesn’t add up to anything.

I am actually more impressed by people who make modest progress on questions of obvious importance than people who make decisive progress on questions that aren’t usually worth even asking. I have always tried to focus my own work on the questions I saw as having an obvious importance, such as the origins of the state or the dynamics of power-relations, whether between the state and its population or in general. Two of my books (Domination and the Arts of Resistance and Weapons of the Weak), for instance, were efforts to understand power-relations in a micro-setting (rather than in a macro-setting). Today, we are interested in what the political conditions are of non-catastrophic macro-economic policy, and that indeed seems an important question to me. Not only social scientists, but laymen too, would recognize the difference between an important question and a trivial question.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking?

Before I began graduate school—a long time back—a friend of mine said: ‘before you go to graduate school, you must read Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.’ I read it the summer before I went to graduate school, and I think it is, in some ways, the most important book I’ve ever read. The other book that greatly influenced me a great deal was E.P. Thomson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963)—I can actually remember the chair I sat in when I read the whole hefty 1000 pages. This book digs into the naissance of the working class consciousness in the same period that Polanyi zooms into to describe the disembedding of the economy from society. Another book that influenced me was Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels, because he pointed to forms of social banditry as political phenomena and should be understood as such in terms of methodology, where they are normally analyzed as something else.

Why do I like these scholars? They have taught me that it is an important contribution to the social sciences to bring in a novel concept that changes people’s way of looking at things. You know these hand-held kaleidoscopes, that when you shake them, they change colors and show you a different world? All works that made an impact on me, had that effect on how I saw the world: if I look at the world through the kaleidoscope this author proposes, I see a fascinatingly different world, and understand things I didn’t understand before.

Now in terms of real-world events that impacted me, the Vietnam War—going on while I took my first job working on South East Asia at the University of Wisconsin in 1967—was certainly one of them. I found myself in the midst of demonstrations and so forth, giving talks and lectures on that phenomenon. I also realized in that period, that I had done a boring dissertation, that sank without a trace. I decided about that time, that since peasants were the most numerous class in world history, it seemed to me that you could have a worthy life studying the peasantry. If development is about anything, it ought to be about peasant livelihoods and the improvement of peasant lives more generally. They also stand at the origins of wars of national liberation, as the Vietnam War was for the Vietnamese. My book The Moral Economy of the Peasant came directly out of the Vietnam War struggles—it was my effort to understand peasant rebellion.

What would a student need to become a skillful scholar or understand the world in a global way?

Here I have a definite opinion. We can assume, in the kind of trade-union sense of the word, that everyone who becomes a scholar is going to be trained in their specialties and disciplines, so I take that for granted. But what I’m fond of telling students these days, is that if 90% of your time is spent reading mainstream political science, sociology, anthropology, and if most of your time is spent talking to people who read the same stuff, then you are going to reproduce mainstream political science, sociology and anthropology. My idea is that if you were doing it right, at least half of the things that you should be reading would be things from outside of your discipline, as most interesting impulses come from the margins of a discipline or even externally. Interesting scholarship in social sciences arises when you see a foreign concept as applicable and adding something to your field. Now I give that advice as a theoretization of my practice. When I was working on The Moral Economy of the Peasant, I read all the peasant novels I could get my hands on; all the oral histories; in short, as much as I could stuff from outside of political science. If you look at the works that have been influential historically, you can tell by the index or bibliography that the author has been reading a lot of things that are outside the normal range of standard, mainstream work.

But if you decide to do something broad and challenging, you’ll face some difficulties and resistance from the established academic machine. Take Barrington Moore’s The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, again one of those great works. This book was turned down six times by publishers, because specialists on each of the fields he covered had problems with the chapters about those subjects.

On the other hand: how important is it to publish articles? A colleague of mine reported how many people actually read academic articles—and the number on average was less then three. So the majority of article publishing is essentially a vast anti-politics machinery put together to help people get tenure, and that holds even for peer-reviewed articles. Professional advancement depends increasingly on a kind of audit system for number of peer-reviewed articles et cetera, a kind of mechanical system that is an anti-politics machine, an effort to avoid making qualitative judgments about how good something is. It is something particularly common to democracies, where you have to convince people you are objective, you’re not playing favors, there are no qualitative judgments, and it’s just comparing the numbers. So, if you are producing an article, and it’s going to be read by three people, then why are you doing this in the first place? You should find another line of work, where you have a little impact on the world. If you’re doing it to please the discipline looking over your shoulder, it’s going to be alienated labor, and I fully grant it is more difficult to make your way if you want to do it otherwise. It’s easy for me to say, because I came along at a time when there was this romance about the third world—anything on the third world was likely to get published. So I am conscious of the fact that life was easier for me than it is for students today. But on the other hand: unless you prefer a clerical nine-to-five job in which you put in your hours, you might as well be doing something exciting even if it’s harder to sell.

You are an agrarian by training; yet all of your texts are decisively political. What’s so political about agriculture? And what are the policy implications for state-making and development in the 3^rd world?

This came to me in the middle of the Vietnam Wars, as people were fighting wars of national liberation. At that point, people began to see for the first time the Vietnamese peasant, the Algerian peasant, the Mexican peasant, as the carrier of the national soul. While it may have been incorrect, the idea was that the peasant as the ordinary Vietnamese stood for the Vietnamese nation in some way. That brought me to agriculture: if you wanted to understand insurrections in Vietnam, you had to understand peasants; and if you wanted to understand peasants, you had to understand things like land tenure, crops, and so forth. It has gone so far that I started out with political violence thirty-some years ago, and now I am studying the domestication of plants and animals!

I think that as the major way of sustenance, as the major resource over which people struggle—questions of land and irrigation water and food supply and famine—are at the very center of the history of political struggles. They are the elementary version of politics and that’s why it seems to me that a concern with such issues as farming is directly and immediately a concern with politics.

Back to the ‘modern, developed world’: in Western Europe and the US, the agricultural section makes up typically 5% of the population. Yet they tend to be heavily overrepresented politically in respect to their demographic weight in many respects because of questions of rural policy, political districting, subsidies… Smallholders and petty bourgeoisie are very important for right-wing parties. They are protected and subsidized to a point where surpluses accumulate and we actually make it difficult for the Third World to export. In a truly neoclassical world, we wouldn’t be subsidizing agriculture and we’d be getting most of our agricultural supplies from poor countries on the periphery of Europe and Latin America. Even in a place like India, which is industrializing and urbanizing rapidly, the fact is that the rural population and the people that live off of agriculture and related activities has never been higher than it is today—even though the proportion is declining, the population is growing at such a rate that this tendency can be marked.

Your book Seeing like a state (Google preview) focuses on legibility and standardization efforts for purposes of taxation and political order. Do you see the same principle hold for the establishment of commodities and markets and are the same ‘interests’ involved, or does the market philosophy require different inscriptions? In other words, what is the difference between legibility for commercial and state purposes, and, in the end, between market power and state power?

It seems to me that large-scale exchange and trade in any commodities at all require a certain level of standardization. Cronon’s book Nature’s metropolis, which is a kind of ecological history of Chicago, has a chapter on the futures market for grain. There exists a tremendous natural variety in the kind of corn, soya and wheat that were grown, but they all have to be sorted into two or three grades in the great granaries, and to be shipped abroad in huge cargo ships–the impetus to standardize in the granaries found its way back to the landscape and diversity of the surroundings of Chicago, reducing the entire region to monocropping.

It’s the same principle at work as I describe in Seeing like a state with regards to the Normalbaum in German scientific forestry. Agricultural commodities become standardized as they move and bulk in international trade. If you build a McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, they tell you architecturally exactly how to construct it, you have to buy the equipment that is standardized, it all has to be placed in the same relationship to the other things in the floor plan, so it’s all worked out in detail, and it is worked out in such detail to produce a standardized burger or standardized fried chicken. And because it is standardized, the person who comes from the corporate headquarters can come with a kind of checklist in which every place is more or less the same, and they can check on cleanliness, quality, productivity and conformity to the corporate standard. This is the kind of control over distance that is required for industrial purposes. In the end, what is the assembly line? It is an effort to standardize the unit of labor power. The processes are not so different for grain production, burgers, or cars—as are the effects on diversity. Contract farming is then an instance to adapt agriculture to post-Fordist conditions with a higher emphasis on demand.

You can be labeled as a critic of the modernizing project inherent in states. Can you give an example of a contemporary form of governing you do endorse or would promote?

The degree to which a planning process is inflected at every level by democratic processes—for all the messiness that it introduces—seems to me to lead in the long run to more satisfactory outcomes for everybody concerned, and it also results in the kind of commitment to the results in which people felt that they had an adequate part in shaping. Examples are rife of successfully designed plans thought up from above, that fail because the people for whom this planning was designed, have had no stake in it. I don’t want to get rid of the modernization project, I just want to tame the rule of experts.

I remember that I was in Berlin at the Wissenschaftskolleg, and there was a woman, Barbara Lane, there who was an architectural historian. We went to a housing area, where two types of Seidlungen or housing were to be found together: Bauhaus housings and a competing housing project by National Socialist architects. It was interesting to me, that the Bauhaus architects had figured out exactly how many square meters people needed, how much water they needed, how much sunlight, playground space… They had planned for an abstract human being; and the architecture could have been executed anywhere in the world. Whereas the Nazi architects had build genuine homes, with little chimneys, small front steps in brick—all these references to vernacular architecture that was part of the German cultural tradition. I realized that in a sense, the international aspiration of the Bauhaus school was to be placeless and universal, as IKEA does now. I found myself a little embarrassed that I would rather have lived in a dwelling designed by the Nazis than a Bauhaus home, but it does illustrate my point of governing: how is it executed? With what level of ambition in mind?

In that vein, your work is cited as a big inspiration to something called resistance studies, which aim to promote the interests of the subaltern/repressed, exactly those who you give a voice, face, and comprehensible outlook. What is your take on such emancipatory resistance studies?

All I have done in books such as Weapons of the Weak is to consider behavior we commonly label ‘apolitical’ or ‘irrational’ as forms of politics that were previously not given the dignity of considering them consciously political. For most of the world most of the time, the possibility of publicly assembling, creating organizations, having demonstrations, creating open democratic processes simply does not exist. The late (great) Charles Tilly and I disagreed about this. For him to consider something a political movement it had to have a durable public presence and have large public goals. I, on the other hand, tried to identify a zone of political action where it was considered inexistent before. About all these situations in which a formal and restricted definition of politics does not apply, I simply asked the question: ‘What happens if we consider this politics?’ And in fact foot-dragging, not complying, and other such tactics that people deploy when faced with brutal or authoritarian power, are often the only political tools available for the most of the world’s population for most of the world’s history.

It is powerful institutions that have most to conceal about the operations of power and about how the world actually works. I thought that the emancipatory potential of social science was actually simply doing your work honestly, showing how things really operate, that this would always have a subversive effect because it was the powerful institutions that had the most to hide and conceal. Good social science, I thought, would by its nature be emancipatory and have a kind of resistance function. I have less confidence nowadays about the motives of people who want to unearth how things work; they bring their own powerful prejudices to bear, and their motives are not always motives I find worthy.

How important is Marxism for you in explaining how the world works?

When I used to be asked about my relation to Marxism I used to say that I’m a crude Marxist, with the emphasis on ‘crude’, in the sense that I look at the material basis of any political struggle, and I think class and material basis are the best points of departure for analysis. And what I add to that—and that’s why I was so taken with Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation—is that it seems to me a powerful argument about the way the economy was embedded historically in other social relations and could not be extracted from it until the early 19^th century when the laissez-faire ideology was elaborated. The struggle that Polanyi points to is a struggle that we’re still engaged in, and certainly after the Washington Consensus we’re going to have to invent forms of social protection of the kind Polanyi talked about. Whether we call them socialism or not, it is the kind of self-defense of people’s life chances and subsistence. How to protect ordinary human beings against market excesses is a classical socialist question still very much to the fore.

In a strange way, I find myself nostalgic for the Cold War, in two senses. First, I think you could argue, as my colleague Roger Smith argued, if you want to understand the success of the civil rights movement in the US, one major reason during the Kennedy era was the fact that the US was losing the Cold War in part—they thought—because of the fact that we were a racist society. So winning the Cold War became premised upon reforms I fully endorsed, to make society more equitable. Secondly, when it was a bipolar world, the US and the West were interested in land reform in places where the land distribution was wildly unequal. After 1989, the IMF and the World Bank have never talked about land reform again.

So while the mechanical teleological Marxist class struggle discourse has simply been proven wrong historically, the Polanyi kind of socialist questions are all alive and well.

In your latest book, you argue that we’re witnessing a definitive expansion and entrenchment of the nation-state over the globe, a sort of final enclosure and you mention liberal political economy as a constraint on high modernist aspirations that can lead to catastrophe. But according to many contemporary observers, this would be contested, with rather the market expanding excessively, which ought to be curbed by states.

I note somewhere in Seeing like a state that the French trade unions were defending social security and the safety net in France against a set of liberal policies of the IMF and the World Bank, and in that respect, the nation-state was one of the few obstacles against markets. Henry Bernstein reminds me every time I argue against the state that it is the only institution that stands between the global liberal economy and the individual or the family.

But in most of the world, the third world anyway, the effective leaver of the world economy has been the state; and often, it is the state that is then checked by a liberal appeal to private space which the expansive state cannot appropriate and regulate.

We might agree that the more truly democratic a state is, which means minimizing the distortion of structural advantages in the accumulation of wealth and property, the degree to which those distortions of wealth, power and property are curbed by the state, indicate the extent to which a state can become something that restrains the completely unimpeded operation of the market. The only state that is likely in the long run to serve as a vehicle for the self-protection of citizens against market failures is a democratic system that is open enough and that negates, mediates or minimizes the structural advantages of concentrations of power, property and wealth.

What is neoliberalism in your definition?

In a sense, the pervasiveness of neoliberal ways of talking has the effect of turning people into calculators of advantages. There is this book, Everything I learned about love I learned in business school, and it’s about ‘cutting your losses’, about having a ‘mission statement’, about ‘measuring performance’… In a curious way, in terms of classical political economy, Hobbes thought we needed a state to restrain our appetites, and it may be that the neoliberal state has so colonized our way of decision-making (stimulating our appetites), that the neoliberal state has in fact created the human actor that now does have to be restrained by the state.

In your last book, The art of not being governed (Google preview), your focus is on places and peoples in South-East Asia that were reluctant to be incorporated into the nation-state system. It is a historical book; does it, despite of that, have any lessons for the present?

Next to what I mentioned earlier about recognizing the choice not to be incorporated into the state as a consciously evasive political choice, I would argue that since the Second World War, these place have been incorporated into the nation-state, albeit not everywhere and unevenly. We need to invent ways of association and cooperation across state boundaries and forms of limited sovereignty like Catalonia. The only alternative today is somehow taming this nation-state, because it can’t be held at bay—it is increasingly usurping these frontier regions—the movie Avatar, which pretends you can burn bridges and keep ‘modernity’ away is simply utopian. So I think the task for indigenous peoples is to somehow slow down and domesticate the advance of the nation-state in ways that will make their absorption more humane.

You stated earlier you are a ‘crude Marxist’, yet in your recent book you adopt a constructionist take on collective identity, by showing how easily social formations can change. If the material basis is so important, what do you mean with constructionism?

The number of things that can function as markers of distinctive identities. If you think about the potential commonalities that groups of people share, any one or any combination of these commonalities can be made the basis for an identity. In South-East Asia, some people bury their dead in jars; they can choose to take that as a boundary sign confirming some sort of group identity; then, all of a sudden, social mobilization occurs on the basis of the way in which the dead are buried—those who bury them in jars versus those who don’t. The question is always: which of these almost endless series of cultural or economic features are the bases for social mobilization? There are material conditions; if in fact a whole series of small landholders all find themselves subject to the same conditions of debt and if there’s an economic crisis and they’re all losing their land at the same time, then it is likely that this kind of pain will crystallize itself as a peasant movement for the reduction of debt. The same goes, of course, for mobilizing French farmers who suffer from the same European regulations; whereas they support different local soccer teams and as such have little in common, when a new regulation targets their industry, they’ll mobilize around that material fact. On the other hand, you can get poor farmers in Michigan, as in the Michigan militias, who decide to mobilize around the fact that the government is the enemy of poor white people.

It seems to me that some features are more likely to serve as the point of crystallization around which group identities will rally, but there is no way of predicting which one it will be in a given situation.

Your last book in a way makes an argument similar to that of Rousseau, namely, that outside the state, there is not anarchy but also—and consciously different—political order. What do you think of the philosophical idea of the ‘state of nature’, which by realists in international relations is extrapolated into the unsafe anarchy that ‘surrounds’ states?

My answer would be a historical one. The state, or centralized political organization, has been with us for the last 4000 years. Even when this state was not all-pervasive or all-powerful everywhere, it was always there. So even if certain spaces or people were ‘outside’ the state—in the so-called state of nature—they always coexisted with the state and interacted with it dialectically. So saying that there are people living inside and with the state, and others outside and without it, and that supposedly they will behave completely different, is a difficult hypothetical. I have, for instance, the idea that life was not ‘brutish, nasty and short’ outside of the state as Hobbes argued, partly because the population levels were so low that the way of dealing with conflict was simply moving out of the way. A lot of the things people struggled and died over, were essentially commodities. So if by the state of nature we mean people living outside the state in a world in which states already exist so they are at the periphery of states, then this is a completely different thing. We know, for instance, that pastoralism is in fact always organized in order to trade with agrarian states; it is not some previous form of subsistence that is superseded by agriculture. Another example: in the 9^th century the people in Borneo were considered to be very backward and they were a typical example of a hunting and gathering society. What were they gathering? Certain kinds of feathers and resins and the gall bladders of monkeys, all stuff hugely valuable in China at the time! So they were gathering these things for international trade with an already existing state; their hunting and gathering is a hunting and gathering performed in the shadow of states. So which ‘state of nature’ are we referring to? When Rousseau speaks of the savages he has met, he sees people that strategically respond to representatives of an organized state, pursuing their interests and behaving politically. So the concept, perhaps, hides more than it reveals.

James Scott is Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology at Yale and is Director of the Agrarian Studies Program. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism.

Related links

Faculty Profile at Yale
Read the Introduction of Seeing Like a State (1998) here (pdf)
Video in which James Scott tells the story of The art of not being governed at Cornell

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #37: Robert Cox

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:06:00 +0000

Robert Cox on World Orders, Historical Change, and the Purpose of Theory in International Relations

Realism in International Relations (IR) has never been challenged as eloquently as by Robert W. Cox in his seminal article Social Forces, States, and World Orders. Ever since, his work has inspired critical students of IR and International Political Economy (IPE) to think beyond the boundaries of conventional theorizing and to investigate the premises that underpin and link international politics and academic reflection on it. Recognized by many as one of the world’s most important thinkers in both IR and IPE, Cox assembles impressive and complex thinking stemming from history, philosophy, and geopolitics, to illuminate how politics can never be separated from economics, how theory is always linked to practice, and how material relations and ideas are inextricably intertwined to co-produce world orders. In this seminal Talk, Cox, amongst others, discusses possible futures we now face in terms of world order; reiterates what it means that theory is always for someone and for some purpose; and shows how the distinction between critical and problem-solving theory illuminates the problem of climate change.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge or principal debate in current IR/IPE? What is your position or answer to this challenge or in this debate?

I do not have a grand theory of where the world is going. I think in terms of dialectics, that is, contradictions, which may or may not be overcome. We are living in a time of gradual disintegration of a historical structure, which not so long ago seemed to be approaching what Francis Fukuyama once called ‘the end of history’.

As a critical theorist, I see two future scenarios. As things are right now, there is a prevailing historical structure, yet there are social forces working towards an alternative historical configuration of forces, a rival historical structure. One is that the relative decline of American power gives way to a more plural world with several centers of world power that would be in continuous negotiation for a constantly adjustable modus vivendi, much akin to the European 19^th-century balance of power system, but now on world scale. One common threat would hang over this process of negotiation for the adjustment of power relations, and that is the problem of global warming and the fragility of the biosphere, which puts pressures on all of us to achieve successes in coordinating particular interests towards the common interest of saving the planet.

Another scenario is also emerging: a continuation of the struggle for global domination, I think a prevailing term on the American side is ‘full spectrum dominance’, pitting US led forces against the potential consolidation of Eurasian power. This is the old geopolitical vision of Halford Mackinder: a heartland consisting of Eurasia, the world island, encircled by the now American-led periphery. The war on terror, first started by the Bush administration and now continued by Obama, renews the American imperative for world dominance. This leads logically to a coming together of the continent of Eurasia, to confront what Eurasians perceive as the attempt of the US to achieve world dominance by encirclment. The conflicts that now exist in the Middle East—Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan—are symptomatic of this, including the growing reservations of some European countries to the role of the periphery’s military alliance, NATO. There is an alternative organization, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, linking Russia, China, and the Central Asian Republics, which in effect would join together Eurasia as a potential counterbalance to NATO.

I think the biggest challenge is the relative decline of the US in relation to the rest of the world and whether and how America will adjust to a world in which it can no longer presume to lead. I think this is extremely difficult for American society and American politicians. The role of developing this new historical structure, by the actors within it, is to build a context for action which shapes thinking about what is possible for those living through it. This engenders a ‘common sense’ about reality that can endure for a long time, as previous historical structures have shown. This is what Fernand Braudel called the ‘longue durée’. A historical structure in the minds of historical actors may seem fixed, but the historian can subsequently see it as being in mutation, gradually sometimes or more suddenly in others.

So probably the biggest challenge is the challenge to America. The rest of the world is showing some ability to understand and to be party to an adjustment to a new world order—but will America understand? That’s the big problem, because the rest of the world is ready to adapt provided the US takes a lead towards understanding its role as that of one great power amongst others. The moment Obama got elected was a moment that represented the possibility of such a change in American society, yet one year later, in terms of international relations, he has appointed all the people associated with the previous administration. So while there is now, because of Obama, a difference in the mode of expression of American power (Obama is much more sympathetic to the rest of the world than the rather aggressively dominant Bush/Cheney presidency), that power is directed in the same way as before. The US still has over seven hundred military bases around the world which seem to the rest of the world as encirclement.

Now compare this to Britain’s position after the Second World War. Britain was no longer able to sustain its position as a world leader and adopted a policy of withdrawal. It could do so because of the idea of a ‘special relationship’ with the US, which effectively meant turning over problems of international security to the United States. So in structural terms, nothing changed much at that moment in terms of dominance in world order, but Britain managed to adopt to its new role. Now back to the present: with Obama, many people expected an international politics of withdrawal: a big part of his support came from the idea that he was the anti-war candidate—he even received the Nobel Peace Prize. But, in accepting his prize, he somewhat apologetically defended fighting his wars. And this straitjacket of war in which Obama finds himself, this seeming determinism regarding the role of the US in the contemporary world order, has major implications for domestic social forces and is called into question by the crisis in the world economy.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I grew up in Canada, and early on I realized that Canada is not just a single entity, but is also an assemblage of communities. I had to come to terms quite early with the fact that states, the homogeneous entities that form the point of departure for thinking about international politics, are in fact made up of combinations of ethnic/religious and social forces, which more often than not have conflicting interests and aspirations. After that, based in Switzerland for 25 years, I traveled the world while working for the International Labor Organization (ILO). At that time, I was no longer identified primarily as a Canadian but rather as an international civil servant— not as a cosmopolitan in the sense of having overcome local identification, but rather could I identify with many different peoples in distinct places. From this experience, I came to understand that all these different peoples ought to be respected in their differences. I thoroughly rejected the idea that the aim should be that everyone would ultimately be the same: difference is healthy, it is interesting, and it would be awfully boring if everyone were the same. So I discovered that not only Canada, but the rest of the world too, was made up of different and conflicting social and political forces, which functioned in alliances that crossed state borders. I saw shared interests with similar groups across borders as well as solidarities within states.

My thinking is furthermore influenced by my tendency, in earlier years, to think about things in historical terms. And not just history in the sense of what happened in the past, but rather history as a way of understanding processes that go on in the world. I read R.G. Collingwood, usually thought of as an idealist in British philosophy, yet whom I found compatible with my own sense of historical materialism. Collingwood spoke about the ‘inside’ as well as the ‘outside’ of historical events. When the positivist looks at what happens by classifying and collecting events and drawing inferences from them, he sees the outside; Collingwood’s emphasis on the inside of events was to understand the meaning of things in terms of the thought-processes of the people who were acting, and their understanding of the structure of relationships within which they lived. To understand history in those terms is what gives meaning to events.

Although I am not a Marxist, I believe much is to be learned from Marxist thinking. Marxist ideas on the tension between capital and labor, and the attempts to institutionalize these relations on state-level and the international level in order to advance material interests, helped me understand the world in a distinct way. I have identified my approach as ‘historical materialism’, yet I have linked it not so much with Marx as with Giambattista Vico (download his main work The New Science here, pdf), the 18^th-century critic of Descartes and the north European Enlightenment who lived in Naples .and later with the 20^th century Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci.

In Vico’s times, Naples was under the rule of the Spanish inquisition, and while he always proclaimed himself to be a devout Catholic, Vico’s vision of the world was quite an antithesis to the orthodox idea of a unilinear history leading to the Kingdom of God on earth. Vico thought in terms of cycles of rise and decline and the possibility of creative new beginnings. Among the Marxists, Gramsci continued the Vichian tradition. He made a distinction between a deterministic and positivist historical economism and historical materialism, in which the realm of ideas is an autonomous force. He recognized the relative autonomy of cultures and ideas and their intimate relationship with material conditions.

Within his historical context, Vico was what we would call a realist, rejecting the Enlightenment belief in a progressive historical process which echoed the Christian teleology. He took a more pessimistic view than that of Enlightenment thinkers; he thought in terms of the rise and decline of what would be called social systems in the terms we use now.

That linear vision of history characteristic of the Enlightenment is persistent up until our days in American thought, especially American political or historical philosophy—I mentioned Francis Fukuyama, who talked about the end of history which we’re moving towards, and we’re almost there. As if history is a finite process which necessarily has to lead towards a definite goal. Fukuyama, I understand, abandoned that vision, but I think nevertheless that it was consistent with a lot of thinking going on within the powerful group of people who were talking about globalization, basically identifying world history with deterministic economic processes. I think this vision is much less likely to be accepted right now as it has led to the financial crisis and the decline of American world power, not militarily, but as effective power. This seems to me the lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan: extreme military power is really not capable of dominating the world today.

Apart from Vichian thinking, I was influenced by a book I read as an undergraduate, Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Historians did not think well of the book, but it saw the world in terms of civilizations, each characterized by a unique spirit, civilizations which underwent a rise and decline, and yet were interrelated either as contemporaries or as descendants. That seemed to me a very appropriate way of understanding what the world had become. While I think we should not take Spengler literally, his way of looking at relationships between groups in historical process has had a big influence on my own thinking.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

I don’t like to prescribe, and my own intellectual trajectory has been very idiosyncratic. Yet I can indicate that, for me, there is a danger in the reading-list-approach to topics, because it tends to put students in the position wherein they get forced to become members of a particular school of thought, and I think that’s a risky thing. Just look at the terminology: different schools of thought or distinct approaches to the same world are called ‘disciplines’, and that is indeed what they do: they discipline students into seeing the world through only one particular lens—which is more misleading than revealing. You can’t understand, for instance, the economy without infusing it with society and all of its problems, or without understanding politics as something that has a kind of organizing and regulating task—you have to take it all together, you can’t just take one aspect. Yet doing this is typical of the problem-solving approach: in order to solve a problem, one has to demarcate and define the problem and set other things aside. But by focusing on solving some concrete problems, which I acknowledge is very important, one blinds oneself for other related issues. If you want to ask where the world is going, you have to get out of that way of thinking.

So I would say something which would probably sound quite heretical to contemporary academics, and that is that if a student feels able to be different, to read widely, and to accept different influences rather than just become entrenched in a particular area of study, he should. A good example which I remember is Susan Strange, who came out of journalism into IPE. Against the fragmentation that conditions mainstream scholarship, she never accepted academic divisions and she talked about IPE saying it should be an open field, and I agree with that emphasis. She called me an eccentric, and coming from her, a non-conformist herself, that was a compliment. Yet what I think I have learnt is that being critical does not readily get you financial resources for research, so you have to be committed and go for it.

What I can comment on more clearly is the role of the historian in relation to the historical structures that condition human action. The historian’s task is to reconstruct these historical structures in his or her own mind so as to be able to grasp the meaning of what the actors do, and what the consequences signify. The historian constructs in his or her mind this seemingly solid but nevertheless transitory structure; he must understand how the actors within any given historical structure, may think in terms of a particular understanding peculiar to its time and place. This fact of the mutation of the “common sense” particular to historical structures which are in process of change points the historian towards the contingency of the prevailing order.

History for me is not a sequence of events but a holistic way of thinking about the world. The current academic fashion breaks the world down into politics, economics, anthropology and so forth. A historical outlook means taking things occurring within a historical context all together. Yet this is very demanding, because one person can hardly accomplish such a view. But one person can at least have an approach that says that everything must be understood. Some contemporary scholars such as Kees van der Pijl (Theory Talk #23) seem to have such an approach to the world.

You have coined the famous distinction between problem-solving and critical theory in your article Social Forces, States and World Orders. If problem-solving theory serves the purposes of the prevailing status quo, for whom or for what purpose is critical theory?

I think the two are distinct but not mutually exclusive. I do not argue for critical theory to the exclusion of problem solving theory. Problem solving takes the world as it is and focuses on correcting certain dysfunctions, certain specific problems. Critical theory is concerned with how the world, that is all the conditions that problem solving theory takes as the given framework, may be changing. Because problem solving theory has to take the basic existing power relationships as given, it will be biased towards perpetuating those relationships, thus tending to make the existing order hegemonic.

What critical theory does, is question these very structural conditions that are tacit assumptions for problem-solving theory, to ask whom and which purposes such theory serves. It looks at the facts that problem-solving theory presents from the inside, that is, as they are experienced by actors in a context which also consists of power relations. Critical theory thus historicizes world orders by uncovering the purposes problem solving theories within such an order serve to uphold. By uncovering the contingency of an existing world order, one can then proceed to think about different world orders. It is more marginal than problem solving theory since it does not comfortably provide policy recommendations to those in power.

What I meant is that there is no theory for itself; theory is always for someone, for some purpose. There is no neutral theory concerning human affairs, no theory of universal validity. Theory derives from practice and experience, and experience is related to time and place. Theory is a part of history. It addresses the problematic of the world of its time and place. An inquirer has to aim to place himself above the historical circumstances in which a theory is propounded. One has to ask about the aims and purposes of those who construct theories in specific historical situations. Broadly speaking, for any theory, there are two possible purposes to serve. One is for guiding the solving of problems posed within the particular context, the existing structure. This leads to a problem-solving form of theory, which takes the existing context as given and seeks to make it work better. The other which I call critical theory is more reflective on the processes of change of historical structures, upon the transformation or challenges arising within the complex of forces constituting the existing historical structure, the existing ‘common sense’ of reality. Critical thinking then contemplates the possibility of an alternative.

The strength of problem-solving theory relies in its ability to fix limits or parameters to a problem area, and to reduce the statement of a particular problem to a limited number of variables which are amenable to rather close and clear examination. The ceteris paribus assumption, the assumption that other things can be ignored, upon which problem-solving theorizing relies, makes it possible to derive a statement of laws and regularities which appear of general applicability.

Critical theory, as I understand it, is critical in the sense that it stands apart from the prevailing order, and asks how that world came about. It does not just accept it: a world that exists has been made, and in the context of a weakening historical structure it can be made anew. Critical theory, unlike problem-solving theory, does not take institutions and social power relations for granted, but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins, and whether and how they might be in process of changing. It is directed towards an appraisal of the very framework for action, the historical structure, which the problem-solving theory accepts as its parameters. Critical theory is a theory of history, in the sense that it is not just concerned about the politics of the past, but the continuing process of historical change. Problem-solving theory is not historical, it is a-historical, in the sense that it in effect posits a continuing present, It posits the continuity of the institutions of power relations which constitute the rules of the game which are assumed to be stable. The strength of the one is the weakness of the other: problem-solving theory can achieve great precision, when narrowing the scope of inquiry and presuming stability of the rules of the game, but in so doing, it can become an ideology supportive of the status quo. Critical theory sacrifices the precision that is possible with a circumscribed set of variables in order to comprehend a wider range of factors in comprehensive historical change.

Critical theory, in my mind, does not propound remedies or make predictions about the emerging shape of things, world order for example. It attempts rather, by analysis of forces and trends, to discern possible futures and to point to the conflicts and contradictions in the existing world order that could move things towards one or other of the possible futures. In that sense it can be a guide for political choice and action.

How would that distinction apply to a contemporary issue such as, say, climate change?

With the example of climate change, the question is not to choose between problem-solving or critical theory. Problem solving theory is practical and necessary since it tells us how to proceed given certain conditions (for instance, the consequences to be expected from carbon generated from certain forms of behavior in terms of damage to the biosphere). Critical theory broadens the scope of inquiry by analyzing the forces favoring or opposing changing patterns of behavior.

In the example of climate change, problem-solving theory asks how to support the big and ever increasing world population by industrial means yet with a kind of energy that is not going to pollute the planet. It requires a lot of innovative thought, has to mobilize huge reluctant and conservative social forces within a slow moving established order with vested interests in the political and industrial complex surrounding existing energy sources. Problem-solving theory gives opportunity to innovate and explore new forms of energy.

Critical theory would take one step further and envisage a world order focused not just on humanity but on the whole of life, taking into account the web of relations in which humanity is only part in our world. Humans have to come to terms what it means to be part of the biosphere, and not just the dominant feature. In fact, it is a big problem of Western religion and modernist enlightenment thinking alike that nature is seen to be created in service of humans in the first, and is a force to be dominated in the second. Both Western religion and modernism have analytically disembedded humans from nature, turning nature into something to be dominated or an abstracted factor of production. To rethink this, to make humans part of nature, implies seeing humans as an entity with a responsibility vis-à-vis the bigger world of which they are a part.

What is the current value of the term ‘hegemony’?

Hegemony as a term used traditionally in international relations meant the supremacy of one major state power over others and perhaps the acceptance of that supremacy by the others. A much more subtle meaning is derived from Gramsci’s thinking bringing culture and ideas alongside material force into the picture. Hegemony in this Gramscian sense means that the great mass of mankind in a particular area or part of the world regard the existing structure of power and authority as established, natural and legitimate. Hegemony is expanded when other people come to accept those conditions as natural. Hegemony is weakened and eroded when the legitimacy of the power structure is called into question and an alternative order seems possible and desirable.

Let’s look at American thinking. It is very much premised on an idea that ultimately, we should all be the same—and the same means, of course, having what America already has, or wanting what Americans want—democratic capitalism, the ‘American way of life’. This can be seen in American efforts at economic and political development abroad and through military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in how the United States has shaped and used international institutions. As I worked for the ILO, I worked closely with an American Director-general, very much a New-Deal thinker, and this meant working for an agenda that effectively tried to extend the same labor standards and regulations that hold in the US to other countries. Now this can all be done in good faith, and believing in the importance of unions and equal labor conditions is important, but it does not take into account the extreme differences in economic conditions and historical background of people in developing countries targeted by these policies. Now my Director-General was a man who could understand the diversity of the world. Rather than put the ILO’s emphasis on expanding the scope of standards, he directed it into development work. It was still carried out in the spirit of American ideas but in a more subtle way. The hegemonic idea was built into the developmental work.

There is the case of contemporary China; if you look at Chinese and especially the middle class, they want to live like Americans, in terms of consumerism and the like. The economic ties that bind China and the US also influence ideas the Chinese hold, and this has very much to do with the hegemony the US has on all these levels—both economically, and in terms of media. Now since that American level of consumption is not sustainable in the long run, and if one billion Chinese, roughly 20% of the world population, were to add to the existing American 5% of consumers and polluters, one can easily predict collapse of the biosphere. We should, then, hope that the decline in American power and the rise in China’s world power would lead to some collective reevaluation of how to live together on the planet.

And, vice versa, how does the rise of China impact on American hegemony?

This is a very interesting question. The Chinese see China as a great power, but, at least for now, with no pretensions to global domination. And the fact that official policy and thinking is now set in that mold may be reassuring. There has been speculation in America about a G2 – China and America – as the central force in world order. China is the world’s biggest creditor and the U.S. the world’s biggest debtor, so some Americans see the G2 idea as a means of saving American hegemony. I do not think this idea meets with any degree of acceptance in China. Indeed, much of the legitimacy of the Chinese Party depends on its capacity to keep the current growth sustainable for the ever-increasing middle class. This is also the reason why China will in all likelihood stay peaceful.

On the other hand, you see the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment in parts of the US. At the same time, I think the Chinese are very careful about what they say. They prefer to speak of a non-ideological ‘peaceful rise’ that benefits all and threatens no one. They see themselves as having been very dependent on America as a market, and their industry has grown on the basis of that market, but they’re also very aware that they have become over-dependent and they are now working to build up much more of a regionally oriented economy. The success of this regional venture will hinge upon the question whether China and Japan will work together despite their continuous tensions based upon history.

The Russians, too, lay down a line for the US. Their small war with Georgia sent a message: ‘do not mess with our near abroad’. And between the two, Russia and China, there is an organization called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, that’s very rarely spoken of. Yet as I indicated, I think it is a very important organization since it signals the potential coming together of Eurasia, not as an empire or fusion, but as a kind of regional cooperative group that is counterpoised to US power. And the question now is, how and whether the US can adapt to the idea of working as one great power among several or whether US pretension to global leadership will provoke the consolidation of a Eurasian alliance to counter that pretension. My hope is for a more plural world, but I am rather pessimistic. I am thus a realist in the sense of being realistic both about the limitations of American power and America’s capacity to change away from its present course.

Robert Cox is emeritus professor in Political Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. He was the former director general and then chief of the International Labor Organization's Program and Planning Division in Geneva, Switzerland. Following his departure from the ILO he taught at Columbia University. He has published, amongst others, Approaches to World Order (1996) and The Political Economy of a Plural World (2002).

Related links

Read Cox’s seminal article Social Forces, States, and World Orders (1986) here (pdf)
Read Cox’s The ‘British School’ in the Global Context (2009, New Political Economy) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #36: Michael Shapiro

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:45:00 +0000

Michael J. Shapiro on Pictures, Paintings, Power and the Political Philosophy of International Relations

How do images reflect politics? How can one learn to appreciate the ‘everyday’ as imbued with power? The oeuvre of Michael J. Shapiro has transcended—or rather—refused—the disciplinary boundaries that structure most inquiry to produce unsettling, difficult yet profoundly relevant and rich accounts of the world around us. Drawing on such diverse traditions as literary theory, sociology, and cultural studies, Shapiro, amongst others, discusses the political philosophy of International Relations; explains what we could learn from critical humanities and reflects on the way in which pictures are relevant texts for critical analysis.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

The biggest challenge for contemporary IR is to wake up from its pre-Kantian slumber. Most of the discipline remains uncritical because it is predicated on an anemic, empiricist philosophy of social science which treats mere appearances. The Kantian/post Kantian innovation is to focus on the conditions of possibility for something to appear. More concretely, the dominant forms of realism and rationalism in the discipline tend to naturalize the geopolitical world of states and to allow an unreflective discourse on sovereignty to dominate the problematics that mainstream inquiry entertains. From critical perspectives, the discipline or IR is an object of analysis rather than a set of norms for creating and analyzing global phenomena. IR and empiricist social science in general is tied to appearances. If we follow the trajectory of post-Kantian critical thinking, our concerns become involved with the alternative ways in which the world is politically partitioned and note the economies of what is able to appear versus what is concealed. The experiences of slavery, forced migration, violent usurpation of indigenous territories, global trading in bodies and body parts all produce perspectives and voices that challenge security-minded and war-strategy focused versions of “international relations.” One critical question, then, is why the dominant sovereignty-predicated focus remains; the others involve recognizing and analyzing global exchanges that operate outside of or below the level of inter-state relations. My strategy? Forget IR.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I must preface my response by noting that I am NOT ‘in’ IR. How IR makes its world is a subject matter for me, not part of my intellectual or disciplinary affiliation. How did I arrive at the kind of critique of the discipline that operates implicitly in my work? I think two aspects matter here. First of all, I consumed a lot of writing in the history of philosophy and I have always been attentive particularly to critically oriented philosophy. This has allowed me to relate questions asked in IR (the discursive ‘appearances’) to the related or underlying conditions. Secondly, I have always tried to heed methodological approaches that distance me from what is familiar. Third, I familiarize myself with a wide variety of genres – literature, film, architecture, poetry, music, landscape painting, and so on. These different genres articulate alternative thought-worlds and allow me to see things from alternative perspectives. For example, one of the best ways to heed the consequences of the Cuban revolution for Cuba’s contemporary life world is to read the crime stories of the Cuban writer, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, And one of the best ways to appreciate the demise of European colonialism is to watch Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film commissioned by the Algerian government, The Battle of Algiers (watch the trailer here).

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

My advice is to avoid becoming “a specialist in IR” because it is a specialty that is intellectually challenged; it’s a “trained incapacity” (to use Thorstein Veblen’s expression). One who wants to achieve a critical distance from the way the dominant disciplines make their worlds must seek to learn the nuances of what Jacques Rancière calls ‘indisciplinarity’. As Rancière puts it, “indisciplinary thought,” is the kind of thought that breaks disciplines in order to deprivilege the distribution of (disciplinary) territories that control “who is qualified to speak about what.” My answer to those who think that critically oriented inquiry is hard to grasp is that things should be hard to grasp. When they are easy to grasp “we are not thinking yet” (to quote one of Gilles Deleuze’s frequent remarks). To cut to the end: the benefit of resisting disciplinary discourses is that one gets to think rather than merely recognize things. And thinking requires the invention of new concepts, new angles of vision, and the production of encounters between bodies that do not share worlds. For example, the Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes was led to recognize that the world functions within more than one temporal practice. While driving with friends in the Morelos section of Mexico, he got lost and asked a campesino the name of the village where he had just stopped. The answer was that the village is named Santa Maria in times of peace and Zapata in time of war. The epiphany that Fuentes achieved at that moment was to see that (in his words) “there is more than one time in the world” – other than, for example, the one bequeathed by the dominant states.

What constitutes good social analysis?

Good social analysis does one or more of the following: It adds voices and perspectives to a domain of thought or inquiry that has generated silences that narrow the scope of “the political.” It invents new concepts. It disrupts the process by which we have assumed that we are attaining a deeper understanding (I am paraphrasing Maurice Blanchot on the purpose of literature here). It substitutes contingency for certainty. It historicizes what is treated as timeless. In short, it unsettles the process of settling how we should interpret the social and political world.

Your work seems to consist in many instances of critique of text. How do you choose your texts?

The issue of a choice of text cannot be characterized in general. For example, when Michel Foucault went back historically to texts on instructions for those “manning” confessional booths, his purpose was not to teach us what the development of Christianity was about. Rather, it was to make current demands on people to tell truths about themselves seem peculiar and thereby to be able to characterize the particular aspects of power-knowledge in the present. By showing that there was once a different kind of demand during a different historical period, he is able to provide a history of “truth” as a power-knowledge phenomenon. He could have done this with other texts from other periods. It is a matter of finding a text that, when juxtaposed with something else, delivers a critical way of thinking about politics, power, authority, etc.

In my case, while treating “American political thought” I chose to examine African American, Latino American and Native American crime novels because by so doing, I was able to see how the perspective on American politics could be enlarged when we go beyond the issues that are enjoined in Euro-American texts. I discovered what I call alternative thought worlds. Such discoveries challenge what many regard as unified centers of knowledge.

Thus, for example, global cities are complex racial-spatial and ethnic orders that reveal their fraught inter-racial/inter-ethnic relations in a wide variety of texts. In the case of France, the films La Haine (watch trailer here) and Caché (watch trailer here) are among the most instructive texts.

In the case of Berlin, before the Berlin Wall came down, graffiti was among the more instructive texts. Now that the city is unified, and Berliners are seeking to overcome much of what they regard as a shameful past, architecture is among the most important texts because, as Andreas Huyssen has put it, Berliners recognize that memory is built.

Which images related to social or political issues have inspired you most or show well the relation between representation and power and why?

My work on cinema, influenced a lot by the cinema books of Gilles Deleuze, treats the way film form can constitute a way of thinking – about politics, about war, about subjectivity, etc. An example of this is the composition of images in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. This film, which by part two creates episodes during the Vietnam War, helps us understand the forces at work that allow young men to be recruited as soldiers into a violent conflict. Among what the film shows, by examining their pre-war daily life world, is the extent to which they lack complex codes that can compete with the patriotic, duty-compelling codes that instigate their willingness to serve.

I cannot cite images without also noting the commentary (sometimes my own) that has helped me see them politically. The opening scenes in Robert Altman’s film McCabe and Mrs. Miller (watch the opening scene here) struck me right away because the scene takes place in the Pacific Northwest and thus deforms the traditional western films (especially those of John Ford), which operate in different, typically desert-like, landscapes.

Another example of an image that I cherish is linked to the following. As I was working on an essay on Berlin and Hong Kong while treating the special case of cities and crowds, I was struck by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s painting of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin because of the way he depicts a crowd where the people are in close proximity while ignoring each other.

Or for another example: I saw the famous Signing of the Declaration of Independence painting in the Independence Hall in Philadelphia very differently once I read the novelist Jamaica Kincaid’s commentary on it:

“America begins with the Declaration of Independence...but who really needs this document.... There is a painting in Philadelphia of the men who signed it. These men looked relaxed; they are enjoying the activity of thinking, the luxury of it. They have time to examine this thing called their conscience and to act on it...some keep their hair in an unkempt style (Jefferson, Washington), and others keep their hair well groomed (Franklin), their clothes pressed...”

She then speaks of those who have worked to prepare the men for the occasion “the people who made their beds and made their clothes nicely pressed and their hair well groomed or in a state of studied dishevelment.” This way of thinking about images, or rather, this different way of seeing what’s in a painting is something I strive for.

Much of your work transgresses the focus of IR on states, but establishes linkages across all levels of analysis. How does this work?

IR purports to be about ‘macropolitics’. To put it simply, every aspect of macropolitics, e.g., governmental policies, has effects on the ways in which people manage their life worlds as they move from sensing things differently, to being affected by them, to taking initiatives. To focus on micropolitics is to map much of this management issue. A micropolitical analysis if it is elaborated and deployed on the many different kinds of bodies affected by macropolitics reveals a level of political interaction that operates below the level of policy-making bodies.

For example, in relation to the issues of security, I treat in my forthcoming The Time of the City the contemporary “securescape” of the modern city, suggesting that increasingly, the well-off classes are walling themselves off from the underclass and that, as a result, the city is increasingly a scene of class warfare. But beyond that particular concern, which occupies a small section of the book, I am concerned with developing a geo-philosophy that is adequate to the micropolitics of urban life in general because most political philosophy is state-obsessed.

Another concept that has proven useful for me in this context is that of ‘biopower’ The concept is first mentioned in Michel Foucault’s lectures at the College de France and further developed in Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality. It presumes first of all that power is productive in the sense that it works not just by inhibiting action but by also producing identities. Thus for example, by the nineteenth century, rather than merely a people, governments saw themselves as having a “population.” The biopolitics of the population becomes intelligible when one recognized that this new collective identity was an object of knowledge for government, that is, the fundamental structuring power in modern society. Dealing with the management of bodies, governments wanted to know about such things as life expectancy, how many calories have to be consumed to allow bodies to keep working, how many new bodies can one count on if one expands public health, etc.

Since then, the concept of biopower has come (at least in the more critical and innovative work) to compete with notions of territorial power as a dimension of state security policy, among other things at the macro-level, and at the micro-level t is used to reference that ways in which bodies which are officially deemed as politically unqualified engage in acts of subjectification, i.e. act to demand to be treated as those with politically relevant speech.

Last question. On this more micro-level, the practice of family life has changed quite radically the last century, moving in the ‘West’ from ‘traditional’, patriarchal families to separations to LAT-relations and people living alone. You’ve written about ‘national culture and the politics of the family’ some time back; would you be able to relate this transformation in family life to changes in political and economical organization?

In my book on the politics of the family I do much of what you’re asking. There was a time when the family was the locus of employment. However as large scale commercial enterprises developed and industrialization followed, the family became a place that sought to qualify their children for work outside of itself – for example by paying for training or education. At the same time, states became interested in family life precisely because it was recognized as the milieu in which useful working bodies are created. Jacques Donzelot’s book on the policing of families chronicles this development. It is thus not surprising that the primary innovation in the discourses on political economy in the nineteenth century focused on the body. Of course presently, different families within racial-spatial and class orders face different issues. In my 2006 book Deforming American Political Thought I contrast the film Risky Business with Clockers. In the former, a white upper middle class family is consumed by the desire to get their son into an Ivy League college, so he can be sure to reproduce their level of privilege, while in the latter, a project-dwelling African American family is striving to keep their sons alive.

Michael J. Shapiro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii. He has published widely on such diverse topics as political theory and philosophy, critical social theory, global politics, politics of media, politics of aesthetics, politics of culture, and indigenous politics.

Related links

Faculty Profile at University of Hawaii
Read Shapiro’s Globalization and the Politics of Discourse (Social Text, 1999) here (pdf)
Read Shapiro’s Samuel Huntington’s Moral Geography (Theory & Event, 1998) here (pdf)
Read Shapiro’s Managing Urban Security: City Walls and Urban Metis (Security Dialogue, 2009) here (pdf)
Read Shapiro's Every Move You Make: Bodies, Surveillance, and Media (Social Text, 2005) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #35: Barry Buzan

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 13:41:00 +0000

Barry Buzan on International Society, Securitization, and an English School Map of the World

Few thinkers have shown to be as capable as Barry Buzan of continuously impacting the direction of debates in IR theory. From regional security complexes to the English School approach to IR as being about international society, and from hegemony to securitization: Buzan’s name will appear on your reading list. It is therefore an honor for Theory Talks to present this comprehensive Talk with professor Buzan. In this Talk, Buzan – amongst others – discusses theory as thinking-tools, describes the contemporary regionalization of international society, and sketches an English School map of the world.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

I think the biggest challenge is a dual one, namely, to reconnect international relations with world history and sociology. First, why connect IR to world history? Unless you have some understanding of how thinking about IR sits with world history, you are in a sort of Westphalian box which you can’t get out of. How has this grown? Most IR theory presupposes the particular conditions of Westphalia, that is, the world is divided in its entirety into sovereign and autonomous boxes named ‘states’. How we understand current international relations through that statist lens is simply not supported by much of world history, neither when you go back in European history nor if you look at other places in the world. So by confronting IR with world history, we can re-think many of the limitations of the theoretical underpinnings that now structure our understanding of the world.

One can then ask the second question: why link IR to sociology? The answer to that question is a little more complex, but fundamentally rests on the premise (adopted, for instance, by the English School) of international society. If you adopt the notion that international society is the point of focus rather than international politics as limited to states, then a sociological outlook seems the most apt thinking tool, rather than the statist perspective of IR. If IR is about international society, that is, about social relations at the global level, then what’s the difference between IR and a sort of global sociology? Yet sociologists—with one or two exceptions—have not occupied the territory of international society, nor have IR scholars generally attempted to build upon a sociological outlook to international relations.

Since I see these two challenges (connecting IR to history and to sociology) as central, my work has gravitated increasingly towards the English School (which builds on the work of, for instance, Hedley Bull) over the last fifteen years or so, because that seems to be a good place to construct such a meeting ground.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I guess my early childhood is really where it started: I had this typical boyish interest in war and weapons, which as I grew a little older began to mutate into an interest in history. I was particularly influenced by reading H.G. Wells’ ‘Outline of History’ (1920, full text here) at an early age. The synoptic vision of history, and the willingness to take on the entire story of history in one volume, made an impression that never left me. At university, Kal Holsti was a person who’s teaching inspired me into becoming interested in International Relations, and Mark Zacher encouraged me to think of it as a possible career. Kenneth Waltz’s ‘Theory of International Politics’ (1979) inspired me a lot, and I found myself engaging with that for a long time.

What I think makes my journey distinct, is that as well as writing as a single author, I have co-authored with an unusually high number of people—by now, it must be a dozen or more, some becoming deep and longstanding partnerships, with such people as Ole Waever, Richard Little, and more recently with Lene Hansen and Mathias Albert. That kind of deep collaborative work requires you to create a ‘third mind’ with the person you’re writing with, and I have found that extremely stimulating. It has enabled me to do things I couldn’t have done myself, yet it has also meant that one comes to terms with another person’s thinking sufficiently to create a third person who is then another author, with a distinct style and way of thinking. So in a sense, I consider my co-authorship to be not my own but rather that of this third person. Since I have worked together with different people, I have stood at the cradle of several distinct ‘third persons’ authors, and in that way I could be criticized for incoherence. You have to find a core on which both authors agree and take that as a point of departure, setting aside the differences you might—and will—have. And that core will be different each time. Yet to be able to do that, think outside of your own limited thinking, was immensely challenging and stimulating.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

I don’t think there is a single answer to that: IR is a huge field and there are many different ways into it, requiring different skills from mathematics to linguistics. Yet what all students would need is an analytical capability of a high level, and a well-focused topic—possessing that, they are bound to teach us something of interest.

I would not, for instance, require adherence to a strict set of theories or ideas. I see ideas or positions in the ‘debates’ rather as ever-evolving tools in a toolbox. A choice of theory should depend on what one wants to think about rather than having the question depending on the a priori chosen theory. One does not attack a flat tire with a chainsaw, simply because one takes a liking to chainsaws. I don’t attach my identity to any school, which I would feel obliged to defend; I take a particularly utilitarian epistemological or ontological view on theory. I can find realism both interesting and utterly flawed; at the same time, I can find some postmodern work interesting as well as profoundly flawed. They have different kinds of utilities, depending on what kind of question you want to ask and answer. I do not have a problem with people adopting different epistemologies in the same analysis; as long as they keep them clear, I don’t see why they cannot complement each other. As I am not deeply knowledgeable of philosophy of knowledge, it might be that I am sitting on a dangerously unstable ontological chair, but so far, so good.

So to come back to what would make a good IR scholar, I would be able to name only what would not make a good student: taking theory as blindfolds or letting method cloud the process of formulating interesting questions, for instance, would not be advisable.

A lot of what is widely published and read in our field is theoretical or meta-theoretical. Why are international relations (IR) and international security studies (ISS) so reflective?

I think it has something to do with the fact that IR is such a broad field. In one way, IR is not like other disciplines in the social sciences; most disciplines in the social sciences are sector-based. So they are reflective of a rather functionally based differentiation approach to understanding the world, something reflected sociologically in how we are organized: law departments are separated from anthropology departments, from sociology which is separated from politics, economics, etc. IR isn’t legitimated in that way: it is defined either by a level of analysis or by encompassing everything, depending on how you frame it. It seems to me that there’s a huge contestation about what IR actually is: some people think of it as international politics, that is, as a sub-branch of politics. Others think of it as political economy, and therefore covering two disciplinary or sectoral grounds. Still others, such as English School and constructivist people, are more sociological in their disciplinary orientation.

So what is this ‘thing’ called IR? I don’t think of it as a discipline, I think of it as a cross-disciplinary field. The most inclusive conceptualization of IR is really about everything: about how humankind organizes itself. That would explain why there is such a multiplicity of theorizing, because most of the functionally differentiated disciplines can concentrate a body of theory which becomes their core. IR can’t do that, unless it is simply understood as only covering international politics, which would just be the macro-side of the discipline of politics. That seems vastly too narrow, at least too narrow to sustain my interest.

If we would have to make a map of the world in international political terms, what would it look like? To make this question somewhat more answerable, would it be divided in north and south, core and periphery, would it be a world of states? Is it one integrated security complex or a world of regional security logics? Is there a hegemon?

I will give you an answer consistent with an English School framing. My map would focus on the interplay between the interstate society and transnational and interhuman society in terms of identity. Since I am getting increasingly postcolonial in my take on IR, my map would probably reflect an interest in the way in which the core-periphery social and power structure, with the West as a weakening core, seems to be evolving into a more regionalized map. International society, on this map, would be more decentered, with a variety of distinctive regional societies emerging in different colors. These regional societies would not be competing with each other as a Cold War map might show you, in terms of regional blocs trying to take over the whole system. They would rather be more defensive than universalist in their aspirations.

The map would also have to accommodate the mutual interplay of more universalist types of identities with the continuing strength of parochial identities, and I would be interested in seeing how this latter map would be superimposable on the former one.

On a transnational level, my map would accentuate the way in which the Washington Consensus seems to have imploded in a way very similar to the implosion of Communism. We have seen a Cold War map, of two ideological regions in distinct colors, turn into a map of different shades of the same color—the Washington Consensus map—which is now being supplanted fairly rapidly by yet another, more regional, map. I am convinced that the implosion of Communism has the same reasons as the implosion of the Washington Consensus: the attempt to construct a global economy of a very intense sort, especially through financial liberalization, was a bit premature: the management ability to sustain such a level of economic integration is not yet there. With the collapse of both ideologies—Communism and the Washington Consensus—we need a period of experiments in political economy, for which regions seem the appropriate size. They would not be isolationist regions of radically contrasting colors, but still, enthusiasm for efforts on a global scale seem to have receded.

In 1991, you made such a map (‘New patterns of global security in the 21st century’), and argued that the 21st century started with the end of the Cold War. How do you think about that now?

At this moment, I think these kinds of boundaries, between the 20th and the 21st century, are not all that interesting. To explain why we have to shift focus a little back in time, to a world with a radically different ‘map’. The 19th century is the great forgotten century in IR, yet it is a century of great turbulence, of great transformations. that the 19th century reflects the need to bring IR and sociology together using history: in most sociological perspectives, the 19th century is the great transformation, as Karl Polanyi would have it. As his exemplary account shows, the 19th century transforms not just the internal character of the leading states, but also the whole character of international society. Basically, IR doesn’t say anything at all about the 19th century, except that it was the peak of European power. I am more inclined to think that what happened in that century was indeed the great transformation, and that we’re still witnessing and grappling with its effects now.

You have done much work on regions in recent years. Why should we start focusing on regions and less on hegemonic power?

The system seems to have developed in the direction of regionalization. With the US recovering from financial malaise, the system seems to be in for a period of decentering, for regionalization. Within the English School there is a literature that notes the tensions between the legitimating principle of sovereign equality for international society on the one hand and the actual practices of hegemony in much of international politics on the other, that is, the practice of hegemony without any legitimation. The way the world is unfolding, with a greater global distribution of power and more voice to non-western cultures, makes the idea that hegemony is ever going to be legitimizable (that is, not just in practice, but as agreed upon by the multiplicity of states) on a global level a passing one.

That doesn’t mean that such hegemonic tendencies might not be very much in play at the regional level. The neighbors of both China and India worry about such hegemonic dynamics unfolding on a regional level.

So the whole core-periphery idea on a global level, with one power setting and enforcing an agenda, seems on its way out. As the West declines, this whole question declines with it relatively to rising powers elsewhere. But it is not only the rise of other powers as such, but rather also the collapse of the Washington Consensus as a global programme. So all in all, the relation between sovereignty as a legitimizing principle and decentralizing tendencies in a more decentralized and regionalized international society, without so much focus on the question of US global leadership, will be the point of focus.

And this is especially interesting since each region has different regional dynamics and powers. If one looks at the Middle East, which I am now studying as a regional international society, one sees that it has a distinct set of primary institutions and a specific postcolonial state-structure. It is thus a very different kind of place as an international society from, say, the West. We are now learning that this category, the West, was a sort of construction taken to be global but which in fact is more reduced to a specific geographical and cultural space than we thought. While you find of course similarities between East Asia and the West if you look for them, you’ll also find significant differences, either of institutions or in practices. In East Asia, for instance, there is a much stronger tradition of non-intervention and sovereignty, and a much greater concern for regime security than you’d find in the West.

You have earlier argued that the post-cold war world would move towards regional security complexes, in part because of declining superpower interest in local matters; and the evening out of military capacity that would mean that only the strongest superpower could (and most often would not) project military might to far away places. In the light of the prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, how do you see the regionalization thesis now?

I am still working on regional security complexes, and I am starting to ask myself questions on whether there is any kind of linkage between strategic interaction defined by security complex theory and the making of regional international societies. In principle, there may be scope for that; whether in practice it holds too, I’m not sure—that’s an empirical question.

In terms of the two cases that you mention, I’m fascinated by the extent to which Afghanistan has remained an insulator for the regional security complexes between which it is nested. Despite invasions and wars and relatively huge upheavals, its actual position hasn’t changed that much since Ole Waever and I wrote Regions and Powers (2003, read the introduction and part of the 1st chapter here in pdf).

From the kind of lofty birds-eye perspective that regional security complex theory gives you, Iraq in some sense is a relatively minor event. The Middle East is so subdivided anyway, and even though Iraq was one of the regional powers and now taken out for a bit with the great increase of American overlay, it doesn’t make any enormous difference. One can understand the interplay between regional dynamics and American penetration, yet in the case of Iraq, it doesn’t seem to have mattered all that much in reshaping regional dynamics, except perhaps that it has worked to the advantage of Iran. But for the rest, it hasn’t redressed the regional security complex of the Middle East very profoundly, nor would one expect so, unless Iraq actually breaks up. If it manages to hold itself together and get back to functioning as a state, then I don’t think things are going to be all that much different: it will remain a region in which conflict is hugely over-determined—so in that sense, I think the Americans have wasted their time and money: they lost a great deal of whatever influence they might have had before going in there.

Some time ago, you argued that international relations theory is theory by and for the West, and ‘rests on an assumption that Western history is world history’. For whom and for what purpose is the idea of ‘international society’?

Linking that to the 19th century, the story of which has been told from a remarkably Western perspective (even by such great writers as Karl Polanyi), I think the vantage point of the notion of international society is that it challenges such region-biased views by requiring a re-telling of old and hegemonic stories that condition so much of our discipline. The supposedly ‘timeless and universal’ perspective of IR is based on a Euro-centric understanding of the past, the present and future, and it does not take into account nearly enough the cultural syncretic processes by which the west itself was and still is made. While the idea of international society is not for someone in particular, it tends to be made by the great powers of the day. In a sense, ‘international society’ can be understood mainly as the international projection or extrapolation of what the great powers agree to construct as the international order in which they want to operate—like most else in IR, it is a great power centered theory, but it has wider potentialities.

As Hedley Bull constructs it, the concept evolves around international order, and everybody has an interest in a certain kind of order as opposed to chaos or anarchy. You might or might not like any particular order, and at any given point you can find people who are opposed to or supportive of the reining order. Right now, we live in a liberal order, so it suits people and societies of that disposition while it is hostile to people and countries who are not of that disposition—which is also one reason why we see this regionalizing tendency.

Yet within this normatively ‘agnostic’ analysis, one can argue that it seems to be the first order that has constructed values such as ‘all humans are equal’, an assumption we have only operated with for the last 60 years. It’s a very big principle that delegitimizes racism, slavery, genocide, and empire. So there have been some transformations under this order which seem not only to reflect the interests of the great powers, but also of people.

Neorealists assume that a US China bipolarity is basically antagonistic: economically both players are competitive, and from a social-cultural view, the ‘G2’ does not seem to share a lot. What would an IR theory need to accommodate, say, Asian perspectives on world politics?

It’s an interesting place to start thinking but I don’t believe neorealist polarity theory offers much more than mental gymnastics. If you, like myself, adopt a Wendtian (Theory Talk #3) constructivist outlook, anarchy is what states make of it.

Interestingly, some things are already coming out using Chinese history, such as War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (2005, read excerpt here) by Victoria Hui, which wheels in Chinese history from the warring states period to ask some hard questions about balance of power assumptions as being the normal operative logic of anarchy. Situations where the sophisticated history of a non-Western international system is brought back into play form a good platform of thinking about neorealism’s assumptions and IR theory in general, and its excessive dependence on western history. And this kind of challenging is not something for me to do; I just act as a provocateur, encouraging those who have the skills to do that.

It is interesting to note that the English School in IR, with its assumptions of international society, is surprisingly popular in China and reasonably influential in the emergent discipline of IR that is coming about there, so it will play into whatever the much-mooted ‘Chinese school’ of IR eventually becomes. While there is no shortage of people in China and Asia more widely who are doing the formal, positivistic, US-realist-style IR, the Chinese seem to be more open to a theory that has a more historical dimension to IR than to the more abstract kind of theorizing. They are also somewhat reluctant to find themselves slaves to American theory, so there’s a certain amount of theoretical nationalism there. It might not be a good thing—yet another great power devising theory to match its interests—but in many ways, it might also turn out to stimulate debate. Yet with a few exceptions you don’t find much of this stance in other Asian countries: South Korea and Japan, for instance, have many of their scholars trained in the US and they still largely follow that way of doing things.

So I would not agree with a necessary antagonistic bipolarity between the US and China, nor would I say that one Asian ‘School’ is possible, given the wide range of diverse interests, not least vis-à-vis each other.

A question on securitization. A threat—such as terrorism—needs an audience to accept the securitizing move as such. What happens if, as for instance the ‘terror thermometer’ of the US, a threat gets discursively sustained yet the threat- or securitization-level normalizes and people get used to it? Is that desecuritization? In other words: what’s the current status of the terrorism-securitization?

I think the current status of the terrorism securitization is indeed somewhat declining. I think I got it right in 2006 when I wrote Will the Global War on Terror be the new Cold War? (International Affairs, 2006, read pdf version here): the war on terror is not going to be a new Cold War in terms of a global dominant macro-securitization which the US can use to structure alliances and frame itself in a good position in global security concerns. Even in the US, nowadays, the term ‘war on terror’ hardly appears at all: in that sense, it is becoming desecuritized, partly because many people are simply not coming on board with a continuous high securitization of the war on terror. Rather, as Mary Kaldor has argued in Theory Talk #30, people would rather treat this as a criminal matter involving policing. Yet, it is not taken off the register entirely, there’s obviously still a problem there.

A bigger problem your question points to is a theoretical problem: what is normal politics? Indeed, within securitization theory, normal politics has been taken as a kind of static status quo, from which one departs with a securitization and returns to with desecuritization, yet as critics have rightly pointed out, ‘normal politics’ is dynamic rather than static. Granted this observation, it becomes important to probe the interrelations between securitization and normal politics. Ole Waever would I think say that emergency measures—so critical to the definition of a securitization—can be bureaucratized and routinized in some senses without losing their qualities as emergency measures. But one has to ask, for instance: what is normal politics in a paranoid dictatorship? Or in the Soviet Union, where even Ray Bans and blue jeans could be security issues! These examples show that it is possible to conceive of normal politics as involving a reasonably high degree of securitization—and then you’re in a difficult situation.

However, I think the basic concept of securitization is still clear, and the basic differentiation between normal politics and securitization with emergency measures is sound, even if there is a lot more to be said than just this.

You recently published a volume with Lene Hansen entitled ‘The Evolution of International Security Studies’ (2009). I have some questions about that. First of all, realists might argue that the field is not in evolution at all but rather falling apart into ever-more critical and less policy-relevant shreds.

That is one interpretation, yet what Lene Hansen and I experienced as we surveyed all this literature, is the extent to which a single conversation exists concerning the major issues within international security studies (ISS). In that sense, the contestation should be interpreted as theoretical flowering and diversification rather than as disintegration: a deepening division of labor rather than a crumbling field. People are talking about similar sorts of issues: if you look at the literature on terrorism, for instance, you can find people from almost any perspective you would care to name: risk theory people, realists, feminists, postcolonialists, and liberals, for instance, all have their say on this international security issue. All these different perspectives bring in useful insights that you don’t get from just a single perspective. Yet to interpret ISS as a single conversation, we had to take a step back and just read everything out there with a question in the back of our minds. If you’re in the middle of such a discussion on any issue, often others participating in such a debate seem universes removed from yourself. I grew up with the discussion being set by strategic studies on the one hand and peace research on the other, and they seemed incommensurable at the time: people on both sides in the debate, talking about the same thing, wouldn’t want to be in the same room with each other—yet in retrospect they were clearly deeply engaged in a single discussion. One purpose of the book is to make that synoptic, ‘division of labour’ view clearer to the various contending approaches within ISS.

Second of all, why do we need this division between IPE/ISS as (sub)disciplines within IR? Doesn’t it blind us to the interconnectedness of economic governance and security governance?

I indeed agree that there is no reason why we would need it, but a more interesting question is then why we do have it. And that is a sociological question, about the way IR as a field unfolded at particular times and under the impact of particular events. The way academic disciplines emerged is not some logical devised plan; rather, it is all about turf wars: who wins gets to establish their school of thought in an institute and/or a journal. If you look at the sociology of the IR discipline in the 70s you can certainly see why this divide between IPE and ISS occurred in the US. You can either lament or cheer that this divide settled in, like I lament most divides that hinder an understanding of IR, because people on either side of any such divide simply don’t talk to each other. They start speaking different languages, publish in different journals, and important and big questions can indeed easily drop into such gaps between disciplines.

Last question. Realists have charged you personally with being responsible for taking their black box—security—and opening it with your book People, States and Fear (1983). Walt in 1991 tried to close what he saw as a Pandora’s box; ever since, many new security black boxes have developed in ISS, yet security is forever established as an ‘essentially contested concept’. Is the evolution of the concept of security as contested within ISS a temporary period with all its ‘turns’ a temporary phase, or is it a foundational question making possible ISS?

Firstly, I am happy to plead guilty if I am accused of opening this box of security; look at the way the literature has evolved since! I am obviously not the only one thinking it was a good idea to do so; rather, it was long overdue. What is interesting, is that the black box of security has been opened and explored much further in Europe (where the concept is now established as ‘essentially contested’) than it has been in the US, where by and large there is little interest in the concept of security as such—it is taken as given. In a sense, this has unfortunately contributed to the widening of the Atlantic divide. One could even say that there is an American style of security studies and a distinctly European one.

Secondly, I think that once opened, the box remains indeed perpetually open. It is a foundational issue, and who’s to know what else will come along? If Alexander Wendt ever gets his quantum social theory together, we might have great insights from that for security; sociobiology, or complex systems modeling (now for example applied to weather systems) might provide analytical boosts: it points for me towards such fascinating yet still science fiction ideas as Isaac Asimov’s ‘psychohistory’ in the Foundation Trilogy many decades ago: the ability to see international relations as a complex system and to say something about the larger patterns and movements.

IR has always been magpie-ish in that it takes insights and concepts from other disciplines and it will continue to do so if other ideas look like they apply to problems addressed in the field. Isn’t that in the end what makes it so interesting?

Barry Buzan is the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and is honorary professor at the Universities of Copenhagen and Jilin. He has written extensively on issues of international security, international society and world history, and is the author of such works as People, States and Fear (1983), Regions and Powers (2003, with Ole Waever), and more recently The Evolution of International Security Studies (2009, with Lene Hansen).

Related links

Faculty Profile at LSE
Read the first chapter of The Evolution of International Security Studies (2009, with Lene Hansen) here (pdf)
Read the first chapter of Regions and Powers (2003, with Ole Waever) here (pdf)
Read the paper Functional Differentiation and sectors: between Sociology and International Relations (2007, with Mathias Albert) here (pdf)
Read Buzan’s Rethinking Security after the Cold War (Cooperation and Conflict, 1997) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #34: James Ferguson

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:34:00 +0000

James Ferguson on Modernity, Development, and Reading Foucault in Lesotho

IR is of course not the only discipline with a global view. Anthropology, for one, has long shed light on the same problems as IR, yet casting surprisingly different shadows. Theory Talks proudly presents a contribution from a cutting-edge anthropologist – possibly the field's most globally oriented scholar – Professor James Ferguson. In this comprehensive Talk, Ferguson engages – amongst others – with the status of the state in IR, with modernity as a category, and challenges critical conceptions of common conceptions surrounding development and Africa.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge or principal debate currently in global (or globally oriented) studies? What would be your position or answer to this challenge or debate?

The first thing I think of in response to that question is more of an attitude than a kind of theoretical issue, properly speaking. And that is the need to approach these questions with a sense of curiosity and open-mindedness.

One of the things that bothers me about a lot of what I read the in social sciences that’s, as you say, ‘globally oriented’, is that it seems to start with a bunch of certainties, a bunch of assumptions – a kind of Western liberal common sense – that we know how countries ought to be organized. They ought to be democracies; they ought to respect human rights; they ought to guarantee the rule of law; they ought to be at peace with their neighbors. And then you look at, say, a country in Africa and all you’re able to see is a series of lacks – of things that should be there but aren’t. And you end up constructing huge parts of the world as just sort of empty spaces where things ought to be there but aren’t. And it leads to a kind of impoverished understanding, I think, because you don’t really understand what is going on here. How do people conduct their affairs? How is legitimate authority exercised? How are rules made and enforced? You know, all the kinds of questions that ought to be the starting place tend to disappear or recede into the background. So, I think the real challenge is to approach this whole question with a sense of openness, a willingness to be surprised and learn something new and not to be so deductive.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in your scholarship?

Well, I guess I first was captured by anthropology as a field. I became interested in the anthropology of Africa, in particular, because of my teachers. The people who taught me anthropology – people like David Brokensha and Paul Bohannan – were Africanists, so the anthropology I learned was, first of all, the anthropology of Africa.

Then, as time wore on – this was the late 1970s – I was increasingly interested in the politics of Southern Africa in particular and the liberation struggles that were going on there. And I became troubled by the gap between the two – one the one hand this sort of academic literature on African societies in anthropology and on the other hand all these interesting events surrounding the struggles against the last vestiges of colonialism in Southern Africa. It seemed to me that there is a space in between those two, where you might be able to connect them, and that became a direction that I was drawn toward.

There are also chance events, I guess you might say. When I was looking for fieldwork sites for my dissertation, I was mostly looking at Zimbabwe and Mozambique. They were both post-liberation societies where the kinds of social transformations were underway that I was quite interested in. And my advisor said, ‘Well, if you’re going to scope out these sites in Southern Africa anyway, why don’t you also go to Lesotho.’ And I said, ‘Well I’m not really interested in Lesotho’. And he said, ‘Well, but it’s a nice place and you won’t get malaria because it’s in the mountains and, you know, why don’t you go there?’ I ended up going. I brought reading along as one does when traveling and the book that I happened to have with me and was reading while I was in Lesotho was Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. So, on the one hand, I was sort of looking at all this stuff going on Lesotho – this swarm of development agencies and development experts – and on the other, I was asking myself these questions about what I was observing in Lesotho which came from reading Foucault at the same time. That led me to formulate a different kind of dissertation project than the one I had been thinking of. This eventually led to my book The Anti-Politics Machine (1990) and Foucault continued to be important for me at various stages in my academic work.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

First of all I am of course not an IR scholar nor would I claim any expertise in that area. As for "global" expertise, certainly there’s a need for a certain kind of knowledge, for a certain kind of expertise, but I would think that in order to make better sense of our world in a global way, one also needs an expertise that is conditioned on a kind of humility if you like. It’s not a matter of being qualified because you know so much.

In some ways, one of the main qualifications to do the work that I like my students to do is to be very aware of how little one knows. There’s a kind of arrogance that comes with expertise sometimes. I remember Edward Said writing about all these Middle East experts. And he pointed out that most of them – he was talking about American experts – hadn’t bothered to learn Arabic and couldn’t read the daily newspaper in the country in which they were supposedly an expert. And I think this is sometimes an issue in political science. I remember hearing a – I won’t give you the name – but a very famous political scientist quoted as saying, ‘Anytime I meet somebody who speaks the local language, I know they’re second-rate.’

For me, that’s shocking since I’d promote recognizing that your own knowledge, your own way of knowing, is one way of knowing among others in the world. And the question is then, what kind of relation are you going to forge between your way of knowing and other ways of knowing? And I would want my students to aspire to establishing – for want of a better word – a non-imperialistic relation between their own and other ways of knowing.

Is that why IR scholars/political scientists and anthropologically oriented scholars fail to communicate, even though they often study the same matter?

I think it is striking in many ways how differently political scientists and anthropologists will approach what looks like the same question. There’s not much being written on that gap. James C. Scott is a figure who has done some bridging between the two disciplines. Timothy Mitchell would be another I think. But apart from that, and unfortunately, there hasn’t been much explicit reflection, I think, on the gap between the political scientists who ‘start from the top’ and anthropologists who ‘start from below’.

You seem to be at the forefront of a movement in anthropology that tries to overcome this gap. Increasingly, scholars like Anna Tsing, James C. Scott, and yourself try to link up international politics and the universals coming from there critically with local developments. And my question is: why is this only now happening?

There’s actually quite a long history in anthropology of people doing work that links local developments with the international and the global scale, or with macro-level oriented disciplines such as politics and economics. I would think of the political economy tradition in anthropology, people like Sydney Mintz and Eric Wolf for instance. And on Zambia, where I 've worked, there is a wonderful text that comes from 1941 by Godfrey Wilson (An Essay on the Economics of Detribalization in Northern Rhodesia) which traces the connection between the Great Depression and World War Two on the one hand, and things that are happening in Bemba villages in northern Zambia. So it is there.

On the other hand, I think it’s true that there’s a new kind of interest in trying to make those sorts of connections in the field. And my sense is that this is motivated by a dissatisfaction: the discipline has been trapped in this sort of valorization of the local, where you are really resting your authority and your academic legitimacy on knowledge of the local, and it was quite a disempowering kind of position for anthropology to occupy. It led to a sort of political impotence. And I think certainly that’s one of the reasons why I’ve tried to change the scale at which I ask some of my questions.

In your latest book Global Shadows (2005), you speak about development organizations that ‘are not states, but that are unquestionably state-like in some respects. … Local and global at the same time they are transnational … Not coincidentally, these organizations and movements that fall outside of the received scheme of analytic levels are also conspicuously under-studied’. In that sense, you challenge what traditional IR scholars would pose as their theoretical toolbox or their lens. So while you’re only a building removed from an IR-realist such as Stephen Krasner (Theory Talk #21) (you’re both at Stanford), you seem to be universes apart. Are there, in your opinion, any shared focuses or challenges or any points where they might enter in a deeper discussion? In other words, what would it take to put a Kenneth Waltz and a James C. Scott – or perhaps not a Scott, but a Ferguson – at one table?

One of the core differences seems to me to hinge on the status of the state. While I know little of IR as a scholarly discipline, from what I've seen the nation-state seems to serve as a fundamental analytical frame. Anthropology, by contrast, always starts with the idea that the nation state is one system of authority and organization among many others. Anthropology takes a long view, and throughout most of human history, human societies were not organized into nation-states. And even today there are other ways in which authority and power and legitimacy and regulation are organized in the world. The fact that we have nation-states now doesn’t mean that there aren’t other ways of organizing those things, or that other ways of organizing life are no longer important or no longer present.

So I think there’s a tendency – in what I know of the IR world – to sort of take nation-states as the constitutive units of the world – to suppose that the world is fundamentally composed of nation-states. And I think anthropologists look at the world and see a much broader array of entities – nation-states are really just one of many, many kinds of claim-making and rule-making and authority-exercising schemes that exists in the world – and not always the most important.

So, to come back to your question what it would take for an IR scholar and an anthropologist to share a table, I think it would be a sensibility towards the contingency of social organization.

One important issue anthropologists face that challenge or address these bigger, ‘traveling universals’ as Anna Tsing would put it, is how to methodologically bridge that gap between remaining faithful to the in-depth case and engaging that with global discourses. How do you deal with that?

One question anthropologists are sometimes asked by other social scientists is: ‘What’s the point of all these cases unless we can make generalizations about them?’ My starting point is rather different. I would follow Max Weber, and say, on the contrary: ‘What’s the point of generalizations unless they help us to understand what’s right in front of us with these cases?’ That is, generalizations are useful when they help us understand that which we encounter, which is always the particular, which is always the world that we live in.

Now I think this question of generalities sometimes gets confused with the question of scale. The confusion arises from the position that when you’re talking about something big then that’s general and if you’re talking about something that’s small, then that’s particular.

But it is possible to think about the world as a unique case since there’s only of them: ‘N’ equals one. How do we understand that unique case, which is the world that we live in? Here’s where I think the question of scale comes up. We have to hazard interpretations and explanatory schemes that try to understand it as a whole. And it’s for that reason that I’ve engaged with categories that would otherwise be dubious, like the category of Africa, for instance. It would be easy to pick that category apart and to show how really there’s so much internal heterogeneity within this thing called ‘Africa’ that it doesn’t make sense to talk about it as an ‘it’. But if you’re trying to understand questions such as: ‘How is the world structured? What are the categories according to which people understand the world and ascribe value to different people and places within it?’, then a category like ‘Africa’ becomes important. Not understood uncritically, but understood as a kind of native category that is a very powerful one in constituting a world.

The concept of ‘development’ is in many ways at the heart of your critiques. To ask a very naïve question perhaps, how can one criticize such a positive concept? Or, to put it more broadly, what’s the use of ‘critique’?

First of all, one would have to say that it’s not always a positive concept. If you were having your land taken away from you so it could be given to some timber company in the name of ‘development’, you might not think it was so positive.

But I think it’s also possible to answer the question in a slightly different way. Which is to start out by asking, ‘Why would one suppose that critical thinking is only for things that one is opposed to?’ For instance, I think it’s crucially important that we think critically about the concept of ‘human rights’. Does that mean that I’m in favor of torture and dictators? Certainly not. But the concept of human rights requires very careful, critical scrutiny, precisely because it is something around which we are organizing our political energies and where we’re focusing our hopes and ambitions for the future. Which reminds me something Foucault said once in an interview, when he was accused of producing an impossibly pessimistic analysis. The interviewer said: ‘You think everything is bad’. Foucault immediately responded by saying, ‘No, No. I don’t say that everything is bad. I say that everything is dangerous.’ That’s very different. Because when things are dangerous, we have to watch them closely. We have to attend to them. We have to see what are they doing. Where are they leading us astray? Where are the dangers?

And I think one wants to approach the things that we value (politically or socially) in that kind of spirit: being attentive to the way that they can lead us astray, to the way that we can end up producing effects that are not the ones that we had in mind. An exemplary account of this, in my view, is the analysis of human rights is a book by Harri Englund, called Prisoners of Freedom (2006, read first chapter here in pdf), which brings just that kind of skeptical scrutiny to bear on the concept of human rights in the effect it actually has. Which is far from being an attack on the idea of human rights. It is, rather, the sort of careful, critical scrutiny that I have in mind.

Throughout your work, one could say you take a stand in a debate in which Marxists are also engaged and that is the debate concerning the effects or nature of structural international power/economic relationships, ‘working upon’ countries in Africa. What are the limits of a Marxist approach to this problematique?

I think a lot of the Marxist work is quite important in understanding the outlines of the global political economy. Some of the work done by geographers in particular is, I think, really essential. I do, however, see some limits in its application, and I’ll give a concrete example from what I’m working on now.

In Africa, we’re witnessing the emergence of these huge poor urban populations that are not employed in wage labor in the usual sense of the term. Increasingly, these people are less and less connected to land as well. Now Marxist approaches tend to valorize the emergence of the proletariat and to see the fundamental relation as based on exploitation by the extraction of surplus value via the labor-capital relation. The story would make sense from a Marxist view as follows: capitalism needs to expand, pushes people off their traditional land as farmers or nomads and pushes them into the cities as cheap labor. My problem is to make sense of these incredible amounts of people who aren’t really exploited in that sense. Their predicament is that they are not even worth exploiting. Nobody wants to come and exploit their labor power by setting up factories and turning them into workers.

Now, a Marxists could say: ‘this is already in Marx, Marx identified the problem of the Lumpen – the ‘Lumpenproletariat’. But for Marx, the Lumpenproletariat was a marginal and really kind of despicable thing and I just don’t think that will do for understanding this situation in contemporary African cities where what Marx might have called the Lumpen constitutes, in some places, the majority of the population. So therefore we need new analytical tools, tools that go beyond what traditional Marxism has to offer.

You are famous for the exploration of the ‘depoliticization’ of poverty and development in your book ‘the Anti-Politics Machine’ (1990). You continue on the disconnection of modernity and growth in ‘Global Shadows’. Is that an argument for the repoliticization of poverty and growth? In that context, are such terms as ‘ownership’ and ‘decentralization’ potential international ‘repoliticizers’ of poverty?

I’m all in favor of politicizing these questions in the sense of presenting them in such a way as to foreground the relations of power that they are constitutive of. I don’t think you can, as you put it, repoliticize things just by switching terms though. One of the things we’ve learned is that terms can be used in all sorts of ways.

Take a term like ‘empowerment’, which originally came out of social movements and was very much a way of addressing poverty as a question of powerlessness. This term was quickly appropriated by mainstream development politics and made into a depoliticized, technical term that has now been emptied of almost all content.

What I think is important is to try to insist on a frame in which things like poverty are relational rather than a matter of a group of people who lack certain things. I think the key to understand critically such terms that are in vogue in development, is to understand them as a way in which groups are brought into social relations with each other. Some of the South African activists I’m talking with now say, ‘We’ve heard enough about ‘poverty alleviation’. What about wealth alleviation?’ That’s a move that insists on saying, ‘We’re not just talking about the poor and what’s wrong with the poor and why are the poor such a problem and what are we going to do with the poor’. It’s rather a question of, ‘What is our relationship with our fellow members of society?’ And I think that kind of move is more than just a shift in terms.

Within the global governance approach to development, there has been a wider shift toward the use of terms such as ‘responsibilization’, ‘decentralization’, ‘privatization’, and ‘local ownership’, as for instance reflected in core documents like the Paris Declaration. This kind of terms indicate a different relationship between donor and receiver in which membership roles are altered in some kind of way. What does this do to what you have dubbed ‘the development machine’?

I should say I’ve not worked on these questions of development projects for many, many years and I’m not well-informed on what the latest wrinkles are in the development industry. I am, however, skeptical that things are terribly different from the way they were when I first started working on these issues. As your question seems to indicate, the development industry has trotted out new languages and new justifications to explain that now things are going to be done fundamentally differently. I can tell you that is what was being said in the late 1970s too, when they were doing all these 'integrated rural development' projects all over Africa. Their slogan then was ‘popular participation’. And they said, ‘We now understand that development can’t be a top-down thing, it has to involve the buy-in from the local people and that we’re going to do it this way’.

So there is a kind of circularity to these things. While the terms might be different, the same kind of realizations or processes often seem to sustain the same kind of relationships, between essentially the same donors (as donors) and the same population to be developed (as receivers).

With that said, I think one does have to go into this with an open mind and be ready to find that maybe there are new things under the sun. There are innovations, and interesting new kinds of politics are emerging. That’s the kind of open-minded sensibility and curiosity that I was talking about at the beginning.

One question I would like to ask you with regards to the use of Foucault in understanding and framing issues, one problem with which many contemporary critics of governmentality studies seem to struggle is the question of agency. A lot of phrases used by Foucauldians or governmentality students tend to adopt the passive mode, making the acting discourses into faceless entities. So, in that way, governmentality studies is also a way of reducing agency and keeping forces that work upon the local kind of anonymous and faceless forces. How do you deal with this?

Well, when I was doing my work on development in The Anti-Politics Machine, I was not actually engaging with Foucault’s idea of governmentality. It’s true, I do use the word in one chapter of the book, but I use it in a very different way than Foucault did, and it’s a usage that actually goes back to Roland Barthes. So, that work was not about governmentality although I have engaged with the concept in some of my later work. What was really important for me at that stage from Foucault was his approach to understanding discourse.

And there, I think the problem of agency, as you put it, is often misposed. Foucault always insisted that discourse is a practice, that there is no opposition between discourse and practice. To engage in a discourse is to do something, to perform an action. Somebody sitting and typing a report is doing something. It’s a form of social action. It’s a form of practice. And so understood in that way, it’s not a question of some anonymous discourse sort of making things happen, it is a question of one set of practices, let’s say the practices of thinking though things, which is articulated with another set of practices, let’s say being a development worker. So the practices of the people who are constructing a country in a particular way, or who are formulating the problem of poverty in a particular way, they’re not just moving some ink on a piece of paper; they’re doing something in the world. And their practices are articulated with the practices of other people, which is why in my book I go from talking about ‘discursive apparatuses’ immediately to talking about ‘institutional apparatuses’. I go from describing what are people doing in a World Bank report to talking about what people are doing with cows in the villages. For me, they’re the same kind of activity.

In your work (explicitly, for instance, in ‘Global Shadows’) you struggle with the concept of modernity. It seems to be an at least problematic concept for anthropologists: it both captures a historical promise and a criterion of differentiation that in a way (also historically) constitutes the very subject of anthropology. How ‘modern’ are you?

I’ve argued that the concept of modernity is analytically incoherent. It’s not a useful analytical category. So while I don’t think it makes sense to ask, ‘Is this person more modern than that person?’, I’ve also tried to say you can’t just end it there. You just can’t say, ‘This is a category that doesn’t really makes sense and let’s not use it’, because, as an ethnographer, you have to listen to and take seriously the categories you encounter in the thought and practices of people you’re working with. And that’s where I encountered the concept of modernity in a way that I can’t just dismiss. It is a very powerful ‘folk category’, as anthropologists like to say. I can bring it into my analysis in a very critical way, but it remains a concept that people use to make sense of their own lives, to make certain identity claims, to give voice to certain kinds of aspirations they have for their lives. And In that sense, one has to take it very seriously. It’s one of the discussions within which very important kinds of political, cultural, social claims are being made.

I could compare it to the concept of ‘race’. Back in the mid- to late twentieth century, anthropologists decided that the concept of race really didn’t make any sense; that there’s no such thing as ‘race’ in a biological sense, and that there are a range of interesting minor biological differences in human populations but they don’t fall out into things called ‘races’ . So, scientifically we should just dispense with the term.

But we also soon found out that that wasn’t good enough. You couldn’t just dispense with the term ‘race’ because we live in a world where racial categories have tremendous force. And to simply say ‘race doesn’t exist’ doesn’t get you very far in understanding racism or understanding the racially structured labor market or what have you.

I treat ‘modernity’ in the same kind of spirit: it is something that is part of our world that we have to be able to grapple with and analyze without swallowing it whole; retaining our scientific skepticism about its adequacy as a concept while also understanding that it’s doing important things in the world that we must attend to.

The solution to the failure of development cooperation is always development cooperation – do you see a different (brighter) future? Is there a task for development studies? Or could – and should – it be replaced by some different approach in bettering people’s lives?

You’ve really asked two questions. One is about the future of, as you call it, development cooperation. And your question of course recalls Foucault's insistence that in our world the solution to the problem of the prison is always the prison, I think it's true that development has shown the same tendency. And yet – while I’m not in the business of trying to foretell the future – I do think that one should be open to new developments, as I said, to be ready to be surprised. It may look like it’s the same old thing out there, but people are inventive. And I think there’s a lot of interesting, innovative politics that takes place, sometimes in some surprising places. So I would like to approach this a sense of ‘We don’t know the answer to this question.’ We should therefore be open and be able to see what’s happening right in front of us. What’s happening right under our eyes that might be more interesting than we think.

The other question is about this formation called development studies, which I have always had an ambivalent relation to. I’ve always mistrusted the term ‘development’ – I diligently put it in quotes through an entire book for that reason. I prefer formulations that foreground questions of power and inequality. So I think if you can find ways of turning conversations about development into conversations about things like global inequality or global justice, that’s often an improvement. At the same time, development studies is an institutional site within which very good work has often been done. And I think it’s certainly the case that what Arturo Escobar called ‘the development encounter’ (anthropologists working in development) is something that needs to be studied – it demands our scholarly attention. Insofar as development studies programs are sites where a whole range of encounters that take place in and around programs of 'development' can be explored in a thoughtful and critical way, then it should certainly be supported.

Last question. What are you working on right now and what is some exciting stuff that is happening out there and which you are following with a keen interest?

I’m interested now in questions of social policy and persistent poverty in southern Africa, particularly. And one of the things that interest me is this strange coexistence of neoliberal economic restructuring with what we thought was its opposite, which is the welfare state. South Africa, for instance, has a quite elaborate system of social grants and pensions, which has been actually expanded in recent years, and it is becoming more and more important as a way both of providing subsistence for people in South Africa and as a kind of technique of government. So I’m interested in the emergence in new kinds of welfarism, if you like.

Simultaneously, one can witness the increasingly important phenomenon of governments in international agencies responding to problems of poverty with a new willingness to dispense what are called ‘cash transfers’. That’s one of those things that is new under the sun. There’s a new willingness to say, ‘Well, what poor people really need is some money’. If I would have told people that twenty-five years ago, they would have laughed me out of the house. Imagine the response if I had come into the World Bank and I said, ‘The problem is that poor people don’t have enough money; you should give them some’… Well, now the World Bank is pushing for what they call ‘conditional cash transfers’; they’re looking at places like Brazil that have done this (largely places in Latin America but not only there), and they’re saying, ‘Actually, we’ve got some anti-poverty programs here that are showing very impressive results and they’re based on giving money’. So, yeah, I’m trying to understand why is that thinkable now when it wasn’t thinkable twenty years ago. What has changed? How has that common-sense understanding changed under our eyes?

I think it’s partly about labor. For so long, there was this sort of terror of undermining the incentive to work, because what you needed to do was to get poor people (and this holds particularly in South Africa), and force them to work. Get them off their land and get them into the mine. Get them into the wage labor market so that their wage labor could be exploited and put to work. And we’re now looking at a world where there are loads of people willing to be exploited: there are actually loads of people willing to offer their labor yet there are no takers. So I think one of the things that may be going on is that poverty technocrats are starting to say, ‘Well, maybe undermining the motive to work is not such a problem because we don’t have jobs for these people anyway’. That’s one of the things I’m thinking about at least.

Professor Ferguson’s research has been conducted in Lesotho and Zambia, and has engaged a broad range of theoretical and ethnographic issues. A central theme running through it has been a concern with the political, broadly conceived, and with the relation between specific social and cultural processes and the abstract narratives of “development” and “modernization” through which such processes have so often been known and understood. Ferguson's most recent book, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, was published by Duke University Press in 2006. The essays that make up the book address a range of specific topics, ranging from structural adjustment, the crisis of the state, and the emergence of new forms of government-via-NGO, to the question of the changing social meaning of "modernity" for colonial and postcolonial urban Africans. They converge, however, around the question of "Africa" as a place in a wider categorical ordering of the world, and they use this question as a way to think about such large-scale issues as globalization, modernity, worldwide inequality, and social justice. He is now beginning a new research project in South Africa, exploring the emergence of new problematics of poverty and social policy under conditions of neoliberalism.

Related links

Ferguson's faculty profile at Stanford

Read Ferguson’s ‘Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the “New World Society' (Cultural Anthropology, 2002, and reprinted as a chapter in ‘Global Shadows’) here (pdf)
Read Ferguson and Gupta’s ‘Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality’ (2002, American Ethnologist) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #33: Stephen Walt

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:00:00 +0000

Stephen Walt on the Israel Lobby, the ‘Security’ in Security Studies, and the Structural Nature of Interstate Competition

Theory Talks proudly presents a comprehensive Talk with one of IR’s most influential contemporary commentators. Ever since the publication of the book The Israel Lobby, Stephen Walt has been at the center of attention, both inside the IR community and in the public debate. In this Talk, he expands on a number of issues, ranging from Iran and the bomb to Europe as an autonomous actor; from the ‘Security’ in Security Studies to the Israel Lobby; and from Thucydides to Obama.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge or principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge or in this debate?

I think that the biggest challenge to the field has three parts. The first part is that it has been a while since there has been a really big new theoretical break-through, the kind of idea that engages everyone in the field. My sense of the field is that for the last 10 or 15 years we have been in something of an intellectual cul-de-sac. Secondly, much of contemporary IR theory is simply not very relevant – it doesn’t actually tell our students much about the real world we’re grappling with; it doesn’t give much guidance to policy makers or even concerned citizens who are trying to understand the contemporary world. Encouraging theorists to engage with real-world issues is something our field ought to do. And the third challenge I see is that of trying to integrate all of the different strands of theory that we already have. We have theories at the systemic level, theories that look at the characteristics of units, and so forth, but we have never been very good at putting those together in any kind of systematic way. Currently, we have lots of competing predictions stemming from those competing theories but we’re still not very good at sorting out which of these might fit together or how you could try and use all of these different bodies of theories in some kind of synthetic way.

As far as the main debate: I think that the most fundamental debate is still the one between those who have an optimistic view of human progress—based largely on the spread of liberal principles--and those who don’t. The former group believes that the international system is gradually evolving in a peaceful direction, that major warfare is becoming increasingly unlikely, and that the spread of democracy, economic interdependence, international institutions, and the integration of information systems are gradually creating a world community in which large-scale warfare is not going to be a serious problem. The second group consists of those who in fact think that international relations basically hasn’t changed much over time. For the latter, international politics is still mostly about competition between territorial units – in the modern world, states – and even if war is unlikely, preparations for war will continue and the familiar set of security concerns will remain central to IR. I’m in the latter group, obviously.

At present, I’m especially concerned by the second challenge I mentioned, the connection between IR theory and the real world. I try to engage issues that are actually happening out there—albeit in a scholarly way—and I wish more academics did too. International relations theory should not become a purely academic enterprise where scholars just write for a handful of other academics. If all we do is read each other’s work without actually trying to speak to larger audiences, we are abdicating a very important social role. What’s the point of having tenure if one never uses that freedom to engage in big, real-world debates? And I think our field has very much slipped into this rarified sort of scholarly autism.

In terms of the main debate, I clearly think the competitive nature of the system is not going to go away. People continually hope that war is becoming obsolete and that security competition will be eliminated by either liberal political forms or economic interdependence, but I just don’t see something like that happening in my lifetime.

In terms of real-world challenges IR theory has to grapple with, I’ll just mention one. Today we are beginning to explore the implications of a globally integrated information system, —of which the Internet is the most obvious manifestation—a world where ideas and information can traverse the globe in real-time and at very low cost. The degree of interconnectivity that now exists between different societies and the capacity to learn about them in real time is potentially very significant, but we still have to figure out what the political implications are. For example, it may become more difficult to demonize other countries or present biased information about them as a wide array of information sources become available. Again, the problem is that we don’t quite know what it means. So that is example of a real-world phenomenon that requires theoretical analysis.

A second real-world issue for us to be thinking about is the balance between the power of the state and the power of the individual. Small groups of people have the potential to do more damage than at any time in history. All you have to do is think about terrorist organizations equipped with biological weapons or nuclear weapons; they could do extraordinary levels of damage, far more than any non-state actor could ever have done in the past. For some, it suggests that states are growing weaker. But at the same time, the capacity of state organizations to monitor what (individual) human beings are up to has also grown, and citizens in many countries seem to be willing to tolerate higher levels of surveillance than they would have accepted in the past. One of the major issues of politics more generally is how this sort of competition between state power and individual autonomy--which includes individuals interested in doing bad things--plays out over the next century. And this matters for not just the western world, but also in lots of other places.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I think four main influences shaped my outlook on IR. First, going back to my childhood, my father was a physicist and also something of a military history buff. Growing up, I got interested in military history and general features of international politics at a relatively young age, and we used to argue a lot about foreign policy when I was in high school. I read a lot of books on war and collected airplane and warship models and things like that.

Secondly, when I was an undergraduate at Stanford I studied with Alexander George (1920-2006), and his interest in using theory to speak to policy issues clearly resonated with me. Also, his attempts to use history in a more systematic and structured way – the work he did on “structured, focused comparison as a type of qualitative methods – was very appealing. This was because I liked history, but I wanted to be able to integrate theory and history in a more rigorous way.

Needless to say, Kenneth Waltz (Theory Talk #40) had an enormous influence on me. He was my dissertation chairman, as well as something of a role model to many of my fellow graduate students. It wasn’t just the ideas he had on international politics—though they were obviously very influential—but also the example he set. Waltz always asked big and fundamental questions – and he was more concerned with quality than quantity. One of the striking things about Waltz was that he didn’t publish an enormous amount relative to his enormous reputation. He obviously had a very productive career and remains active today, but he didn’t publish a huge number of books and articles. There are lots of less influential scholars who have much longer CVs. Instead, he tended to publish work that was always really, really good, and on central topics. One of the things I learned from that is that quality control really matters: it is better to write a smaller number of really important pieces than a huge number of not very interesting works. Waltz was also inspiring because he wasn’t afraid to challenge fads or the conventional wisdom, and because he tried to state things clearly and simply, and I’ve tried to emulate those traits in my own work.

The final influence has been my colleagues and peers, going back to my graduate days at Berkeley. I was fortunate enough to go to graduate school with a terrific set of students and I subsequently met others during my years as a pre-doctoral fellow at Harvard. And I often tell graduate students that they’ll learn as much from each other as they’re going to learn from their professors, and that their fellow-graduate students are going to be their intellectual partners for a long time, so its important to forge lots of intellectual connections. I was lucky to have come along at a moment when some remarkably smart and dedicated peers were around and a lot of my own success is due to having smart people to learn from early on.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

I can think of three things here. One is that you do need a lot of knowledge of the real world and of the relevant history. It is hard to be very good at understanding the contemporary world politics if you don’t know a lot of the substance of it. The value of any theory ultimately rests on its ability to explain what is actually occurring (or has occurred), and knowing a lot about substance helps us create theories that actually do fit the facts.

I might add that this means knowing a lot about global history. When people like me were trained in North America, courses in diplomatic history tended to be European history, or maybe transatlantic history. But unless you became a regional specialist, you simply didn’t learn very much about the history of other parts of the world. Today, however, one needs to try and learn as much about what happened in South Asia or Latin America or East Asia or Africa as well, because history is both the primary data base for testing theories and because how we understand the past shapes a lot of behavior today. So the first point is this basic bedrock knowledge of the real world.

Second is a capacity for simplification. Theory is all about figuring out what the essence of a particular phenomenon is; it’s about abstraction, eliminating the superfluous elements and really getting at the essence of what is happening. And that involves imagination--the ability to conceive of things in simple terms rather than in complex terms and to strip away what is peripheral and grasp the essence of a social phenomenon. There is also the capacity to analogize, to take an idea from one realm and see that it applies in a totally different domain, while recognizing ways in which the analogy may not hold. So the second step consists in taking all that knowledge of the real world and stripping away the stuff that doesn’t matter to really see what is going on. Some people are very good at this and others aren’t. I think you can try and hone that capacity through graduate training, but often it is simply a mental quality that some people have and others don’t.

And thirdly, everyone needs to get at least a certain basic training in methods of causal inference and research design. I don’t necessarily mean the full arsenal of quantitative and qualitative methods, but the basic principles research design, and learning how to draw conclusions correctly from a pattern of evidence and the capacity to test ideas rigorously is fundamental. If you don’t have that, you’ll make elementary mistakes and get the wrong answer.

In 1991, you published an article called The Renaissance of Security Studies (read here, pdf), arguing against the widening of the concept of security into non-national realms such as human security, environmental security, etc. ‘Wideners’ have since gained momentum, not in the least because of events such as 9/11. How do you think about the definition of security now?

There is no question that the concept of security has broadened from what it might have been in the 1950s or 1960s, when it did tend to be very state-centered. What I was arguing against in 1991 was making the term ‘security’ so inclusive that it included virtually anything that might affect human welfare. So people, for instance, wanted the field of security studies to include the study of global health, or the study of poverty, or of migration. And I felt first of all that this “redefinition” was being used to try and take over the field in ways that I didn’t think were going to be helpful.

In particular, I felt the attempts to redefine were being made in order to marginalize the study of traditional forms of security affairs. Ultimately, I think the actual name of a field is kind of a secondary issue: it doesn’t really matter what we call these things. If you want to call more traditional security studies ‘strategic studies’ and call the study of human security ‘security studies’, I don’t have a big problem with that. What I was objecting to was the attempt to use nomenclature as a way of legitimizing a particular view of the field, so that traditional topics could be excluded and a whole set of unrelated topics could occupy it instead. In particular, people wanted to define “security studies” broadly so that academic positions and programs that had traditionally focused on conflict and war could be taken over by people studying the environment, public health, gender politics, or whatever, even when it had no particular connection to organized violence. I should emphasize that I think topic like global health or migration or human rights or transnational crime are all important subjects that deserve serious attention, and I certainly wasn’t suggesting that they shouldn’t be studied; I just thought that should be done openly, and not through a sort-of stealthy redefinition of an existing sub-field. And I wanted to retain a relatively focused conception of the subfield, so that it would retain some intellectual coherence and so that it wouldn’t suffer the same fate that military history had suffered in many academic history departments.

Of course, when I was writing that article in the early 1990s, there were a lot of people who believed that with the Cold War over, peace was going to break out everywhere and we were not going to need to study these things anymore. Indeed, a number of prominent scholars said some remarkably silly things about the obsolescence of security studies, in effect suggesting that people who were experts on war and security competition could be put out to pasture and replaced a new group of scholars who will study these other questions. Unfortunately, that initial post-Cold War optimism wasn’t borne out. We see now that competition between states has continued and that war is still a major challenge, even though it may take somewhat different forms. I don’t think there is a particularly heated debate any longer: we have discovered that there is room for a lot of different people studying a lot of different aspects of human competition in the field.

In an interview with Harry Kreisler in 2005, you stated that IR theory is about ‘developing general propositions, valid across time and space, explaining the behavior of internationally consequential actors’ – and you’re quick to give some examples: states, international organizations, but also terrorist groups. Now this definition – supposedly timeless – would probably have looked different, say, 25 years ago. Does this mean (1) that international politics changes over time (and space), and (2) that the purpose of IR theory shifts over time?

When I was in graduate school, there was a question on the UC Berkeley qualifying exam in IR that went something like this: “Has the fundamental nature of international politics changed in the past 400 years?’ There is obviously no right or wrong answer to that question, which is why they liked to ask it, but it did force students to think carefully about different aspects of world politics and to decide where we stood. There are obviously some aspects of international politics different now from how they were 500 years ago, or even 25 years ago, and there are also many features of international politics that haven’t changed very much at all.

Now if you go back 25 years and look at what was happening in the world, you’d discover that people were very worried about terrorism—it was a big issue for the Reagan Administration, for example—so it’s not like terrorism has just emerged on the world stage. On the other hand, the relative importance of issues does shift over time, and we are a field that does get affected by real-world events. The oil shocks in the 1970s set part of the scholarly agenda in the field for a while; so did the emergence of a set of significant ethnic conflicts in the aftermath of the Cold War. But I think the basic focus of the IR field has changed less than we think: the set of international consequential actors, or the types of actors we look at, doesn’t change as much as people often claim.

How would I sum it up? First, states have been the focus of the field and will remain so in the future. Second, international organizations are probably more important now than they were 150 years ago, but they weren’t unknown then and they are mostly a manifestation of state power anyway. Third, there are transnational organizations now that play a somewhat more active role than they might have earlier but they aren’t a completely new phenomenon either – the Roman Catholic church was one of the first transnational organizations and it’s been around a very long time. And there have been plenty of other “non-state” actors of consequence, like the international socialist movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, and various terrorist organizations all over the world. So I tend to see the landscape of world politics as changing less than people think. We are a faddish business, but I tend to see more continuity than others do.

For realists, when domestic issues start interfering with foreign policy, you have a problem – that was what The Israel Lobby was all about. So how about this financial crisis? I mean, the economy of the US, due to the status of the dollar, is inextricably bound up with that of, say, China. That hypothetically constrains what the US can say and do to China in terms of high-politics.

Your question asks whether a high degree of economic interdependence between major powers can significantly constrain the level or intensity of security competition between them. From my perspective, I think the real question is whether domestic groups in either China or the United States would be able to influence the behavior of either country because they were concerned about preserving a particular set of economic relations. Specifically, will business interests in the US press Washington to tread lightly around China, because they were concerned with what might happen if China used its economic leverage? I think the answer is “yes,” but I don’t think that will prevent the US and China from seeing each other as rivals and from engaging in various forms of security competition at the same time.

That said, I think there is no question the US and China will attempt to preserve mutually profitable economic relations over time. But if China continues to grow in terms of relative power and its strength increases relative to that of the US, the two states are going to compete in lots of other ways as well. And managing that competition is going to be difficult. That’s not to say the two states are inevitably going to go to war, but I will be surprised if we don’t have a more and more competitive relationship with China as its power increases.

Did the book The Israel Lobby have the impact you’d want it to be? Do you see any difference in the way it has been received in Europe and in the US?

The answer to both questions is “yes.” With respect to mainstream commentary in the US, I was struck by how consistently how our arguments we were misunderstood or misrepresented, and by the fact that some critics appeared not to have actually read what we wrote. This isn’t all that surprising, because almost all of the reviewers in mainstream outlets in the United States were people who had very strong views on this subject and who had previously taken positions at odds with ours. But instead of refuting our arguments with facts and logic, most of them simply misrepresented what we wrote. We made several points over and over in the book—in order to make sure that our position was crystal-clear—yet a lot of reviewers simply misread what we wrote or simply chose to attack a phony version of our argument as opposed to what we really said. For example, critics said we questioned Israel’s legitimacy or complained that we were trying to disenfranchise American Jewry, when in fact we wrote the exact opposite. Others characterized it as an anti-Israel book, despite the fact that we went to considerable lenghts to say that we thought that the policies advocated by groups like AIPAC were harmful to the United States and Israel alike. And of course we had to deal with a lot of unwarranted personal attacks as well.

As one might expect, the reaction in Europe was much more favorable—I think eight out of nine major reviews in the UK were quite positive—and we also got several very positive reviews in Israel itself, including a lengthy review in Ha’aretz.

Overall, the book had precisely the impact we wanted it to have. Our main goal in writing the book was to foster a more open discussion of a subject that had become largely – not entirely, but largely – a taboo subject in the US. There was a very powerful set of interest groups defending the “special relationship” between the US and Israel, and these groups had a big impact on US Middle East policy. Everybody in Washington knows that, but it was a phenomenon that nobody was willing talk about and certainly not to criticize. We didn’t think that situation was healthy, particularly given how badly America’s position in the Middle East had become by the time we were writing the book. So our goal was to get the subject out in the open, so that people could start talking about it. And I think that if you look at what’s been written and said since then, and at the nature of the current debate now in the US, we clearly succeeded. This is now a subject that people will talk about openly; there are far more critical conversations about the different influences on American Middle East policy, and even including popular commentators like Jon Stewart of the Daily Show – will now openly talk about this interest group, the Israel Lobby.

Opening up the discussion creates a space for new policy, and U.S. policy has clearly shifted somewhat under President Obama. I’m certainly not going to claim credit for that shift, but I do think that having a more open discussion has made it easier for policymakers, other concerned citizens, and even many strong supporters of Israel to start to rethink the current relationship, and ask whether our policy of unconditional support has been good for either the United States or Israel.

Does the EU have any influence in pressuring the two-state solution for the Middle East, or is US pressure the only one that matters here?

The European Union has an enormous potential leverage, if it spoke as one and if it used its economic influence towards both the Palestinians and the Israelis. If the EU wanted to exercise influence, it would be taken quite seriously. It has not been willing to do that, however, partly because the United States has always leaned pretty hard on the EU not to put any pressure on Israel and to not play too active a role. If the US were willing to push the EU to take a different stance, or if the EU would be willing to do so independently, than it could have a quite considerable positive influence. But until recently the EU has done pretty much whatever Washington wanted it to do, and it has refused to do anything that the United States strongly opposed.

One more question on the EU: there seem to be two groups of people thinking about its international influence and how that should evolve. On the one hand, there’s the economic power/human security group as represented by, for instance, Mary Kaldor in Theory Talk #30, and on the other there’s the military power-group, as represented by for instance Antonio Marquina in Theory Talk #25, calling for hard power in order to be able to attain ‘soft’ goals.

In a sense, they’re both right. If the Europeans want to exercise relatively little global influence and focus primarily on European affairs, economic issues, and the maintenance of current social welfare benefits, they can. Europe doesn’t face any imminent and serious security problems, mostly because the US has been willing to shoulder a lot of the global burden, and seems willing to keep on doing that. In that sense, Mary Kaldor is right: the EU can probably go on for quite some time, doing relatively little in the hard power department.

But there is a price to pay for that: when things like the Balkan Wars happened, ultimately, the Europeans had to call on the Americans to solve the problem. I don’t think this situation will last forever; the US shouldn’t have to keep solving local European problems. Secondly, the current situation means that Europe will not have a particularly powerful voice on lots of other issues, whether it is Central Asia or the Middle East or Africa. So the European states face a choice: if they want to wield greater global influence, they will have to muster greater capabilities for doing so. On the other hand, if they’re not interested in doing that anymore, they can pretty much continue as they are.

We’ve been waiting for a new NATO Strategic Concept for a decade now. Why is it lagging and what do you think it will look like?

I think nobody really knows what NATO’s mission is now that the Cold War is over. Yet for various reasons, the alliance has held together. One reason is to maintain a certain stability in the immediate post-Cold War; another was the U.S. desire to retain influence in Europe, a third was the sheer “stickiness” of a heavily bureaucratized alliance structure. Lots of efforts have been made to re-organize NATO and to prepare it for out-of-area missions, that is, missions outside of the traditional European theater. You can tell there hasn’t been enormous energy or enthusiasm behind those efforts, however, and the United States keeps doing most of the heavy lifting in places like Iraq or Afghanistan.

This situation reflects a more fundamental shift in world politics: Europe simply doesn’t matter as much anymore in comparison to other parts of the world. If you look at where the strategic attention of the US is going to be over the next twenty or thirty years, it is going to be on the Middle East, Central Asia and East Asia. From 1945 to 1990, by contrast, Europe was really the main focus of the US’s strategic attention, for all the obvious reasons. That’s going to be less and less the case over time, and thus getting out a new Strategic Concept for NATO, simply isn’t a top priority for Washington at this moment.

Is Obama a realist? And, if so, what kind of realist?

I’m reasonably sure that Obama has never read Mearsheimer, Waltz, Krasner or Morgenthau, and he probably wouldn’t describe himself in those terms, but I do think he is a realist in the sense that he is essentially a pragmatist – he’s not wedded to a powerful ideological agenda. Like all American politicians, he invokes certain liberal values like liberty and democracy, but his foreign policy decisions don’t seem to flow from a particularly ideological worldview. I don’t think he is someone who believes in trying to spread democracy at the point of a gun the way neoconservatives in the Bush administration did.

Furthermore, Obama has emphasized the need to deal with both allies and adversaries—even if you have differences with the latter—and that is clearly consistent with a realist view of the world. Realists recognize that power is important but also a pretty crude instrument, and that there are inherent limits to what any state can try to do. You can’t try and transform everything that you don’t like about the world; indeed, most of the time states are just trying to advance their interests in the face of enormous constraints. In short, realists recognize that we mostly have to live with circumstances that aren’t perfect, because we don’t live in a perfect world.

In one of your commentaries at Foreign Policy, you write that it is unlikely that Iran would drop nuclear ambitions – it seems to be a broadly shared consensus in the country. Maybe a naive question, but what would it matter if they would get it, not taking into account the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)? It is a big country pursuing realist politics on a regional scale and it simply wants the recognition of being so – it is furthermore surrounded by religiously differing Muslim countries (one might say a Shiite country in a Sunni world) and has nuclear powers all around it. Might the possession of the bomb not make it a more responsible regional power instead, if it feels less threatened?

That’s certainly a possibility. If Iran does get a nuclear bomb one day, I believe the consequences are going to be less significant than many people believe. That’s certainly been the case in all the other examples of nuclear proliferation that we have seen to date. NSC-68 argued that Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons would have far-reaching negative implications, but it really didn’t change things very much. We were serious rivals before the got the bomb and we remained rivals afterwards, but it wasn’t as if getting the bomb allowed the Soviet Union to do all sorts of things that it had been unable to do previously. Much the same is true of communist China: there was great fear in the US and the broader West when China was making moves towards a nuclear capability, mostly because people believed Mao was irrational and might be willing to use them. Of course, none of this turned out to be true.

Nuclear weapons turn out to be good only for one thing: deterring direct attacks on your own homeland and perhaps on close allies. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, it is not going to be able to blackmail its neighbors or to tell us what to do in the various parts of the world that we care about. Why? Because using a nuclear weapon against us or against Israel would invite devastating retaliation, and so an Iranian threat to use its weapons simply isn’t credible. I don’t think it would be a good thing for Iran to get nuclear weapons and I hope they can be persuaded not to, but I don’t think the world would come to an end the day they acquire a nuclear capability.

There seems to be this unstoppable build-up of tension evolving around Iran as an international policy issue – especially in parts of the US administration and in Israel. Is Iran going to drop off the agenda without any confrontation?

There are no circumstances I can imagine in which Iran would drop off the agenda—it is a country of over 70 million people in a very important part of the world and it has considerable natural resources—so it’s going to be a significant state irrespective of who is running Iran and what its policies are. There has been, I believe, a significant effort to demonize Iran in the eyes of many Americans, and to portray it as a group of deeply irrational and illogical fanatics who are irrevocably hostile to American interests. I think that’s simply not the case: Iran is a country that is pursuing its own national interests, no less imperfectly than we do, I might add, and it is currently doing a variety of things that is clearly at odds with what we want. But I do not think U.S. and Iranian interests are irreconcilable over time. Improving relations is not going to be easy because there are groups in Iran who don’t have much interest in that, and there are groups in the US and elsewhere that don’t much care for that, either. But I hope that cooler heads will prevail so that in the next five or ten years we see a gradual relaxation of tensions between the two countries.

You seem to be one of the few scholars I have interviewed, who is not impressed by the predicted growth of the BRICs. Why is that?

First of all, I think the whole acronym ‘BRICs’ lumps together a set of states that is as different as they are similar. Brazil is a significant country, for example, but it is not going to be like China over the next fifty years. The same thing goes for Russia. Russia’s economy is going to grow modestly but its population is going to shrink, so it is going to be in many ways less significant as an international actor over time. China, by contrast is going to be much more significant in all sorts of ways over the same period. Again, the acronym suggests more similarities than is really warranted.

Secondly, the general claim that these countries are going to be somewhat more significant in the future than they were in the past is correct. But the problem is that we tend to overstate this change. In my view, a book like Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World (read excerpt here) exaggerates the significance of this tendency. All you really need to do is look at the projections for what each countries’ relative share of gross world product is going to be in say, twenty or thirty years. The US is still going to have about 25 to 30 percent; China will move up from about 6 or 7 percent today to 12 to 14 percent in about twenty to thirty years, which is a significant move upwards. However, it’s still going to be half the size of the US in economic terms. But all of the other BRICs are going to stay in the low single digits, so the idea that the rise of the BRICs is creating a new multipolar world is simply exaggerating the significance of these countries. They are going to be more consequential (with the possible exception of Russia) then they were in the past, but it’s not going to be a complete transformation of world politics or even a structural change in the polarity of the system.

Ever since you wrote The Origins of Alliances (1987), it is commonly believed that you "built some bridges" between constructivism and realism (mainly through your refinement of Waltz's Balance of Power theory). What's your opinion on this? Doesn't this make you a Constructivist in some sort of way?

I certainly never thought of myself as building a bridge between the two, in part because when I wrote it, constructivism was really just starting to get noticed in the field of international politics. The main reason people said I ‘flirted’ with constructivism was because I had brought perceptions of intent into the measurement of the perception of threat, and people pointed out that threat perception is at least to some degree socially constructed. I took one step away from traditional realism in the book by substituting the concept of the balance of power with that of the balance of threat as the principal reason for the building (or not) of alliances, but it wasn’t a very big step.

I should add that I was quite critical of some of the earlier constructivist work because I thought it was very dismissive of other work but hadn’t demonstrated a positive agenda of its own; constructivists and post-modernists tended to be attacking everything in the field without offering something in place of what they were attempting to destroy. Now, some twenty years later, I do think that constructivist approaches have added a lot to our understanding of the field, even though constructivism by its very nature is incapable of providing much in the way of prediction. These approaches alert us to the way in which attitudes, beliefs, identities and norms can evolve and change, but they’re not very good at telling us how they’re going to evolve and change.

So, in the end, what do you think more important for determining policy? Threat perception or the ‘material’ basis of a threat?

On the whole, the material dimension matters more. States are almost always sensitive to the material balance of power, even though we still have trouble measuring it. In some circumstances, however, intentions can be sufficiently malign to override material capabilities. So in general I am still a structuralist, but there are going to be cases where relatively weak states are seen as sufficiently nasty to get a lot of attention.

Last question. Robert Gilpin is known for assigning the first chapter of Thucydides in his courses, and then asking his students: "Do you think you know more about IR than an Athenian student during the time of the Peloponnesian War?" Do we know more now?

I think we do. First of all, we have a much richer and reliable evidentiary base for a lot of the claims we make about international politics. Second, there are various ideas that simply never occurred to Thucydides when he wrote about the things that can shape the behavior of states or other international actors. Having said that, you’re not going to get me to criticize Thucydides, in part because it is a book that is rich in insights. He did grasp a number of enduring features of international politics, and it is all the more impressive because he didn’t have a lot of earlier literature to guide him. Most notably, the book reminds us of a central realist insight: political competition is a structural fact of life in the international system. And that has been true for millennia.

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Rene Belfer Professsor of International Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. He has been a Resident Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, and he has also served as a consultant for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the National Defense University. He presently serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies. Professor Walt is the author of The Origins of Alliances (1987), which received the 1988 Edgar S. Furniss National Security Book Award. He is also the author of Revolution and War (1996), Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (2005), and, with co-author J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (2007).

Related links

Faculty profile at Harvard
Read Walt’s Commentaries at Foreign Policy here
Read Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby (working paper, 2006) here (pdf)
Conversations with History - Mearsheimer and Walt on the Israel Lobby
See a Documentary on the Israel Lobby here
Read Walt’s How Firm is America's Grasp on Global Supremacy? (Los Angeles World Affairs Council, 2005) here (pdf)
Read Walt’s The Imbalance of Power (Harvard Magazine March/April 2004) here (pdf)
Read Walt’s American Primacy: Its Prospects and Pitfalls (Naval War College Review, 2002) here (pdf)
Read Walt’s Rigor or Rigor Mortis?: Rational Choice and Security Studies (International Security 23, no. 4, 1999) here (pdf)
Read Walt’s International Relations: One World, Many Theories (Foreign Policy, 1998) here (pdf)
Read Walt’s The Renaissance of Security Studies (International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2., 1991) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #32: Miriam Elman

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:16:00 +0000

Miriam Elman on Lakatos versus Kuhn and Progress in IR Theory

How do disciplines advance? Can one still speak of ‘progress’ in a field like IR, consisting of various, competing, explanatory frameworks? Miriam F. Elman has dedicated much of her time to discussing such questions specifically for IR. In this Talk, she – amongst others – contrasts the approaches of Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos to progress; she challenges the view that progress in IR theory is primarily inhibited by ‘vested interests’; and she shows how (neo-)classical realism still has a lot to say.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

I’d like to start by saying what I think the principle debates in IR are NOT. The central debates are not whether rational choice or constructivism matters more; whether domestic politics trumps external constraints and opportunities in explaining international outcomes and foreign policy strategies; or whether Realism is or is not relevant in the post cold-war or 9/11 era. I think that these are unhelpful and uninteresting questions that do little to advance the state of the field or our understanding of past or contemporary international relations. Clearly, when we look at any given issue (for example, terrorism; the democratic peace phenomenon; nuclear proliferation), both rational choice and constructivist perspective offer valuable insights. There is no reason to have to choose among these approaches. Similarly, there is no need to pick between ‘second image’ and ‘third image’ variables. In fact, some of the most interesting work in IR today is being done by scholars who combine levels of analysis, looking at how the international impacts the domestic to produce distinct state responses to external challenges (see for example, Etel Solingen’s masterful book Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East, Princeton University Press, 2007). Lastly, Realism remains a vibrant area of study in IR—indeed, classical realist thought is now experiencing a renaissance with the publication of multiple works by self-identified Realists such as William Wohlforth, Randall Schweller, and Christopher Layne (see Steven E. Lobell, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Jeffrey Taliaferro, Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy, Cambridge University Press, 2009).

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I was fortunate to have many terrific teachers and mentors as an undergraduate (at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel) and graduate student (at Columbia University), but I would say that the scholar that inspired me the most was Robert Jervis. Jervis was (and still is) one of the most important and interesting contemporary scholars writing on IR. Anything Jervis writes—absolutely everything!—is worth reading. His work is extraordinary in its richness, historical breadth, and ability to zero in on the key errors in judgment of both policymakers and theorists. His book, Perceptions and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 1976), is one of the top 5 books ever published in the field, and a ‘must read’ for every student coming into the field.

Columbia University’s Ph.D. program gave me the tools and skills necessary to think critically about IR. My first publication was a letter to the editor, which was published in International Security (co-authored with my spouse, Colin Elman). The letter originated from some comments that Colin Elman and I made at a seminar presentation by Paul Schroeder at Columbia’s War and Peace Institute. Nothing would have ever come of that had Robert Jervis, Jack Snyder, Hendrik Spruyt, and David Baldwin not encouraged us to write our comments up and submit them to the journal. Columbia University’s Political Science Department is a special place—nurturing yet demanding; intellectually stimulating yet self-consciously eschewing hand-holding. It has been 13 years since I left, and I have tried to recreate some of that atmosphere for my own graduate students ever since.

In terms of inspiring events, I’d have to say it was Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. I was living in Israel at the time and protested the war in downtown Tel Aviv along with tens of thousands of other Israelis. It was a very moving experience and made me realize both the importance of democratic governance (voters can end wars that go sour, or at least compel democratically elected policymakers to change course) and the limits of democratic governance for war and peace decision making (democratically elected leaders can typically initiate wars by circumventing checks and balances, nor are leaders always more bellicose than citizens). Living in Israel brought these issues into stark relief and it is not surprising that one of my first publications was on the Lebanon war, and that I have always been interested in the democratic peace debate. These days I am also doing more work on the Middle East than I have in the past; I have research projects on democratization in the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So I really feel like I am going back to my roots.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

I’d like to suggest instead that one of the biggest challenges for students doing contemporary IR in general (and security studies more specifically) is to become sufficiently proficient in scholarly work being done outside of the field of IR. This includes having some working knowledge of scholarship being done in comparative and American Politics, and in Political Theory, but also beyond political science and the social sciences more generally. In order to be relevant, both for theory and for policy, IR scholars need to engage with anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and scholars in other disciplines. This is not to say that we IR scholars all need to be training in joint degree programs or publishing only in interdisciplinary journals. But it is to say that we need to be aware of the work being done in other fields, so that we can draw on the insights from other areas of study and do better in constructing our theories; gathering the evidence for them; and offering policy-relevant answers to the central questions of war and peace. Whenever I go to professional political science conferences (APSA or ISA for example), I am continually struck by how insular so many of us are. But the very best IR scholarship today is being written by people who are intellectually curious about the work being done in cognate disciplines. IR theorists such as Daniel Philpott, Rose McDermott, and Richard Ned Lebow are among those doing this kind of cutting edge, cross-disciplinary work. At the very least, knowing how scholars in other disciplines address similar topics and issues can provide us with a better handle on the guild rules and reward mechanisms that undergird the subfield of IR, and the discipline of political science more generally.

Are we progressing in the study of international politics and how does one ‘measure’ our progress?

In our book Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field (MIT Press, 2003, second edition 2008), Colin Elman and I, along with a group of distinguished scholars of IR, consider whether Imre Lakatos’ methodology is a useable one for evaluating IR theory. We concluded that it was, although some of the other contributors to the book were less enamored by Lakatos and were more inclined to offer other metrics for assessing whether IR is progressing. I definitely think there are some illegitimate ways of doing science—for example, I don’t think that theories should be amended simply in order to salvage them from anomalous evidence. I still think that Lakatos’ notion of ad-hocness and his recommendations for how scholars can deal with disconfirming evidence in ‘progressive’ ways (e.g. by predicting novel facts) is very useful. Scholars should be tenacious in defending their theories—we should not be so fickle that we discard good theories every time a new event unfolds. But we have to do this defending in legitimate ways.

Some of the people I have previously interviewed indicate as a challenge to progress in IR theory the fact that the established people in the field have become over-invested in their intellectual and theoretical positions. They stress the need for a new generation of scholars to open up new paths of inquiry. What’s your view on this?

My view is that the scholarship that tends to be rewarded is the scholarship that takes short declarative positions, ruling out a host of competing explanations, and giving only short shrift to the scholarship that came before. The demand in our ‘market’ is for work that is quite mono-causal and often simplistic in its rendering of the topic or issue at hand. And that tends to be what gets the major exposure. If you think of some of the top work published recently, then you see there is no in-depth theorizing, but rather only lightly touches upon previously published work on the issue; and the answers given tend to express truncated views of politics and international relations.

So I’m not even sure if this is going to be solved by a generational shift. I think that there is a more profound issue here about what gets published in the major research journals and by the major academic presses. And that in turn might be a consequence of publishing pressures: the pressure to go smaller, shorter, less footnotes, less detail, shorter in word length… That lends itself to a certain kind of writing that I think is not open to the sort of eclectic, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic theorizing attentive to history and complexity which one would ideally want to have. It’s hard to find books that do such sound theorizing nowadays.

Let me give you an example: I’ve talked to a lot of scholars recently about criticisms they’ve received on their published work, and they all indicated that they had these criticisms covered in the earlier manuscripts, but that editors forced them to remove that nuance because they didn’t have space. Another example is that your standard journal article has to look as follows: you start with an existing explanation for a problem, explain why according to your new approach it is wrong, show two or three cases and sum the argument up in the conclusion. So that means that some of the reasons why theoretical innovation is lagging might be far more mundane than one thinks at first.

But still, one could agree with for instance Alexander Wendt (Theory Talk #3) that it is difficult for established scholars to let go of their ‘big ideas’.

Yes, but I don’t see that as something necessarily bad: you’re tapping into the tenacity of theorists and their theories here. I think that resilience is something good: the fact that someone is reluctant to give up his or her pet theory is not only good for theory development but also likely from a more psychological point of view: if you’ve worked on something for a long time, you wouldn’t want to give it up that easily.

Theoretical tenacity is a central issue in the work of Lakatos, which we linked to IR in the previously mentioned volume. Thomas Kuhn would say that theories persist because not enough anomalies have pervaded for scientific revolution to take place, or because alternative theories and their proponents haven’t been persuasive enough; so it’s a matter of a radical break between one theory and the other, a sweeping and permanent change. Some people looked at post-Cold-War IR theory as reflecting such a kind of shift, when, for example, many in the field moved away from neorealism towards other, more domestic-policy sensitive approaches.

For Imre Lakatos, by contrast, this kind of prescriptive way of seeing science is very dangerous, because new ideas might come from demagogues and it’s simply not a very pluralistic or open way of speaking about science, to say that it’s either the old theory or the new one. So he suggested an alternative way to measure progress in scientific research, and I think that his approach is intuitively appealing for many IR scholars, simply because we try not to throw out our theories with each challenging real-world event but rather we try to improve our theories as a response in order to explain what’s happening while also accounting for new information. Unlike Kuhn, who saw science as dominated by single monopolistic paradigms at any given time, Lakatos’s MSRP is far more tolerant in anticipating that at any time a given science will have several scientific research programs. I think this more accurately describes the field of IR. Lakatos envisioned a pluralistic science and he was justifiably worried about the ‘destructive effect’ that naïve falsification strategies could have on budding scientific research programs. The notion of Kuhnian ‘paradigm wars’ is totally foreign to Lakatos’s approach.

Yet a Lakatonian view on progress in IR doesn’t support relativism; I would take a stand against scholars holding on to ‘their’ co-existing theories which both fail to explain what’s happening in international politics. Lakatos would see that as very dangerous, and I concur that we have a serious issue in IR with this. You can see it in the way new theoretical debate positions get framed: scholars refer to other theories as ‘having a point’, but then again, their own, new theory also does. Everybody is kind of ‘right’, as if it’s all the same, as if there are no incorrect assertions concerning facts. Yet I think there are facts, and that there are right interpretations and wrong interpretations. That’s linked to my conception of progress in IR. I think there is a lot of theory that just isn’t moving forward, that is sort of stuck in a rut, but there are also advances that are moving us forward, like the neoclassical realist agenda. While some say it is regressive, I think that it moves forward the thinking of classical realists in a more systematic way, in a way that helps us address some of the important aspects of IR today and I think it is a vibrant research agenda.

Earlier, you’ve examined how traditionalist diplomatic and military historians and qualitative case study methodists relate to one another. What are the main differences between their approaches and how should a student recognize and pick one or other?

Before considering the differences, it is important to note the similarities. Diplomatic historians and qualitative IR scholars are bound to be very sympathetic to each other. They have a shared subject matter, similar methodological leanings, and mutual views that their scholarship is underrepresented or undervalued in their discipline. There really is no such thing as an a-theoretical historian or an a-historical political scientist—this is a stereotype that pervades our thinking about the two disciplines but it really is a misnomer. I think the main difference is in the aesthetics—history simply looks and reads differently than political science. If you look at the books in political science/IR published by the top university presses (for example, Cornell, Princeton, Cambridge) they have a certain style that is followed fairly religiously: introduction; theory chapter; case study chapters (all distinct in time and place); concluding chapter with policy recommendations. Historians would never write international relations this way. For historians, causal arguments are embedded in narrative, and arguments don’t float freely across temporal and spatial contexts.

What’s the most important lessons both approaches can learn from one another?

Robert Jervis (Theory Talk #12), Paul W. Schroeder, Richard Ned Lebow, John Lewis Gaddis and the other contributors to my book (co-edited with Colin Elman), Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations (MIT Press, 2001), offer different and compelling answers to this question. In the last paragraphs of their respective essays in the book Schroeder says that he could not conceive of being a political scientist and Jervis says that he could not be a historian, but both acknowledge the importance of a continued dialogue and conversation, one in which historians and political scientists can “be friends and, in some cases, allies”.

Last question. You’ve examined the famous challenge to realists, who see states as ‘black boxes’ caught up in an inescapable balance of power, that democracies don’t fight amongst each other about a decade ago. Does this still hold? And is democracy cause, or effect, of peace?

Much of my earlier work has been critical of the democratic peace theory, but I have never thought that critiquing the democratic peace proposition requires us to throw the baby out with the bathwater by rejecting consideration of the domestic sources of foreign policy or the normative influences on state behavior. Democracy matters, it is just that most (not all) democratic peace theorists get democracy wrong—they don’t operationalize it right, and so the theory tends to be more applicable to understanding American foreign policymaking than it is for explaining the behavior of other democratic states. Most democratic states simply do not distinguish friend from foe on the basis of regime type alone. Threat perception is much more complex than that. So the theory does not travel very well outside of the US context. (I have a host of other critiques of the theory that can be found in my edited book Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer?, MIT Press, 1997).

I am currently working on a project that looks at how war and peace impact democratic political development (the second image reversed). “Democracy as effect of peace” has been relatively understudied, certainly compared to the cottage industry that looks at how democracy impacts war and peace outcomes. When states are under the gun (particularly when they are new, fledgling polities), democratic governance tends to work out differently than when external conditions are more benign. It is particularly interesting to look at how institution builders use a threatening international environment to persuade others about the optimality of particular rules and structures. This tends to be a pattern that I have found across multiple historical and contemporary cases.

As an aside, I would amend your question slightly. Realists do not argue that states are ‘black boxes’. On the contrary, realists acknowledge that domestic politics (as well as ideology and identity) matters, and indeed often dominates state foreign policy making. What realists argue is that rational states should not allow these things to matter, and that those that do will eventually suffer the consequences (In Kenneth Waltz’s parlance, they will “fall by the wayside”). Your claim that realism ‘black boxes’ the state is common in the literature, and often found in the writing of realists themselves. But I think it is fundamentally incorrect. Indeed, realists from Hans Morgenthau to contemporary writers like Kenneth Waltz, Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, and Christopher Layne have always looked within the state, but what they found there they did not like, and they proscribed that smart states should instead follow the ‘national interest’, and base policy on strategic (read: external) constraints and opportunities. Realism is far more of a normative position on IR (and democratic politics too) than most people recognize.

Miriam Fendius Elman is Associate Professor of Political Science, Maxwell School, Syracuse University and Faculty Research Associate, Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC). Previously she was Assistant and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University. She is coeditor, with Colin Elman, of Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations (MIT Press, 2001), and of Progress in IR Theory (2003).

Related links

Faculty profile at Syracuse
Read the introduction from Progress in International Relations Theory here (Pdf)
Read Colin and Miriam Elman’s Lakatos and Neorealism: a reply to Vasquez (The American Political Science Review, 1997) here (Pdf)
Read Elman's The Role of History in International Relations (Millenium, 2008) here (Pdf)
Miriam Elman's project on the Middle East can be found here
Read Paul Schroeder, Colin and Miriam Elman's History vs. Neo-realism: a Second Look (International Security, 1995) here (Pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #31: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:23:00 +0000

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Game Theory, Prediction and Fear of Logics in IR

While many scholars interviewed here debate how we can make sense of international politics in a changing world, for Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, international politics can be explained by underlying logics based on rational choice. Dubbed ‘the New Nostradamus’, Bueno de Mesquita uses mathematical models to not only explain international politics but also to predict outcomes – not only to a scholarly audience, but also to high-placed decision makers in the government of the US and to the CIA. In this comprehensive Talk, Bueno de Mesquita, amongst others, explains how prediction in IR is done; refutes the resentment against using rational choice in predicting outcomes in IR; and shows how formal logics demonstrates that neo-realism is simply false.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

I assume the question refers to the study of IR and not to the biggest challenges in international relations per se. Within the academic study of IR I think there are several important challenges. For me, the purpose of studying IR is to understand how international affairs work in the world and why they work that way. As we develop better understanding we also develop better prospects of being able to improve outcomes, especially with regard to avoiding violence and finding ways to settle disputes peacefully.

Among the debates that impinge on understanding I think two are central. One relates to the extent to which our focus might be better placed on individual decision makers and their interests rather than assuming that their interests and the state’s interests are the same. Later in your questions, for instance, you conflate the two, assuming that the welfare of the state is what decision makers are concerned about. This conflation of state and individual interests is, in my view, a fundamental impediment to advancing our understanding of IR. States, as I see it, do not have interests or preferences or beliefs, people do. We may speak of the “national interest” as some aggregation of what most people want or what many people want, or what a few powerful people want, but each of these meanings can produce entirely different expectations about what is in the “national interest.” Indeed, we know that adding up people’s preferences to some aggregate view of the national interest (perhaps short of the survival of sovereignty) has the problem that x can be preferred by a supermajority to y and y can be preferred by a supermajority to z and z can be preferred by a supermajority to x – and so we cannot say that policy x advances the national interest more than policy y or policy z. (This cycling of aggregated preferences is, of course, the Condorcet result from the late 18th century. Its refinement by Kenneth Arrow, leading to his impossibility theorem, was a major factor behind his receipt of the Nobel Prize in Economics).

The second dimension of debate that I believe impinges on our understanding of international relations is that there is insufficient emphasis on the careful application of logic and evidence – rather than personal opinion or personal values – in the way graduate students are trained and in the way debate is carried on in the field. I am always surprised, for instance, to discover that some individuals offer individual case examples as evidence for a hypothesis when a correlation of 0 between two variables implies that about half of the time when x increases so does y, and half the time when x increases y decreases, and likewise, when x decreases half the time y increases and half the time it decreases so if x and y have no relationship to each other we can find cases that seemingly support any hypothesis (or refute it). Likewise I am surprised when people offer a single case as a presumptive refutation of a probabilistic hypothesis even though probabilities inherently imply some distribution of outcomes that can only be assessed against a large number of observations.

In short, too much time is spent debating methods on grounds of personal predilections or based on expert testimonials instead of reflection on the logic and evidence behind assessments.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR (people who inspired you, books, events, how did you conceive your ideas)?

I started out as an area specialist (South Asia – my dissertation was on strategies of opposition parties in coalition governments at the state level in India, later published as my first book. I did field work, studied Urdu for 5 years, and did modern Indian history as one of my dissertation examination fields) but was exposed in my first year of graduate school to the then nascent formal modeling approach. I was greatly influenced in a graduate course taught by Donald Stokes. I read and prepared an oral presentation on William Riker’s Theory of Political Coalitions for that course and discovered that the strategic principle in that book was incorrectly derived. This was my first exposure to formal modeling and the first time that I saw how rigorous logic (a formal model in this case) could be used to conclude that a claim was false, not as a matter of opinion but as a matter of straightforward logic. This, plus my undergraduate exposure to basic statistics gave me a way to look at arguments in terms of systematic evidence rather than selected cases and in terms of logic rather than personal judgment. This work also fit well with my interest in studying coalition governments in India so I was able to combine my area specialist interests with my then new interest in quantitative and formal analysis.

I was also profoundly influenced by Kenneth Organski’s Stages of Political Development in which he looked at how different coalitions of interests shaped political and economic development. What he called the syncratic model had a particularly deep influence on my thinking about coalition strategies and was an important factor in my decision to go to graduate school at the University of Michigan to study comparative politics (I did not do IR as a field).

Finally, the chair of my Ph.D. committee – Richard L. Park – had a deep influence on my thinking and my approach to teaching. He demonstrated a tolerance for a perspective different from his own that I found inspiring. Dick Park was one of the founders of modern South Asian studies. He found my rational choice and quantitative approach to Indian politics rather different from his own thinking but he encouraged me, supported me, and nurtured the confidence that allowed me to go forward despite resistance from many other leading lights in the South Asia research community at the time. One of my most satisfying academic experiences is having had the opportunity to co-author a book with him (India’s Political system, 2nd edition) just before his untimely death.

Later, thanks to David Rohde when he and I were assistant professors at Michigan State University, I had the opportunity to meet William Riker and to move to Rochester where I learned to improve my skills as a political scientist.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

Graduate programs seem to vary greatly in the extent to which they emphasize learning the literature and learning tools for doing research. I think that students who want to study IR should, for starters, think carefully about which type of graduate program they want to be in. I believe that much of the received wisdom about international relations does not stand up to careful logical or empirical scrutiny. A successful student – whatever they conclude about ongoing debates – ought, I think, to have the disposition to be willing to challenge received wisdom and come to a reasoned conclusion about what has merits and what does not. I believe training in the tools of analysis facilitate such reasoning better than does a heavy focus on the literature. Of course, it is essential that students know what the debates are in a field and what the evidence is for alternative perspectives and so they must know the essential literature but they must also know how to evaluate the evidence. That means they need to master some diverse mix of the tools of analysis: research design, archival and historical research, statistical analysis, and mathematical, logical reasoning. Learning tools on one’s own is more difficult than keeping up with the literature so, in my opinion, graduate training should emphasize the acquisition of analytic tools.

What are, according to you, the constant factors underlying international politics?

As I see it, 1. People are self-interested; 2. Leaders want to come to and maintain themselves in power; 3. International politics and domestic politics can create challenges to political survival that run counter to each other, forcing leaders to try to find a way to balance domestic and international threats; 4. This balancing between satisfying the demands of domestic supporters and the demands of foreign rivals is the fundamental problem in international relations and necessitates continuous inventiveness to find solutions.

Rational choice and game theory hinge heavily on logics. Can you tell me what logics is about in the rational choice approach?

I have a quite primitive conception of logics, which goes something like this: if someone says ‘if A, then B’, I want to see how that follows from the assumptions and axioms. Natural language has its ambiguities, and formal logics cannot solve but make explicit and more comprehensible many arguments made in natural language. A friend of mine is a linguist and a mathematician, and he gives the example of the expression: ‘I saw a man with a telescope’. Now this is a completely ambiguous statement: does it mean I was looking through a telescope and saw a man? Does it mean I saw a man who was carrying a telescope? If I wrote this down as a mathematical expression, I would have defined the terms much more precisely. The syntactical logic of the utterance would then be unambiguous. Don’t misunderstand me: mathematics also has its ambiguities, with answers to some questions simply looking like ‘not zero’, but it has a lot less of those issues than natural language. And that leads to one of the main advantages of rational choice: however one may disagree with it, at least it makes clear and explicit the assumptions it makes in its hypotheses by formalizing them as much as possible, which is not something one can say about many of the other approaches out there. One of the main misunderstandings about formal logics is that we interpret utterances. But we don’t try to capture what someone out there meant; we try to make explicit what the theorist meant. If you make what the theorist had in mind explicit, you can see if it holds in reality. Then you don’t end up with conversations in which somebody says ‘well, that’s not what I meant’.

In the classical social science divide between understanding and explaining, where would you put yourself and why?

My motivation in studying international affairs is first and foremost to understand why things happen the way they do. My personal interest in understanding how the world of international politics works is driven by the expectation that a thorough understanding will lead not only to explanation but also to the ability to predict and even modify future outcomes. I believe that the scientific method is the most reliable way to create convergence between understanding, explanation, and (often probabilistic) prediction.

For many, we now live in what is called a ‘risk society’, where risk assessment and controlling the future and outcomes has supplanted material threat as a number one preoccupation for advanced societies. Your company Decision Insights portrays itself as follows: ‘a unique information company that possesses the most accurate decision-making and problem-solving system available in the world today. A system that has successfully analyzed thousands of sensitive issues for government and business obtaining a verifiable accuracy rate exceeding 90% plus.’ Can you tell us something about how this system works?

First, Decision Insights (DII) is not my company and I am not a member of its board of directors. I am one of the larger shareholders in it but without influence over its policies, postings, or activities. Although I was a founder of a company called Policon in the early 1980s, Policon was taken over by Decision Insights. Since 2003 my involvement with DII has just been to pay 20% of my company’s gross revenue to DII to use the forecasting model I developed many years ago. DII owns the commercial (but not academic) rights to that forecasting model. My company is Mesquita & Roundell, LLC (M&R) so I will answer the question from M&R’s perspective.

The forecasting and policy engineering model I developed assumes that stakeholders on any policy issue care about two things: the outcome on the issue and the extent to which they are seen as instrumental in putting an agreement together (or blocking one). The model specifies a rather simple game and solves the game, in the process estimating how much each stakeholder values the policy outcome relative to being seen as instrumental in shaping the outcome. It also estimates how each player perceives its relationship with each other player, what proposals players make to each other regarding resolution of the issue (including no proposal at all) on a round by round basis. The model estimates how player positions change and also updates player estimates of the willingness of others to take risks. It does quite a bit more as well. This model depends on expert inputs based on an intensive interview process that elicits who the stakeholders are who will try to influence an outcome, what outcome they currently argue for, how much persuasive clout they could bring to bear, and how salient the issue is to them compared to other issues on their plate. Experts are not asked how they think the issue will be resolved and the model frequently disagrees with the conventional wisdom on what is likely to happen.

Interested readers should read my 2002 book Predicting Politics (Ohio State University Press) or my 1994 book (co-edited with Frans Stokman) European Community Decision Making (Yale University Press) or my 1997 article in International Interactions for explanations of how the model works. They should also read Stanley Feder’s 2002 article in the Annual Review of Political Science for an evaluation of what the model can and cannot do based on the experiences of someone who used it more than a thousand times at the CIA.

Recently I developed a new forecasting and policy analysis model, which not only estimates changes in player positions over time, but also changes in their salience, flexibility, and power to shape the outcome over time. I am in the process of constructing user-friendly software for this model and will post it on the web for free access at least for several months in association with my forthcoming book, The Predictioneer’s Game (Random House, 2009). Depending on how it gets used (or abused) I will decide on whether to continue to make it freely available for academic use or restrict access to it.

Considering that, according to the CIA, this model is right in 90% of the cases that experts who provide input are wrong, doesn’t this make loads of IR scholarship redundant?

I do not quite understand what is meant here by “make loads of IR scholarship redundant.” The accuracy of a model such as my forecasting model provides a tool for IR scholars to use that may help us understand, explain, and predict events. It also provides policy analysts and decision makers with assessments that have transparent logic so they can argue with its conclusions, generally based on their own data. I do not see any of this as redundant – it is what most scholarship I believe aspires to do. Of course, understanding and explanation tend to be subjective whereas predictive accuracy is readily measured and so provides a challenge for other approaches. The CIA assessment is that this particular model is accurate about 90 percent of the time. My new model so far seems to do better. The CIA assessment of my old model also says that it “hits the bulls eye” more than twice as often as the experts who provided the data inputs and that when it and the experts disagree about the anticipated outcome, the model is almost always right rather than the experts. That is, the model appears to provide a more reliable way of evaluating the experts’ information than they have themselves. Still, without the expert inputs, the model is just a bundle of equations. It represents, then, a natural synergy between area specialist knowledge and decision making/game theoretic analysis. If we could only have area expertise or a model it clearly would be better just to have the area expertise but there is no reason for us to be limited to one or the other. The combination of the two provides more reliable assessments, at least according to the CIA’s evaluation across a very large sample. It is worth noting that the CIA’s assessment is readily evaluated by academics because I have also had many articles and books published with a large number of predictions about events that had not happened at the time of publication or acceptance of the manuscript. Thus, anyone can check out the accuracy of those predictions.

My question about redundancy is rather: isn’t a lot of IR scholarship unnecessary when the stuff you and other rational choice people work with is so good in explaining and predicting? What’s the value of alternative modes of explanation, if any?

The focus in everything I read is strictly on first the logic and secondly the evidence. So first of all, I look if the conclusion – whatever the explanation or the prediction intended – follows necessarily from the argument. If it does, it is potentially an explanation or prediction of things, and then as a second step I look at evidence in the world to see whether the assumptions that lie behind this logical argument actually explain behavior.

Let me give you a concrete example. I find that the logic of the constructivist argument (the first step) is entirely plausible. It is internally consistent, it could be the way things are. However, making the next step, I find little systematic evidence that confirms expectations of constructivism in IR: I don’t see people inculcate norms, and that their values and behavior changes significantly as a consequence of that. I don’t find the individual case studies that constructivists tend to use informative as evidence because if you have a zero correlation between two variables then you can find cases where X goes up, Y goes up, when X goes down Y goes up, when X goes up Y goes down, X goes down Y goes down. So picking singular cases doesn’t tell you what pattern of behavior is: the predictions in the constructivist argument are about general patterns or norms of behavior and thus are only appropriately evaluated on the basis of a large number of cases. And in fact, up until now, there are several sound empirical studies that in fact point in the opposite explanatory direction. That does not, however, close the discussion because there are simply not enough studies yet. The same goes for other explanatory frames: I was an Indianist earlier on, and I worked on system-level explanations incorporating polarity and so forth, but I simply couldn’t find the evidence to match that explanation out there, and in fact even the internal consistence of the underlying logic was far-fetched.

Stephen Walt has made the comment about people such as myself that we are overly concerned about logical consistency and, while he is of course entitled to his view, I hold that an argument that is not internally consistent can allow you to say anything you feel like, and therefore is just an argument from personal taste or predilection and whatever you say might turn out to be empirically consistent. Now that doesn’t make for an argument for me: one needs then the additional step of looking backwards from this empirical evidence to construct what are in fact the logics that would lead to that outcome. I see consistency as fundamental to understanding how the world works.

Game theory or rational choice approaches actors as rational + self-interested. But world leaders have frequently acted against their interests: Saddam by committing ‘political suicide’, as Robert Jervis puts it; the Bush administration by a whole series of actions that undermined the US position in the world; and, let’s face it, America has lived quite unsustainable for the last decades, both in economic and ecological terms. That raises questions on access to correct knowledge of self-interest, which, already according to Tolstoy, one can only access in hindsight, that is, looking back. Does this raise a problem for game theory?

I could not disagree more with the portrayal of examples in this question as evidence of irrational behavior. Before delving into a detailed answer – which follows – let me recall the CIA’s assessment of a 90 percent accuracy rate for my simple forecasting model. Neither those CIA analyses nor my perhaps hundreds of published forecasts involve hindsight so the evidence tells us that the claim in the question regarding hindsight is not consistent with evidence. Appeals to authority or revered figures like Tolstoy (or Jervis, for that matter) are not substitutes for logic and evidence. They essentially invoke the pre-Pascal, Jesuitical understanding of what is probably true as the preponderance of opinion by clerics rather than as the preponderance of evidence.

One of the most common errors made by anti-rational choice analysts is to engage in post hoc, ergo propter hoc false reasoning. Let’s take the two examples offered in the question. Did Saddam Hussein act against his self-interest? Well, it certainly turned out badly for him but could he have known that ex ante when he had to make choices? I contend that the answer is no and I explain why.

As it happens, I use the example of Saddam Hussein’s failure to illustrate several basic principles in my textbook, Principles of International Politics. First, we know now that things turned out badly for Saddam Hussein but neither we nor he could have known that before the fact when he had to make choices. Indeed, based on what he could know (such as the prior history of the United States government in dealing with him) he chose actions that were rational; that is consistent with what appear to have been his interests in survival. In the first Gulf War (1991), despite his army having been completely routed (and Colin Powell arguing to the Congress before that war that the United States would suffer perhaps tens of thousands of casualties and deaths), the US did not march on Baghdad and overthrow him or his government. Indeed, the Bush 41 administration did not even compel an unconditional surrender. Based on that experience, Saddam would have had solid reason to doubt the US government’s resolve to remove him from power. Second, we know now that he did not have WMD, but many thought he did before the 2003 invasion. It is quite possible that he thought he had WMD, we do not know. What we do know, is that some arguments against the 2003 war (which I opposed for other reasons at the time – namely that I saw no clear and present danger that would justify a pre-emptive attack by the US government) revolved around concern that there would be massive American casualties because Hussein was likely to use his WMD capacity (he had, after all, used nerve gas against the Iraqi Kurdish population and in 2003 American soldiers were deployed with anti-chemical weapons gear, apparently indicating that this was seen as a credible threat). Thus, by interfering with international inspections he was able to increase the belief at the time that he had WMD (see my textbook, third edition, for an explanation of the Bayesian updating calculations) and this could have deterred an American invasion. Thus, his actions seem to have been his best hope of political survival given that exile was not a good option (Bush was against it and, as the Pinochet experience surely taught Saddam Hussein, just because one is promised a secure exile does not mean that the promise will be kept – such promises lack credible commitment or enforcement). Once he knew that Bush 43 was serious and not bluffing it was too late for Saddam Hussein to extricate himself or to alter his earlier policies which had, after all, worked well for him for nearly a quarter of a century. (George Downs and David Rocke’s resurrection hypothesis, published in the AJPS back in late 80s or early 90s, provides a good account of this sort of choice pattern. And we should remember that sometimes these extreme risks pay off – the Tet offensive was a military failure for the North Vietnamese but it was a tremendous political coup for them).

The Bush 43 case you point to is an example of confusing/conflating the interests of the American people (however those might be known) and George W. Bush’s interests. Your evidence for Bush acting against his self-interest is that he undermined the interests of the United States around the world. But, let’s look at Bush as a political leader and not treat his interests and U.S. interests as one and the same.

First, we might take note that George W. Bush was re-elected by a strong margin in 2004. Despite the indeterminate outcome of his first presidential race and the revelations of Abu Ghraib and torture before the 2004 election, he won re-election, a major objective for most democratic politicians. What is more, while with hindsight we believe that the policy of torture (which I strongly opposed from the first revelations), harmed American interests, it is worth noting that John Kerry did not speak out against the policy during the 2004 campaign, presumably out of fear of being labeled as soft on terrorism. So, while the actions may indeed have harmed America’s standing internationally, it seems evident that Bush saw the policy as beneficial to him (and probably believed and still believes it was the right thing to do) and Kerry, apparently, did not see opposing it as beneficial.

Second, even after an incredibly unpopular presidency and a disastrous economy, Bush’s Republican Party managed to win 48 percent of the popular vote for the presidency in 2008. Pursuit of a third presidential term for a party is difficult even when the presidency has been rather successful and popular (e.g., Eisenhower was quite popular in 1960 and the presidential race was extremely close, but still Nixon lost; despite Clinton’s popularity, Al Gore, though in an extremely tight race, did not become president). So it must be said that given the record of Bush’s presidency, the 2008 race was not a blow-out. If we assume, as I do, that politics is about political survival (of individuals, their parties and their policies), then the assumption that Bush acted irrationally seems odd at best. His core constituents remained happy enough with what he did that they made the 2008 race perhaps surprisingly close.

Finally, the example of Americans (and virtually the entire world) living unsustainably is not evidence of irrationality. It is evidence that people discount the future rather heavily compared to their short-term welfare (remember Axelrod’s shadow of the future?). Everyone does things that they find beneficial in the short-run even when they know that it is harmful in the long run. People smoke, they eat too much, they save too little, sleep too little, etc., all of which just indicates that they do not share your implied willingness to sacrifice now for benefits later. There is nothing irrational about that; it is just indicative of the fact that different people tolerate risks differently, discount the future differently, and evaluate information differently. This is a good example where personal values – which I happen to share – are being substituted for logic and evidence in coming to conclusions about what motivates people.

Joseph Nye is another colleague of yours who has also done policy work. One of the main conclusions he draws is that policy makers, by operating under stress and with imperfect information, are very little helped by our analyses. What’s your take on that?

Let’s be a bit more precise about what Joe Nye claims. He does not claim that policy makers are little benefited by the sort of analysis he does. Rather he contends that they are little benefited by the sort of analysis that I do – that is, mathematically grounded, game theory analysis. (See his recent piece in the Washington Post).

I do not know whether policy makers benefit from what I will refer to as conventional political analysis. They surely listen to the individual wisdom and personal insights offered to them by some scholars though whether that is beneficial or leads to better policy outcomes is hard to say. (They certainly listened to such academic IR scholars as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Condoleezza Rice).

What I know from personal experience is that there is a push in the intelligence community to bring more technical forms of analysis, including statistical, decision-theoretic, social network, and game theoretic analysis, to bear on intelligence assessments. In fact, I am on a National Academy of Sciences committee charged to examine this question at the request of the intelligence community, presumably because they think such analysis will be improved by more scientifically grounded methods than those currently most in use.

One of the arguments that Joe Nye makes against mathematical analysis of the sort I do, is that policy makers do not understand it and therefore do not pay attention to it. This is an odd argument. It implies that people who use game theory either do not or cannot speak their own language clearly enough to communicate ideas and results without resort to technical jargon. As someone who has been consulting in the intelligence and national security world for 27 years I must disagree. I have briefed people at quite high levels of government in the United States and Great Britain over the years as well as high level corporate executives. I have not encountered any particular difficulty communicating to them ideas and results without resort to math or technical jargon. The results I report on, to be sure, were derived from game theory analysis, and questions they posed to me were answered based on such analysis, but always in plain, straightforward English. I do not report on my personal opinions and am not purporting to offer wisdom. Without grounding my reports in the analysis I do, I might have come to completely different conclusions and, as noted by the CIA’s evaluations, my personal, “expert” judgment was likely to be less accurate and less reliable than my model-based assessments.

That is not to say that I or anyone else in the international relations research community has a particularly large impact on policy. I think that by and large we do not and I think the reason for that is a combination of things. As a community we have not produced enough reliable results along with evidence for those results so that we should expect decision makers to pay close attention. And not enough of us are willing to put our reputations on the line by offering explanations or insights in print into events before they happen so that policy makers and academics can evaluate who gets things right – by whatever means – and who does not. That is one reason why I have emphasized publishing analyses about important policy questions before the outcome is known. That way, people can decide for themselves whether my approach is helpful based on the evidence rather than just their personal preferences.

Since you do, as you have indicated, quite some consulting work for government, I’d like to ask: how influential is game theory and rational choice in US foreign policy formation?

Joseph Nye and Mearsheimer, for instance, have said that nobody in government pays attention to this sort of work, the fact is that they do. First of all, I did extensive research on highly important national security matters for the US at the specific and direct request of William Casey when he was director of the Central Intelligence Agency, at the specific request of Undersecretaries of State and Defense, and briefed them on the results. Likewise, in the UK I have done briefed Cabinet Secretaries and members on important policy matters in the Tony Blair administration. To give you a recent example, I did a report that was crucial in changing the Intelligence estimates with regards to Iran’s nuclear program. This report took off of the table for the Bush administration large part of the possibility of attacking Iran. Secondly, while there is a huge diversity in commitment to idealism and world views in the people working with national security, I’m at the head of the National Academy of Sciences at the moment on request by the director of Intelligence for the purpose of trying to get broader use of quantitative and mathematical methods by analysts in the intelligence community, because people at the senior level apparently have come to the conclusion that some important policy failures were the result of not using these methods, but that these failures were rather the result of applying more casual approaches to national security and international politics more general. Since we are working with people at a high level of government, we will have a substantial impact: why would the government ask for such a committee if they didn’t take the work seriously? Thirdly, the CIA has incorporated and is regularly using, for almost 25 years, a model called Factions, which is my original Static Forecasting Model. And they reported that it has had a substantial impact on decisions made by the President of the United States in crucial foreign policy matters.

Is the European Union, giving up sovereignty for not much of a gain in political leverage at the supranational level, a rational project?

The members of the European Union – and their voters -- certainly made important economic and environmental gains as a result of the Union. I doubt that the Union was agreed to by its members out of a strong desire to increase their supranational political leverage. Rationality, remember is an assumption that individuals do what they believe is in their best interest, taking constraints into account. It is not an assumption about what specific interests (supranational political leverage) they have or want. I am certainly not an expert on the European Union so your question would be better pursued with someone who is (Frans Stokman at Groningen, or Robert Thomson at Trinity in Dublin, for example). I would be wary of pointing to a single outcome and then assuming that this was the purpose behind formation of the Union. Of course, a model could be constructed around the assumption that the objective of the members was supranational political gains and, assuming those gains were not had, we could then conclude that either incomplete information led to an ex post incorrect choice (this is the fundamental insight in a nut shell into the ex ante attraction of cartels and their ex post failures) or the specific choice model was falsified.

You’ve run a prediction on Iran in April at Ted Talks. Now things start to happen there. Was your model close, or did it miss out on anything?

The model so far has done rather well. I predicted that the Iranian presidential race would be close but that Ahmadinejad would win. We don’t actually know how close it was – we do know that the reported results are inconsistent with polling and with a reasonable statistical projection from the previous election. The modeling results also predicted that Ahmadinejad and Khamenei’s power was going to enter a period of significant decline even though Khamenei would remain a major political force probably until he retires. Clearly the events since the election indicate that Ahmadinejad and Khamenei have faced an unprecedented political challenge. We have to go back to the 1979 revolution to see something comparable so I think the evidence supports the prediction that they are entering a period of declining political power (which should not be confused with saying they will be ousted any time soon). Having gone back into my output to look at other details, I was intrigued to see (as a non-expert on Iran) that the model predicted a sharp increase in the political power of students and dissidents starting now and continuing for several months, although with fits and starts (I can send the graph if you like – it is just an excel plot of results produced on November 1, 2008 as I prepared my TED talk).

On the nuclear front, I am predicting that by around 2010 or early 2011 (the model is not as precise as I would like about timing; it is better at sequencing) there will be an agreement that limits Iran to producing small, research-quantities of weapons-grade fuel. I have not modeled the inspection regime that would be required to support such an agreement. It is worth noting that President Obama has acknowledged publicly that Iran has the right (under the NPT) to produce civilian nuclear energy (and, implicitly, to enrich uranium for this purpose), something apparently denied by the Bush administration. So Obama has moved the discussion forward toward the outcome predicted in my TED talk so as I see it things are moving as predicted both on the political influence front and on the nuclear front.

What’s the biggest challenge to rational choice/game theory approaches so far?

The biggest challenges are a shortage of students and professors attracted to political science with the mathematical skills and exposure to the scientific method so that they recognize the actual limitations as opposed to the imagined limitations put forth by people who do not have a good understanding of the wide range of rational choice theories. By way of illustration, it is common for IR scholars to put prospect theory forward as an alternative to rational choice yet prospect theory is a rational choice theory. It is an alternative to expected utility maximization, but it (like minimax regret, quantal response, satisficing and other approaches) just makes different assumptions about how people convert their values and beliefs into action intended to improve their welfare.

If one wants to understand the world from a game-theoretical way, who should we absolutely read and why? What’s the most elegant piece on game theory you know?

I assume this question is asking about the “IR” world and not everything in the world. I think the people right now who are doing the most to advance our understanding of important IR phenomena from a game theory perspective are, in no particular order, James Fearon, Alastair Smith, Robert Powell, James Morrow, Branislav Slantchev, Eric Gartzke, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Shanker Satyanath – I had better stop but there are others equally important to read so I inevitably will leave out important, cutting edge scholars for which I apologize.

I cannot list one work as the most elegant and I am confident that elegance is not the criterion I would use to recommend works for others to read. Let me suggest some works for people to read that can help provide insight into IR from a game theoretic perspective. I find Robert Powell’s In the Shadow of Power deeply insightful in clarifying some of the important limitations of realist and neorealist thinking. Jim Fearon’s papers on rationalist explanations of war and on audience costs provide a strong foundation for understanding fundamental features of interactions in international affairs. Ethan Bueno de Mesquita’s papers on terrorism provide a strong understanding of the difficulties inherent in negotiating with terrorists, explanations for many significant empirical regularities associated with terrorism, and insights into the structure and factionalization of terrorist organizations. Alastair Smith and Jim Morrow (along with Randolph Siverson and me) try to provide some perspective on IR and its relations to domestic politics in The Logic of Political Survival and related papers. I would hope that IR students and researchers would know at least most of these works.

Last question. Why has there been so much resentment against using rational choice in IR?

Ignorance and fear. I don’t view scholarship as a popularity contest, and some scholarship can be very demanding. As with any method, I find there are good critiques of game theory as a way of addressing a certain kind of problems, but the good critiques are almost never made by people who are not rational choice people, because people who don’t do rational choice simply don’t know enough. They haven’t done enough homework to actually know what rational choice theory is about. If you go through the citations of people who make these harsh critiques of rational choice, shockingly, you see they are simply unaware of the literature. What they’re citing is people who don’t do rational choice and their critique is therefore invoking a straw man. So the argument that, for instance, rational choice has not added anything to our understanding, is a patently false statement: if you actually read the rational choice literature in IR, you know it’s false.

One should go even further and acknowledge that a substantial body of rational choice literature has addressed some of the most prominent theories of IR in a very logically careful way, and has shown that the central arguments don’t follow. Now that is done by people who didn’t start out being hostile to the arguments analyzed, rather the other way around. For example, the work of Robert Powell, a student and friend of Kenneth Waltz, has formalized significant parts of the neo-realist argument and shown that essential elements don’t logically lead to the conclusions that neo-realists think they lead to, and that they don’t play a role in generating outcomes in actual international politics. Powell has shown, for instance, that anarchy is not unique to IR – one should rather conceptualize this as non-cooperative games (read a summary of the argument here). He as also demonstrated very carefully why the debate between relative gains and absolute gains is incoherent logically.

In a 1989 book, The Balance of Power and in subsequent articles, Emerson Niou, Peter Ordeshook, and Gregory Rose took the neo-realist argument, formalized it, and they deduced four theorems from the neo-realist, so-called ‘Waltz-assumptions’. They make a distinction between essential and inessential states. An essential state is a state that can turn a losing coalition or block of nations into a blocking or a winning coalition. An inessential state is a state whose addition to an alliance or coalition can’t change any outcomes in terms of winning, losing or blocking. The four theorems that follow from a careful picking apart of the neo-realist argument are: (1) essential states never become inessential; (2) essential states never cease to exist; (3) inessential states never become essential; (4) inessential states do cease to exist. Empirically, however, we can say that each of those four logically derived results from the neo-realist argument is false. Austria-Hungary and the Soviet Union in their days were essential states, and they no longer exist. In the 16th century, the Netherlands was certainly an essential state, and it is not today; the US in the 1820s was not an essential state, and it certainly is today, and so forth. We can amass cases that contradict the theorems that follow logically from Waltz’s theory. And this is just a part of a large body of literature that has contributed significantly by formalizing prominent IR theories and by showing that – in the case of neo-realism – these central beliefs are wrong. And yet, this rational choice based literature is either ignored or dismissed by the people that rational choice has shown are doing research the central tenants of which are simply false.

Now apart from these negative results, rational choice and game theory specifically has also produced some important positive results and insights into politics. If you look, for instance, at Jim Fearon’s work on rationalist explanations of war, you see that the reason of why wars occur, is not about ethnic, economic or other differences, but it’s rather about three elements, of which you have to have any one to get a war: (1) uncertainty; (2) a dispute over something indivisible; or (3) a commitment problem. Now this is a very significant contribution, because you can now predict the probability if any one dispute will become violent. Furthermore, as a policy maker, you can then zoom in on these three and eliminate them. Now if theory is about engaging with empirics, about testing explanatory value, then this is not a bad track record. Morgenthau in the preface to the third edition of Politics amongst Nations indicates he was urged to respond to critics of the logics of his theory, but he writes: ‘I will not stoop’. But this is not stooping, this is how science progresses! If your theory doesn’t hold to empirical scrutiny, what is it worth? In my view, realist theory and balance of power theory is affected in its core by the empirical and logical challenges posed. They have been sufficiently refuted, they are false theories, and we should move on. But they don’t move on.

This is not to say that it is in all cases ‘rational choice versus IR theory X’, because I hold, for instance, that there is potential for a marriage between rational choice and constructivism. They don’t exclude but rather complement each other. Constructivism is all about how preferences arise and rational choice takes them as given to predict outcomes, so this is potentially a great combination.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Silver Professor of Politics at New York University. His most recent books include The Logic of Political Survival, with Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow (MIT Press, 2003, winner of the 2004 Best Book Award from the Conflict Processes Section of the American Political Science Association), Predicting Politics (Ohio State University Press, 2002), and Principles of International Politics, 3rd edition (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2006), as well as the forthcoming Strategy of Campaigning, with Kiron Skinner, Sirhey Kudelia, and Condoleezza Rice (University of Michigan Press). He is also the author (with George Downs) of "The Rise of Sustainable Autocracy" in Foreign Affairs (September 2005) and numerous other policy pieces in major newspapers and magazines concerned with means to promote nation building and the impediments to success. Additionally, he has authored more than one hundred articles and fourteen books on politics, as well as one published novel, The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge (Ohio State University Press, 2001).

Related links

Faculty profile at NYU
Read Bueno de Mesquita’s Game Theory, Political Economy, and the Evolving Study of War (American Political Science Review, 2006) here (pdf)
Read Bueno de Mesquita’s Foreign Policy Analysis and Rational Choice Models here (pdf)
Read Bueno de Mesquita’s Development and Democracy (Foreign Policy, 2005) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #30: Mary Kaldor

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Fri, 15 May 2009 22:21:00 +0000

Mary Kaldor on Framing War, the Military-Industrial Complex, and Human Security

The end of the Cold War sent a shockwave through both the practice of international politics and the study thereof. We moved from a Cold War and old wars to a world of new wars, where, in a context of globalization and balkanization, the social relations of violent conflict have changed profoundly. While this has been partly accepted, it also led to somewhat of a theoretical stalemate in IR. In this seminal Talk, Mary Kaldor helps making sense out of our rapidly changing world, by showing that the world is still very much organized according to clear logics. She – amongst others – shows how war is very much about framing; she challenges us to see governance as a fit between the organization of capital and coercion; and she argues that if the EU wants to be an international actor, it should center its policy agenda on human security.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? And what is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

Everything is changing so dramatically that I think the central challenge is whether International Relations is a subject at all, to tell you the truth. We are witnessing a shift from international relations to global politics. By that, I mean that in stead of settling things in the traditional way, based on the inside-outside convention which is so typical of international relations as a discipline, where the inside is politics and the outside is strategy and diplomacy, more and more of what counted as the outside is becoming politics and more and more involves not just states, but also non-state actors, civil society groups and so on. On the other hand, what happens inside our borders is increasingly treated by foreign ministries and the army. We’re in a moment of tremendous flux where lots of critical ideas that ten years ago were seen as very challenging are now widely accepted.

Whether it’s critical security approaches, whether it’s the importance of multilateralism… all of these things seem more broadly accepted than they used to be, say, ten years ago: there’s more and more acceptance that we’re moving towards a world of global politics, and yet, oddly enough, because this is the way this discipline is taught – especially in the United States – many people in the field remain within realist assumptions and realist ways of doing things. So while in a way it is not a debate, it is still a challenge to start working with what are now accepted new concepts. For instance, to give you an example from my own experience: I find that a lot of people, while they are willing to accept that contemporary conflicts have changed and that the main conflicts that they are concerned with are what I call new wars, they are not willing to accept that this requires a new approach. I have been reading a lot of American literature and they regard new wars as something to approach from within the traditional counter-insurgency literature on national liberation. They still think there is a world of traditional geopolitics and I think perhaps that is the biggest debate, or the biggest idea to be challenged.

The other big challenge, I suppose, is to think discursively – and thereby I mean that the biggest debate is or should be about constructivism, really. There’s an important debate between people who have different interpretative understandings of social science and those who have an explanatory understanding, and I think that that’s in a way the biggest debate going on at the moment. The main idea that social constructivist approaches have added, is that how you frame things shapes how you find solutions in social sciences. So much in those sciences is about identifying human motivations and that is impossible to establish objectively. What you can do is try to find interpretations that enable you to act and to reflect upon your practice, to see how helpful your interpretation actually was.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

A lot of it is very personal. I’d have go right back to my childhood: my background is that I am half Hungarian and that my uncle was a dissident in Hungary in prison during the 1950s. At the same time, however, my mother was an active member of the Labor Party and a peace activist, and somehow I had to find a way of reconciling these two sides of my family. So I think that from a very early age I was against nuclear weapons and had an active interest in the peace tradition. At the same time, I had this very uneasy feeling that people who are involved in peace activism weren’t really concerned about issues like human rights and the problem of communism in Eastern Europe. So somehow I wanted to bring those two things together.

Then, I was myself very involved in peace activism, and when I left university, I got a job at SIPRI (the Swedish International Peace Research Institute) and there my job was (because of my undergraduate diploma in economics) to construct the Arms Trade Statistics – and funnily enough, as I look back on my career, that’s one of the things I’m most proud of, because it is still being used today. And through that, I got very interested in the defense industry, arms trade, military technology, which lasted for about ten years. In the 1980s the peace movement surged in Europe, in which I then got really involved. I was really inspired by two people in that context: one is the historian E.P. Thomson who talked a lot about ‘history from below’, and another was Mient Jan Faber, a Dutch peace activist who had worked a lot on aspects of Eastern Europe that I was interested in.

As a result of that, some of us started the Helsinki Citizens Assembly (hCa) the idea of which was to help civil society in difficult places and to work together across the East-West divide. I got tremendously involved in Yugoslavia and Bosnia, because branches of the hCa were started, and being there led to all my work on new wars.

So in the end the most important ingredients for the dish that I became would have been family experience; some very important people such as Edward Thomson; and the experience of being a peace and human rights activist.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

I do think, as you see from my own experience, that activism is very important. And then it’s also important what kind of activism. Quite contrary to the general academic view which hold that if you’re too political you’ll become less objective, I think activism forces you to be very objective because you have to get your arguments right and you can’t twist them as it suits you. You can always be publicly challenged. But related to activism is the ability to be reflexive and to reflect on what you do and what you do wrong, in short, to think about your own behavior and ideas very critically. Imagine yourself in somebody else’s shoes. That’s tightly linked to what I denoted as the constructivist challenge to IR: how do people make decisions? Where does change actually come from? Where does agency reside?

There’s an old fashioned view that change comes from above, that leaders make decisions, change policies, and that view holds that leaders simply decided that the Cold War was over. I think change actually sort of bubbles up through discursive practice, through dialogue, discourses, the way people talk about things. Leaders cannot uphold a Cold War or War on Terror if nobody believes their discourse – such ideas have to be upheld by societies at large. Look, for instance, at how everybody has changed their views on climate change. That hasn’t come because some politician decides so; it is rather the politicians that have been dragged into this.

And for a student it is very important not to get caught up in appealing narratives that are projected on global politics afterwards, but to try and scrutinize what’s going on as closely as possible. Seeing actors in practice forces you to put yourself in their place, and this, in turn, creates a deep understanding of political and social reality.

You have been writing about the changes the nature in the social relations of warfare has gone through since the end of the Cold War, starting out with your famous book New and Old Wars. Things have been turbulent since and, for instance, private security actors are rife. Has the Old War forever faded?

Well I certainly think that ‘old war’ has faded, but I’m not sure if it has forever faded – let me qualify that. Many people see the shift from traditional, standing army warfare to different kind of warfare occurring at the end of the Cold War, but if one observes closely, it is actually after the Second World War that old wars have become very, very rare. And I think there are clear reasons for that. One reason is something we experienced in the Second World War, which is that military technology has simply become too destructive to be used in symmetrical ways. Nuclear war is, I think, a metaphor for the destructiveness of war in general.

Another reason, which I think is something we’re often not aware of, is that globalization (which is I think greater human consciousness) has profoundly constrained the possibility of atrocities and war. This has to do with the whole social construction and perception issue of politics I referred to. Just to give you an example: when Israel attacked Gaza most people were completely horrified. I remember one of my friends rung me up and said: ‘don’t they think Palestinians are humans?’ And I said: ‘no, of course not, this is war.’ You don’t think the other side is human in a war. But my friend said: ‘but surely we thought the Germans were humans in the Second World War…’ To which I replied: ‘no, we didn’t; we killed about one or two hundred thousand in a single night in Hamburg and Dresden!’ So what we did in the Second World War was actually far worse than what the Israelis did in Gaza. But nowadays the context is changed by this hugely changed consciousness (an effect or essential element of globalization) – it’s simply unacceptable to do something like killing 200.000 overnight nowadays. Now, of course, given that this contemporary condition has to do with human consciousness, implies that the situation can change again, depending largely on how we frame things – just like it was possible for Hitler to re-invent slavery after it had been abolished. I hope, of course, that such conflicts and practices are a thing of the past, and I hope particularly with new technologies that we will always have this sensitivity. But nevertheless you can never rule out the possibility.

This leads me to ask you a meta-question: are you basically optimist or pessimist about human nature and/or the nature of social interactions on a large scale (like, for instance, the level of global politics)? Is politics the fight to curb negative tendencies in human nature or are we empowering the good that people inherently do?

Well, do you know the famous phrase of Antonio Gramsci, who called for ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’? I think that’s a very good description of how one ought to feel. One ought to be very clear about the negative sides of human relationships, and the huge difficulties of changing human relationships. But I also think one ought to be positive about what human beings will do given the right conditions and trying to create the conditions in which human beings can solve problems though debate and reason rather than through violence and struggle. That seems to me the key thing. So in one sense I am optimistic: if you create the conditions through which people can have free debate then they will come up with reasonable solutions. But creating those conditions is extremely difficult.

Is new war still war? Because if it isn’t, then responding to it by military means might not be the right answer.

I think that’s a very good question and a very difficult one to answer. In my book on old wars and new wars, I said that new wars are essentially a mixture between war (by which I mean political conflict, conflict between two politically organized groups, for a political cause), crime (with which I mean using violence for private motives) and human rights violations (which means aggression against individuals). New wars are thus a kind of mixture of spheres previously separated analytically, but, importantly, there is always a political dimension in the sense that the parties to the conflict very often frame what they do in political terms. And insofar as they do that, they see themselves primarily as fighting a war, which in turn legitimizes what they do (because, remember, war is really ‘legitimized killing’). So if you’re saying ‘I’m doing this for national liberation’ rather than ‘I’m doing this because I want money or power’ it somehow sounds a little bit better. You can observe this with the suicide bombers in Britain: when they gave their explanations on video, that they define themselves as soldiers. They describe the situation in which their agency should be understood as war, they frame things in a political way, because politics is a commonly accepted motive for violence.

Different ways of framing different types of violence imply different solutions or different ways of addressing the problem. If we frame violence as war, it has to be addressed in terms of international relations and military answers. Another option would be to frame terrorism and other new wars as a crime or as banditry. The implication of the latter option is that these phenomena should be dealt with through law enforcement and policing.

Now that ‘small’ difference in framing, changes everything: it’s the difference between high and low politics, between what is commonly defined as a threat to the national state or rather a threat to public safety, and, ultimately, a difference between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the state. If we decide to call terrorism or ethnic conflicts war, then it actually legitimized the terrorist or the ethnic cleanser as an enemy or a warring party and can lead to the destructive, and often counter-productive, use of force. That is why it is better to emphasize the rule of law and law enforcement and treat such people as criminals.

At the same time, framing something as non-political and thus as a matter of law enforcement sometimes does create problems as well: in Northern Ireland the British said ‘we’re doing law enforcement’, so they treated the IRA prisoners just like ordinary criminals. That led to problems like the hunger strike in the H-block, and in the end the British had to give in and allow the IRA prisoners to be treated as political prisoners, and in the end they then had to deal with the conflict through talks as though they were serious political issues to be debated.

I do however think that politics is going to be part of the solution: politics means negotiation and contestation, but also developing an alternative political framework based on inclusive ideas instead of exclusive labels.

A question about the Cold War. In your book the Imaginary War you argue that security elites in the East and West framed the other as a threat, not because they were convinced of the danger of the other, but rather to manage internal conflict in their own spheres. Can you explain that?

To start with your last question: absolutely. David Keen’s new book Endless War: Hidden Functions of the War on Terror (2006, read a related piece by Keen here) illustrates this very well. My argument was that the Cold War was an imaginary war. In other words, it wasn’t peace, it was as though the Second World War hadn’t ended, and in our imagination we fought something like the Second World War over and again, with imaginary attacks across the German plains, and with all the elements of war yet without the actual fighting.

Somehow, during the Second World War, both the West and the Soviet Union figured out and resolved the problems that they faced in the preceding period. The West discovered the advantages of big government and how to solve the problems of unemployment, and the Soviet Union discovered how to be efficient, because central planning had been very inefficient. And in fact the socialist system, I argue, wasn’t a socialist system but rather a war-economy system. And the military-industrial complex that constituted the core of post-war economic growth in the US, is a micro-cosmos of a war economy. And so basically these two systems benefited in their own way from this re-alignment, which permitted the particular restructuring of the societies, polities and economies internal to their spheres of influence. The Cold War was essentially a mutual enterprise in which both sides kept each other going. And that worked out quite well, considering the phase of economic development we had then reached, with a system based on Fordist mass production that allowed for mass consumption in the West and mass armament in the East.

That all worked well until the Vietnam war – that war began to challenge the imaginary war story, but it was also kind of the moment when the Cold War stopped producing economic growth as it had done in the 50s and 60s. So the Cold War started to falter and you had détente and that didn’t work because nobody believed any longer in the reasons for the continuing arms race when they saw their leaders kissing each other. And so then you had the new Cold War, and gradually the whole thing began to disintegrate. So my view on the Cold War, as I tried to present it in that book, incorporates very much a sort of constructivist argument about the link between what was until then primarily seen as a political division leading to a territorial division of the world into two militarily guarded zones and the internal social, political and economic organization linked to that military division.

Interesting, so there was a territorial governance ‘fit’ between the organization of both capital and military coercion during the Cold War. It seems that that fit existed, too, during the 19^th century: war used to be predominantly a national territorial issue, concerning national security, and the economy was also being consolidated and organized in national terms. Then, during the Cold War, the world got organized in a bipolar way, both economically and militarily as you argue. After the Cold War, emphasis shifted towards human security, non-territorial threats and interventions using expeditionary forces. Is there now also a fit between capital and coercion?

Not yet. As I argue in a recent piece, Old Wars, Cold Wars, New Wars and the War or Terror (see links below), Bush has tried very desperately to have a Cold War again – and the War on Terror was a way to kind of re-invent the Cold War. And Bush needed that, because the story the US has invented about itself was that the US uses its superior technology to bring democracy to the rest of the world and to fight against enemies, which not only maintains the military-industrial complex but also works as a story people can believe in and can support, which creates legitimacy for the government and its policies. So somehow they had to renew that story and the War on Terror gave them a wonderful opportunity to attempt to recreate a world that worked. In a sense, it has become politics as usual to find a common enemy for the US.

And I think that what you point at here is the central point of the global crisis with which we as of yet have to come to terms with: there is currently no fit between the organization of capital and coercion outside of the imagination of the former US administration, or rather, there is a fit but it just isn’t the one that has been sold to us in the whole War on Terror-discourse. To understand what the fit does look like, I think it is crucial to understand that money is actually a construction, and it’s an expression of power relations. The fact that the dollar was the most important international currency was very much linked to American military power and American power in organizing the bipolar system. The US in a way was using its military and monetary power to obstruct rather than to facilitate the functioning of the world economy. The US basically had a huge debt and was sucking in money from the rest of the world. So I think that this is what this crisis is all about, and I think solving the crisis really involves changes in the organization of security as well as a change in international finance and the use of currencies. China is making the same point when they called for transfers of money to the IMF and creating a real international currency rather than using the dollar or any other national currency, which empowers too much one single political entity, and thus also distorts political and military relations. But indeed, since the organization of capital and violence are linked, the creation of an international currency would mean a significant decrease in the capacity of the US to project military power abroad.

I’d like to ask you something more about the ‘military-industrial complex’ you mentioned earlier. In 1959, Samuel Huntington wrote about how the military industry came into being after the Second World War; in 1961, Eisenhower warned us about it, and one could say that it was some kind of ‘infant industry’ protected until about the 70s when the world economy got restructured and the market became increasingly the forum for exchange of (American) military technology.

Often, military technology is labeled as a source of innovation for society – things like mobile phones and internet are said to be military technologies that have spilled over to society. During wartime, military technology can also have innovative effects for warring parties, because in war the technology gets tested. It’s what the market is in peacetime. However, military technology has another aspect to it as well: in peacetime, you have no way of testing what kind of technology is efficient. In war, you get defeated if your technology isn’t effective; in peace, and particularly in the Cold War, all that mattered was that you had to imagine that you were fighting a war, but actual fighting hardly took place, so innovations didn’t get tested. Yet both parties to the conflict kept emphasising innovation and felt the urge to match the perceived innovative threat often in a very involuted way. I argue that if you trace the innovation on both sides it is as though both were arming not against each other but against a phantom German army. So military technology became more and more complicated, and more and more divorced from civilian technology. That’s one of the reasons why, although American productivity did grow because of the stimulus of military spending, it didn’t become increasingly productive, and this is essentially why many American products are (still) uncompetitive. New military technology, based on innovations that are not actually tested in war situations, created a drag on the American and British economies, absorbing important skills and pulling technology along what one might call a degenerate evolution. I have labeled these technologies as baroque, more and more expensive and elaborate and less and less useful, in the Baroque Arsenal, a book I published in 1981.

But that doesn’t mean that the military-industrial-complex hasn’t been hugely powerful politically.. Take the Israel lobby, it’s much better to understand it in terms of a military-industrial complex, which is increasingly very much internationalized and both Israel and Britain are deeply integrated into the American military-industrial complex. But an even more worrying aspect is you now have the added dimension of private security companies. The old military-industrial complex was interested in making weapons and wasn’t essentially interested in war but rather in a permanent arms-race to create a permanent and stable market; in fact war was rather bad for it, because in war their clients would discover – and that’s exactly what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan – that the technology is baroque: too expensive and too complicated to actually use. Actually now there’s a huge restructuring going on in the US military, and many of these complex systems that kept the military-industrial complex alive are being canceled, which has a huge impact on the big, traditional American defense contractors. But now you get this other dimension of the newly emerging network that also consists of private security service providers, who benefit from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the one hand, you have traditional companies of the military-industrial complex with their over-complex weapon systems that are interested in producing useless weapons systems but not in war. On the other hand, you have new companies whose income essentially depends on the ongoing war. That’s terribly worrying to me.

You’ve been involved in the reflection upon the European human security doctrine. Does a European emphasis on human security not inhibit its development as an independent international actor (that could reinforce its political position with military might), and thus actually reflect its dependency on external interests through the NATO?

I think exactly the opposite. I think the only way that Europe can become an international actor is if it has a human security agenda. I think so for several reasons. First of all, as we know from the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, you can’t actually any longer defend your interest through conventional military forces. Secondly, the EU is a new kind of actor. It’s not a traditional nation-state, but rather a new kind of polity, and its security policy has to reflect the nature of that distinctiveness. The EU started of course as a peace project, as a way of bringing together the countries of Europe, and its way of acting independently in our world has to be to try and extend the peace project. And the way you extend the peace project is through human security – which might well mean that you need military forces, because sometimes there are cases when protecting individuals requires repelling aggression. But it means you are using military forces in a completely different way: not to defend European interests, except insofar as European interests are in global security, but rather to defend ordinary people on the ground. And normally those military forces would be used together with policemen and other civilians. We call that a human security force in our doctrine rather than a military force. And then there’s a third argument, which is that I think the European project will never be popular if it is seen as a new military superpower. That’s what we saw in the French ‘no’: the French Left combined with the xenophobic Right to defeat the European project because they thought it was neoliberal and militaristic, and I think the same was the case with the Irish, and I think that only if you can convince them that what Europe is doing is human security and not militaristic, will you get the Left on board.

But then one could argue that ‘human security’ linked to intervention is a new way of playing the governance game, in which the world is to confirm to our conception European of security, as for instance Mark Duffield (Theory Talk #41) does.

While I really enjoyed Mark Duffield’s book Security, Development and Unending War, I think it is too negative. There is something very seductive about his argument that we have human rights at home and human (in)security abroad, in which human security approaches are viewed as a way of mitigating the terrible consequences of our exclusive consumerism and social insurance policies. But then you ask: what is the alternative, and I think the real problem is that for him there’s no middle position between imperial intervention and global revolution. When you look at his alternative, he talks vaguely about solidarity and I think there just has to be a middle position, or at least we have to believe in the existence of a middle position, which for me is reflected in a human security agenda, which I would argue is not imperialist because it has to be executed within a multilateralist framework based on the equality of human beings. And we simply can’t use conventional warfare, our actions have to be different, and that’s how I understand the middle position.

But then there’s the incapacity of the ‘international community’ to intervene when it’s necessary, or, as you call it in your book Reflections on globalization and human security, the ‘security gap’ flowing from our conception of human security and the daily fear of violence of millions worldwide. And one way to close this gap is the way Mark Duffield criticizes, namely, by letting the invisible hand of the aid ‘market’ tackle the gap. How do you see role of the increasing non-state aid, development and security ‘industry’?

I think it is quite worrying, actually. Perhaps I’m simply somewhat old-fashioned, but I think there are certain things you just can’t leave to be governed by the market, and especially security is one of them. I think there are huge problems with private security companies and with NGOs: there is this terrible contracting culture that is built around international missions, which wastes enormous amounts of money through layer upon layer upon layer of contracts. If somebody is contracted to build a school, and they subcontract it, and each subcontractor takes their part, and by the time we get to the school, there’s no money left. The NGOs, furthermore, are often more worried about their donors than about the ones they’re building the school for. So there are all kinds of problems that are related to the privatization culture. On the other hand, I don’t think that at this point you can do without these entities, because there simply isn’t the capacity on a national or global scale to engage in those projects, as you point out. I mean, even parts of the UN, such as UNDP, are forced to get their money not from states but from foundations and other donors, which makes them just as worried as NGOs about their donors, and inhibits effective problem-solving. But I think hard security issues, anything to do with war fighting, anything related to using guns, should be kept out of the private sphere, which the Americans didn’t do in Iraq and Afghanistan, as Peter Singer shows in Theory Talk # 29.

Mary Kaldor is Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics and Political Science. She previously worked at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and the Science Policy Research Unit and the Sussex European Institute at the University of Sussex. Her books include The Baroque Arsenal (1982) The Imaginary War (1990) New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era (1999) Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (2003). She was a founder member of European Nuclear Disarmament (END), founder and Co-Chair of the Helsinki Citizen’s Assembly, and a member of the International Independent Commission to investigate the Kosovo Crisis, established by the Swedish Prime Minister and chaired by Richard Goldstone, which published the Kosovo Report (Oxford: OUP) in autumn 2000. Mary Kaldor was also convenor of the study group on European Security Capabilities established at the request of Javier Solana, which produced the Barcelona report, 'A Human Security Doctrine for Europe' and in 2007 the follow-up report, A European Way of Security: The Madrid Report of the Human Security Study Group.

Theory Talk #29: Peter Singer

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:39:00 +0000

Peter W. Singer on Child Soldiers, Private Soldiers and Robot Soldiers

IR is typically all about conflicts between nation-states, fought out by national armies. But what if the majority of combatants in reality is not represented by the image of a soldier in a uniform fighting for patriotic commitment to his flag? Peter W. Singer has made a point of showing how warfare is not the exclusive terrain of national soldiers, but rather a heterogeneous field where children, men and women are fighting for all kinds of ends and with all kinds of means. In this Talk, he explains, amongst others, how this requires a profound reframing of IR; how doing interesting research requires the courage to distance oneself from dominant opinions, and how robotics will change the nature of warfare forever.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

I believe the biggest challenge is how we continue to hold on to old theories, old frameworks, that actually do not apply to our current reality. That is, we have a field that continually keeps its head in the sand, while the sands underneath it are shifting. And my work has been, in many ways, dedicated to trying to challenge some of those aspects. Take, for example, the concept that the state is the only player in international relations. When I was in graduate school, that was something which was very much forced upon us. People would argue back against this state only approach with examples from human rights or environmental issues, and the response always made was: ‘oh, well, but those are just soft issues – when it comes to security, of course, the state is the only player’. That’s what Corporate Warriors was about: it argued that even in this realm of security (considered the core of state-hood), the state is not the only player. Even more, states were becoming dependent on private military firms (PMCs); even the most powerful states, to carry out their military tasks. And this has several policy implications for warfare, just as the question of who states are having to face up against with their armies: which is the state that the US is fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan?

We keep holding on to those categories frantically, because they supply us with frameworks we deem necessary for understanding what’s going on: in policy terms, without the notion of states, we simply wouldn’t know what to do, how to intervene in the world out there. But when we enter situations and we only look at them the way we want them to be, instead of the way they really are, that’s when we make some of our worst mistakes – and Iraq would be a great example of that.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

All of us are shaped by our own experiences, so for me it’s a lot about how I grew up (you know, as a kid I played lots with toy soldiers and with Star Wars action figures!). I come from a family that has a good deal of military background, that may have shaped my understanding. When I was in grad school a lot of fundamental transition was taking place in the world (the Cold War had just ended) and I had some fantastic professors when I was there, amongst which the great late Samuel Huntington, who was a particular inspiration. You might agree or disagree with him, but he was a titan of the field because he co-determined the framework in the debate of how we would explore IR. And that’s true whether you talk about civil-military relations or if you’re looking at issues of culture and war.

For this new book on robotics and war, it again comes out of my personal experience of growing up loving these topics, but it also comes out of a sense of frustration. As I talk about in the book, I would go to a series of conferences, which were bringing together really some of the major personalities and players in the security studies field as well as from the Pentagon; they would talk about what’s new and revolutionary in war, and yet, here we were, using robots – and no-one was even mentioning it! Let alone that anyone was wrestling with the impact of it, the trends this was following, or the ethical and legal issues that would arise from it, how it would impact war initiation, how war is fought and ended… No one was willing to talk about the employment of drones in war, because as one person put it: ‘it’s mere science-fiction’.

Well, guess what: it’s not mere science fiction: in the US army, we currently have more than 7.000 drones in the air and more than 12.000 unmanned ground systems. In our operations, we use them every single day. And, to give you an idea of where we are, these are just your Model T Ford, the Wright Brother’s Flyer – compared to what’s coming. So it was in a sense a little bit of a frustration with our field that I was wrestling with. And that set me out on a journey. The same fascination linked to frustration has formed the driving force behind each and every investigation I did.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

Don’t take scorn or ‘no’ for an answer. My experience, in terms of my own work, is an interesting example hereof. As my dissertation topic, I wanted to look at private military companies, and I was told by a very distinguished professor that I would do well to instead quit graduate school and go work in Hollywood, for thinking about fictional topics such as private companies in war. And yet, my dissertation lead to my book Corporate Warriors, and we have more private contractors in Iraq now than US soldiers. All the controversies that have come out of Iraq, such as the torturing in Abu-Ghraib involving ‘interpreters’ from private security companies and the 2004 shootings in Fallujah involving Blackwater personnel, all center around private military contractors.

The first time I presented the topic of my second book, on child soldiers, a Harvard professor told me I was ‘making it up’: she didn’t believe the issue of child soldiers mattered, let alone existed. And that’s of course an absurdity, since there are presently more than 300.000 child soldiers active. Plus, the issues that come out of studying child soldiers cover everything from legal and ethical questions to the challenges that soldiers face in the battlefield, like being fired on by young children. The very first US combat casualty in Afghanistan, a Green Beret, was killed by a 14-year-old sniper.

The same goes for a book on robotics and war: it is considered a major career risk to research and write a serious book on what many people insist is science-fiction. I also doubled down the risk factor in this book by writing it in a way I wanted to write it. It is a very pop-culture book, lots of anecdotes, lots of stories in it, but it also refers to Hobbes. It has IR theory but also discusses everything from Star Wars to Gilmore Girls. Hopefully, it makes people laugh out loud at some point in the reading of it. But, importantly, it has taken robotics out of science fiction and into policy.

So the lesson would be: believe in yourself. If you think you have come across an interesting and important topic and you get scrutinized by the old guard, don’t take “no” for an answer. A subject isn’t interesting because an authority thinks it is so.

I especially think that the old idea of a sort of apprenticeship model is one that really doesn’t drive the best work. But yet, that is how a lot of research is being done in our field: we take what some professor has done, and some advisee tweaks it just a slight bit. That’s not how we get good research is done, and that’s not how good theory is built.

You have gained fame for your book Corporate Warriors on the corporate security sector or private military companies (PMCs) as you call them. Since, publications on the subject have proliferated. But data is hard to come by – because governments are reluctant to disclose information and because the companies involved invoke contractual privacy. How did you manage to get by your data?

Research, research, research. Gather each and every book or article that relates even vaguely to the topic. I picked things from history, political science, economics… One of the challenges of IR is that people only read IR. Well, guess what: the world doesn’t work in these stove-pipes. Each issue in the field, including PMCs, has aspects of it that concern, and are treated by, other epistemic communities such as law, history, economics, etc. Each one of those opens up new research pathways.

At the same time, of course, we live in a world were not everything is in books. The comedian Stephen Colbert jokes: ‘I don’t trust books, there’s no heart’. So you interview, and not just in your own field and not just fellow academics, but everyone that matters to that topic of concern. And if it’s a topic that’s alive, there’s likely to be some news connected to your topic. The idea here is that you can build a 365-degree picture of what we’re looking at concerning your topic.

In the case of PMCs, I felt I was like a scientist, wanting to understand everything about this strange animal: how does it behave, how is it structured, but also the context in which it grew and interacts with other species of actors out there.

The same is the case for Children of War: it’s not just about reading the history or reading the latest issue of Security Studies, but jumping into the field and getting to know everything you can. Considering my last book, I talked to newspaper editors from Lebanon, to Human Rights Watch, to four-star generals and 19-year-old drone pilots, but also to insurgents from Iraq, to find out: what do they think about it?

The privatization of security, you argue, falls into a juridical gap or loophole: international law does not anticipate private military actors and few are the countries that have adopted domestic legislation. Is this a structural problem, or do you foresee a gradual abolishment of private actors, in the line of the anti-Blackwater legislation in Iraq and Afghanistan?

First comes awareness – and that’s being built up – and then comes responses. Now, so far, responses have been ad hoc, coming at PMCs from the sides so to speak. We’re still in the phase in which a multiplicity of actors is slowly recognizing first the existence and second the importance of PMCs, and the fact that law seems to lag behind on their existence.

A more important question, which basically puts your question in a wider way, is whether they are legitimate or not? It’s not about their action, or if they commit a crime (many companies or peoples commit crimes, including in the military field of course), but it’s literally: are they legitimate or not? And a related question would be: when do you hire them, and when do you not? It’s not a question anymore “can contractors can do it?” It’s rather: “should they?” We’ve been focused on the can part, and we should shift our attention to the should, which is a more fundamental question. Now, you see this sort of patchwork of regulation being built and expanding in different areas, from the US to Iraq, and that is how international law ultimately gets built. But we know there’s an extreme lag-time.

In 1961, Eisenhower warned us for the pervasive influence of what he then famously dubbed the ‘military industrial complex’, referring to an essentially American dynamic. Is the private military industry essentially an American product?

This question is put from a very 20th-century mindset: we live in a global world, and industry is not structured along predominantly national lines. Executive Outcomes, a now defunct but heavily controversial company, came out of South Africa, so the industry does not only come out of the US or have a American only dynamic. Because of our size and military spending, the US is definitively an 800-pound gorilla in the market, but it is by no means a monopoly.

But interestingly, one can ask what Eisenhower would think about current developments. He only referred to defense manufacturing, and we have now moved into defense services as well. I think he would probably be rolling over in his grave if he saw that essentially military tasks have been handed over to civilians without any structures, regulation or planning in place.

In your latest book, Wired for War, you explain how technological change is transforming warfare, and how this ‘impersonal’ form of warfare is spreading throughout the world. How pervasive is this tendency? Is technological innovation the new ‘race to the bottom’ which will replace nuclear buildup as the primary source of competition and thus tension between conflicting actors?

I think one tendency which we are observing is the ‘open source phenomenon’. This tendency is not just limited to the software industry – we are increasingly using military technologies that are commercial and off the shelf, do it yourself. For example, the Raven drone is a drone US soldiers use in Iraq and Afghanistan; however, for about 1.000 US dollars you can build your own version of this drone.

Now whether you talk about this machine or some other low-cost weapon system like the AK47, the general tendency is towards flattening of the marketplace of war and the technologies used in it: not only because of low costs but also because of the (black) market as the prime forum of exchange of these items, the state no longer has exclusive access to the tools to effectively wage a war. In the past, due to the huge investments required to produce war machines, only strong states were able to show preponderance. During the 20th century, the industry changed dramatically, producing on the one hand highly capital and technology intensive systems like nuclear arms, but on the other very cheap and relatively simple weapons like the AK47 and some chemical weapons. If you wonder how so much civil conflict is possible, or why warlords and rogue states seem to proliferate, one question to ask would be: can it be that they endure simply because the weapons are so easy to make or to get by? Take a situation like that of the Lebanon war a few years ago, where Israel, the state with probably the most powerful army in the Middle East, is fighting a non-state actor, Hezbollah, a weird amalgam of a terrorist group, a political party and a social services organization with its own hospitals and schools. It may not be a state or formal military, but Hezbollah was able to fly four unmanned drones back and forth over Israel.

Another example would be a radical internet site that allowed you to detonate a roadside bomb in Iraq from your home computer in the US.

In order to understand what has happened, you can look at the software industry: it started with a couple of huge players, which increasingly faced competition from smart copycats and competitors improving on services or offering them for less. The landscape is flattening.

Both corporate security actors and high-tech or unarmed weapons are only available for those who can pay for them. Does this mean the prevalence of the market-logic over state control over violence, and if so, do you consider that something bad?

Just in order to show you how our world diverges from theory, in the book I tell the story of a group of college kids from Swartmore who fundraised money to do something about the genocide in Darfur. They then entered into negotiations with a private military company about the hire of robotic drones to deploy to Sudan. It does sound like a Hollywood movie, but it has become the world we live in. But I don’t think that anyone planned this outcome, either of drones or of private military contractors. People take decisions within the constraints of the contexts and focused on resolving an issue in their own limited agenda. And increasingly, it becomes more difficult for us as individuals to oversee the outcomes of our actions and choices, and so has it for states.

Existing theories we have do not appropriately deal with this randomness or unpredictability if you will. Theory and understanding generally lags behind on actual change ‘out there.’ An example is current thinking on civil-military relations, which is still largely based on Sam Huntington’s ’59 book The Soldier and the State. I think that we don’t need an entirely new theory but rather an updating of existing work. It’s no longer just the soldier and the state, as Huntington put it, but now it’s also the market, which profoundly affects the relationship between soldier and states.

Last question. You’ve written on child soldiers, private soldiers, and robot soldiers. Why soldiers, and what’s your next project going to be on?

First of all, the thread that connects all of those is that we have these assumptions about war and the warrior that no longer hold in their monopolies. When I say the word ‘war’ an image probably comes to your mind. It is probably a male soldier wearing a uniform. If the man is wearing a uniform, this means, of course, he is representing a nation-state military. That will inspire us to assume that this soldier will probably be inspired by patriotism, that he goes to war because of politics.

But that monopoly no longer holds true. War is fought by men, women, children (one out of every combatants today in the world is a child), and increasingly we see the human monopoly on war breaking and being supplemented by robots. The organizations these actors are fighting in are no longer just militaries, they are terrorist groups, insurgents, warlords, pirates, private military corporations, and mafias. And the motivating factors are not just politics: if your readers can find me one war that’s exclusively driven by politics… That’s the same for individual players in them. Granted, for some soldiers it’s patriotism, for others it’s private profit; for others it’s religion – you name it. When we “assume,” our assumptions set us up to fail, to make an “ass” out of “u” and “me.”

Secondly, I’m actually doing a book right now that looks at another big change we’re wising up to: the millennial generation. The Millennials are the ones born between 1980 and 2005; in raw numbers, they’re about 1,25 the size of the baby boomers and 3 times the size of generation X. Just like the Baby Boomers had a huge impact on the world and on everything from politics to economics and society by their sheer weight of numbers, so this millennial generation, I argue, is already leaving its imprints upon our world. You can’t write a history of the 1960s without writing about the baby boomers, and you won’t be able to write about the present and future without mentioning the Millennials.

Peter W. Singer is the director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative and a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings. Singer’s research focuses on three core issues: the future of war, current U.S. defense needs and future priorities, and the future of the U.S. defense system. Singer lectures frequently to U.S. military audiences and is the author of several books and articles, including Corporate Warriors (2004) and Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (2009).

Related links

Profile at Brookings
Read Singer’s Wired for War? Robots and Military Doctrine (Joint Forces Quarterly 2009) here (pdf)
Read Singer’s Military Robots and the Laws of War (The New Atlantis, 2009) here (pdf)
Read Singer’s Seven Questions: The Hired Guns of Iraq (Foreign Policy, 2007) here
Read Singer’s Humanitarian Principles, Private Military Agents: Some Implications of the Privatized Military Industry for the Humanitarian Community (Humanitarian Policy Group Report 22) here (pdf)
Read Singer’s Talk is Cheap: Getting Serious About Preventing Child Soldiers (Cornell International Law Journal, 2004) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #28: Marysia Zalewski

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:17:00 +0000

Marysia Zalewski on Unsettling IR, Masculinity and Making IR Theory Interesting (again)

IR is perhaps one of the most gender-biased fields in Social Sciences: typically, any IR ‘specialist’, whether scholar or practitioner, is a white, middle-aged man. Generally, few questions are being asked on how this influences how IR got constructed and how this conditions the questions we ask. In this unsettling Talk, Marysia Zalewski shows how our search for ontological security limits the scope of possible answers, how teaching IR should fundamentally change to attract students, and how the mainstream focus of IR tends to push women off the map.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

This is a typical ‘IR question’ since it presupposes there is (or perhaps ‘should be’) a central issue that we could/should all agree on. Also I think there’s a huge difference between a central ‘challenge’ and a principal ‘debate’ – whereas the latter might be confined to the scholarly community, with little to do with what either the public or politicians think is a pressing issue, the former we might understand to be more related to what matters to ‘ordinary people’. As such these can be (often are) very different. (Do ‘ordinary people’ spend much time arguing the difference between realism and neo-realism or constructivism and poststructuralism?) I really don’t think that just because we are all supposedly dealing with the international sphere in IR, there should necessarily be a central issue or debate that we should agree on as being central. There is such a massively wide range of issues we might be concerned with … a problem for me is that the things that tend to end up scoring highly on IR’s priority list (biggest challenges) are the things that have tended to mirror the interests of major powers in the world – whether that’s the American government or Western powers more generally, which, by the way, are (surely not coincidentally!) still overwhelmingly dominated by elite men. Even if war, conflict or really the incidence of violent deaths could be ‘sort of’ agreed upon as the central issue in IR; why isn’t IR’s central concern poverty given it still produces the highest body count?

The central issue I myself try to address is gender. I don’t claim it should be the central debate in IR, but I do try to demonstrate or illustrate that gender is actually very central to the constitution and practice of international politics. And it is consistently difficult to get people to really understand that.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I see my scholarship not so much informed by IR, but rather as informed by my introduction to the important realm of ideas as well as to how structures work (or don’t) in societies; but also how discrimination continue to wreak devastation despite the wealth of opposition to them. What theory is and does has also been central to my work all along. And funnily enough, the first person to ever inspire me to really think of these issues was an evening class teacher whose name I have unfortunately completely forgotten! I did an evening class in sociology in the mid eighties, and my teacher was a through and through Marxist scholar and an enormously passionate and inspiring teacher. He even managed to make the debates about structure and agency really interesting! But when I reached the section on feminism in the textbook we used, I had a bit of an evangelical moment: ‘oh my god! So this is how it works!’

Subsequent to this when I was at the University of East Anglia during my undergrad years, I had Steve Smith as one of my lecturers in IR, and he influenced me quite a lot, although many of our classes then were on nuclear weapons (Carol Cohn would have had a ‘field day’!). In terms of authors that were pivotal for my thinking in ‘feminist IR’, I definitively have to include Cynthia Enloe (and especially her 1989 book Bananas, Beaches and Bases), but also Carol Cohn, Jindy Petmann, Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan as well as more ‘generic’ feminist authors for example Mary Hawkesworth and Wendy Brown. I remain inspired by these people (personally well as intellectually).

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

- Not do IR in a conventional way! Conventional IR tends to mitigate against working with ‘the globe’ in anything like an inclusive kind of way. Go to and live in different countries if at all possible; look to different disciplines, like sociology, anthropology, politics, philosophy, literature… To be a good IR student, paradoxically, you have to go outside of the fixed categories of IR. I know it can be difficult to figure out where to look, especially since mainstream IR tends to present students with neat categories, but that’s part of the joyous adventure of intellectual discovery. Teaching curricula should really learn to work with this more innovative and interactive approach to teaching that engages knowledge from different fields or spheres of our eclectic human experience: link theory to political practice to photography to literature. That is, if the resources are there of course, they are not always available in academia …

Theory is often approached as a homogenous part of IR work, the vague ivory-tower chapter that precedes ‘what the book is really about’. Grand theory, furthermore, has given way to mid-level theorizing, has came to occupy the center stage of the field recently, as Christian Reus-Smit argues in Theory Talk #27. How homogenous is (IR) theory?

The idea there is something as ‘grand theory’, or that theory becomes the ‘nasty’ part of IR work, is a shame… Many of my students do indeed seem to want to jump theory to go to ‘the real stuff’. I think this has more to do with the way we often teach theory rather than with theory itself. Usually it goes like this (or some version of this): we start out with realism, then comes liberalism, then perhaps structuralism, Marxism or constructivism or poststructuralism, perhaps followed by a week on the environment or feminism or some ‘other add-on’ … in subsequent papers or exams, students often have to discuss the big debates - or feel they have to – this becomes the ‘real’ thing. As such, because of the way theory is presented, it is very difficult for something like feminism to be seen as relevant. It becomes relegated to something related (only) to (only) women, inevitably then as something exogenous from the core debates, which one can thus easily ignore.

I teach a course called ‘Gender, Sex and Death in World Politics’, and I teach it as a theory course – but not really using the word theory (much). It includes ‘issues’ such as human rights, gender, masculinity, films and so on. I try to show the students how theory is not something we ‘build’ in the academic world and then apply to the real world ‘out there’, but rather that theory is something we do, or practice, through our actions. If theory gets thought of the other way around, and with a focus on what the most powerful see as the most important, we get exactly IR theory: a circular reasoning that keeps the world going in ways we perhaps don’t want. Mainstream IR theory generally works to reinforce or justify existing power-relations (typically what elite white men are doing). Thinking about theory encourages us to reflect (with rigour) on the way we tell our stories. And this really matters. Any one ‘issue’ engenders many stories – what matters to me theoretically is how some stories or theoretical narrative become regarded as the most important ones to choose. To give you, as an example, as you know I work on gender. Sometimes I take ‘IR issues’ such as war and confront them from a gender perspective. This (theoretical) ‘angle’ facilitates the construction of a very different story than what a ‘Kenneth Waltz’ (Theory Talk #40) or ‘Alexander Wendt’ might give you. Theory is what we do; which involves the different decisions we make about how we approach issues that matter to us, whether this is as researchers or as politicians, or as (though sometimes simultaneously – though which ‘identity’ becomes the ‘important’ one?) mothers or as soldiers.

To summarize: we should not teach (IR) theory in conventional ways, but rather explain and demonstrate how theory constructs not only our understanding of the world, but through that, constructs our worlds.

If one searches the internet for material on a specific issue within IR, the results will likely approach hundreds if not thousands of pages. Those can be skimmed down to some hundred publications on a single issue, written probably from a number of perspectives. IR, thus, has multiple paradigms with each its own ‘truth conditions’. But the big questions don’t seem to get answered by any of them. Is that the sign of a field in crisis?

That the big questions do not get answered is most certainly not a sign of a field in crisis. It might be a sign of the gatekeepers of the field in crisis, which is different. It’s a sign of intellectual engagement, intellectual energy. The problem is rather the idea that there are these big questions, which, as I’ve said, usually reflect the interests of the (already) powerful. Linked to the assumption that there are big questions, there is an assumption that there are big answers, and that it is our aim to find them.

But the field goes up and down, depending on social and cultural conditions, like most academic fields; but clearly since 9-11 IR has vigorously returned to an explicit focus on the supposed ‘big questions/issues’; the ‘evil enemy’; good versus bad, war against terror, the axis of evil… We’ve seen these ‘big questions/issues’ clearly emerge through the Bush administration, which deflected attention away from a whole other range of issues that we might have been looking at.

My website now counts 27 interviews, all white men but one. The world population consists for about 50% of women. Is this simple demographic fact sufficiently represented in thinking about IR?

… I bet you know what my answer will be to that! It’s a complicated matter… IR is still very narrow, dominated by the US agenda - intellectually and scholarly - so what about the rest of the world? Most geographic, demographic or ‘other’ ‘facts’ still get ignored by mainstream IR; that poverty is the number one killer; that (actually) 51% of the world population is female, that water and food are more important to most people than weaponry; that gender and other constituted categories profoundly impact on the practices of international politics. Despite this, there is a great deal of feminist work being done on international politics, although you might not find most of this work in IR.

Some might ask (they do!): ‘what has feminism contributed to the study of IR the last 20 years?’ One of my responses is that this is perhaps not quite the ‘right’ question (or we should at least query the assumptions that lead to its asking …). I would suggest that feminist scholars have made massive inroads in constituting international politics in theory/practice – though not (always) as a ‘contribution’ to IR …

Now maybe a stupid question: how can we map the field of gender or feminist studies? There’s an awful load of different positions in this field, relating to how much is biologically determined (sex) and how much culturally (gender); if different cultures means different genders; and what an equal world would actually look like from a gendered lens.

Gender analysis clearly suggests there is a distinction between masculinity and femininity. But the feminist argument is that this distinction doesn’t have a nature or essence – rather gender is a social construction. Yet gender becomes to have the appearance of essence; it becomes planted, crafted on and rooted into biological sex through our practices. Starting, however, by interrogating this distinction (and it enforcement and resistances), you can do so many things. Some scholars explicitly engage obvious political agendas, for example in regard to working toward justice for women. There are countless egregious harms done through gender and arguably especially to women. It is important for many feminist scholars to keep the attention on women and to link scholarly work to, for example, governmental polices. These feminists clearly find policy agendas important as well as the aim of achieving change in society. Other scholars focus more explicitly on deconstructing how gender works. This might be in teaching or in definitions of the state; or the workings of international war crimes tribunals; or in policy meetings on gender mainstreaming; or what women in an East-Timorese supermarket think is important in international politics. For many feminist scholars it is, as Cynthia Enloe puts it, very important to keep women interesting. It’s just so easy for women to slip off the agendas of political and intellectual significance, especially in IR.

More explicitly on your question – it’s not that it isn’t important to think about and study the different approaches feminist and gender scholars employ in IR; but it is perhaps more important to cautiously analyze what the mapping of feminism in IR does to feminism (‘answer’ = given IR’s methodological and ontological commitments - feminism tends to disappear off the ‘map’ of ‘real’ significance).

And what would an equal world look like? Perhaps this is out with the scope of our intellectual imaginations? Our conceptual structures and languages are so deeply constituted with and by gender ...

With Jane Papart, you’ve co-edited two important and distinct books on the ‘man question’ in IR (‘The Man Question in International Relations’ (1998, read a short review here) and ‘Rethinking the Man Question’, 2008). You argue that IR is constructed around masculinity, and that destabilizing the subject of man might destabilize the whole field. I can already see some politicians and scholars thinking: ‘but is that a good idea?’ However, I’d like to ask how the masculinity of the field might be deconstructed and, more importantly, what kind of change that might bring to our approaches not only to the international reality, but also to international theory.

Well, here again, we’re looking for concrete answers to concrete questions … what counts as concrete? Why aren’t, for example, the shopping practices of women worldwide part of the core Q-and-A’s in IR? I am not necessarily suggesting that this is the key question that we’ve forgotten to ask (though it might be …); rather I argue that the sense of sureness and certainty we’re looking for (and often assume) in IR is problematic. I suggest we remain cautious about the ontological security – through specific forms of questioning - we’re trying to achieve.

In the ‘man question’ books we are not arguing that IR is constructed around masculinity – rather that gender is central. But as the focus on gender is often assumed to be ‘only’ about women it is extremely important to understand that men are a ‘gender’ (and gendered) too – and that masculinity, as well as femininity, is crucial to analyze. Keeping a sharp eye on masculinity demonstrates that the whole of IR is gendered – a point more easily (if wrongly) missed if the focus remains too closely on women.

But more explicitly on your question; masculinity is constantly being destabilized in the field; indeed, the persistent shoring up of masculinity(ies) defines the field in large part. To understand the depth of this I insist that we need to take gender seriously. Taking gender seriously changes how we think about what’s real; what violence is; where power lies; what power is; and about what’s important. But taking gender seriously is persistently mis-understood. For example the UN pays much attention to rape and sexual violence in war and conflict. That seems to be good, but we need to ask if all the legislation really changes anything. Perhaps not much. Rape and sexual violence has so much to do with perceptions of what it means to be a ‘good’ soldier; a ‘good’ man, and what women of another country or social group represent in any given conflict… and indeed what counts as rape, or what counts as sex. The recent conviction of the Austrian man Josef Fritzl is interesting to consider in this context. He might be of major interest to IR scholars engaged in research on violence, war and conflict. It is generally considered that Fritzl must be crazy – mad - insane. Yet are his acts of raping and imprisonment so far outside ‘normal’ masculinity? ‘Yes and no’ - the answer is both. My question here is indeed a ‘big’ and provocative one – but can his acts really be simply answered/dismissed though the (constructed) category of madness? Taking gender really seriously might imply a reconstruction of the generic first year undergraduate IR course to focus on women, feminism and gender – and start off the first lecture with the case study of Josef Fritzl. That would indeed be radical.

That you ask if the deconstruction of masculinity in IR would be a ‘good idea’ shows how important and unsettling the question is (as is masculinity), not only for mainstream IR students but in general. This unsettlement is a good (political/intellectual) thing given because gender is everywhere in our daily practice; it is ‘simply’ conventionally rendered invisible by a common understanding that this is just the way ‘it is’. Once you start dismantling these boundaries of gender, or really showing how fragile they are, it becomes, well, unsettling. And that’s exactly how ‘teaching gender’ should be.

Marysia Zalewski is Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Aberdeen. She has published widely on feminist theory, gender and international relations. She is currently completing a monograph on the relationship between feminism and international relations.

Related links

Faculty profile at the University of Aberdeen
Read Zalewski’s Is Women’s Studies Dead? (2003) here (pdf)
Read Marysia Zalewski, Ann Tickner, Christine Sylvester, Margot Light, Vivienne Jabri, Kimberly Hutchings, and Fred Halliday’s Roundtable Discussion: Reflections on the Past, Prospects for the Future in Gender and International Relations (Millenium, 2008) here (pdf)
Read the Google e-book of International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (1996) co-edited by Zalewski (limited access) here

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Theory Talk #27: Christian Reus-Smit

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:43:00 +0000

Christian Reus-Smit on IR Cultures, Re-thinking IR and Bridging the Normative-Empirical Divide

The big debates in IR theory are over, but the big questions that drive our work remain challenges. In order to address these challenges, scholars now work from their different cultures. However, if we want to develop scholarship that answers to the need to make political sense out of our changing world, Christian Reus-Smit argues, we need to bridge the divide between normative and empirical scholarship. In this Talk, Reus-Smit addresses not only this issue but amongst others also probes into what makes IR IR, into sound social constructivist method, and into the necessity to partially rethink IR theory.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

As some previous contributors have argued, we are beyond the period of great debates, where lively discussions between for instance realism, liberalism and Marxism were a core part of the IR theory agenda. We have now arrived at a situation in which different cultures of IR scholarship coexist. You can make a very broad distinction between two different kinds of cultures: the rationalist/positivist approaches, on the one hand, and more social/interpretivist approaches on the other. Talking about those different approaches as cultures is quite useful in my opinion, as they each have their own distinctive social ontologies, norms of scholarly practice, rituals of engagement, modes of inclusion and exclusion, and more or less profound prejudices. There are, however, no hard and fast boundaries between them: they tend to interweave at the margins, research is being done at their boundaries, and communication and learning occurs between them at multiple levels. One could say that there is a geographical divide between the US and the rest, with scholars in the US engaging in the more rationalist/positivist-oriented approaches, while in Europe and Great Britain, for instance, the social approach is stronger, but then again, the whole postmodern and constructivist movement originated in the US as well.

In terms of challenges to the field, we should see this less as a matter of focusing on specific problems such as terrorism or the financial crisis (important as it is for us to address these), but rather the deeper challenge is bringing together two areas of scholarship that have not spoken to each other very well, and those are empirical theories of IR and normative theories of IR. I’ve focused on this issue in a number of my publications, but it figures most prominently in the Introduction Duncan Snidal and I wrote for the Oxford Handbook of International Relations, which came out last year. The reason we bridge this divide is because many of the issues we face today in IR are issues of political action: How should we respond to terrorism? How should we deal with the global financial crisis? How should we treat poverty or global environmental change? These are all crucial questions for IR, but we cannot answer them from either solely a normative-theoretic or empirical-theoretic perspective. We need to bring these things together. So the critical challenge for IR theory is to systematically engage these two forms of theoretical reflection.

An example of a concrete issue on which both approaches diverge quite radically is that of humanitarian intervention. There is a body of work on the subject clearly written from a normative perspective, by scholars that worry away about the principles that should govern humanitarian intervention and when it is legitimate to intervene for humanitarian reasons and so forth. Then there is another body of work studying the politics of humanitarian intervention. This literature is concerned with when interventions do or do not take place, with whether interventions are shaped by the material self-interest of powerful actors or by other factors such as changing international norms of sovereignty. To really contribute substantially to an action-oriented understanding of ‘humanitarian intervention’, we need both types of knowledge. We are still in an academic world characterized by a division of labor, between philosophers or political theorists who tackle the normative-theoretic questions and political scientists who grapple with empirical-theoretic questions.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR (people who inspired you, books, events, how did you conceive your ideas)?

First of all, my general interest in world politics comes from my very unconventional high school education: I spent the two years between my 14th and 16th birthdays in a car with my family travelling overland from England to India. This was in 1975-77, so we were in Iran before the revolution, in Afghanistan before the Russian invasion, etc. This extraordinary trip gave me direct experience of the complexities and inequities of global politics. Because of this experience, I went on went on to study international politics at university, and it probably lies behind my enduring interest in issues of international justice.

During my PhD, I worked a lot on philosophical approaches to international justice, but I was at the same time very frustrated by the limitations of this kind of scholarship. I was intellectually convinced by the logics of the arguments they put forth for international justice, but at the same time asked myself why these ideas were having so little purchase on international politics. So my interest turned to the politics of ethics. It was clear to me that ethical principles are deeply implicated in politics, and not just within the state, but which principles hold sway, and how they come to affect world politics, is far from straightforward. What has since been a theme in my work is the historical and societal contingency and distinctiveness of the ideas that shape political action. Contrary to what many scholars believe, IR is not a realm of recurrence and repetition; rather, the nature of international politics has varied considerably overtime, deeply conditioned by prevailing cultural and social contexts. Understanding this varied nature of international politics is crucial, as it brings to the fore the creative nature of human agency, though always framed and constituted by structural contexts. Once we understand this quality of human agency, it becomes much easier to talk about change, perhaps positive change, in international politics.

Developments in ‘real world’ politics have affected my scholarship profoundly, but there are also thinker’s whose work I return to time and again, whose work I find particularly illuminating: Quentin Skinner, the philosopher of history; Jurgen Habermas on communicative action; and historians such as Michael Adas (especially his 1989 book Machines as the Measure of Men, read a review here) and Euan Cameron (The European Reformation). There are also thinkers whose work I find intellectually challenging and conceptually frustrating yet difficult to escape. Hedley Bull’s 1977 book The Anarchical Society is a good example. It’s a book I disagree with in many ways, but , like others, I have found its conceptual architecture difficult to shake free.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

There’s a whole range of qualities and activities that can form or inform a good student of the field. It goes without saying that keeping informed on contemporary developments through the media is important, as are having a basic sense of the history of the international system and an understanding of fundamental theories that condition how we see world politics.

But for me, the overwhelming characteristic of a good student is a critical and questioning state of mind. Students have to realize that we see and understand the world through frameworks of ideas, and that these ideas are always partial. This is hardly a controversial claim: Kenneth Waltz (Theory Talk #40) could agree with this as much as a critical theorist or constructivist. What it means, however, is that we have to be very self-reflective about the ideas we are employing; we have to be sensitive to the notion that these ideas are always limited, our assumptions are always merely assumptions. The fundamental attitude of the good IR scholar is, therefore, to be self-reflective about the ideas we invoke, and to always question the taken-for-granteds, in our field.

This can be very empowering for students, as many of the ‘givens’ in the field are built upon weak foundations. A lot of very fruitful scholarship over the last 15 years has come from showing that these foundations are fragile. Take for example the whole literature on the nature of sovereignty: when I was an undergraduate student in the late 1970s and early 1980s, sovereignty was a taken for granted. We simply learnt that it referred to the supreme and absolute authority of the state---to the idea that there is a single authority within the boundaries of the state, and that the state acknowledges no higher authority beyond---and on this basis we went on to theorize and analyze international politics. But now, due to the work of a wide variety of scholars, from Jens Bartelson to Stephen Krasner (Theory Talk #21), we know that in fact sovereignty is variable, that it is a practice, and that in reality most states represent deviations from what we have learnt sovereignty to be rather than examples. And this leaves us with a very different view of international politics.

Governance-wise, we’re going through interesting times in IR: everything in 2009 points towards a reshuffle of the deck of IR cards. Democracies fight wars; multipolarity is back; the financial crisis provokes intervention but of a new kind, and resource scarcity leads to panic politics. The whole globalization discourse seems curbed. Should we re-think big parts of IR theory or do we still have the theoretical tools to account for all this change?

The short answer is that we do need to rethink IR theory – and that goes both for more conventional theory and recent innovations. For me, this moment in international history includes very complicated mixtures of the traditional and the new. It is clear, for instance, that the system of sovereign states persists, albeit in evolving form. It is also clear that globalization proceeds apace – it would, for instance, be impossible for us to explain the global financial crisis without the language of global economic integration. So these two things coexist, and they’re overlaid with a whole series of other phenomena that we have barely got a handle on. One example of such a phenomenon is transnational agency. Yes, there has been a lot of good work done on analyzing such things as transnational advocacy networks. Yet far less work has been done on the darker sides of the same processes, for which we even lack a suitable vocabulary.

Does that mean we have to throw everything out and start again? I think the answer is clearly no – many of the theories we have developed give us a good handle on aspects of what is happening. Realism with its developed knowledge of security dilemmas, for instance, gives us a good handle on one dynamic within the system of sovereign states. But there are big areas for which we haven’t developed useful frameworks of analysis. I think terrorism is a good example of this. During the 1980s, many of us focused on arms control; in the 1990s it was the environment and people re-tooled themselves as environment specialists; and since 2001 many scholars have re-tooled as terrorism experts. Good work has been done, but what we’re really missing is a way of talking about where this kind of violence fits in the context of the broader international system.

For me the key question is: What kind of international system produces this kind of violence? One of the most dramatic things to have occurred since the end of the Second World War, is the decrease in the incidence of interstate warfare: it’s not just a decrease in the absolute number of interstate wars, but if you look at the ratio between the number of states in the system (which has quadrupled since 1945) to the number of interstate wars, then you have a dramatic decline. At the same time, however, we are witnessing an increase in other forms of organized violence. What kind of system produces these trends in patterns of violence? As a field, I think we haven’t come far at all in being able to answer such questions. So I’d say: we absolutely need innovation because we are living in a historically unique world right now. But we shouldn’t throw out what we have achieved, and we should continue to import from other disciplines, like we have always done in IR.

What happened to the big debates in IR? And is their disappearance an indicator of maturity of the field or rather of an identity crisis?

Well, an underlying question here is: What exactly is IR? I’m the Head of a Department of International Relations, quite separate from the ANU’s departments of political science. Yet I find myself insisting that IR becomes impoverished to the extent that it becomes isolated from the broader study of politics. I also find myself arguing that we, in my Department, study not only international relations but global politics, which means we study not just interstate relations but political phenomena that transcend and constitute state boundaries. Staying in the old box of exterior relations between states would prevent us addressing the may of the most pressing issues of contemporary world politics. This means, however, that we must live with a field that is inherently ambiguous and constantly evolving. This should not be seen as problematic, though: it’s merely a reflection of the changing world that we seek to understand. For me, the field is defined by debates about the key questions we should be addressing, and as these debates shift the parameters of the field inevitably move around, which is a healthy sign of life in my opinion.

The age of great debates between paradigms is, however, over. It is still fruitful to place the big theories in debate with each other concerning a specific issue or in teaching, it helps us understand different possible ways to tackle any issue as a heuristic device. But the problem is when such thinking becomes dominant, like it did 15 years ago: that led to a ‘Cinderella syndrome’, where you try and squeeze an ugly and oversized world into a beautiful theoretical glass shoe. That leaves us blind to the complexities of the world.

The last major work that attempted grand theorizing was Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics (Theory Talk #3). But the fact that so few other scholars seem inclined to engage in such theorizing reflects, I believe, a general lack of confidence about the parameters of the international/global world in which we live. When Waltz wrote his book on the structure of the international system, that system appeared much more parsimonious: a politically and even economically bipolar world is much easier to theorize in a structural kind of way than a somewhat globalized, somewhat multipolar world characterized by a host of seemingly new phenomena. It has become far more difficulty for us to confidently distill the essential dynamics of this system, and this has pushed us away from grand theorizing toward middle range theorizing within a number of distinct cultures of scholarship. For better or for worse, the work of high theory is now in realm of formulating concepts and vocabularies to help us understand complexity.

As a social constructivist, perhaps you could explain me how we can demonstrate that certain ‘logics’ pervade the international system at different times, such as arguably liberalism at the present time. How does one demonstrate that ideas have explanatory power and yet are constituted by the practices of ‘concrete’ actors?

There are a number of rules of thumb that one should apply in the decision to make a constructivist argument. The first thing is that process tracing is incredibly important for scholars who want to make an argument of the role of ideas or values. How is it that particular ideas have come to shape the interests of the actor? How do they shape arguments between actors? And how have those ideas become more important than other ideas in shaping interests and arguments for actors? The second thing is dealing with alternative arguments. Part of making an argument on ideas is not only about showing that and how norms or ideas work, but it’s equally fundamental to think about alternative explanations and show either how they relate to the role ideas play (ideas and material explanations do not have to conflict per definition), or how they can explain something other factors or explanations can’t explain. And thirdly, it is important to work with counterfactuals: what would happen in the absence of the structure of argument, ideas or norms you hold to be responsible for a certain action or event? If you have an argument where you can tick those three boxes, you probably have a pretty sound argument.

Final question. You’ve written a piece on history through constructivist eyes. Is there anything particular about the relationship between history and constructivism in IR?

Well, actually, yes. There has been a quite radical return to the study of history in IR recently, and constructivists have been at the forefront of that tendency. In the article, I argue that the constructivist emphasis on contingency and change led them, almost inevitably, to the study of history. The dominance of structural realist and rationalist approaches during the 1970s and 1980s tended to marginalize the study of history. Structural realists were interested in formulating law-like propositions to explain continuity in international relations, and rationalists sought to explain relations between states with reference to universal, means-ends forms of rationality. Both of these tendencies were blind to the particularity and contingency of international history, the very things that interest constructivists.

Chris Reus-Smit is Professor of International Politics and Head of the Department of International Relations. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1995, and has been awarded fellowships and grants by the MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Australian Research Council, and the Social Science Research Council in New York, the Rockefeller Foundation, the European University Institute in Florence, and the British Academy. He is the author of American Power and World Order (Polity 2004) and The Moral Purpose of the State (Princeton 1999), co-author of Theories of International Relations (Macmillan/Palgrave 2001, 2005, 2008), editor of The Politics of International Law (Cambridge 2004), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford 2008); Resolving International Crises of Legitimacy (Special Issue International Politics 2007), and Between Sovereignty and Global Governance (Macmillan 1998). His articles have appeared in a wide range of journals, including International Organization, Review of International Studies, Millennium, and The European Journal of International Relations. His work has been awarded both the BISA Prize (2001) and the Northedge Prize (1992) He is currently co-editor (with Nicholas Wheeler) of the Cambridge Studies in International Relations books series.

Related links

Faculty profile at the Australian National University
Read Reus-Smit’s The Constructivist Turn: Critical Theory after the Cold War (1996) here (pdf)
Read Reus-Smit’s Human Rights and the Social Construction of Sovereignty (Review of International Studies, 2001) here (pdf)
Read the Introduction of Reus-Smit’s book The Politics of International Law (2004) here (pdf)

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Theory Talk #26: Jennifer Mitzen

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:19:00 +0000

Jennifer Mitzen on Ontological Security, Multilateral Diplomacy, and States’ Addiction to War

IR is all about war. That is, our work is to an extent based on the imperative that war is to be avoided. But what if states develop a dependency on conflict, what if war becomes an addiction that co-determines their raison d’être in important ways? In this Talk, Jennifer Mitzen shows – amongst others – how the most important thing seems to be not the nature of state relations but rather their stability, and, in this line of thought, she probes into the history of multilateral diplomacy to show how it provokes peace for surprising reasons.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

I won’t presume to say what the big debate is; and I wonder whether IR is still defined by its big debates among paradigms, the way it used to be. When I’m immersed in something I tend to think of its questions as the ‘big’ debate. So now, for example, I think it’s important to understand the effects of talking in public. World politics is full of public talk; the United States just elected a president who stresses talking to adversaries ‘without preconditions’; and we don’t know enough about how talking in public works and the effects it produces. So to me, debates among rationalists, constructivists, legal scholars, and so on, on the impact of talk and the prospects for deliberation in world politics seem most challenging and interesting.

That research question could be embedded in a Big Debate, like rational choice vs. constructivism or realism vs. idealism; but why? The larger debates didn’t drive the research, and the goal isn’t to figure out which paradigm gets it right. So it wouldn’t make sense to approach the question as a partisan on a particular side of a debate. Knowing the big debates is certainly helpful for learning the field. But it seems like for doing research and answering real world questions debates can sometimes overemphasize differences when it can be more productive to be open to or highlight overlaps and synergies.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

A strong influence was the graduate school environment at the University of Chicago, where I received my Ph. D. As an undergraduate I had been an economics major, and didn’t take any international relations courses. A journalistic internship after college led me to think about graduate school; and I applied to Chicago’s Committee on International Relations master’s program, and afterward for the Political Science PhD. So I came to graduate school with little IR background. And what was unique about the U of Chicago environment was its intellectual openness and interdisciplinarity. There was the freedom and encouragement to experiment intellectually, and the opportunity to present ideas and get feedback in workshop settings across a range of disciplines, methods, and worldviews. There also was a culture of critical engagement with each other’s ideas. So I’d say it was the interplay of people that I got in touch with in that intellectual environment that helped me to both learn the field and to keep its boundaries porous.

In terms of intellectual influences for particular ideas, a graduate seminar on Hannah Arendt is what initially spurred thinking about what it might mean for states to govern together. This eventually morphed into a focus on Habermas and public spheres, and now has led me to the collective intentionality literature, for insights into plural subjecthood and action. And I happened to be reading on Heinz Kohut and self-psychology as I was doing the empirical work for my dissertation. This led to ontological security, and to speculating about whether it might be possible to scale up the need for ontological security from individuals to states.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

To start with, a PhD, one that includes broad training in theories of IR, in a wide range of methods, and in an appreciation for all of them. It also seems important to say that being a specialist in IR isn’t just about the training. You can have the best training in the world, but it boils down to, first, whether you have a good question and second, whether you’re curious about and/or feel you have something to say about international politics. Not that you need to enter graduate school with a fully formed dissertation topic or the germs of a breakthrough theoretical contribution. But caring about world politics and about ideas really needs to be there. Without it, why sit down every day in front of the computer, struggling through writing blocks, conceptual dead-ends, messy empirics, and so on?

A lot of theorists in IR have chosen to look back into diplomatic history to develop their ideas. You’ve looked at the Concert of Europe. Why?

First, I find the Concert of Europe intrinsically interesting – it’s the first security institution, the first experiment with using multilateral diplomacy to manage the balance of power. It’s also interesting because the Concert is often treated as a model for contemporary security governance. After the Cold War, it was frequently seen as a model for the new Europe; after the US unilateralism of the early 2000s it has appeared again, as part of a debate about a multilateral alternative. With some scholars advocating a ‘council of democracies’ to enforce international norms, others raise the example of the Concert as preferable for being less institutionalized and more pluralistic. So actually, developing my argument by probing the 19th century does not take me very far from today’s debates.

Finally, I think we haven’t yet absorbed the lessons of the Concert. We take for granted that states can solve problems by sitting in a room together, debating policy specifics. But this makes the role of talking solely one of information exchange. While that is important, talking in public has a lot more force.

To get a sense of its power, it’s useful to step back to when talking together was not taken for granted. Before the Concert, great powers had only ever cooperated to help defeat one another, so forum discussions appeared threatening. So by examining the early phases of multilateral diplomacy, it’s easier to see that before meetings could be for information exchange they had to serve a deeper function, of pulling states together and helping them solve the problem of violence.

What’s the role of argument and deliberation in international politics? How does it matter for the response of the international community if, for example, states state their intentions ‘nicely’ before invading a country?

Public talk, that is, multilateral diplomacy, is perhaps the most important legitimizing tool for international action. NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo is generally perceived as legitimate because of the arguments advanced in the diplomacy surrounding it. The U.S.-led invasion in Iraq is not, at least partly because of how the US conducted its multilateral diplomacy.

Taking the Iraq case, where the U.S. went to the Security Council but acted anyway, one could certainly argue that U.S. talk was cheap. But think about if the U.S. had not announced its plans in the Security Council. It’s very likely that the legitimacy of the Security Council as the primary institution for managing global security would have been damaged, since it would have given license to other great powers to do the same. And the U.S. has paid a price for its unilateralism, since it greatly diminished American ‘soft power.’ There are always rule-breakers, in any society; and so the proposition is not that states engaging in public talk won’t break international rules. The proposition is rather that being a hypocrite in a context where a state can be called out as a hypocrite – that is, where there are forums for and a discourse of joint problem-solving – is costly.

Your work on international politics seems to be concerned solely with interstate relations. Is IR still all about states? That is, can state agency solve that small number of very important problems in the world?

Well, I should say that I think that IR is not all about states. I have, however, two reasons to focus on them anyway. First, states can either obstruct global problem solving or facilitate it. As long as state action is required on an issue, it’s important to understand inter-state dynamics. Second, states are the world’s principal legitimate public goods providers. Who else can we turn to, for basic safety, health, and security? Not our neighbors, or NGOs, or stakeholders, or corporations. The only mechanism through which these are provided reliably and with accountability is government. What we have now is a situation where we seem to agree that there are global public goods, but there is no world state. As long as states remain the principal actors responsible for human wellbeing, in a holistic sense, then how they work together to create a public space and provide public goods, is an important focus of study.

In your 2006 article, Ontological Security in World Politics , you argue that states might want to uphold even conflicts in their search for stable surroundings or ‘ontological security’. Can you explain that, and give an example?

The question that fascinated me was: how could it be possible that a state might ‘want’ a conflict? We assume states want to avoid conflict. Yet there are cases, like the Cold War, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and others, where parties seem deeply attached to the conflict; and their attachment seems to be keeping the conflict alive. Realists who look to the security dilemma would explain this anomaly with the concept of uncertainty, but uncertainty about one another’s intentions seems insufficient to explain how states can keep a conflict alive for over fifty years. I propose that the problem is more one of certainty than uncertainty. Conflicts are routinized relationships, and routines secure identities. The premise is that all social actors value agency, their ability to choose and pursue goals, and that ability rests on knowing their preferences and interests. Agency rests on identity. This means actors need to feel they have stable identities; they need ontological security.

The reason we should treat stable identity as something actors seek, rather than something that can be assumed, has to do with uncertainty – deep, profound uncertainty – and our intrinsic fear of it. Social life is full of danger, and it’s not just the known unknowns, but also the unknown unknowns, that we fear. But if we were actively aware of all the dangers all the time, our anxiety would be so intense that it would be impossible to act at all. Routines, especially routines with significant others, hold this uncertainty at bay. The platform of stability they create helps aspiring agents know who they are. So, when faced with a new or uncertain environment, actors tend to routinize their relationships, to create the stability or certainty they need in order to be agentic. Then, because actors value agency, they get attached to the routines, even if the relationships they create are physically harmful. That’s the pathology of ontological security.

The argument that states need ‘ontological security’ is based partly on psychological ideas. Applied to states, how far can the psychological analogy go?

This is a very good question. A lot of theorizing about states is in some way or another based on an analogy with individuals. In IR, realists assume that states have egoistic ‘personalities’ and are driven by a need for material security, while neo-liberals argue that we should analyze the state as a rational decision maker. Those both are psychological assumptions about states. In arguing that states, besides physical security, also need ontological security, I just take the realist-rationalist argument to a more general level. In fact, since rational action emanates from preferences or desires, states cannot be rational actors without having a sense of stable identity.

Anarchy is, for realists, the most structural characteristic of the international system. However, if public diplomacy matters, couldn’t one argue that there is no anarchy between states?

It depends on what we mean by anarchy. If we’re talking about the fact that the use of force is de-centralized and not unified into a world state, then of course there is still anarchy. But when anarchy is defined as a distribution of political authority, namely as the flip side of sovereignty, where sovereignty implies that all political authority is inside the state and none is between them, then whether anarchy exists is an open question. This isn’t a new insight – several scholars have been challenging the premise of anarchy on these grounds for a long time. So, in order to know whether to accept or reject the premise of anarchy, the first question is, how is political authority constituted? Then, where is it located? According to public sphere theory, political authority is discursively constituted and we need to look at structures of communication and at how actions are decided upon and rationalized. From here, whether there’s anarchy or not in a given issue is an empirical question. Again, a lot of scholars have recognized the limits of anarchy as an assumption about the structure of world politics; what I add is to come at it from a public sphere perspective.

Is your approach to world politics optimistic?

Actually, in one sense my approach is quite pessimistic. The need for ontological security helps us see how conflicts can become sources of identity, and so subject to attachment dynamics that cause them to persist and to be hard to let go of. Conflicts can be a lot more important to participants – and therefore a lot stickier – than even realists recognize.

On the more hopeful side, what I’ve written on world politics, in particular on the role of publicity and discussion, implies that change is possible. Under some conditions, public talk can help states change the way they interact, in a positive direction and toward cooperative, salutary ends that otherwise would not be possible. This does not mean change is inevitable or even always possible. But it offers an outline for how to think about moving forward, in a way that can lessen the sense that we’re always only muddling through.

Jennifer Mitzen is assistant professor of Political Science at the Ohio State University. Professor Mitzen has research and teaching interests in international relations theory, global governance, international organization, and post-conflict reconciliation. She is completing a book manuscript on the impact of publicity and deliberation on great power politics, with particular attention to the evolution of conference diplomacy in 19th century Europe. Other research includes the impact of needs for ontological security on international politics.

Related links

Faculty Profile at Ohio State
Read Mitzen’s Ontological Security in World Politics (European Journal of IR, 2006) here (pdf)
Read Mitzen’s Reading Habermas in Anarchy: Multilateral Diplomacy and Global Public Spheres (American Political Science Review, 2005) here (pdf)

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Theory Talk #25: Antonio Marquina

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:58:00 +0000

Antonio Marquina on the Deceit of Globalization, Energy Security and Challenges to European Foreign Policy

2009 starts out with international turmoil: a global financial crisis, war in Gaza and a gas crisis evolving around Russian supplies. Spanish professor Antonio Marquina Barrio explains how current events represent a necessary but difficult confrontation with international political reality – a confrontation challenging previously popular trust in globalization and the market. In this comprehensive Talk, he furthermore assesses the weaknesses of European international politics, explains why sound theorizing should play a bigger role in Europe; and how we can understand issues of energy security like the current crisis evolving around Russian gas.

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge or principal debate within International Relations (IR)? And what is your position in this debate / concerning this challenge?

There are, in fact, many important debates in the field of International Relations. That is because the field has extended into very diverse subject areas, in the process of which it furthermore became multidisciplinary. So it would really depend on who you ask. But since we’re talking here, I’ll indicate which debate is most significant in my opinion.

In the 90’s, debates in IR centered on the magical keyword of ‘globalization’, due to the excitement that the end of the Cold War provoked. With the American world vision then dominating the world, many scholars – with Fukuyama – euphorically declared that ‘history ended’ and that the world was to a certain extent unified by capitalism. Governance was based on liberalism and focused mainly on the importance of markets (as convincingly argued by the late Susan Strange in her “States and markets”), failing states and the effects of globalization on sovereignty.

Currently, after two Bush administrations, we’re gradually developing a clearer image of the failing of that image, principally because its principal protagonist and example, the United States, is victim of its own over-enthusiasm. It is important to realize the implications of this American debilitation: its decline logically induces multipolarity, and with multipolarity, competition between states.

Slowly, IR scholars start to realize that – contrary to what euphoric post-Cold-War perceptions predicted – (1) states are not simply administrative units that support markets but do not interfere, and (2) that markets won’t govern themselves. In this context, the concept of ‘governance’ gets different characteristics, and the most important debate of the coming years will thus be how we reorganize the governance of the international system in an increasingly multipolar world.

The United States will for some time of course remain the principal great power in the system, but it will start needing agreements and real partnerships if its wants to solve much of its problems. At the core of this realization, again, is the fact that the world has had eight years to observe the Bush administration proving the U.S. is incapable to unilaterally resolve its problems. This has had and will continue to have important consequences: cooperation and coalitions between key states will be indispensable to shape the international system and to resolve not only global problems but regional ones as well.

How did you arrive where you are in IR?

I have dedicated myself earlier to the studying of archives on the 2nd World War and the Cold War, but only after having completed six degrees, amongst others in International Law and Economics. After 1982, when I received the Rockefeller Fellowship in international relations, I got into contact with a number of American and European think tanks, and gradually I realized two things: firstly, that not all problems in international politics are “rational”, that is, important issues do not answer to Western logics; and secondly, that one cannot understand a local problem by solely focusing on that problem. All significant local issues have global effects or implications, and what happens in one part of the world is thus conditioned by events in other places. In that sense, I would like to emphasize that being critical of Fukuyama-style globalization does not rule out the acceptation that the world has become increasingly interconnected.

While I have great respect for a great number of people I have had the pleasure to meet throughout my career, my vision on international politics has always been conditioned by the conviction that it is my personal curiosity about international dynamics that leads to investigation and subsequently has to form the basis of my conclusions.

For me, approaches to international politics cannot be abstract, that is, they need to be based on a historical foundation. All problems have a trajectory, roots that you have to know. For me, any approach to a concrete problem in international politics thus has to be introduced expounding the origins of the problem, its trajectory and, most importantly, its dynamics. Such an approach has to be broad, in that it takes into account factors which one can only understand with a multidisciplinary training.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or to understand the world in a global way?

One has to be open and study a wide array of issues. This multidisciplinarity also implies that one has to be generalist. I would say that any good curriculum of international studies is wide, and does not allow a student to specialize until really late in their career. Take the time to enjoy reading up on such diverse subjects as the environment and common goods, economics, conflicts, political systems, international law, international institutions and organizations, perceptions and public opinion, security, decision making, new technologies and their implications, history, culture, religions... In order to be able to understand some critical issues, one also has to learn languages and try to understand cultures. We study international relations and thus have to be able to put ourselves in the place of someone far away, to understand the perspectives of others. Culture and religion condition how people see themselves and others, and thus condition the behavior we’re studying.

Are states still the principal actors in International relations?

Right now we’re witnessing some events that clearly confirm states as the principal players both in terms of security and of economics. Events such as the scramble for energy security and contemporary efforts to redesign the global financial system are state-led. As a result, the fashion that held sway throughout the nineties to say that states were losing power to market actors in the context of globalization is withering away. There are, of course, other actors that come into play when studying IR but to understand international politics well one has to understand first and foremost what it is states are and do.

But that doesn’t mean that states are sturdy black boxes: the international system is now filled with other different agents and factors that tend to shape it. Such factors are, for instance, technological progress, international norms and institutions, aging populations, increasing migrations flows, cultural asymmetries, strong economic competition, the search for high-quality education as a critical factor for development and success, and rapid changes in general induce or force states to change their functions, identity and behavior.

What is currently the biggest misconception reigning amongst IR specialists?

The biggest misconception I recognize is actually related to what I’ve said before on globalization. In Europe, for example, people who deal with European security let their approaches depend on similar fashions: something happens and the whole discourse and thus the security identity of Europe changes. Take the impact of 9/11 on European security. After that date, all official documents on the subject of security mentioned terrorism on the first page, and the people behind European security completely changed their definition of what security means. Terrorist attacks are of course an important security issue, but to make it the core of the European security configuration is simply overreacting, and to change the principal goal and approach of NATO after a terrorist attack is a big mistake. It’s a military security organization designed for other purposes, purposes that depend on the fifth article which only recognizes state threats, and 9/11, if one thing, was certainly not a clear state threat. To fight terrorism, we can dispose of police and intelligence services.

And this goes not only for security but for academic work in International Relations as well. We should really take more care in measuring the impact of certain events and ideas, because if we make a fuss and say they change our world, they will actually end up doing so. So now, almost eight years later, we find out that perhaps after all we shouldn’t have changed our outlook on IR so drastically.

And not only terrorism or globalization have been such fashion items, but concepts like ‘human security’ are, too. The work available on the subject could fill various encyclopedias, but an operationalizable definition is still pending. Of course it is an important concept, but before it has been aptly defined we should not take it as a core concept of international relations. Our job is to rationalize international events in political terms, and what we say can influence politicians. So we better make sure we know exactly what the influence of events is, and how we define reality.

In, for example, the United States or the United Kingdom, studying IR means studying loads of theory, and different departments clearly state differing theoretical outlooks on their websites. Why is this not the case in Spain?

There are three important reasons why theory of international relations in Spain does not receive the attention it should. The first is the fact that IR is still a subsection of International Law. The second is that the selection of professors is parochial, which implies that ‘things could be better’. The third follows from the first two and is the simple lack of interest of a number of Spanish professors to write volumes about something like ‘analyzing the international system from this or that theoretical perspective’.

The consequences of this lack of interest in theory, which is by the way not only Spanish but reigns in more European countries, are far-reaching. To give you an example: take NATO’s last strategic concept of 1999. The theoretical framework is clear, almost transparent and it has clear implications for what it is NATO does. It defines the organization and makes it recognizable for other international actors. This clearness is the result of hard work by people trained in international politics – trained well to understand the importance of theory and its effects upon the political reality.

Now take a European or Spanish document on security. Generally, the theoretical frameworks of European documents are vague and eclectic, and consist of appealing quotes from one place and nice terms from another, without displaying the internal consistency that produces sound and coherent policy. If a basic document which defines the European or Spanish stance on an issue, that is, which should direct individuals to consistently behave according to policy, is vague, the resulting political behavior will be too. So a lot of the lack of a structuring backbone in our international politics is the direct result of a lack of interest for theory in our universities. A good example of this tendency is the EU document “A Secure Europe in a Better World”. A careful reading shows it doesn’t define strategy properly - the result is an inconsistent strategic document, which should be a contradictio in terminis.

So theory is fundamental because it gives you the context from which a political entity operates, it situates actors and helps not only external actors such as other states recognize how one state will behave, it also helps politicians in that state to project sound policy.

You’ve edited a book entitled Energy Security which is being published now by Palgrave-McMillan. How should we frame the issue of energy security and how important will it be relative to other challenges in the international system?

It’s a fundamental problem, because without energy, we would simply not be talking here. The struggle for resources is a traditional theme within IR, but it has clearly gained a new dimension recently since what we were supposed to hold for a free energy market stopped existing – and now the media suddenly start recognizing as something alarming that 85% of oil and 70-80% of gas reserves in the world are controlled by state-owned energy companies. This has always been the case, whatever supporters of globalization and free trade might have argued. The funny thing is that energy markets in many countries are also imperfect markets (oligopolies). How can you defend current shares selling, transactions and practices invoking the market? What is worst: ‘the market’ has meant in some countries the privatization of monopolies, which in turn leads to structural energy insecurity for populations. Wonderful world!

Apart from this state control of reserves, we now face an increasing demand by big growers such as Brazil, India and China, who desperately need energy to sustainably fuel their growth. And possibly, there is simply not enough energy to fuel that demand. That not only puts pressure on prices and thus the energy market, but it also fosters increased competition between big energy consumers, reinforcing the tendency of states to tighten control over energy companies.

Then there is the tendency of some states to use this state control in the context of scarcity as a political weapon – as did Russia with Ukraine some time ago and now again, simply cutting the flow of gas. Since Ukrainian gas pipelines lead to Europe, we suffer too. Depending on unreliable suppliers doesn’t fit into my image of a ‘better Europe in a secure world’. And this kind of behavior is not going to stop if the situation remains the same – that is, if we don’t find alternative energy sources – and at this point the alternatives are simply not economically viable.

So if we don’t find a breakthrough in the medium term, which is not very likely, we’ll live in a very unstable system in terms of interstate relations. Now this situation will only reinforce the increasing multipolarity of the international system we’re witnessing, which already complicates cooperation. If on top of that states compete and thus do not trust one another because of the energy issue, things start to look bad.

So how do we deal with this? Through the market? I’ve already argued that the energy market is heavily influenced by state-interests, on both the supply and on the distribution side. So the market is highly imperfect. So the recent fuss in Spain about Lukoil, a Russian oil company, possibly taking over part of Repsol, an important Spanish oil company, is not that strange. If the majority of the supply market is already controlled by states through monopolies, oligopolies or cartels, how can the other actors play through the market? They will either be bought or pushed out of the market.

From this point of view, I heavily criticize the European Union (EU) for acting so firmly on the fashionable belief the last decade that energy is all an issue of the market and companies. We had the chance to affirm ourselves as an independent actor in the case of gas pipelines that supply us with gas coming from the East, but no. The EU acted on the belief that this would arrange itself through the invisible hand of the market and Russia happily agreed with us – Russian state-owned companies simply bought the gas from Central Asia and now has the EU in an energy-straightjacket because Russia dominates the supply – the geopolitical power Russia can now project is immense.

And who can we blame? The responsible politicians are impossible to be held accountable because all we can do is vote on election day. The European Parliament is extremely weak and lacks governance capabilities. I have not seen any politician resign on this issue, which I consider one of the most important errors in European policy to date. Nobody takes responsibility.

In this book, you state that the competition between states for energy security in a context of scarcity will form one of the principal issues around which cooperation and possibly conflicts will arise. In Theory Talk #11, Peter Haas argues we should try and avoid that themes related to the environment and resources become securitized, while promoting an international regimes approach which might foster cooperation. How does your perspective differ from that of Peter Haas?

The basic point where we differ is that however much I would like state interests not to exist, they do. And as a professor I think it my duty to focus not on how I would like the world to work, but on how it de facto works. Studying international politics, one cannot talk about energy or the environment for that matter without taking into account how state interests influence what goes on. When it comes to natural resources, of whatever kind possible, while we would like them to be a big enough pie to share between all of us, we in reality have a small pie. So when I theorize about how to divide the pie and how others might react to that, I have to part from how big the pie is in reality and not from how big I want it to be.

Now that does not mean that I think that environmental issues should be securitized in general. But one has to admit that they can become trigger events, as in the case of Darfur, where the lack of sufficient natural resources was an important factor in the breaking out of conflict. However, it will never be the only reason conflict breaks out. An incidental and transitory damage to resources normally will not cause significant problems within a rich, stable country. Political stability, good management of ethnical divisions and a sound economy have a great influence. But again, one can understand neither the conflict of Darfur nor migration flows in several regions, nor the possible sustained diminution of resources in different areas without taking into consideration the limits and constrains imposed by environmental changes and their impact on security.

The European Union is a ‘strange animal’ in a world of states, that is, a sui generis political institution. Do you consider the European Union a success?

Europe is in a complicated situation right now, due to a whole specter of problems. The first one is that the United States is criticizing us for being reluctant to make some commitments while on the other hand it would distrust a politically united Europe with its own army. The US spends about 500 billion on the military, the EU together around 200 billion. Pumping that into a European army combined with the size of the European economy would make for a formidable competitor, something the US would prefer to avoid – which is the reason why the US insists in NATO as Europe’s security structure rather than for example the Western European Union or the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). All this will imply a new consensus in NATO.

Another, related issue is that the UE lives by the rule that international influence means pulling its wallet every time it’s negotiating, thinking that it had ‘soft’ or ‘normative’ power. And since a whole range of other countries is increasingly capable of drawing its wallet at the negotiation table, but without European conditionality (that is, insisting in good governance and human rights as a condition for trade), Europe’s ability to project influence is declining. The sad thing is that Europe at this time is unable to fix its ties with its complicated neighborhood.

A third, and less related but all the more profound challenge is that of the transfer of incomes we’re witnessing globally. In non-monetary terms, the US, representing some 5% of the world’s population, consumes more than 30% of its resources; in Europe that balance is about 22% to 30%. In terms of income and jobs, however, we’re witnessing a huge shift towards the east, amongst others because of the simple demographic fact that the European population is aging – and this crisis might well be an indication of the effort the ‘old’ political and financial structure has of dealing with that shift. It will imply a declining importance of the European Union in shaping the international system.

A fourth and the most important European challenge is the common political decision making. With 27 such diverse states now member, how can you find consensus? Impossible. So a two speed Europe will be the only solution given the fact that Europe as a mere free trade area will mean its conversion into an irrelevant international actor.

Professor Antonio Marquina holds the chair of International Security at the Complutense University of Madrid and director of UNISCI, a think-tank on international security and cooperation. He is the author of over fifty books in Spanish on the subject and has published in English, amongst others, Security and Environment in the Mediterranean: Conceptualising Security and Environmental Conflicts (2003), Euro-Mediterranean Partnership For the 21st Century (2000), and Energy Security: Visions from Asia and Europe (2009).

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Theory Talk #24: Robert Bates

noreply@blogger.com (Peer Schouten) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:20:00 +0000

Robert Bates on the Politics of Coffee, Small-N Studies, and the Crumbling Definition of the State

Social sciences in general and International Relations in particular is preoccupied with quantitative studies. As a result, individual case studies, or, in methodologically correct language, Small-N populations, have been somewhat discredited. In this Talk, Robert H. Bates, essentially an economic historian, explains amongst others how (single) case studies are just as valid as large-N studies, how coffee can illustrate the workings of international markets, and how the definition of the State should be reconsidered.

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What is, according to you, the biggest challenge or principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge or in this debate?

For me, the most important challenge is to recognize what ‘states’, the principal actors in IR, actually are. More people are slowly finding out that states are not stable, but rather equilibriums. To put it very plainly: what we refer to as a state is simply a place where people have agreed to put their weapons down. However, little by little, people from all over (that is, security studies, development studies and International Relations) are realizing that this Weberian definition does not always apply.

Rather, perhaps due to the extension of the concept of ‘security’ since the end of the Cold War, this definition has come under scrutiny. During the Cold War, security referred principally to the possibility of interstate conflict. If there was no risk of interstate conflict, security was not seen as threatened. Since the end of the Cold War, we’ve partly shifted our attention to intrastate conflict elsewhere as a possible source of insecurity, such terrorism in Afghanistan, which could spill over.

Currently, our definition of the state as principally ‘a place where people have agreed to lay down their weapons’ is being challenged by a great number of cases. In Russia and neighboring countries, armed groups are widespread; Italy has its known problems with the mafia; in Serbia, pirates in recent years have hijacked many ships passing the Danube, and many armed groups still exist in the rest of the Balkans. All these groups use non-state violence to manipulate interests. Without even mentioning Latin America and Africa, one has already enough reasons to doubt if the Weberian definition of the state as a monopoly on violence actually exists outside of our normative minds.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I am actually reluctant to mention specific people or books that have specifically shaped my thought, also because I have always had the feeling that the most important issues are as of yet not addressed. I think it has always been my own curiosity that motivated me most. One of the experiences that has influenced strongly my thinking on international relations, is the work I did on coffee. I never expected so many politics to be involved, and with such effects, in the market for a product as coffee. Another important experience was the fieldwork I did in rural Zambia. Being there in rural communities, I found out that these people know what they are doing, and that policy makers with ideas from abroad, without local knowledge, do not.

If I were to name some scholars whose work impresses me, I’d surely mention the work of Charles Tilly, who offers a very interesting perspective on the development of states, taking form of government essentially as the result of contention between different factions over the means of coercion and capital. Also, the things David Friedman wrote on the size and shape of nations, interests me a lot. These works interest me especially since I am currently trying to understand the economy of the military and the relationship of the military to the state.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

There are a few things here that I would like to point out. The first one is that in the States, there are these dominant habits of mind that have dumbed our generations down. One of such habits is the relationship the social sciences have had to mathematics. The best mathematicians have tried to stay away from the social sciences while the most exciting work could have been done on this frontier. On the other hand, the dominant way of formal modeling and quantification has led to a straitjacket in social sciences that has doctrinated whole generations of scholars to focus on very limited issues.

One has to look at different fields. I can receive a quantitatively brilliant economics student for a PhD, but I will always ask him: ‘did you read up on law, anthropology, sociology?’ One has to have a broad basis to understand the world. The world is not just math, law, economics or psychology – unfortunately for scholars who love clean models, the world consists of all that and much more. So any explanation should incorporate, albeit just implicitly, knowledge on that complex reality.

Another essential aspect of training is fieldwork. I do not accept PhD students who finish their degrees on Africa without actually having been there. That has to do with my last point: one cannot pretend to generate new knowledge about a complex reality by reading up on it.

In 1998, you co-edited a book called Analytic Narratives. The book expounds a methodology for drawing generalizations from specific historical examples. Could you briefly reiterate the argument made in the book, and indicate if you find it still holds now?

The actual reason for the book was that me and a few other ‘historians’ found we were having the same problem: we were all convinced that you can take a (that is: one) historical example and legitimately extrapolate it to a generalized model. The French Revolution for instance was the case in point for one contributor to the volume. Sure, the French Revolution will never repeat itself, so what’s the use trying to generalize, one could ask. But it is our point of view that one can learn something from history, and we tried to defend a method that proves as rigorous as possible.

The idea is as follows. One has a historical small-N case study – that means, studying a population of one or two cases instead of lets say, 100. It is common wisdom that the bigger the population, the more trustworthy the conclusions about tendencies. However, if one generates a model, that is, infer an abstraction from a small-N case study, the procedure remains basically the same and is thus equally valid: in the end, the validity of the model or theory always depends on its testing. And here, academic rigor comes into play: we have a case, we created a model, and now we have to proceed to formulate testable implications of this model, of the formula ‘if … , then …’. If one can generate testable implications – and test them, even better – whether it be from a big-N or a small-N population, one has in principle a valid scientific study.

A year earlier, you published Open-Economy Politics: The Political Economy of the World Coffee Trade, a book in which you challenge the domestic-international divide and study the workings of international market-governance institutions. First of all: why coffee? And, secondly, how ‘open’ is the world economy at this point?

I actually stumbled on the subject of coffee by accident. I was doing a lot of research on Africa in that period and when the government proposed me to do some research on the subject, I was actually happy to ‘get out of Africa’ for a while. And actually, the whole investigation was a big adventure: the International Coffee Organization, which was the principal object of study, was (because it ceased to exist) located in Colombia – and political tensions rose high while I was there, up to the point that I had to leave because of violence. But apart from that, it was actually very interesting to see how much this institution had in coordinating policy by big coffee producing countries. Every decision made by the organization on policy in situations of market problems such as overproduction had far-reaching and distinct consequences for, for example, Brazil and local producers in Africa. Every decision has different effects on who wins and loses. So the International Coffee Organization constituted a real ‘coffee government’. In my book I try to explain why and how it rose to power, and why it ceased to exist. After having dedicated about a decade to coffee, I was ready to go back again to Africa – now with a fuller understanding of how international dynamics influence local outcomes.

Do countries with an open economy behave differently international from countries which are not ‘open’?

This question is often asked and American policy makers, be it aid-workers or foreign policy specialists, do believe that open economies behave in a certain, perhaps ‘better’, way. The answer is, however, more complicated. An ‘open’ economy refers typically to an economy that is not governed by strong state regulation or intervention, in order to let the market do its work. But the dichotomy ‘open vs closed’ does not reflect actual politics: policy choices are constantly being made, even in so-called open economies – it’s a lot of work to keep an economy ‘open’. By that I mean that there’s always policy choices involved, so labeling a country’s economy ‘open’ or ‘closed’ reflects ideology by the observer. One can only ask: open to which interests?

Your most recent book, When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa argues from a game-theoretic perspective that African states did not manage to tax their societies and thus engaged in the path-dependent history that led to current exploitation. How does your explanation go?

I tried to ask in this book: when does a country work? That is, which are stable situations? States make money through violence – either by extortion or by policing. They characterize themselves by their monopoly on violence, meaning that they can use that violence either to engage in taxation by policing or for exploitation using extortion. Societies can either engage in productive activity or not. A functional country is an equilibrium, where the government uses violence to police, and where society engages in production. In Africa, we saw the choice being made (perhaps not consciously) of government exploitation because taxation didn’t work well in a context of global price stagnation. That, in turn, destroys the perspective of society to produce, leading to a relatively stable yet little desirable situation.

We’ve witnessed a relative stability since the 90’s, with very little structural violence and stable prices. But the effects of the current crisis could be devastating, at least in terms of political stability: if global prices drop, society will not be able to survive and rebel against their governments – and since governments do not depend on parliaments or on taxation of society, they will have little incentives to either improve the situation or not to harm society.

You’ve spent a lot of time in Africa, and are considered one of the worlds leading specialists on the subject. What’s the biggest misconception existing about African politics (or political economy)?

The biggest misconception which reigns on Africa is the issue of agency. Many westerners see Africa as a passive continent in trouble that will not move without the active implementation of western best practices. And with that in mind, they engage in analysis and developmental aid. Aid based on that way of thinking can be highly detrimental. I’ll give you an example. Foreign AIDS programs in Africa have the tendency to transfer existing resources away from local hospitals and doctors to internationally established and implemented programs. If in one place a hospital is running with local experts but 20 miles away an internationally funded hospital opens, the local hospital can close and doctors will be pushed out of the market. And in situations like that, engaging in aid is trying to solve one problem while causing another. We feel that we are the solution, they are beggars. That’s simply not true. I, for one, owe a lot to Africa – a whole career and loads of happiness – having added little to the over-all balance.

Robert H. Bates is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University. His research focuses on the political economy of development, particularly in Africa, and on violence and state failure. Bates has conducted field work in Zambia, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Columbia and Brazil. Bates currently serves as a researcher and resource person with the Africa Economic Research Consortium, Nairobi; as a member of the Political Instability Task Force of the United States Government; and as Professeur associé, School of Economics, University of Toulouse, where he has taught since 2000. Among his most recent books are Analytic Narratives with Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Barry Weingast. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, Prosperity and Violence, W.W. Norton, 2001, and When things fell apart (2008).

Related links

Bates’ Faculty Profile at Harvard

Read Bates’ Institutions and Development (2006, Journal of African Economies) here (pdf)
Read the Introduction of Bates' 2008 book When Things Fell Apart here (pdf)
Read Bates’ Ethnicity, Capital Formation, and Conflict here (pdf)

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