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It's time for all of us to reflect on the brutal reality of this country's colonization and understand the true meaning of reconciliation. The truths are difficult, but listening is the first step to stop the silencing of Indigenous voices. This Canada Day, we must hear the voices of those who were never allowed to speak for themselves.

Contributed by: Sango Mahanty, Jean-Christophe Diepart and Sarou Long In July 2021, a French court ruled against a group of Indigenous Bunong farmers from Mondulkiri in Northeastern Cambodia. Represented by French Laywer Fiodor Rilov, and with civil society support, the group accused the French Bolloré Group and their subsidiary company, Compagnie du Cambodge (controlled by … Read more Courting justice: when legal challenges to corporate land grabs go wrong

Here is a link to the latest draft of the Democratic Party Platform. Here is what I wrote about 2016 in Global Americans. The party is not paying much attention to Latin America, either then or now. Back then, I wrote that countries were just jumbled together. In 2020 they solved that problems by not mentioning countries at all. Mexico is not mentioned at all, even in the discussion of USMCA. I know, I know, the platform is just a basic document of values, with a lot of cooks making the soup. But as I noted last year, is it so hard to say we support the Colombia peace process and anti-corruption efforts in Central America, we value Mexico for everything, and the like?Below is the "Americas" section:Democrats believe the Western Hemisphere is America's strategic home base—a region bound together by common values, history, and vision of a more prosperous, democratic, and secure future. When the United States hosts the region's leaders at next year's Summit of the Americas—the first to be held here since the 1994 inaugural meeting in Miami—we will turn the page on the Trump Administration's denigration and extortion of our neighbors, and we will chart a new era of cooperation based on partnership and shared responsibility for the region we all call home. "Denigration and extortion." Strong, but accurate. I really don't like "strategic home base," which is militarist and imperialist. It's not our home--it's their home.Democrats will reaffirm the importance of North America to U.S. global economiccompetitiveness. We will ensure the USMCA lives up to its commitment to create prosperity for American workers, and we will strictly enforce compliance with its labor and environmental provisions. We will reinvigorate and build upon the North American Plan for Animal and Pandemic Influenza launched under the Obama-Biden Administration and work with our partners to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused the biggest economic decline in history across Latin America and the Caribbean. This is a funny paragraph, beginning with acknowledging Trump's passage of a new bill, then pivoting to an Obama policy as counterweight. The labor and worker language is like 2016, which also reflected Bernie Sanders' influence, but I feel like the wording is stronger now. Rather than coerce our neighbors into supporting cruel migration policies, we will work with our regional and international partners to address the root causes of migration—violence and insecurity, weak rule of law, lack of educational and economic opportunity, pervasive corruption, and environmental degradation. Rather than encourage climate denial and environmental devastation, we will rally the world to protect the Amazon from deforestation, protect Indigenous peoples, and help vulnerable nations in the Caribbean and Central America adapt to the impacts of climate change. And rather than imitate populist demagogues, we will link arms with our neighbors to realize our shared aspirations for the region's future. This is new and good. In 2016, Democrats framed immigration largely in domestic terms. Viewing it in structural terms, including climate, is a reality-based view, and very necessary.We will reject President Trump's failed Venezuela policy, which has only served to entrench Nicolás Maduro's dictatorial regime and exacerbate a human rights and humanitarian crisis. To rise to the occasion of the world's worst refugee crisis and worst humanitarian crisis outside a warzone in decades, the United States will mobilize its partners across the region and around the  world to meet the urgent needs of the people of Venezuela, and grant Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelans in the United States. Democrats believe that the best opportunity to rescue Venezuela's democracy is through smart pressure and effective diplomacy, not empty, bellicose threats untethered to realistic policy goals and motivated by domestic partisan objectives. There are no specifics and Biden has never had any beyond doing mostly what Trump is doing without the empty threats. TPS is clearly critical, so a good step forward and he really needs to contrast himself in Florida on that issue.Democrats will also move swiftly to reverse Trump Administration policies that haveundermined U.S. national interests and harmed the Cuban people and their families in the United States, including its efforts to curtail travel and remittances. Rather than strengthening the regime, we will promote human rights and people-to-people exchanges, and empower the Cuban people to write their own future. This is an easy one. Obama started it, and Biden will get back to that point and move forward again. Subscribe in a reader

Theory Talk #75: Tarak Barkawi on IR after the West, and why the best work in IR is often found at its marginsIn this Talk, Tarak Barkawi discusses the importance of the archive and real-world experiences, at a time of growing institutional constraints. He reflects on the growing rationalization and "schoolification" of the academy, a disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized within a university audit culture, and the future of IR in a post-COVID world. He also discusses IR's contorted relationship to the archive, and explore future sites of critical innovation and inquiry, including the value of knowledge production outside of the academy. PDF version of this TalkSo what is, or should be, according to you, the biggest challenge, or principal debate in critical social sciences and history?Right now, despite thinking about it, I don't have an answer to that question. Had you asked me five years ago, I would have said, without hesitation, Eurocentrism. There's a line in Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe where he remarks that Europe has already been provincialized by history, but we still needed to provincialize it intellectually in the social sciences. Both sides of this equation have intensified in recent years. Amid a pandemic, in the wreckage of neoliberalism, in the wake of financial crisis, the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the events of the Trump Presidency, and the return of the far right, the West feels fundamentally reduced in stature. The academy, meanwhile, has moved on from the postcolonial to the decolonial with its focus on alternative epistemologies, about which I am more ambivalent intellectually and politically. Western states and societies are powerful and rich, their freedoms attractive, and most of them will rebound. But what does it mean for the social sciences and other Western intellectual traditions which trace their heritage to the European Enlightenments that the West may no longer be 'the West', no longer the metropole of a global order more or less controlled by its leading states? What kind of implications does the disassembling of the West in world history have for social and political inquiry? I don't have an answer to that. Speaking more specifically about IR, we are dealing now with conservative appropriations of Eurocentrism, with the rise of other civilizational IRs (Chinese, European, Indian). These kinds of moves, like the decolonial one, foreground ultimately incommensurable systems of knowing and valuing, at best, and at worst are Eurocentrism with the signs reversed, usually to China. I do not think what we should be doing right now in the academy is having Chinese social sciences, Islamic social sciences, Indian social sciences, and so on. But that's definitely one way in which the collapse of the West is playing out intellectually. How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?By the time you get to my age you have a lot of debt, mostly to students, to old teachers and supervisors, and to colleagues and friends. University scholars tend not to have very exciting lives, so I don't have much to offer in the way of events. But I can give you an experience that I do keep revisiting when I reflect on the directions I've taken and the things I've been interested in. When I was in high school, I took a university course taught by Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers. As many will know, before he became involved in the Vietnam War, and later in opposing it, he worked on game theory and nuclear strategy. I grew up in Southern California, in Orange County, and there was a program that let you take courses at the University of California, Irvine. I took one on the history of the Roman Empire and then a pair of courses on nuclear weapons that culminated with one taught by Ellsberg himself. I actually had no idea who he was but the topic interested me. Nuclear war was in the air in the early 1980s. Activist graduate students taught the preparatory course. They were good teachers and I learned all about the history and politics of nuclear weapons. But I also came to realize that these teachers were trying to shape (what I would now call) my political subjectivity. Sometimes they were ham handed, like the old ball bearings in the tin can trick: turn the lights out in the room, and put one ball bearing in the can for each nuclear warhead in the world, in 1945 this many; in 1955 this many; and so on. In retrospect, that's where I got hooked on the idea of graduate school. I was aware that Ellsberg was regarded as an important personage. He taught in a large lecture hall. At every session, a kind of loyal corps of new and old activists turned out, many in some version of '60s attire. The father of a high school friend was desperate to get Ellsberg's autograph, and sent his son along with me to the lecture one night to get it. It was political instruction of the first order to figure out that this suburban dad had been a physics PhD at Berkley in the late '60s and early '70s, demonstrating against the Vietnam War. But now he worked for a major aerospace defense contractor. He had a hot tub in his backyard. Meanwhile, Ellsberg cancelled class one week because he'd been arrested demonstrating at a major arms fair in Los Angeles. "We stopped the arms race for a few hours," he told the class after. I schooled myself on who Ellsberg was and Vietnam, the Cold War, and much else came into view. Meanwhile, he gave a master class in nuclear weapons and foreign policy, cheekily naming his course after Kissinger's book, I later came to appreciate. I learned about RAND, the utility of madness for making nuclear threats, and how close we'd come to nuclear war since 1945. My high school had actually been built to double as a fallout shelter, at a time when civil defense was taken seriously as an aspect of a credible threat of second strike. It was low slung, stoutly built, with high iron fences that could be closed to create a cantonment. We were not far from Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station and a range of other likely targets. All of this sank in as I progressed in these courses. Then one day at a strip mall bookstore, I discovered Noam Chomsky's US foreign policy books and never looked back. At Cambridge, I caught the tail end of the old Centre of International Studies, originally started by an intelligence historian and explicitly multi-disciplinary. It had, in my time, historians, lawyers, area studies, development studies, political theory and history of thought, and IR scholars and political scientists. Boundaries certainly existed out there in the disciplines. But there weren't substantial institutional obstacles to thinking across them, while interdisciplinary environments gave you lots of local resources (i.e. colleagues and students) for thinking and reading creatively. What would a student need to become a kind of specialist in your kind of area or field or to understand the world in a global way? Lots of history, especially other peoples' histories; to experience what it's like to see the world from a different place than where you grew up, so that the foreign is not an abstraction to you. I think another route that can create very interesting scholars is to have a practitioner career first, in development, the military, a diplomatic corps, NGOs, whatever. Even only five years doing something like that not only teaches people how the world works, it is intellectually fecund, creative. People just out of operational posts are often full of ideas, and can access interesting resources for research, like professional networks. How, in your view, should IR responding to the shifting geopolitical landscape?  The fate I think we want to avoid is carrying on with what Stanley Hoffmann called the "American social science": the IR invented out of imperial crisis and world war by Anglo-American officials, foundations and thinkers. Very broadly speaking, and with variations, this was a new world combination of realism and positivism. This discipline was intended as the intellectual counterpart to the American-centered world order, designed, among other things, to disappear the question of race in the century of the global color line. The way it conceived the national/international world obscured how US world power worked in practice. That power operated in and through formally sovereign, independent states—an empire by invitation, in the somewhat rosy view of Geir Lundestad—trialed in Latin America and well suited to a decolonizing world. It was an anti-colonial imperium. Political science divided up this world between IR and comparative politics. This kind of IR is cortically connected to the American-centered world fading away before our eyes. It is a kind of zombie discipline where we teach students about world politics as if we were still sitting with the great power peacemakers of 1919 and 1944-45. It is still studying how to make states cooperate under a hegemon or how to make credible deterrence threats in various circumstances. Interestingly, I think one of the ways the collapse of US power is shaping the discipline was identified by Walt and Mearsheimer in their 2013 article on the decline of theory in IR. In the US especially but not only, IR is increasingly indistinguishable from political science as a universal positivist enterprise mostly interested in applying highly evolved, quantitative or experimental approaches to more or less minor questions. Go too far down this road and IR disappears as a distinct disciplinary space, it becomes just a subject matter, a site of empiricist inquiry. Instead, the best work in IR mostly occurs on the edges of the discipline. IR often serves as cover for diverse and interdisciplinary work on transboundary relations. Those relations fall outside the core objects of analysis of the main social science and humanities disciplines but are IR's distinctive focus. The mainstream, inter-paradigm discipline, for me, has never been a convincing social science of the international and is not something I teach or think much about these days. But the classical inheritances of the discipline help IR retain significant historical, philosophical and normative dimensions. Add in a pluralist disposition towards methodology, and IR can be a unique intellectual space capable of producing scholars and scholarship that operate across disciplines. The new materialism, or political ecology, is one area in which this is really happening right now. IR is also a receptive home for debating the questions thrown up by the decolonial turn. These are two big themes in contemporary intellectual life, in and beyond the academy. IR potentially offers distinct perspectives on them which can push debates forward in unexpected ways, in part because we retain a focus on the political and the state, which too easily drop out of sight in global turns in other disciplines. In exchange, topics like the new materialism and the decolonial offer IR the chance to connect with world politics in these new times, after the American century. In my view, and it is not one that I think is widely shared, IR should become the "studies" discipline that centers on the transboundary. How do we re-imagine IR as the interdisciplinary site for the study of transboundary relations as a distinct social and political space? That's a question of general interest in a global world, but one which few traditions of thought are as well-equipped to reflect on and push forward as we are.That's an interesting and forceful critique which also brings us back to a common thread throughout your work: questions of power and knowledge and specifically the relation between power and knowledge in IR and social science. I'm interested in exploring this point further, because so much of your critique has been centered on how profoundly Eurocentric IR is and as a product of Western power. Well, IR's development as a discipline has been closely tied to Western state power. It would seem that it has to change, given the shifts underway in the world. It's like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons - he's run off the cliff. His legs are still moving, but he hasn't dropped, yet. That said, there's no singularly determinate relation between power and the historical development of intellectual traditions. Who knows what kind of new ideas and re-imagining of IR's concepts we might see? As I say, I think one reflection of these changes is that we're already seeing North American IR start to fade into universal quantitative social science. As Hoffmann observed, part of IR's appeal was that the Americans were running the world, that's why you started a social science concerned with things like bipolarity and deterrence, and with analyzing the foreign policy of a great power and its interests and conflicts around the world. Nowadays the Americans are at a late Roman stage of imperial decline. Thinking from the command posts of US foreign policy doesn't look so attractive or convincing when Emperor Nero is running the show, or something altogether darker is waiting in the wings. IR is supposed to be in command of world politics, analyzing them from on high. But what I've seen over the course of my education and career is the way world politics commands IR. The end of the Cold War torpedoed many careers and projects; the 1990s created corps of scholars concerned with development, civil war and humanitarian intervention; in the 2000s, we produced terrorism experts (and critical terrorism studies) and counterinsurgency specialists and critics, along with many scholars concerned in one way or another with Islam. What I have always found fascinating, and deeply indicative, about IR is the relative absence until relatively recently of serious inquiry into power/knowledge relations or the sociology of knowledge. In 1998 when Ole Waever goes to look at some of these questions, he notes how little there was to work from then, before Oren, Vitalis, Guilhot and others published. It's an astounding observation. In area studies, in anthropology, in the history of science, in development studies, in all of these areas of inquiry so closely entangled with imperial and state power, there are long-running, well developed traditions of inquiry into power/knowledge relations. It's a well-recognized area of inquiry, not some fringe activity, and it's heavily empirical, primary sourced based, as well as interesting conceptually. In recent decades you've seen really significant work come out about the role of the Second World War in the development of game theory, and its continuing entwinement with the nuclear contest of the Cold War. I'm thinking here of S.M. Amadae, Paul Erickson, and Philip Mirowski among others. The knowledge forms the American social science used to study world politics were part and parcel of world politics, they were internal to histories of geopolitics rather than in command of them. Of course, for a social science that models itself on natural science, with methodologies that produce so-called objective knowledge, the idea that scientific knowledge itself is historical and power-ridden, well, you can't really make sense of that. You'd be put in the incoherent position of studying it objectively, as it were, with the same tools. IR arises from the terminal crisis of the British Empire; its political presuppositions and much else were fundamentally shaped by the worldwide anti-communist project of the US Cold War state; and it removed race as a term of inquiry into world politics during the century of the global color line. All this, and but for Hoffmann's essay, IR has no tradition of power/knowledge inquiry into its own house until recently? It's not credible intellectually. Anthropologists should be brought in to teach us how to do this kind of thing. You've been at the forefront of the notion of historical IR, and in investigating the relationship between history and theory – why is history important for IR?Well, I think I'd start with the question of what do we mean when we say history? For mainstream social science, it means facts in the past against which to test theories and explanations. For critical IR scholars, it usually means historicism, as that term is understood in social theory: social phenomena are historical, shaped by time and place. Class, state, race, nation, empire, war, these are all different in different contexts. While I think this is a very significant insight and one that I agree with, on its own it tends to imply that historical knowledge is available, that it can be found by reading historians. In fact, for both empiricism and historicism there is a presumption that you can pretty reliably find out what happened in the past. For me, this ignores a second kind of historicism, the historicism of history writing itself, the historiographical. The questions historians ask, how they inquire into them, the particular archives they use, the ways in which they construct meaning and significance in their narratives, the questions they don't ask, that about which they are silent, all of these, shape history writing, the history that we know about. The upshot is that the past is not stable; it keeps changing as these two meanings of historicism intertwine. We understand the Haitian revolution now, or the indigenous peoples of the Americas, entirely differently than we did just a few decades ago.That raises another twist to this problem. Many IR scholars access history through reading historians or through synthetic accounts; they encounter history by and large through secondary sources. One consequence is that they are often a generation or more behind university historians. Think of how Gaddis, for instance, remains a go to authority on the history of the Cold War in IR. In other disciplines, from the 1980s on, there was a historical turn that took scholars into the archives. Anthropologists and literary scholars used historians' tools to answers their own questions. The result was not just a bunch of history books, but entirely new readings of core questions. The classic example is the historical Shakespeare that Stephen Greenblatt found in the archives, rather than the one whose texts had been read by generations of students in English departments. My point here is that working in archives was conceptually, theoretically significant for these disciplines and the subjects they studied. For example, historical anthropology has given us new perspectives on imperialism. While there is some archival work in IR of course, especially in disciplinary history, it is not central to disciplinary debates and the purpose is usually theory testing in which the past appears as merely a bag of facts. In sum, when I say history and theory, I don't just mean thinking historically. I mean actually doing history, being an historian—which means archives—and in so doing becoming a better theorist. Could you expand on these points by telling us about your recent work on military history? I think that military history is particularly interesting because it is a site where war is reproduced and shaped. Military history participates in that which it purports only to study. Popular military histories shape the identities of publics. Staff college versions are about learning lessons and fighting war better the next time. People who grow up wanting to be soldiers often read about them in history books. So our historical knowledge of war, and war as a social and historical process, are wrapped up together. I hope some sense of the promise of power/knowledge studies for larger questions comes through here. I'm saying that part of what war is as a social phenomenon is history writing about it. It's in this kind of context that the fact that a great deal of military history is actually written by veterans, often of the very campaigns of which they write, becomes interesting. Battle produces its own historians. This is a tradition that goes back to European antiquity, soldiers and commanders returning to write histories, the histories, of the wars they fought in. So this question of veterans' history writing is in constitutive relations with warfare, and with the West and its nations and armies. My shorthand for the particular area of this I want to look into is what I call "White men's military histories". That is, Western military history in the modern era is racialized, not just about enemies but about the White identities constructed in and through it. And I want to look at the way this is done in campaigns against racialized others, particularly situations where defeats and reverses were inflicted on the Westerners. How were such events and experiences made sense of historically? How were they mediated in and through military history? I think defeats are particularly productive, incitements to discourse and sense making. To think about these questions, I want to look at the place of veterans in the production of military histories, as authors, sources, communities of interpretation. My sandbox is the tumultuous first year of the Korean War, where US forces suffered publically-evident reverses and risked being pushed into the sea. In a variety of ways, veterans shape military history, through their questions, their grievances, their struggles over reputation, their memories. This happens at many different sites and scales, including official and popular histories, and the networks of veterans behind them as well as other, independently published works. Over the course of veterans' lives, their war throws up questions and issues that become the subject of sometimes dueling and contradictory accounts. Through their history writing, they connect their war experience to Western traditions of battle historiography. They make their war speak to other wars. This is what military history is, and how it can come to produce and reproduce practices of war-making, at least in Anglo-American context. Of course, much of this history writing, like narrations of experience generally, reflects dominant ideologies, in this case discourses of the US Cold War in Asia. But counter-historians are also to be found among soldiers. The shocks and tragic absurdities of any given war produce research questions of their own. At risk of mixing metaphors, the veterans know where the skeletons are buried. They bear resentments and grievances about how their war was conducted that become research topics, and they often have the networks and wherewithal to produce informed and systematic accounts. So as well as reproducing hegemonic discourses, soldier historians are also interesting as a new critical resource for understanding war.This shouldn't be that surprising. In other areas of inquiry, amateur and practitioner scholars have often been a source of critical innovation. LGBTQ history starts outside the academy, among activists who turned their apartments into archives. Much of what we now call postcolonial scholarship also began outside the academy, among colonized intellectuals involved in anti-imperial struggles. Let me close this off by going back to the archive. There are really rich sources for this kind of project. Military historians of all kinds leave behind papers full of their research materials and correspondence. The commanders and others they wrote about often waged extended epistolary campaigns concerned with correcting and shaping the historical record. But more than this, by situating archival sources alongside what later became researched and published histories, what drops out and what goes in to military history comes into view. What is silenced, and what is given voice? We can then see how the violent and forlorn episodes of war are turned into narrated events with military meaning. What is the process by which war experience becomes military history?Given the interdisciplinary nature of your work, what field you place yourself in? And are there any problems have you encountered when writing and thinking across scholarly boundaries?In my head I live in a kind of idealized interdisciplinary war studies, and my field is the intersection of war and empire. Sort of Michael Howard meets Critical Theory and Frantz Fanon. This has given me a particular voice in critical IR broadly conceived, and a distinctive place from which to engage the discipline. The mostly UK departments I've been in have been broadly hospitable places in practice for interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching, so long as you published rather than perished. Of course, interdisciplinary is a complicated word. It is one thing to be multi-disciplinary, to publish in the core journals of more than one discipline and to be recognized and read by scholars in more than one discipline. But work that falls between disciplinary centers, which takes up questions and offers answers recognized centrally by no discipline, that's something harder to deal with. I thought after Soldiers of Empire won prizes in two disciplines that I'd have an easier time getting funding for the project I described earlier in the interview. But I've gotten nowhere, despite years of applications to a variety of US, UK, and European funders. Of course, this may be because it is a bad project! My point, though, is that disciplines necessarily, and even rightly, privilege work that speaks to central questions; that's the work that naturally takes on significance in disciplinary contexts, as in many grant or scholarship panels. I think another point here is the nature of the times. Understandably, no one is particularly interested right now in White men's military histories. What I think has really empowered disciplines during my time in the UK academy has been the intersection with audit culture and university management. Repeated waves of rationalization have washed over the UK academy, which have emphasized discipline as a unit of measurement and management even as departments themselves were often "schoolified" into more or less odd combinations of disciplines. Schoolification helped to break down old solidarities and identities, while audit culture needed something on which to base its measures. The great victory of neoliberalism over the academy is evident in the way it is just accepted now that performance has to be assessed by various public criteria. This is where top disciplinary journals enter the picture, as unquestionable (and quantifiable) indicators of excellence. Interdisciplinary journals don't have the same recognition, constituency, or obvious significance. To put it in IR terms, Environment and Planning D or Comparative Studies in Society and History, to take two top journals that interdisciplinary IR types publish in, will never have the same weight as, say, ISQ or APSR. That that seems natural is an indicator of change—when I started, RIS—traditionally welcoming of interdisciplinary scholarship—was seen as just as good a place to publish as any US journal. Now RIS is perceived as merely a "national" journal while ISQ and APSR are "international" or world-class. This kind of thing has consequences for careers and the make-up of departments. What I'm drawing attention to is not so much an intellectual or academic debate; scholars always disagree on what good scholarship is, which is how it is supposed to be. It is rather the combination of discipline with the suffocating culture of petty management that pervades so much of British life. Get your disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized in an audit culture environment, and you can really expand. For example, the professionalization of methods training in the UK has worked as a kind of Trojan Horse for quantitative and positivist approaches within disciplines. In IR, in the potted geographic lingo we use, that has meant more US style work. Disappearing is the idea of IR as an "inter-discipline," where departments have multi-disciplinary identities like I described above. The US idea that IR is part of political science is much more the common sense now than it was in the UK. Another dimension of the eclipse of interdisciplinary IR has been the rise of quantitative European political science, boosted by large, multiyear grants from the ERC and national research councils. It's pretty crazy, strategically speaking, for the UK to establish a civilizational scale where you're always behind the US or its European counterparts. You'll never do North American IR as well as the North Americans do, especially given the disparity in resources. You'll always be trending second or third tier. The British do like to beat themselves up. Meanwhile, making US political science journals the practical standard for "international excellence" threatens to make the environment toxic for the very scholarship that has made British IR distinctive and attractive globally. The upshot of that will be another wave of émigré scholars, which the British academy's crises and reform initiatives produce from time to time. Think of the generation of UK IR scholars who decamped to Australia, an academy poised to prosper in the post-covid world (if the government there can get its vaccination program on track) and a major site right now of really innovative IR scholarship. To return to what you mentioned earlier regarding the hesitancy to go to the archives, this is also mirrored in a hesitancy to do serious ethnography, I think as well. Or there's this "doing ethnography" that involves a three-day field trip. This kind of sweet-shop 'pick and mix' has come to characterize some methodologies, because of these constraints that you highlight…A lot of what I'm talking about has happened within universities, it's not externally imposed or a direct consequence of the various government-run assessment exercises. Academics, eagerly assisted by university managers, have done a lot of this to themselves and their students. The implications can be far reaching for the kind of scholarship that departments foster, from PhDs on up. More and more of the UK PhD is taken up with research methods courses, largely oriented around positivism even if they have critical components. Already this gives a directionality to ideas. The advantage of the traditional UK PhD—working on your own with a supervisor to produce a piece of research—has been intellectual freedom, even when the supervisor wasn't doing their job properly. It's not great, but the possibility for creative, innovative, even field changing scholarship was retained. PhD students weren't disciplined, so to speak. What happens now is that PhD students are subject to a very strict four year deadline, often only partially funded, their universities caring mainly about timely completion not placement and preparation for a scholarly career, a classic case of the measurement displacing the substantive value. The formal coursework they get is methods driven. You can supervise interdisciplinary PhD research in this kind of environment, but it's not easy and poses real risks and creates myriad obstacles for the student. A strange consequence of this, as many of my master's students will tell you, is that I often advise them to consider US PhDs, just in other disciplines. That way, they get the benefit of rigorous PhD level coursework beyond methods. They can do so in disciplines like history or anthropology that are currently receptive both to the critical and the transnational/transboundary. That is not a great outcome for UK IR, even if it may be for critically-minded students. Outside of a very few institutions and scattered individuals, US political science, of course, has largely cleansed itself of the critical and alternative approaches that had started to flower in the glasnost era of the 1990s. That is not something we should be seeking to emulate in the UK.So yes, there's much to say here, about how the four year PhD has materially shaped scholarship in the UK. There is generally very little funding for field work. Universities worried about liability have put all kinds of obstacles in the way of students trying to get to field work sites. Requirements like insisting that students be in residence for their fourth year in order to write up and submit on time further limit the possibilities for field work. The upshot is to make the PhD dissertation more a library exercise or to favor the kind of quantitative, data science work that fits more easily into these time constraints and structures. Again, quite obviously, power sculpts knowledge. It becomes simply impossible, within the PhD, to do the kinds of things associated with serious qualitative scholarship, like learn languages, spend long time periods in field sites and to visit them more than once, to develop real networks there. Over time this shapes the academy, often in unintended ways. I think this is one of the reasons that IR in the UK has been so theoretic in character—what else can people do but read books, think and write in this kind of environment? As I say, the other kind of thing they can do is quantitative work, which takes us right back to the fate Walt and Mearsheimer sensed befalling IR as political science. Watch for IR and Data Science joint degrees as the next step in this evolution. Political Science in the US starts teaching methods at the freshman level. They get them young. We have discussed the rather grim state of affairs for the future of critical social science scholarship, at least in the UK and US. To conclude – what prospects for hope in the future are there?Well, if I had a public relations consultant pack, this is the point at which it would advise talking about children and the power of science to save us. I think the environment for universities, political, financial, and otherwise may get considerably more difficult. Little is untouchable in Western public life right now, it is only a question of when and in what ways they will come for us. The nationalist and far-right turns in Western politics feed off transgressing boundaries. There's no reason to suspect universities will be immune from this, and they haven't been. In the UK, as a consequence of Brexit, we are having to nationalise, and de-European-ise our scholarships and admissions processes. We are administratively enacting the surrender of cosmopolitan achievements in world politics and in academic life. This is not a plot but in no small measure the outcome of democratic will, registered in the large majority Boris Johnson's Conservatives won at the last general election. It will have far reaching consequences for UK university life. This is all pretty scary if you think, as I do, that we are nearer the beginning then the end of the rise of the right. Covid will supercharge some of these processes of de-globalization. I can already see an unholy alliance forming of university managers and introvert academics who will want to keep in place various dimensions of the online academic life that has taken shape since spring 2020. Often this will be justified by reference to environmental concerns and by the increased, if degraded, access that online events make possible. We are going to have a serious fight on our hands to retain our travel budgets at anywhere near pre-pandemic levels. I'm hoping that this generation of students, subjected to online education, will become warriors for in-person teaching. All of this said, it's hard to imagine a more interesting time to be teaching, thinking and writing about world politics. Politics quite evidently retains its capacity to turn the world upside down. Had you told US citizens where they would be on January 6th, 2021 in 2016, they would have called you alarmist if not outlandish. I think we're in for more moments like that. Tarak Barkawi is a professor of International Relations at LSE. He uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire. His most recent book, Soldiers of Empire, examined the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War, reconceiving Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms. Currently, he is working on the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior. This new project explores soldiers' history writing as a site for war's constitutive presence in society and politics.PDF version of this Talk

Karen Litfin on Gaia Theory, Global Ecovillages, and Embedding IR in the Earth System




This is the third in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich 






Many debates in International Relations concern struggles regarding what should be the autonomous limits and focus of the discipline itself. However, increasing environmental and climate concerns challenge the self-contained nature of IR on discrete political phenomena, because what IR considers it's exogenous context is threatening to destabilize the premises of the content of international political practice itself. While such concerns often lead to a securitization and politicization of the environment and climate in IR, some scholars argue we should work towards the exact opposite. In this Talk, Karen Litfin—among others—elaborates on the kind of theory in which IR is embedded in, rather than applied to, natural systems; discusses examples of social arrangements that try to translate that theoretical insight into practice; and engages with questions of secularism and mysticism that irrevocably accompany those efforts.






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 fact that we can today truly speak of something of a global economy, the central problem now is to formulate the political institutions that are commensurate to these globalized economic institutions. We have far to go on that project. It also means doing so within the carrying capacity of the earth—that is, politically configuring that global economy in such a way that it doesn't exhaust ecological resources. So I would say that the challenge, in terms of actual politics, is to find those institutions.



The challenge for the discipline of International Relations is to do the necessary thinking to facilitate that institutional transition, but few IR scholars even acknowledge that political institutions must attend to the carrying capacity of the earth. In general, the discipline of International Relations, Political Science and even most of social sciences more generally behave as if there are no natural constraints to our behavior. Yet our freedom to even be able to theorize about the international system is completely dependent upon a vast web of life, other people growing our food, and a whole technological infrastructure that we had nothing to do with creating. International Relations talks a lot about interdependence, but do we really take it seriously?





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



I've always been interested in science and technology. As an undergraduate, I studied physics and astronomy, but I didn't finish those majors because I realized, that if I graduated with those degrees I would most likely be working indirectly or directly for the military. I got politicized and I began to see that the political agenda drives the scientific agenda. This was in the 1970s and it was possible at that time that we were going to have an all-out nuclear war. I did not want to be a part of that.



I began to see that there is a dialectical relationship between science and politics. Because science facilitates the technological changes, which make the basic backdrop for politics, it's very important. For instance, the defense department was funding DARPA, which led—without them fathoming that at the time—to the development of the Internet—now a key site where global politics plays out.



Science also provides metaphors through which we understand politics. I did my Masters thesis on the mechanistic worldview and the devitalization of nature in the 17th century—that is, taking living nature out of our systematic theorizing. While others had written on this, I traced it back to the ancient Greek philosophy. A reductionist and mechanistic worldview underpins a lot of IR theory, as well most of our political institutions. We need to really start questioning that. Another way this plays out is that the notion of the global really had a huge jump when we got the image of Earth fromspace. The idea of Earth Day was really closely aligned to the fact that the image of the earth from space just had come out. Gaia Theory came about because James Lovelock was looking for signs of life on Mars. We were interested in extra-planetary life, but weren't looking at our own system or planet. So basically it turned all that science back on the Earth and said 'Oh my Gosh, we do have this kind of atmosphere that has the telltale science of life in it', which tells us that life is hoping to create the atmosphere. Then to have the human mind to conceptualize that is really huge. The idea that we are the Earth becoming conscious of itself is basically what science is telling us. These monitoring systems are one means by which we have the possibility of becoming conscious of that fact.



In terms of personal trajectory, when I started teaching International Relations back in the early 1990s, I started realizing that petroleum holds the whole thing together, the whole global system was held together by petroleum. (You could also say fossil fuels, but coal and natural gas don't power that much transnationally; it's really the petroleum.) Yet hardly anybody in IR talks seriously about petroleum—or energy or biodiversity or soil or the atmosphere. That's what I mean about getting to the material basis. But having said that, I think how we interact with the material basis is a reflection of our consciousness. So I'm not a material reductionist. Rather, I'm looking for a wholeness that understands our approach to material reality as being a reflection of our consciousness.



So this was why I have become interested in biological metaphors. I still think the leaning edge of human thought is understanding human systems as living systems. From this vantage point, we can begin to reshape our institutions in ways that mimic, sustain, and regenerate living systems. There's a long history of natural law and I don't exactly put myself in that camp, but I think there are ways that we need to understand ourselves as thoroughly embedded in natural systems and then move consciously from that place.





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



To my mind, these are very different questions because, at least at many universities, becoming an IR specialist often entails ignoring some fundamental global realities. For one, even though most of humanity lives in so-called developing countries, most IR theory pays attention only to the Global North. Likewise, IR is fairly blind to the fact that the lifestyles of the Global North, if globalized, would require between three and six Earths, depending upon whether you are looking at Europeans or North Americans. Again, there is only one Earth! Fortunately, an important subfield has emerged with IR—global environmental politics—that is helping to rectify the situation.



The question I would prefer to answer is: what would a student need to know in order to understand the most pressing challenges facing the world system? To this, I would advise three things. The first would be to dive deeply into a broad and critical reading of the history of modernity, including the interpenetrating scientific, political, commercial, theological and industrial revolutions that characterize the modern era. The second would be to learn about the primary international institutions (the WTO, World Bank, IMF, EU, UN Security Council, etc.), and ask what is working, what isn't, and why? The third would be to do all of this learning while simultaneously learning to think systemically. Take at least one good course on systems theory; one that specifically offers a strong grounding in living systems, and start making connections. Why, for instance, do 'ecology' and 'economics' share the same root (oikos, Greek for household)? What would it mean to consider the international system as a living system and a subset of the Earth system? If we think this world system that we've created of a globalized economy and rudimentary international law is not a part of a living system, we are living in a big delusion. So to actually understand how living systems function, we need the literature on system theory that of course has been used in biology and ecology, but has also been applied a lot in the business world and organizational development. I think it's making its way into IR.





The world is full of technologies and technological systems (and getting more so each day). Could you elaborate on how this is relevant for IR?



I think that's a huge gap: IR doesn't pay nearly enough attention to technological systems—and when they do, it's generally from an uncritical and mechanical perspective. Even though much of the constructivist critique of liberal institutionalism is that the latter is overly materialistic, it actually isn't as if institutionalists talk about economics as if that were a material reality. Economics is a secondary human system overlaid on, but abstracted from, material systems. I think that IR needs to get really serious about understanding the actual material basis for politics. Climate change will probably be the issue that drives that.



So what kinds of technologies and institutions are we going to have to facilitate a global civilization? Now that's a worthwhile question! As I indicated, we now have a more or less globalized economy, but we don't have a global polis; we don't have the institutions that are commensurate to the economy that we have got. So the question is: can we sustain current civilization on the energy budget that is available to us and not wreck the climate?



Technological systems are driven by energy; energy is the master resource. Some energy analysts say that in order to have a global civilization, we need to have an energy return on energy investments of something like 5 to 1—meaning, for instance, that for each barrel of oil we put into getting more oil, we need to get five back. Right now petroleum is getting—depending on where you find it and how it's getting to you—somewhere between 15 and 25 to 1. That's the Middle East. It used to be 100 to 1 at the beginning of the 19th century. And now we are getting, say, 20:1. I've seen analyses of tar sands that put that energy source at somewhere between 3 and 5 to 1. Solar panels, if they work well, they are maybe getting 5:1. So the trend is worsening and we are starting to push that envelope of 5:1 energy return on investment. And if we exploit some of the new unconventional hydrocarbons—like fracking and, worse, methane hydrates—to their maximum potential, we'll fry the planet.



My question is how we can leverage existing technological, economic, financial and political resources to sustain a global civilization. I dearly wish more people were putting their attention on that question. The underlying assumption for most people is that business as usual can continue. Maybe, but not for long.



I'd like to throw in one little term coined by Stephen Quilley, an environmental sociologist: 'low energy cosmopolitanism' (read the paper here). I think this is a huge challenge for us. If it's possible to have a global civilization on the energy budget that we have available, it's going to be some form of a low energy cosmopolitanism, where we make some very conscious choices about what we are going to globalize. For instance, Germany probably wouldn't be importing grapes from Africa and none of us would be going on luxury vacations. We would be making a lot of conscious choices, but if we want to have a global civilization we have to be globalizing something, so what is it that we are globalizing?





How do you see the question of technological determinism when studying technologies?



This is really important to note, because if you just look at human systems as living systems there can be a kind of materialistic reductionism there. People who think like William Connolly, the new materialism understands that we should not be materialistic reductionists and that there is this wildcard of human consciousness. The fact of the matter is, we can assemble all the data we want but we don't know where we are going. But what we do know is that we've created a tremendously complex and complicated world that nobody can actually understand!



I think we need to address that question in a very specific way with respect of specific technologies, but if we stick to one example—satellites—I think the technologies do have certain properties embedded in them. I have written a feminist theoretical critique of earth observing satellites, where I argued that this kind of gaze from space actually does downplay or preclude certain perspectives. But as I thought about it more deeply, I saw very concretely that a lot of people are using those technologies to do what they want—not what the centralized political and scientific institutions that gave rise to the satellites wanted. So I would say the wildcard here is consciousness and human inventiveness, because that's what will shape how people deploy the technologies once there are on the ground.



For example, satellites were devised for spying and are certainly still being used for spying, but they are being used for so much else, such as Google Maps. I think some people might have been able to foresee that kind of development, but most of us didn't have a clue that this sort of thing could come about. Or that you could have indigenous people mapping their traditional lands in order to make land rights claims. So the wildcard really is human consciousness and that's why nothing really is deterministic. The greater the complexity in a living system, the more surprising its emergent properties. Seven billion human brains linked together in global technological and ecological systems are bound to yield surprises!





You indicated that you use biology and living systems as a reservoir for metaphors. Could you elaborate on that?



If I speak about living systems I usually do so through work called Gaia Theory. Looking through the lens of Gaia Theory, we would first understand that we exist within certain spheres such as biosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere. We have taken geological time and inserted it into human time by digging up fossil fuels. As a consequence, we have kind of checkmated ourselves and are now forced into having to think in geological terms. We have to start thinking in geological time scales, which was never the case before. If we are going to find a way of inhabiting this planet sustainably, particularly if we are going to have anything approaching a global civilization, we have to understand that we live within a living system and then go about the rather daunting but exciting project of developing international law and institutions that reflect that reality.



There is a whole subfield of earth system governance in which Earth system scientists, IR theorists and international legal experts are coming together to think through these questions. The literature on earth system governance starts from the premise that the Earth is a living system and draws heavily on earth system science, which draws heavily from Gaia theory. You cannot separate atmosphere, oceans, lithosphere, and biosphere: they are all intertwined as one big living system—and now humanity is functioning as a geophysical force on a planetary scale. That's the meaning of the Anthropocene, and it will require an entirely new way of going about politics and economics.



So how can we bring the concept of Gaia Theory into practical reality? Besides the emerging field of Earth system governance, we can also do this in a very personal way by beginning to really internalize what it means being a human being at this time. A few years back, I came to the point where I decided that I did not want to theorize about anything I could not live. That turned out to be a huge challenge. After I wrote the 'integral politics' piece (see links below)—and I really do love that piece!—I saw that I couldn't fully live it. It was so big. For me, one of the most important implications of Gaia Theory is that we are the Earth becoming aware of itself. That's a huge implication. If you merely think of it conceptually, it is wonderful mind candy; but if you actually take it to the heart and try to live it, it changes your life. I challenged myself to do this and, at some point, it occurred to me that there must be other people who have traveled farther down that road than I had—in other words, people who had radically changed their lives to reflect their growing awareness that human beings are the Earth becoming conscious of itself. So I found myself traveling around the world to ecovillages which, for me, helped to tie it all together. Why is somebody who's teaching international environmental law and politics wandering around the world visiting these little tiny micro-communities? Because these people are taking the radical implications of Gaia Theory to heart (even if they've never read about it) and collectively changing their material, economic and social lives. That's why I spent a year on the road living in ecovillages. It's a strange thing to be an IR theorist who doesn't want to theorize about anything that she can't live!





Bringing up the issue of how to live your research, could you elaborate on what kind of outlook is necessary to live in accordance to Gaia Theory?



So this leads to the importance of humility for me. The value of humility is that it comes naturally as a consequence of understanding. You do not have to value it in advance; it comes automatically from understanding ourselves as part of this larger living system. In my experience at least, as soon as you grasp that, you automatically have an enormous sense of humility and gratitude. Those two qualities just spontaneously arise from truly grasping that reality. Going back to ecovillages, I asked myself who is living in ways that can actually work for the long run. The result became the eponymous book. I wanted to see collective efforts and particularly larger communities that were generally at least a hundred people, because you can do a lot more collectively, than you can on your own. Some of these communities are reducing their ecological footprint radically. In some cases, we are talking about per capita reductions in material consumption and waste production of 80-90% as compared to their home country averages.



This is very big news—especially given that these communities are still tied to the larger system. They are not tiny isolated enclaves. For instance, they're still using the mass transit of the larger society; most of them have Wi-Fi and high-speed Internet. They're not living in caves and many of them are very much globally engaged. On a material level, they're much closer to living within the Earth's carrying capacity. So in that way, I was very interested in just seeing what are their physical systems. But I began to see that their physical systems were only made possible because of the degree of trust and reciprocity that they have created.



That entails doing a lot of personal work. Diana Leafe-Christian, who has written a number of books on communities, says that 'community life is the longest and most expensive personal growth workshop you'll ever take'. It's true! If you're willing to do the personal work and hang in there through the difficult times and conflicts, you can develop the kind of self that's willing to do some very deep sharing. I would add, though, that this level of sharing is done best when it is respectful of the individualism that we have developed. I don't think that communities should be running roughshod over individualism. There needs to be some balance of privacy and communal life. The communities that work well have figured out a way to do this. To my mind, the communities that work really well are the ones who are working on developing collective forms of consciousness. Which means actually I think going beyond the separative rational mind: it doesn't mean demeaning those qualities, it means using them, but using them in the service of something larger. As I said earlier, progressive change entails transcending and including. Individualism, for all its negative consequences, is a genuine historical achievement.



And I would say on a very practical level, one of the ways that they reduce their footprint is by withdrawing to some extent from the global economy. Having very low consumption and being fairly energy efficient and self-reliant, reliance on food self-sufficiency, but withdrawing from global society. To me, they are answering the question I raised earlier: What would a low-energy cosmopolitanism look like? And they are doing this not just because they consume less and live more simply but because by and large ecovillagers actually have a cosmopolitan identity. They might be growing their own food and composting their shit, but they're also tied into the global system. They're actively engaged in the Internet, sometimes attending global conferences and many of them are politically active on issues such as genetically modified organisms and nuclear waste disposal and human rights.



They are little nodes of positive examples, but they're very small. In fact, hardly anybody lives in an ecovillage, which is why the last chapter of my book is called 'Scaling it up'. I basically look at the underlying principles of ecovillages and talk about how these principles could be scaled up to the level of cities, regions, national government and international norms. I realize this is a big stretch, but I felt that as an International Relations scholar, I at least need to try it. The important misconception you run into that moment is the idea that sustainability needs to be expensive—the idea that somehow we can consume our way into sustainability. Actually, the most sustainable form of consumption is no consumption! Yet this is not what all ecovillages do. There is one community that I visited in up-state New York, in Ithaca, this is the same city that Cornell University is in, where two thirds of the residents have masters degrees or PhDs and their homes are worth more than the average in the area. They have a pretty middle class lifestyle, yet their average ecological footprint is about half the American norm. So they're not sustainable, but they are definitely moving in the right direction. They hired architects and have nice homes, which is a very different approach than that of most rural ecovillages.



In the Global North, the smallest footprints that I saw tended to be in the rural off-grid ecovillages that were more or less self-sufficient in food, energy, and water. In some of these communities, residents were living on as little as 25% of their average national incomes. This is impressive because it tells us that people in affluent countries can live well on far less money and with far less environmental damage than is considered normal in those countries.



Yet the fact of the matter is that most people today live in cities, so it was important for me to also look at urban ecovillages. Los Angeles Ecovillage, for instance, has a very small footprint because it is high-density and automobile use is discouraged. If you lower your transportation footprint by not driving or sharing vehicles, and if you grow your own food or rely upon locally produced food and have and passive solar construction and renewable energy for your buildings, you can dramatically reduce your energy consumption. You can have a much smaller footprint and still have a very comfortable life. People think that you need money in order to live. It seems that we need money in order to live, but actually what we need is food and shelter and transportation and relationships. So if you figure out ways of getting those things without money, you've made a huge step to getting out of the global economy. In a nutshell, that's what ecovillages are doing.





So are ecovillages all the same across the globe? Is it a new 'social form' emerging?



It is different in the developing countries and in the affluent countries, and I think it's important to clarify that at the outset. I visited a number of ecovillages and ecovillage networks in both developing countries and affluent countries. In the latter, there is a greater possibility for what I consider 'post-individualist' that both transcends and includes individualism. A very simple 'post-individualistic' approach to property rights, for instance, would be co-housing, where the land is owned in common and people own their own homes. But their private homes would be a lot smaller because so many amenities are shared. The common house would have a community kitchen, so that, depending upon how much people are willing to share, private kitchens can be very small. If there's a collectively owned guest space, then you don't need a guest room in your house. And if you do a lot of your socializing together, then you can do that in the common house. So your own house could be quite small but you would still have access to all the comforts of a private existence and more. The more people are willing to share, the more will be collectively owned. And that really does require trust, because it's a big problem if the relationships blow up and you have your finances entangled with those people! This is just one example of how property rights can coexist with the softening of boundaries between individuals.



The flipside of this is occurring in developing countries, where the post-individualistic arrangement that I've been making doesn't really apply. And this is important because that's where most people in the world live. There you have cultures where people already have much more of a collective orientation. So we really need to pay attention to what's happening there. Actually, in many cases, their developmental task is to become more individuals. And the question is: how do they become more highly-individualized rather than being subsumed by traditional moral codes—how do they that without over-consuming. In the west, we had a fossil fuel subsidy that enabled us to become highly individualized, as I said before, the only reason we can be having this interview is because somebody else is growing our food.



In developing countries, the real task is to find a way for people to become more individualistic without over consuming. And so this is why I was impressed by the model I saw in Sarvodaya, a Sri Lankan participatory development network that belongs to the Global Ecovillage Network. There, fifteen thousand villages are trying to apply ecovillage principles to create what they call a "no-poverty/no-affluence society." Their programs in micro-finance and women's literacy, for instance, give villagers—especially women—an incentive to stay in the village because they have a livelihood. And when people stay in their villages, they tend to live a lot more sustainably. As the women becoming literate, they begin making choices for themselves and therefore becoming more individualized. So it's a way of hopefully leap-frogging urbanization in order to sustain rural village life.



I should say that you can apply these principles anywhere you live, in cities as well as rural areas. I visited quite a few ecovillages in cities. One of the most important things that the Global Ecovillage Network is doing is training people, wherever they live, to apply ecovillage principles in their urban neighborhoods or wherever they find themselves. There have been some amazing projects coming up in the Brazilian favelas and in China. GEN has developed a course called 'Gaia Education' that's being offered all over the world and especially in developing countries. There's now a Global Ecovillage Network for Africa. There are basic principles of sustainability that, if you live in an ecovillage, you can apply more intentionally, but they are applicable everywhere.





In a way, 'Gaia theory' sounds very spiritual—and for that reason the Gaia concept was initially very much opposed by many physicists and climate scientists. In a way, Gaia theory entails a critique of modernist secularism and faith in technology; how do you see that in your work?



I have mentioned the critique of mechanization in the early modern era, but in fact the early modern scientists, such as Newton, were all looking for God. Now many of the hard sciences are moving in the direction of mysticism—I would speak of mysticism rather than spirituality—but it's not a mysticism that is simply a projection of the human psyche onto the cosmos; rather, it is empirically derived. I think that's a kind of postmodern development that would have been impossible in the pre-modern era. That's what I was saying about transcending and including, that the ideas that we have of who we are in the cosmos are so different as a consequence of modern science. We can transcend those ideas but also include them. From the Big Bang and the evolution of species, we came out of all of that! And implicit within this fact, if you take it deeper, is that there is a secret oneness to it all. I think that the lessons we have to learn politically and economically now are about interdependence. But if you take interdependence to its depths, it too implies a secret oneness. Most importantly for the current evolutionary crisis: that oneness is embedded in our consciousness and we can access that. That is the reason why I don't want to theorize about anything that I can't live; I'm working at that level as well.



It's interesting, because that also has implications for my teaching. I teach in a fairly direct way when I have living bodies and inquiring minds right in front of me and can engage them at a personal level. I give them my big picture view of politics as a subset of living systems and also being a kind of living system. I get them to inhabit that in themselves through doing contemplative and reflective exercises in the classroom. For instance, I'm teaching a class called political ecology of the world food system and we talked about the globalization of different food commodities and where chocolate comes from for instance, where it originally came from, who processes it, how much do the farmers get from all of that. I brought in raw cacao nibs, which most of the students had never tasted before. We talked about where these came from and how expensive they were even though cacao is not processed, because raw cacao is a something of a delicacy. Then I gave them this very highly processed chocolate without sugar and with alternative sweeteners in it. I invited them to really be present to tasting each of these things as I talked about them and I left some significant gaps of silence, they could actually be present to experience of themselves inhabiting the living system and now being the beneficiary of a world food system. How did we come to have cacao from West Africa and stevia from Paraguay in our mouths? What are sociopolitical and biotic networks that have made this possible? And can we allow ourselves to truly experience what it means to be the beneficiary of these living systems? And what of our own as living system? When I am in the classroom it is actually quite easy to teach what I call person/planet politics. I never teach anything as if it is just 'out there'. Whenever I teach anything, I want the students to inhabit it in their bodies, in their experience. And I try to do that as best as I can by living what I teach as best I can.



It is a little embarrassing, but I don't know how all of this applies to IR; I am just trying to do it as best I can in my own life, as it is presented to me. And I write about it and I publish things—I have a piece coming out on localism that basically makes the case for what I call organic globalism, which is a globalization that is premised upon the earth as a living system and international institutions being designed very consciously on that basis. I don't quite know what it looks like but I have a sense of its rightness. To be honest with you, I am better with that in the classroom that I am at the level of large-scale institutions. Because I am beginning to inhabit this in my own being and I can communicate it to students. Maybe the next challenge is to be able to communicate it at a larger level.





So isn't there a tension between living sustainably and participating in a globalized world that is hard-wired in terms of technology?



Consciousness does not at all preclude technology. For example, I think us having this dialogue is on some level contributing to a certain kind of consciousness and it's completely facilitated by technology. Without Skype we wouldn't be having this conversation. What's helpful to me, about what I call E2C2 (ecology, economics, community and consciousness) is that these are four lenses through which to view any phenomenon—and that includes technology. For instance, we can view our Skype conversation through the lens of ecology in terms of the amount of energy that's used. Economically, we might consider what is being produced and what its value is. It's probably a pretty good economic deal since you and I are virtually paying nothing for it! So economically it's a good deal. In terms of the communitarian lens, we are developing a dialogue that will hopefully be in a relational field with many other people, perhaps thereby also contributing to a certain growth of consciousness.



E2C2 offers four lenses through which we can look at technology; they are not mutually exclusive. For me, the question is: to what extent are our technologies beneficial in terms of each of the lenses. Denis Hayes, the guy who started Earth Day, said the basic principle of sustainability is that you leave your molecules at home and export your photons. This brings us back to the concept of low energy cosmopolitanism. It's a huge question: what are we going to globalize? If we are going to have a global civilization we need to have global communication. The Internet is a tremendous achievement in that regard, and could to function as a kind of global brain, though its roots are in its military applications and today it is primarily dominated by commerce. (And I understand that pornography is a big part of it as well.) Despite its limitations, the Internet provides an infrastructure that could enable us to be in communication globally, which is very important if you want to develop a global consciousness and a global civilization. But we need to understand that our technologies must operate within the limits of the Earth system. In other words, technologies—like all human systems—are also living systems.





Last question. So how can we relate this back to IR?



I think one of the ways this is happening is that some pockets of IR are actually returning to foundational concepts. For instance, Alexander Wendt (Theory Talk #3) has started this Journal International Theory. People are seriously looking at the bigger and deeper questions, so uniting more with political theorists for instance. This idea that we are coming up against real limits is a very frightening idea from the perspective of a certain idea of freedom rooted in liberal politics. We really need to rethink the meaning of freedom in an era of limits. My own feeling is that human beings are kind of hard-wired towards unlimitedness—but the world is now pressing us to interrogate this impulse. We don't do well with limits. But the fact of the matter is, we are not evolutionarily adapted to abundance, we don't even know what to do with abundance. We are squandering resources in the most absurd ways. So we really need to rethink what freedom is in a world of limits.



It's not all together a bad thing that we are facing these limits. Those of us who have at least the privilege of being well fed and reasonably comfortable, can actually turn our attention to this question of consciousness. Because this question of 'what is freedom' is a problem of human consciousness. Rather than turning our desire towards mastery—I think as human beings we have an innate desire towards mastery – rather than turning that desire onto the external world, we've pretty well mastered it; except turns out that we live in it so it's coming back to bite us and we are facing huge climate change most likely. When we shift the focus of this desire for mastery to our own psyches, then lots of things open up. And I don't think only people who live in industrialized countries need to do this or are doing this. One of the things I saw in my ecovillage book is that people living in developing countries are also quite aware of it and are doing it at the places they live as well. There is a global awakening, at least in small pockets, to the fact that we live within a limited Earth system and a serious inquiry into what it means to be a human being at this juncture between modernity and the Anthropocene.





Karen Litfin (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 1992) is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. She specializes in global environmental politics, with core interests in green theory, the science/policy interface, and what she calls "person/planet politics." Her first book, Ozone Discourses: Science and Politics in International Environmental Cooperation (Columbia University Press, 1994), looks at the discursive framing of science in the ozone treaties. Her second book, The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics (MIT Press, 1998), explores how state sovereignty is being reconfigured as a consequence of global environmental politics. Some of the topics of her recently publications include: the politics of earth remote sensing; the political implications of Gaia Theory; the relationship between scientific and political authority in the climate change negotiations; the politics of sacrifice in an ecologically full world; and holistic thinking in the global ecovillage movement. 





Related links





Faculty profile at the University of Washington
Read Litfin's Thinking like a planet: Gaian politics and the transformation of the world food system (2011 book chapter) here (pdf)  
Read Litfin's Towards an Integral Perspective on World Politics: Secularism, Sovereignty and the Challenge of Global Ecoloy (Millennium, 2003) here (pdf) 
Read Litfin's The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty (Global Society, 1999) here (pdf) 
Read Litfin's The Gendered Eye in the Sky: Feminist Perspectives on Earth Observation Satellites (Frontiers 1997) here (pdf) 








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