In this article, Loaay Wattad focuses on the evolution of hope and morality in dystopian narratives. Through the case study of 'The Hunger Games' trilogy, he explores how dystopian literature manifests and reverberates in our daily lives and emphasizes its development into a tangible political statement—one that challenges Hobbesian philosophy and its expression in contemporary politics. This analysis takes on added poignancy in light of current events, such as the ongoing war on Gaza, highlighting the timeliness and relevance of dystopian reflections in the face of contemporary conflicts and wars.
I recommend Brian Winter's article in Foreign Affairs on the durability of Jair Bolsonaro's popularity, which in fact just went up. He zeroes in on the country's interior:The interiorzão is not defined on any map, but it generally refers to a belt of land sagging around the country's geographic midsection, from the state of Mato Grosso do Sul in the west through Goiás, Minas Gerais, and parts of Bahia in the east. This is a Brazil of soy farms and cattle ranches, oversize Ford pickup trucks, air-conditioned shopping malls, and all-you-can-eat steakhouses. Some of it is old, but much of it was erected only in the last 30 years or so. Instead of Afro-Catholic syncretism and bossa nova, it boasts evangelical megachurches and sertanejo, a kind of tropicalized country music sung by barrel-chested men in cowboy hats and Wrangler jeans.It is Brazil's equivalent to flyover country, parts that are not tourist destinations and do not correspond to the foreigner's view of the country as a whole. As with Trump in the U.S., it constitutes a core of support that's not likely to fall away.I can imagine a similar worldview holding there and here. What I consider to be destroying institutions, Bolsonaro/Trump supporters see "getting things done." What I see as unacceptable rhetoric, they see as a return to morality. What I see as conspiracy theories, they see as truths. What I clearly see as lying, they see as "telling it like it is." Brazil's political history is so different from the U.S., but there are parallels here.As Brian writes, quite a few elites have repented their support for Bolsonaro. The same has happened here, but that doesn't necessarily signal change. That core is still there, and they love the show they're seeing. The difficulty for any analyst is to truly move away from trying to sort out self-interest. People adore their president despite the fact that he is screwing them. Depressed economic growth, rampant virus, you name it (wrecked post office, even!).From an electoral standpoint, it's sobering. The party systems of the two countries are so different that comparison isn't worthwhile, but at a very basic level, established opposite parties will find it hard to convince that core base that they have anything to offer. To win, you need to bring everyone else together. Subscribe in a reader
I literally stumbled into British Idealism. I took the only political theory MA course on offer that term while a graduate student at Arizona State University called liberalism old and new. It started with Hegel, then T H Green and L T Hobhouse before ending with John Dewey. While I found the readings challenging, I found the material highly interesting as it was very different from the standard fare. I have always had an interest in exploring key works in the history of political thought, but what interests me most about British Idealism work is how it seeks to be relevant in communicating to us today. I've seen large parts of my work as a new wave of British Idealist thinking (with a strong interest in institutions and realism). Recently, I was asked to compile a list of my work that is about or touches on British Idealism. Here it is:2003Brooks, Thom. "T. H. Green's Theory of Punishment," History of Political Thought 24(4) (2003): 685-701.2008Brooks, Thom. "Was Green a Utilitarian in Practice?" Collingwood and British Idealism Studies 14(1) (2008): 5-15.2009Brooks, Thom. "Muirhead, Hetherington and Mackenzie" in W. Sweet (ed.), The Moral, Social and Political Philosophy of the British Idealists. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009, pp. 209-232.2010Brooks, Thom. "Punishment and British Idealism" in Jesper Ryberg and J. Angelo Corlett (ed.), Punishment and Ethics: New Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 16-32.2011 Brooks, Thom. "Is Bradley a Retributivist?" History of Political Thought 32(1) (2011): 83-95.Brooks, Thom. "What Did the British Idealists Ever Do for Us?" in T. Brooks (ed.), New Waves in Ethics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 28-47.Brooks, Thom. "Punishment: Political, Not Moral," New Criminal Law Review 14(3) (2011): 427-438.Brooks, Thom. "British Idealism" in D. Pritchard (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.Brooks, Thom. "Punishment" in D. Pritchard (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.2012Brooks, Thom. Punishment. London: Routledge, 2012.Brooks, Thom. "Hegel and the Unified Theory of Punishment" in T. Brooks (ed.), Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Blackwell, 2012, pp. 103-123.Brooks, Thom. "James Seth on Natural Law and Legal Theory," Collingwood and British Idealism Studies 12(2) (2012): 115-132.2013Brooks, Thom. "In Defence of Political Theory: Impact and Opportunities," Political Studies Review 11(2) (2013): 209-215.Brooks, Thom. "The Right to Be Punished," Legal Theory in China 3 (2013): 21-31.2014Brooks, Thom, ed. Ethical Citizenship: British Idealism and the Politics of Recognition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.Brooks, Thom. "Ethical Citizenship and the Stakeholder Society" in T. Brooks (ed.), Ethical Citizenship: British Idealism and the Politics of Recognition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 125-138.Brooks, Thom. "On F. H. Bradley's 'Some Remarks on Punishment'," Ethics 125(1) (2014): 223-225.2015Brooks, Thom. "The Stakeholder Society and the Politics of Hope," Renewal 23 (1/2) (2015): 44-54.Brooks, Thom. "Why Political Theory Matters" in G. Peters, J. Pierre and G. Stoker (ed.), The Relevance of Political Science. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 136-147.Brooks, Thom. "Defending Punishment," Philosophy and Public Issues 5 (2015): 73-94.2016Brooks, Thom. "Justice as Stakeholding" in K. Watene and J. Drydyk (eds), Theorizing Justice. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, pp. 111-127.Brooks, Thom. "In Defence of Punishment and the Unified Theory of Punishment," Criminal Law and Philosophy 10(3) (2016): 629-638.2017Brooks, Thom. "Unlocking Morality from Criminal Law," Journal of Moral Philosophy 14(3) (2017): 339-352.Brooks, Thom. "Hegel's Philosophy of Law" in D. Moyar (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Hegel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 453-474.Brooks, Thom. "Hegel on Crime and Punishment" in T. Brooks and S. Stein (eds), Hegel's Political Philosophy: On the Normative Significance of Method and System. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 202-221.2019Brooks, Thom. "Taking the System Seriously: Nicholson's Overturning Orthodoxy about Hegel and Punishment," Collingwood and British Idealism Studies 25(2) (2019): 315-334.2020 Brooks, Thom. "More Than Recognition: Why Stakeholding Matters for Reconciliation in Hegel's Philosophy of Right," Owl of Minerva 51 (2020): 59-86.2021Brooks, Thom. Punishment: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2021.
Here we go again. Another "obituary" for libertarianism. While Salon Magazine declares that we all live in a "libertarian dystopia," and a new brand of big‐government conservatives promise to free the Republican party and American government from their libertarian captivity, Barton Swaim declares in the Wall Street Journal that a new book "works as an obituary" for libertarianism. That's not a characterization that I think the authors—Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi—would accept of their book, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. Swaim notes that the book surveys many different kinds of self‐styled libertarians over the past two centuries, and that the authors lay out six "markers" that libertarians share: property rights, individualism, free markets, skepticism of authority, negative liberties, and a belief that people are best left to order themselves spontaneously. Not a bad list, significantly overlapping with the list of seven key libertarian ideas that I laid out in the first chapter of my own book, The Libertarian Mind. He goes on to argue, following the authors, "In the 21st century, the movement in the U.S. has consisted in an assortment of competing, often disputatious intellectual cadres: anarchists, anarcho‐capitalists, paleo‐libertarians (right‐wing), 'liberaltarians' (left‐wing) and many others." Somehow he leaves out actual libertarians, such as those who populate the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, the Objectivist world, and much of the Libertarian Party. Indeed, a few lines later he cites the "diversity" of "the priestess of capitalism Ayn Rand, the politician Rand Paul and the billionaire philanthropist Charles Koch"—none of whom would fall into any of the esoteric categories that he suggests make up modern libertarianism and in fact belong to actual libertarianism or its penumbras. The whole review is ahistorical. Swaim never mentions classical liberalism, the revolutionary movement that challenged monarchs, autocrats, mercantilism, caste society, and established churches beginning in the 18th century. Liberalism soon swept the United States and Western Europe and ushered in what economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls the "Great Enrichment," the unprecedented rise in living standards that has made us moderns some 3,000 percent richer than our ancestors of 1800. The ideas of the classical liberals, including John Locke, Adam Smith, and the American Founders, are those that animate modern libertarianism: equal rights, constitutional government, free markets, tolerance, the rule of law. Zwolinski and Tomasi say that "what sets libertarians apart is the absolutism and systematicity" with which we advocate those ideas. Well, yes, after 200 years of historical observation and philosophical and economic debate, many of us do believe that a firmer adherence to liberal/libertarian ideas would serve society well. We observe that the closer a society comes to consistent tolerance, free markets, and the rule of law, the more it will achieve widespread peace, prosperity, and freedom. Swaim insists that libertarians do not engage "with ultimate questions—questions about the good life, morality, religious meaning, human purpose and so on." He's wrong about that. Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. F. A. Hayek stressed the importance of morals and tradition. Ayn Rand set out a fairly strict code of personal ethics. Thomas Szasz's work challenged the reductionists and behaviorists with a commitment to the old ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, and responsibility for one's choices. Charles Murray emphasizes the value and indeed the necessity of community and responsibility. Libertarian philosophers of virtue ethics find the case for limited government to be based on the search for the good life. Swaim would be on more solid ground to say that libertarianism does not presume to tell individuals what to believe and how to live. Separation of church and state and all that. As I wrote in a letter to the Journal (not yet published), Swaim refers to the "studiously amoral philosophy of libertarianism." A popular summary of libertarianism, "don't hit other people, don't take their stuff, and keep your promises," is just the basic morality that allows human beings to live together in peace. As for his claim that libertarianism is dead, that this book is an obituary, I refer Swaim again to all the people who complain that we're living in some sort of libertarian world. Libertarians often feel depressed; they believe the world is on "the road to serfdom." But in fact the world is far freer in this century than ever before in history. Free markets and free trade, an end to slavery and caste societies, representative government, and the rule of law now govern the Western world and much of the rest. Most of the Cato Institute's website comprises complaints about the malfeasance of the U.S. government. But in the bigger picture, libertarians have had much success. In the roughly 50 years since I started thinking about politics, one could point to such successes as: the end of conscription in the United States social, economic, and political equality for women dramatically lower marginal tax rates freer trade deregulation of major industries such as airlines, trucking, communication, and finance the almost total demise of communism and the consequent discrediting of socialism and central planning the reorientation of antitrust policy to a consumer welfare standard expanded First Amendment protections expanded Second Amendment protections the progress of gay rights and gay marriage growing opportunities for school choice a slow erosion of the war on drugs I could go on. None of these are total victories. No ideology achieves all of its sweeping vision, at least not without a military conquest of the government and the ability to rule by decree—and those experiments are nothing to emulate. In various parts of the world bad ideas are back—socialism, protectionism, ethnic nationalism, anti‐Semitism, even industrial policy. The libertarian challenge is to join with other liberals—Reaganite conservatives, free‐speech liberals, people who are "fiscally conservative and socially liberal"—to push back against these bad resurgent ideas. But this record of accomplishment is no obituary.
On this day in 1790, the great economist, moral philosopher and social psychologist AdamSmith died. The story is that he was entertaining friends at his home, Panmure House offEdinburgh's Canongate, when he felt unwell, rose and said: "Friends, we will have tocontinue this conversation in another place." He died soon after.It's a nice story, though greatly exaggerated for effect. Adam Smith's religious beliefs are amatter of debate, and it unlikely he believed in an afterlife anyway. Indeed, though he diedseventy years before Darwin's Origin of Species, he was grasping towards an evolutionaryexplanation of why human life, in economics, morality and other areas, seems to serve us ingenerally beneficial ways, without the need for any conscious direction from governmentsor anyone else. As if directed by an Invisible Hand, he wrote, though he knew there was noconscious entity moving that hand. Or Providence, he suggested. How it generated theharmony that F A Hayek would later call spontaneous order was a mystery to Smith, and tohis friend David Hume and other scholars of the age.Smith ordered that, on his death, all his papers should be burned, apart from one essay onThe History of Astronomy. It was not such an uncommon request at the time: people did notwant to be judged on the basis of their random notes and half-though-out jottings. But wewere lucky he spared The History of Astronomy, which is a remarkable essay in thephilosophy of science, advancing a trial-and-error thesis that would not be lost on thetwentieth-century author of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Sir Karl Popper.The fact that Smith wrote on scientific method demonstrates how wide his interestsand his expertise were. As well as the economics for which he is most remembered today, he alsowrote and lectured on the use of language, on the arts, on justice, on politics and on moralphilosophy. In fact it was his first book on ethics, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that in1759 made him internationally famous — and guaranteed him a generous income for lifethat would give him the freedom to think about economics and write his 1776 masterpieceAn Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which he referred to as hisInquiry, but to us is known as simply The Wealth of Nations.In this, Smith offers an explanation of why, in economics, the spontaneous order ideaworks. For centuries, people imagined that the only gainers in any economic transactionwere those who ended up with the money. But Smith noted that their customers benefitedtoo, by getting goods or services that they valued more than the cash. Indeed, the tradewould not happen unless both sides thought they were getting value from it. To maximisethe creation and distribution of value, he concluded, we need to be facilitating freeexchange — not thwarting it with protectionist measures against foreign imports ordomestic regulations on what and how people are allowed to trade.This simple 'system of natural liberty', explained Smith, was what allowed the spontaneoussociety to flourish and raised nations from poverty to prosperity. It enabled individuals tostrive to 'better their condition', and that of their families. By contrast, regulations and lawswere too often laid down by politicians and their business cronies: to promote their owninterests, most generally in opposition to the interests of the working poor.Smith would have regarded a government that controls nearly half the economy, spendingnearly half the nation's GDP — a concept that he introduced to the world on the very firstpage of The Wealth of Nations — as the greatest tyranny. Taxes, he thought, were anotherway in which established interests skew things in their favour and block potentialcompetition. Taxes, he argued, should be as low as possible, should encourage rather thanrestrict free trade and innovation, and should be simple, understandable and convenient topay. One can imagine what he might have thought of a tax code like the UK's, which islonger than The Wealth of Nations itself, and a regulatory rule book that is even longer.When economic freedom, tempered by Smith's moral virtues of prudence, justice,beneficence and self-control, has been allowed to flourish, it has led to the greatestincrease, and spread, of human prosperity. The free trade era of the nineteenth centuryenriched much of the world and brought humanity cheap food and manufactures. Theglobalisation of the twentieth and twenty-first brought nearly all nations into the worldtrading system and thereby pulled a billion people out of dollar-a-day poverty.Adam Smith's intellectual and practical legacy is plain enough. The issue is whether theworld's governments will ever stop frittering it away.
Gabrielle Hecht on Nuclear Ontologies, De-provincializing the Cold War, and Postcolonial Technopolitics
This is the fourth 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
Nuclear power has formed a centerpiece of Cold-War IR theorizing. Yet besides the ways in which its destructive capacity invalidates or alters the way we should understand questions of war and peace, there are different powers at play in the roles the nuclear assumes in global politics. Through careful investigations of alternative sites and spaces of nuclear politics, Gabrielle Hecht has uncovered some of the unexpected ways in which what one can call the 'nuclear condition' affects politics across the globe. In this Talk, Hecht, amongst others, explores what it means to 'be nuclear'; explains how we need to deprovincialize the Cold War to fully grasp its significance in global politics; and challenges us to explore technopolitics outside of the comfortable context of OECD-countries.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is according to your view the most important challenge facing global politics and what is/should be the central debate in the discipline of International Relations (IR)?
I think one of the most important challenges in global politics is the question of planetary boundaries. In the 1970s the Club of Rome published the report 'the Limits to Growth' (read PDF here), which addressed the finite quality of the planet's resources. It exposed the problems that the ideology (and practice) of endless economic growth posed for these limits. The question of climate change today really is all about planetary boundaries. We have already exceeded the CO2 level that is safe for the planet to sustain human life: We have just passed 400 parts per million; the desirable level is rated at 350 parts per million; the pre-industrial level of CO2 was 270 parts per million. So we have already produced more CO2 than is sustainable. And that is just one indicator. There are all kinds of other planetary boundaries at play—energy supply being the most salient one in terms of climate change. How can we even produce enough energy to maintain the lifestyles of the industrialized north? What about the requirements of the so-called 'rest'?
Obviously this is a huge issue and there are many parts to it. One part of this—the piece that I have studied the most—is nuclear power. Many people are enthusiastic about nuclear power as a solution to climate change. Some prominent environmentalists have been converted, because they believe nuclear power offers a way to produce a large amount of energy with a very small amount of matter, and because they see it as carbon free. (That's pretty clearly not the case, by the way, though nuclear power certainly produces less carbon than fossil fuels.) But are the human health and environmental costs worth the savings in carbon? Do the resources poured into nuclear power—some are predicting a thousand new reactors in the next few decades—take away resources from other forms of energy production, forms that could potentially address the emissions problems more rapidly and with lower costs for the environment and for human health? Moreover, nuclear power in any one location ends up becoming a global issue. So in that sense nuclear power in China, in India or in Japan is inherently a global problem. And the industry everywhere certainly needs global regulation—at the moment, there is none. The International Atomic Energy Agency is not a regulator. These are serious questions for international relations, and should be fodder for analysis.
One can obviously put this into perspective by comparing the death toll from nuclear power with that related to coal—would one then actually have to be against the use of coal? The numbers of coal-related deaths are astonishing. But the first, most obvious point to make is that being against coal doesn't require being in favor of nuclear power! It's also extremely important to realize that death and morbidity figures for nuclear power are highly contested. Take the figures concerning Chernobyl. The IAEA and WHO put Chernobyl deaths at 4,000. A study published by National Cancer Institute in the United States puts the deaths at something like 43,000. A meta-analysis of 5,000 Slavic language scientific studies estimates the total number of Chernobyl deaths (some of which are yet to come) at 900,000. These discrepancies have a lot to do with controversies over the biological effects of low-level radiation, and also with the technopolitics of measurement and counting. Comparing the two energy technologies is much more complicated than merely counting coal deaths vs. nuclear power deaths.
How did arrive where you currently are in your thinking about these issues?
Actually, the real question is how I came to study politics. I got my bachelor's degree in physics from MIT in the 1980s. The two biggest political issues on campus at that time were Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative and Apartheid in South Africa (specifically, a move to divest American corporate interests in South Africa, the very corporations that were funding MIT research and for which MIT students would work when they graduated). I got interested in both, and along the way I came to realize that I was much more interested in the politics of science and technology than I was in actually doing physics. So I took some courses in the field of science and technology studies (STS), and decided to attend graduate school in the history and sociology of science and technology.
I had also always had a morbid fascination with nuclear weapons. I'd read a lot of post-apocalyptic science fiction when I was a teenager. All of these things came together for me in graduate school. I first hoped to study the history of Soviet nuclear weapons but quickly realized that would be impossible for all kinds of reasons. I ended up studying French nuclear power after I realized that nobody had researched it in the ways that interested me. I had lived in France in the 1970s, when the nuclear power program was undergoing rapid expansion. So it was a good fit. After I was done with that project, I became interested in rethinking the so-called nuclear age from a colonial and post-colonial perspective.
What would a student need to become a specialist in global studies or understand the world in a global way?
Travel, learn languages. Remain attentive to—and critical of—the political work done by claims to 'global' purview. Learn history—you won't understand international relations in any depth at all if you remain rooted in the present.
Then, for those want to start exploring the global politics of science and technology, two books come immediately to mind. Timothy Mitchell's (Theory Talk #59) Carbon Democracy, on the global technopolitics of fossil fuels. And Paul Edwards's A Vast Machine, on the relationship between data and models in the production of knowledge about climate change. Both are must-reads.
The world is permeated with technological artifacts and systems—in what ways is this relevant for approaches to global politics? Where is the conceptual place for technologies within IR?
First, I should make clear that I am not an IR specialist.
That said, I think it does not make sense to think about international relations (lower case) without thinking about the technologies, systems, and infrastructures that make any kind of global movement possible. The flows of people, of products, of culture, political exchanges—these are all mediated through and practiced in the technological systems that permeate our globe. So are the interruptions and absences in such 'flows'. I draw attention to the specific political practices that are enacted through technological systems with the notion of technopolitics. I initially used this concept in my work on nuclear power in France to capture the ways in which hybrid forms of power are enacted in technological artifacts, systems and practices. There I used the term in a rather narrow sense to talk about the strategic practices of designing technologies to enact political goals. My paramount example was that of the French atomic weapons program. In the early 1950s, France's political leaders insisted that France would never build atomic weapons. But engineers and other leaders in the nascent nuclear program were designing reactors in a way that optimized the production of weapons-grade plutonium rather than electricity. When politicians finally signed on, the technology was ready to go. This example problematizes the very notion of a 'political decision'. Instead of a single, discursive decision, we see a complex process whereby political choices are inscribed into technologies, which subsequently favor certain political outcomes over others.
In this example, both engineers and politicians consciously engaged in technopolitics. By contrast, Timothy Mitchell has used the hyphenated term 'techno-politics' to emphasize the unpredictable and unintended effects of technological assemblages. Over the last fifteen years, I have also developed a broader notion of the term, particularly in its adjectival form, 'technopolitical'. I find this to be a useful shorthand for describing both how politics can be strategically enacted through technological systems, and also how technological systems can be re-appropriated for political ends in ways that were unintended by their designers. The point, really, is to highlight the myriad politics of materiality.
Do the particular characteristics of nuclear technologies and related research programs make it impossible to apply the lenses of 'high politics'?
I think a high-politics approach to understanding nuclear weapons decision-making is extremely impoverished. It's not that there aren't high politics, of course there are. But they cannot offer a sufficient or straightforward explanation for how or why any one particular country develops a nuclear program. A focus on high politics implies a focus decision makers and moments. But that's really misleading. In pretty much every case, the apparent 'moment' of decision is in fact a long process involving a tremendous amount of technopolitical, cultural, and institutional work, rife with conflicts and contingencies of all kinds. I think a more productive approach is to try to understand nuclear capacity-building.
Itty Abraham has done some fantastic work on India's nuclear program, which helps us think about other cases as well. For example, he analyzes the symbolic importance of the nuclear test, noting that IR uses 'the test' as kind of 'aha!' moment, the moment in which one knows that a country has nuclear weapons. Instead, Abraham sees the test as a process for the cultural production of meaning: a process in which certain meanings get fixed, but by no means the most important moment for understanding the actual technology and politics behind the production of nuclear weapons.
Your book Entangled Geographies (2011) explores a plethora of places, people, and technical networks that sustained the US and Soviet empires. Here, as in Being Nuclear (2012), you insist on investigating the Cold War as transnational history. What difference does this move make?
In Entangled Geographies, my colleagues and I build on the work of Odd Arne Westad, whose book The Global Cold War was an argument for understanding the non-superpower, non-European dimensions of the Cold War. We give that a technopolitical spin, which offers a de-provincializing of the Cold War that's complementary to Westad's. By focusing on places like Saudi Arabia, or Zimbabwe, or Brazil, or South Africa, we show how even the central struggles of the Cold War were intimately bound up in 'northern' relationships to colonial and post-colonial worlds, and in the imaginaries that characterized those relationships.
In Being Nuclear I focus on uranium from Africa—more specifically South Africa, Namibia, Gabon, Madagascar, and Niger. Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, but it has been almost completely absent from accounts of the nuclear age, whether scholarly or popular. This changed in 2002, when the US and British governments claimed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein 'sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' (later specified as the infamous 'yellowcake from Niger'). Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium. But that did not admit Niger, or any of Africa's other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states. Nor did it mean that uranium itself counted as a nuclear thing. My book explores what it means for something—a state, an object, an industry, a workplace—to be 'nuclear'. I show that such questions lie at the heart of today's global order and the relationships between 'developing nations' and 'nuclear powers'.
Being Nuclear argues that 'nuclearity' is not a straightforward scientific classification but a contested technopolitical one. In the first part of the book, I follow uranium's path out of Africa and analyze the invention of the global uranium market. In the second part, I enter African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure. In both parts, I show that nuclearity requires instruments and data, technological systems and infrastructures, national agencies and international organizations, experts and conferences, and journals and media exposure. When (and where) nuclearity is densely distributed among these elements, it can offer a means of claiming expertise, compensation, or citizenship. It can serve as a framework for making sense of history, experience, and memory. When (and where) network elements are absent, weak, or poorly connected, nuclearity falters, fades, or disappears altogether, failing to provide a resource for people claiming remediation or treatment. Nuclearity in one register doesn't easily transpose to another: geopolitical nuclearity doesn't automatically translate into occupational nuclearity. Yet these domains remain connected. African uranium miners depend on the transnational movement of nuclear things, but that movement also depends on African miners. Ultimately, I conclude, nuclear security must be considered in tandem with other forms of human security—food and health and environmental and political security. By placing Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa, the book seeks to remake our understanding of the nuclear age.
I should note that it's not only uranium production that connects the colonial and postcolonial spaces with nuclear things. (Also: African countries weren't the only such places where uranium was produced. Much of the rest of the world's uranium came from the Navajo nation in the United States, Aboriginal territories in Australia, First Nation territories in Canada, colonized spaces in the Soviet Empire, etc.) French nuclear weapons were tested in the Algerian desert and French Polynesia; the United States tested its weapons on the Bikini Islands; Britain tested its weapons in Maralinga, in Aboriginal Australia; the Soviet Union tested its weapons on the planes of Kazakhstan. And so on.
So, understanding the history of the Cold War—even its most iconic technology, nuclear weapons—as a form of transnational history really calls attention to spaces that have previously been considered marginal, even perhaps not fully nuclear. Ultimately, it should provoke us to problematize 'the Cold War' as a frame for global or transnational history (and social science).
Looking at those colonized and semi-colonized spaces of mining, testing and monitoring infrastructures gives us not necessarily an answer to the question of why the Cold War ended, but it does enable you to ask different and possibly more interesting questions. It can lead you, for example, to place the Cold War within the framework of imperialism (rather than the other way around). A longer historical view questions whether the Cold War really represents historical rupture. What political work is done by such claims to rupture? How does that work differ in different places? What are its material consequences?
Why are science and technology hardly ever studied in the postcolonial world from a STS perspective?
I think there are a number of reasons why STS has paid relatively little attention to the postcolonial world. One is that in STS—like many disciplines—the prestige of the subject matter maps onto the prestige of the researcher. So STS researchers who study cutting-edge science or large-scale technological systems seem somehow to be getting at 'harder' topics, ones that that focus on active creation. Engineering and other acts of creation appear more prestigious than acts of maintenance, or acts of dismantling. Even studying small-scale creation seems to confer more prestige than studying mundane practices. This brings us back to the theme of rupture vs. continuity: studying or proclaiming rupture seems somehow sexier—and certainly more radical—than studying continuity.
Another, more trivial answer is just that most STS researchers so far have come from Europe and North America, and they tend not to be trained in area studies.
Does the constant ontological insecurity of nuclear things mean that the 'nuclear' is purely a matter of social and political construction?
No, definitely not. But I think to explain what I mean by all this we should take a few steps back and start with what I like to call nuclear exceptionalism. This is a technopolitical claim—emerging immediately after the end of World War II—that there was something radically unique about nuclear things. From 1945 onward, both cold warriors and their activist opponents cultivated this nuclear exceptionalism. Atomic weapons were portrayed as fundamentally different from any other human creation. The bomb was the ultimate geopolitical trump card, and it was imagined as replacing empire in one fell swoop. You see nuclear scientists and engineers gaining prestige, power, and funding far beyond their colleagues in conventional research. In the meantime, anti-nuclear groups make their own claims to exceptionalism by talking about the unprecedented dangers posed by nuclear things. Everywhere you see nuclearity and morality intertwined. Nuclear things either represent salvation or moral depravity… or the apocalyptic end of mankind. But regardless of where you stood politically, this notion of nuclear exceptionalism rested on the sense that the difference between nuclear and non-nuclear things was transparent---ultimately a clear-cut, physical matter of radioactivity.
The nuclear thus emerges not just as a category, but also as a universal and universalizing ontology, one that seems to apply in the same way all over the globe. And frankly, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists have reproduced that nuclear exceptionalism. (I did it myself in my first book, The Radiance of France.)
All of which has made it hard to see that what I call nuclearity—the process by which something comes to count as a "nuclear" thing – has a history, a politics, and a geography. Things that count as nuclear in one time and place might not count as nuclear at another. Rendering something as nuclear and exceptional is a form of technopolitical claims-making. It follows that insisting that certain things are not especially nuclear, or that they are banal, is also a form of technopolitical claims-making.
You can see this in the response of the nuclear industry to activist opponents. In the late 1960s and over the course of the 1970s, the nuclear industry began to represent nuclear power not as a life-saving technology for the human race, but as simply another way to boil water. Radiation was just another industrial risk. Such representations seek to banalize nuclear things.
Nuclearity could thus get made, unmade and remade. My favorite example comes from a 1995 US government report on nuclear proliferation. The appendix has a table that summarizes the nuclear activities of 172 nations. Neither Gabon, nor Niger, nor Namibia are listed as having any nuclear activities, despite the fact that those nations together, during that very year, produced something like 25% of the world's uranium. So when does uranium count as a nuclear thing? When does it lose its nuclearity? And what does Africa have to do with it?
The argument is not that radioactivity doesn't have to do anything with nuclearity, or that nuclearity has nothing to do with the technologies and physical processes we typically associate with the word. Rather, I argue that nuclearity is one thing, and radioactivity and fission are another; sometimes they are co-terminus, but not always and not necessarily. Understanding where (and why) they don't map onto each other is politically revealing.
Which kind of interdisciplinary exchanges do we need between your discipline and IR to deepen our understanding of global technopolitics?
Science and technology studies (STS) is really good at exploring practice, and especially at calling attention to the differences between principles and practice—for example, between regulation on the one hand, and the actual practices that regulations are meant to control (without ever entirely succeeding). STS can bring to IR an understanding of how the intimate details of practice matter politically—of how everyday technopolitical and techno-scientific exchanges can be more important loci for politics than treaties, diplomacy, and other forms of what you called high politics.
I can also answer this question wearing my historian's hat. The IR scholarship on nuclear weapons that I'm familiar with (and again, I'm not an expert!) seems to be quite focused on producing models—on using history to produce predictive models that will in turn serve to shape international policy on nuclear weapons regulation. But if history tells us one thing, it is that models are basically useless for understanding how countries develop nuclear weapons. Instead, history and STS both teach us about which questions to ask (in this instance, about nuclear development). Identifying the important questions—rather than prescribing the applicable model—leaves open the list of possible answers. It also leaves open solutions and policies, letting us be more attentive to the specificities and uniqueness of individual cases.
Final question. Let's take the example of Iran's nuclear program. What alternative question about the issue would lenses of nuclear exceptionalism bring us?
Nuclear technology has played an important role in shaping modern Iranian national identity. This began in the 1970s under the Shah, who – with the support of the US – developed a grandiose plan to build a fleet of nuclear reactors. It took a different turn after the 1979 Iranian revolution. For a while, the new regime sidelined the nuclear program as an unwelcome manifestation of western corruption. But after a few years leaders reappropriated nuclear development and sought to invest it with Iranian-ness. The dynamics of nuclear exceptionalism have operated in Iran much the same way they did in France and in South Africa. Nuclear exceptionalism has served to give material form to national identity. And materialized national identity is most emphatically not something that you can negotiate away in the P5+1 talks.
Gabrielle Hecht is Professor of History at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and serves as associate director of the African Studies Center. She recently published Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press and Wits University Press, 2012), which has received awards from the American Historical Association and the American Sociological Association, as well as the 2013 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize and Honorable Mention for the African Studies Association's 2013 Herskovits Award. She is also the author of The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (MIT Press 1998 & 2009) and editor of Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, editor (MIT Press, 2011). Hecht is embarking on a new book project on technology and power in Africa, as well as new research on transnational toxic trash. She has held visiting positions at universities in Australia, France, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden.
Related links
Hecht's faculty profile at the University of Michigan Read Hecht's Introduction to Entangled Geographies (MIT Press 2011) here (pdf) Read Hecht's The Power of Nuclear Things (Technology & Culture 2010) here (pdf) Read Hecht's Nuclear Ontologies (Constellations 2006) here (pdf) Read Hecht's Rupture-Talk in the Nuclear Age (Social Studies of Science 2002) here (pdf)
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
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For the umpteenth time, the U.S. and Iran have come close to an open war neither side wants. The Israelis strike a building within the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus, killing senior officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Iranians, with unintended irony, protest this violation of diplomatic premises, and almost start a war with Israel by launching hundreds of drones and missiles that the U.S., given ample warning, helps to intercept. The Israelis launch a counterstrike to demonstrate its ability to evade Iran's defenses. That appears to end the exchange until the next round.Sooner or later, if the U.S. and the Islamic Republic are going to avoid such a lose-lose conflict, the two sides will need to stop shouting and start talking. Forty-five years of exchanging empty slogans, accusations, threats, and denunciations have accomplished little beyond furthering a few political careers and feeding a sense of self-righteousness. For successive U.S. administrations, Iran remains a problem that will not go away.To paraphrase Trotsky, "You may have no business with Iran; but Iran has business with you." For Iran, the U.S. remains an obsession. The more Iran's hated rulers denounce it, the more attractive it becomes — as both a role model and a destination — to a savvy population suffering from inflation, unemployment, and the stern, misogynistic dictates of an aging and ossified ruling elite.The Islamic Republic, despite the wishes of many Iranians and their friends, is probably not going away soon. In the first months after the fall of the monarchy, the most-asked question in Tehran was, "When are THEY leaving?" (Inhaa key mirand?). Forty-five years later THEY are still in charge and show no signs of packing their bags.Why should we talk to the Islamic Republic, when it has the appalling history that it does? Why should we talk when its overriding policy principle is, in the words of one Iranian official, "opposition to you"? We need to talk because talking (and listening) to an adversary means serving our national interests by communicating. Talking never means either approval of or affection for the Islamic Republic.Talking to the Islamic Republic is not going to bring down that government, persuade the ruling clerics to step aside, or persuade them to stop repressing its women, musicians, journalists, lawyers, students and academics. Talking is not going to end the ruling clerics' bizarre obsessions with controlling every trivial detail of Iranians' private lives. What talking does is allow each side to present its point of view and to correct the dangerous "mythperceptions" that have prevented the U.S. and Iran from breaking out of a 45-year downward spiral of futility.For what has happened when the two sides have not talked? What has happened, for example, when the Islamic Republic's representatives at meetings refuse face-to-face meetings with their American counterparts? What has happened when one side ignores, or rejects outright, proposals from the other to meet in at setting of mutual respect?Whenever two sides — neighbors, relatives, countries — for whatever reason, cannot talk, each side becomes, to the other, simultaneously sub-human and super-human. "Superhuman" means the other is capable of anything. In this case, a superhuman Iran can build and deliver a nuclear weapon in weeks, manipulate proxies to do its will anywhere, and rebuild the mighty Persian Empires of Greek and Roman times. On the other side, a superhuman United States can guide events in Iran and subvert its young people through a powerful, hidden network of agents – journalists, intellectuals, writers, etc. – ready to obey instructions from Washington.As for being "subhuman," in this view neither side is constrained by any sense of morality or humanity. It will do (and since it is also superhuman, can do) anything. In such a case, the superhuman we fear and the subhuman we despise. When such a powerful and evil adversary threatens us, we feel justified in taking any action against it, because that adversary will stop at nothing and has only one goal: to destroy us by any means possible.At one level, leaders in both Tehran and Washington seek to avoid an Iran-U.S. war. Although Tehran's ruling clerics care little for the lives of ordinary Iranians – who would be the victims of such a war – they do care about staying in power and continuing to enjoy their villas and foreign currency accounts. A war with the U.S. would threaten their good life. In Washington, both Democratic and Republican presidents have known that "another stupid war" in the Middle East is a political loser. In 2016, Trump ran against such wars, and his message was powerful. Although he foolishly abandoned the Iran nuclear deal and made a bizarre threat to blow up "52 historical sites" in Iran, he clearly had no stomach for a war. He summarily fired his national security adviser, a paid shill for the cultists of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), when he pushed the president toward confrontation.Does Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu want to drag the U.S. into a war with Iran? To all appearances he does, not only to rid Israel of a declared enemy, but, more important, to keep himself in power. The Israeli premier has used Iran to manipulate the U.S. and even to intervene directly in American domestic politics. The more extreme the rhetoric and actions from Tehran, the better for Netanyahu. It is said he went into mourning when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — notorious for his curious anti-Israeli rhetoric — left office in 2013. But he can usually depend on the Islamic Republic to help him both by overplaying its weak hand and by raising the volume on its tired slogans.Wars often begin with both sides saying they want peace. But miscalculations, underestimating or overestimating the other side, and third-party actions can push a country down a path it knows is self-destructive. Talking to the Islamic Republic will be hard, but it is worth doing if it can keep both sides off a road to disaster.
The next issue of "Constellations" (vol. 40, no. 4) features articles on The Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt am Main) and the Frankfurt School:"The Institute for Social Research at 100: Continuity and Transformation"Eleven articles are now available online:* Axel Honneth - "The Institute for Social Research on its 100th birthday. A former director's perspective"Excerpt: "There are deeper, less superficial reasons for being skeptical today with regard to the potential of this tradition to guide us in our social–theoretical attempts to comprehend the present situation in a fruitful way, both philosophically sound and empirically productive. In the following, I want to discuss three challenges resulting from structural changes in our social and intellectual environment that make it more and more difficult to preview a fruitful, productive, and energizing future for Critical Theory in its traditional form. These three challenges stem from (1) the growing awareness of the endurance of the colonial past of Western societies, (2) the unmistakable importance of the ecological question, and, finally, (3) the growing uncertainties about the exact format and arrangement of interdisciplinary research."* Rainer Forst: "The rational critique of social unreason. On critical theory in the Frankfurt tradition" [open access]Excerpt: "In my view, then, critical theory must be reconfigured as a critique of relations of justification. This calls, on the one hand, for a critical social scientific analysis of social and political relations of domination that includes cultural and, not least, economic structures and relationships. In this regard, two dimensions of domination must be distinguished: subjugation to unjustifiable norms and institutions, and subjugation to conditions that prevent practices of justification. Such critical analysis must be combined with a discourse-theoretical, genealogical critique of the justifications and justification narratives that confer legitimacy on unjustifiable relations. On the other hand, we must pose the constructive question of how a "basic structure of justification" can be conceived as a requirement of fundamental justice and be realized in social practice - not as an ideal or a model to be imposed on societies, but as a normative order to be developed autonomously. Essentially, a theory we call critical ought to be based on the principle of criticism itself. Its medium is reason striving for practices of autonomous justification among equals."* Alessandro Ferrara - "If Foucault, why not Rawls? On enlarging the critical tent"Excerpt: "It is undeniably among the aims of critical theory to envisage a society in which diversity can exist in the absence of oppression. Now, it's all too easy to merely invoke the ideal of equals living together with their diversity (ethnic, ethical, religious, cultural, or of gender, lifestyle, sexual preference) and without oppression. Deconstructionists, post-colonial theorists, and theorists of recognition often emphatically do so. However, when it comes to specifying concretely which institutions should form the basic structure of such a society, how they should relate to one other, what rights and liberties (and how limited and balanced) citizens should have, and what democratic legitimacy means, it is a whole different story.On the nuts and bolts of an oppression-free society the entire first generation had little to offer, to say nothing of the cauldron of the "verwaltete Welt" (Adorno). Habermas has quite a lot to say, in Between Facts and Norms and in his exchange with Rawls. Among the younger critical theorists who long for reviving the earlier program of the Frankfurt School, few even attempt to say anything. This is the problem, instead, on which [John Rawls's] Political Liberalism, not A Theory of Justice, offers an elaborate theory unmatched by any other to date (....) Critical theory can only gain from enlarging its tent to include also some of Rawls's concepts - reasonability, civility, reciprocity - and from launching empirical research on the conditions of the possibility for them to maintain traction in the challenging decades ahead of us."* Maeve Cooke - "Social theory as critical theory: Horkheimer's program and its relevance today"Excerpt: "Since formalist models of politics abstain from critique of the prevailing deep-seated ethical-existential values and from recommendation of alternatives, they are conducive toward unquestioning acceptance of the ethical-existential values undergirding the established political procedures, facilitating the reproduction of the political status quo. Against this, I take the view that contemporary critical theory must engage with ethical-existential questions, not least if it is to meet the challenges posed by our disastrous ecological situation. This requires it, in turn, to engage with the question of ethical-existential validity. Given the challenge of value pluralism, therefore, a key task for contemporary critical theory is to elaborate a conception of ethical validity that is at once universalist and attentive to the plurality of ethical values and worldviews."* Samuel Moyn - "Critical theory's generational predicament" [Link]Excerpt: "(....) it seems clear that the principal cause of the lack of interest in critical theory for younger generations - the lack of zeal to perpetuate or even study it - is that the votaries of the tradition conformed unreflectively to "the end of history" in the 1990s. They had essentially nothing to say about American unipolarity and the militarism that has so clearly accompanied it. Worse, for one-time Marxists, they never formulated an analysis or critique of economic neoliberalism. Yet these are the causes at the center of the activism and theorizing of many who lived through the past decade and forging a critical perspective on their times."* Martin Saar - "Rethinking Critique and Theory" [open access]Excerpt: "Benjamin's partisanship for the perspective of the defeated in historiography, Adorno's and Horkheimer's insistence on the deep ambivalence of enlightenment ideals, and Marcuse's clear-sighted perception of the central role of the excluded and marginalized, whom the capitalist system cannot even properly exploit, are starting points for a radical self-critique of the Western liberation movements, which have yet to admit their own entanglement in domination elsewhere and thus should actually make way for an even more radical, decentered enlightenment and liberation."* Frank I. Michelman - "Totality, morality, and social philosophy"Excerpt: "We thus see the Institute for Social Research, at a signal moment in its early history, posing for itself the dialectic of human individual agency and environing social totality - with neither element placed at the other's disposal - as a main topic for pursuit by social philosophy and its connected program of social research. It is by pursuit of that topic that the Institute's engagements over the decades of my own academic career have figured, importantly for me, in my work (not generally classified as "Frankfurt School") on liberal constitutional theory. Most pointedly it has done so in undertakings by Jürgen Habermas to explicate a moral point of view from which citizens in a political society encounter one another as each a free and equal person commanding full respect as such - but to explicate that morality, as I have sought to explain, not as a view "that philosophy independently discovers," but rather as one that lies embedded in a historically particular social totality."* Cristina Lafont - "The return of the critique of ideologies" [open access]Excerpt: "(....) I shall focus on just one issue: the recent revival in critiques of ideology. In my view, this type of critique is an important task of critical theory and remains one of its most significant legacies. Yet, if one focuses on the work of critical theorists over the past decades, this statement is far from obvious. In fact, the second generation of the Frankfurt school,most notably Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action, explicitly rejects ideology critique as obsolete in the context of contemporary societies. Even though in the 1960s and 1970s, he had embraced the classicalMarxist approach to ideology critique, he ultimately rejected it. It was the explicit attempt to rebut objections that had plagued this approach that brought about the so-called "democratic turn" of critical theory characteristic of Habermas's work from the 1980s onward and in which the critique of ideologies no longer plays a role."* Christopher F. Zurn - "We're not special: Congratulations!"Excerpt: "It is fine, then, to get right to work on current social movements - Occupy Wall Street and other Square movements, Black Lives Matter, the Sunrise and Third Act movements, MeToo, the Arab Spring, or the Mahsa Amini protests - and on pressing contemporary social problems - climate change and human adaptation, deepening material inequality, the erosion of constitutional democracy, artificial intelligence and human de-skilling, global migration and refugee waves, the transformation of the Westphalian international order, the resilience and resurgence of patriarchy, and so on - without worrying how to fit these movements and problems into the architectonic of Dialectic of Enlightenment or Theory of Communicative Action. To be sure, we need not ignore the conceptual resources and insights of our tradition when they are relevant and enlightening. But we need to take interdisciplinarity seriously by looking to the much broader currents of critical thought on social formations and the changing horizons of human emancipation."* Peter E. Gordon - "The animating impulses of critical theory"Excerpt: "For some readers, this generational shift - between the first and second generations of critical theory - is overdramatized into a stark contrast between totalizing negativism and restorationist optimism, both of which seem to hover at too great an altitude above social reality. Needless to say, this contrast does an injustice to both parties. Adorno and Horkheimer are far more committed to reason's self-reflective possibilities, while Habermas remains far more attentive to reason's systemic distortion. They converge at a point of dialectical mediation, whereas neither pure negativism nor pure idealism would serve as a viable groundwork for critical theory. In what follows I wish to suggest that Horkheimer's original model of social philosophy, as animated by a rational but materialist ideal of emancipation, still has enduring merit."* William E. Scheuerman - "Horkheimer's unrealized vision"Excerpt: "Horkheimer's idea of a mutually constructive exchange between philosophy and critical social science has too often been rare and ephemeral. And this should worry us if you believe, as this author does, that Horkheimer was right to see such an exchange as indispensable to critical theory. (....) Only in 1962 did Habermas, in an appropriately interdisciplinary study that relied heavily on research from legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists, begin to revitalize Frankfurt critical theory. Not only did his landmark Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere take the social sciences seriously, but its young author seems to have implicitly grasped that critical theory could only flourish on the basis of an authentically cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. Horkheimer's original interdisciplinary vision clearly inspired the young Habermas. When properly reconstructed, it should inspire us today as well."
When I was in graduate school "the imaginary" was one of those words that circulated all the more often because it was untethered to any specific theoretical source. It borrowed bits from Lacan and bits from Castoriadis to suggest some historically specific articulation of the very capacity to imagine. There were multiple imaginaries, political, social, technical etc., As someone who was getting interested in Spinoza at the time I tried to connect his writing on the imagination with this idea to no avail.Now, thinking about Spinoza again, it might make sense to think about the way in which Spinoza's particular idea of the imagination is useful for thinking about social and political life. I should be clear that on this point I mean "imagination" as it is described as a particular kind of necessarily incomplete and inadequate knowledge in the Ethics, and not superstition as it is developed in Spinoza's political writings. Any such separation is artificial, as the two are thoroughly intertwined as bodies and minds, however, it is still worth at least heuristically the limitation of thinking from that of acting. For Spinoza the imagination, images formed by the body, always involve both the body that affects us and how we are affected. As Spinoza writes, "Next, to retain the customary words, the affections of the human body whose ideas present external bodies as present to us, we shall call images of things, though they do not reproduce the figure of things. And when the mind regards bodies in this way, we shall say that it imagines." (EIIP17schol).It is not representation but presence that is central to the imagination. To imagine something is to regard i as present. This presence is a confused amalgamation of the qualities of the thing affecting us, and the way we are affected. To imagine is to treat our own associations and connections as if they were part of what we are perceiving. "For example, a soldier, having seen traces of a horse in the sand, will immediately pass from the thought of a horse in the sand will immediately pass from the thought of a horse to the thought of a horseman, and from that to the thought of war and so on. And so each one, according as he has been accustomed to join and connect the image of things in this or that way, will pass from one thought to another" (EIIP18Schol). As I have argued in my post on Spinoza and conspiracy theories is that it stresses the imagination can be both complex, involving a chain of associations from hoof print to horse, and horse to war, and immediate, directly lived as something present. As Althusser stresses for Spinoza the imagination is nothing other than the phenomenological world of lived experience as such. All of our perceptions and evaluations of the world as it is lived, or tendency to view some aspects of nature as good or bad, useful or harmful, organized or disorganized, are the imagination, which is to say are confused perceptions of our own desires and the way that the object affects us. I was thinking of this mediation of the immediate or the immediacy of mediation when reading about theories of race. First, and not surprising, is this line from Etienne Balibar's "Is there a Neo-Racism?" As Balibar writes "I shall therefore venture the idea that the racist complex inextricably combines a crucial function of misrecognition (without which the violence would not be tolerable to the very people engaging in it) and a 'will to know', a violent desire for immediate knowledge of social relations." In other words, part of the appeal of racism is that it makes social relations immediately legible. It provides a geography, dividing town into the "good" and "bad" part, a morality, telling us (people who believe ourselves to be white) who to trust and who to fear. As much as this imagination is immediate, registered in somatic markers such as skin, hair, and eye color, the immediacy is a product of associations and connections that we are constantly subject to, media, entertainment, etc., and, like Spinoza's soldier, we have forgotten in focusing on the immediate present nature of the image.Or, to take another version of the argument, this time from Stuart Hall, "Race is only one element in this struggle to command and structure the popular ideology: but it has been, over the past two decades, a leading element: perhaps the key element. Since it appears to be grounded in natural and biological "facts," it is a way of drawing distinctions and developing practices which appear, themselves, to be "natural," given and universal...Race provides the structure of simplifications which make it possible to construct plausible explanations of troubling developments and which facilitates the application of simplifying remedies. Who now wants to begin to explore the complex of economic and political forces which have perpetuated and multiplied the poverty of the working-class districts fo the inner cities? Who will have time for that complicated exercise--which may require us to trace connections between structures of our society which is more convenient to keep apart: when a simple, obvious, "natural" explanation lies to hand."A few hasty connections/conclusions. First, if you listen to any episode of Hotel Bar Sessions the podcast that I am now a cohost of, I suggest you listen to the interview with Caleb Cain available here (I can plug this in good faith because this is from before I joined the show):One of the thing that comes up in the discussion is how the racist, or "race realist" explanation offers a quick an easy explanation of a variety of phenomena, such as why the inner city of Baltimore is the way that it is in terms of poverty and crime. An actual, or to use the Spinozist term, adequate understanding of the actual factors that have made the inner city the way it is would have to take into consideration the history of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, deindustrialization, etc. etc. etc., Of course it is important to point out that what appears here as immediate, race as an explanation, is itself the product of a long history of associations. It took us a long time to see race, and it takes a lot of work, political and ideological, for us not to see everything about social life, the accumulation of capital, and so on, that is effaced in the immediacy and simplicity of seeing race. So this is what it might mean to consider what "the imaginary institution of society" might mean from a Spinozist perspective. It is the dominance of a particular set of immediate associations of bodies and qualities, associations that are themselves the product of a complex articulation (in Hall's sense), that disappears in the immediacy of the association. I have focused here on race as one such mediated immediacy. It would be wrong to think it is the only one. As Alexandra Minna Stern argues in her book Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination, "Transphobia is the butter on the bread of much alt-right and alt-light vlogging." As with race there is an appeal to a kind of natural immediacy, that of sex, gender, and gender roles, one that is the product of many mediations, right down to the latest explosion in a gender reveal party. The natural order of sex and gender is in some sense the entry point to a larger sense of a natural order. Of course the relation between these two different images of nature, racial and sexual, is complex, overdetermined, and in some sense always shifting. As much as there is an epistemic tendency towards the imagination predicated on its immediacy and self-evident nature, there is a practical one as well: the order and connection of bodies being the same as ideas and all. For many, especially those with advantages in the existing order, there are reasons to hold unto and act within the horizon described by its imagination. I recently finished reading Jeremy Gilbert and Alex William's Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win it Back). In the midst of that book there is a long discussion to retrieve the idea of interests in politics. One of the things that Gilbert and Williams stress that one's interest is related to both one's position and one's horizon. As they write,"From this perspective, workers who vote for immigration restrictions are acting against their interests when conceived within a liberal, communist, or even expansively social democratic horizon, but not when conceived within a conservative horizon. What is it that defines the particular characteristics of the horizon within which interests are perceived, computed, and acted upon? In part it must be a question of the scale--in terms of space and time--of that horizon. When horizons of interest are operating at a small scale, this will mean a focus on the hyperlocal (my immediate family) and the hyper-present (today and tomorrow and perhaps next year). What is reasonable within one horizon is unreasonable in another."If we want to change and expand the horizon of people's interest we must first recognize the horizon that they already operate within even if that horizon is defined by imaginations that seem irrational to us. "Inadequate and confused ideas follow with the same necessity as adequate, or clear and distinct ideas" (EIIP36). To put this in Spinozist terms, we all strive to maintain our existence, but we do so according to what we understand, rightly or wrongly, to be in our interest according to our given level of imagination or understanding. All of which is a very long way of saying that any politics of radical change has to start with understanding the epistemic and practical attachments that most have to the existing imaginary institution of society.
Nearly two months into the war in Gaza, the Biden administration finds itself in a bind. International support for Israel, once strong in the aftermath of Hamas' brutal October 7 attacks, has given way to broad condemnation as Tel Aviv's campaign has left at least 15,000 Palestinians dead in addition to 30,000 injured and 1.8 million displaced.The White House's answer to this anger has been twofold. In public, President Joe Biden and his allies have emphasized the need for Israel to follow international law in its campaign to destroy Hamas but avoided weighing in on whether Israel has already violated the laws of war. In private, officials have urged their Israeli counterparts to "fight more surgically and avoid further mass displacement of Palestinians" after the temporary truce ends, according to the New York Times.But what does it mean for Israel to conduct a "surgical" war against an enemy embedded in an area roughly the size of Philadelphia with more than two million residents? And what does international law mean to a state whose leaders appear committed to destroying Hamas by any means necessary?Few thinkers are better equipped to answer these questions than Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale University and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute, which publishes RS. Moyn has long grappled with the relationship between war and morality, most notably in his 2021 book "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War."RS spoke with Moyn about how U.S. policymakers think about war and what the Gaza conflict means for the future of international law. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.RS: U.S. officials have reportedly admonished Israel to be more 'surgical' in its war against Hamas in Gaza. How do you interpret that call? What does it tell us about how officials view war more broadly?Moyn: It seems as if American policymakers are pushing on Israel their own solution to a controversial war, which is to combine an unlimited right to self-defense with a humanization of the conduct of the hostilities. Now, the truth is, Israel probably got to that combination before September 11, 2001, and the United States learned it from Israel in the first place. But given that America is Israel's patron and protector, it's now in a position of teaching the lesson to Israel that it learned from it. Now, I'm all for saying that these wars — the War on Terror, the campaign in Gaza — are parodies of humanized war because they're so costly in civilian lives. But they're not as bad as they could be because of this new policy — it's still largely rhetorical, but it's policy too — of containing the collateral damage and saying that that makes the war more tolerable.RS: Why is the U.S., and the Biden administration in particular, so focused on questions of international law in war? To the extent that they have placed checks on Israel, it's been to suggest that international law is the thing that they must be holding to, rather than a broader sense of morality.Moyn: Well, it's really only a part of international law, which is itself very interesting. Claiming an unlimited right to self-defense isn't just a moral claim; it's also a legal claim, and it's wrong. It was wrong in the War on Terror, and I think it's wrong when Israel asserts it today. We could get into the details on that side of the equation, but you're right that in our debates, international law has become something that for many listeners means constraint not of the right to wage war but of how it's waged. I think that Joe Biden, in his so called 'bear hug' strategy, thought that once it became clear how controversial this war was going to be, he would push humanitarian concern as a way of not interfering with Israel's claimed right of self-defense, [just as] America didn't tolerate those who said its wars were illegal while sometimes accepting the criticism that the way it conducts them is illegal.RS: How, both in its justification and in its conduct, does this war differ from the wars that the U.S. carried out following 9/11?Moyn: It is more similar to the ground campaigns that America fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, which involved a pretty substantial commitment of troops and a lot of blood spilled just because ground warfare is bloody, especially when it involves cities like Fallujah or Gaza City. It's not similar to the absolutely no-holds-barred phase of the War on Terror where the George W. Bush administration asserted that international law just didn't apply to what it did to detainees. The whole point of humanized warfare is that Israel is claiming that it's following the law. But it's also not similar to the later, so-called "sustainable" phase of America's War on Terror when America pulled out troops even while extending its drone campaign and special forces deployments and then claimed to sanitize that phase of the War on Terror without all the messiness of American troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel's currently in a phase that combines lots and lots of violence with claims to still be following international law. It has had phases of its struggle against Hamas that involved just bombing or its own use of special forces that were about conducting the struggle but making it as antiseptic as possible. It's just that Israel can't conduct that kind of campaign while promising to remove Hamas from power altogether.RS: Do I understand correctly that, generally, law of war questions only concern conduct within the war and not whether the broader goals of a war are appropriate or inappropriate? Doesn't it leave those questions entirely to the discretion of states?Moyn: It depends on how you define laws of war, but what we call international humanitarian law, or the laws of armed conflict, is really exclusively about how you fight. And there are other laws about when, whether, under what circumstances you can fight at all. You could call that body of law part of the laws of war, but it wouldn't be what most people mean when they use that phrase.RS: I guess I'm thinking about the question of proportionality.Moyn: The reason that's a tricky concept is that it applies in both stages of the analysis. In the so-called jus ad bellum analysis — when the resort to force in the first place or on a continuing basis is legal — there's the question of whether the exercise of a self-defense right is proportional. That is a totally different inquiry than what has generally been talked about in terms of proportionality because that's in the jus in bello — the laws of war about the conduct of hostilities. And there the question is, does the collateral damage in any particular attack outweigh the anticipated military advantage of that attack? We could argue that Israel is being disproportionate in the war in general, on the first part of the question, or we can argue with regard to any particular attack whether its attacks are disproportionately harmful to civilians.RS: Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik recently wrote that the lesson of this war is "brutal and short: human rights are not universal and international law is arbitrarily applied." Do you agree with that take?Moyn: No, because it was a lesson that the whole history of human rights and international law already taught.RS: Can you tell me more about that?Moyn: Well, there was never a time when human rights weren't selectively applied, and there was never a time when international law wasn't the law of the powerful. This campaign seems like a rather late date to learn what has always been obvious.RS: Is that a fundamental problem for international law? Or is there a possibility of a more effective international legal system in the future?Moyn: Sure, it's not as if there isn't a struggle within politics, and therefore in law, to make the law different than it has been. I could say that American law works to the advantage of the powerful and against the weak, and that would be true, but that doesn't mean we can't change it for the better.I think international law has been changed for the better at times, but it's never been freed from this syndrome that it's a body of law of, by, and for states, framed with their approval, and interpreted by them to suit their ends. We can struggle to make it more constraining in more ways, but never is it apart from the political context. Never will it transcend selectivity and inadequacy.RS: You've already written a book-length answer to this, so I'll forgive you if it's not the easiest one to answer quickly, but do you think that international law can be a tool to fight for an actual end to war? Or is it simply a tool to manage war into the future?Moyn: I do think there are a lot of resources in it. It is revolutionary that we can make claims not just that states are fighting brutally but that they're engaged in illegal war-making. The trouble is that, if we prioritize the first claim, the second claim gets lost in the shuffle. I think that's what's happened in our time through the War on Terror, with the emphasis on torture and later civilian death in drone campaigns. It seems to be repeating itself in this situation, with the emphasis on civilian death, which is not dishonorable, but in the end there's only a political solution, which means we should focus at some point on who's in the right, who has a just claim, and what would make political violence something of the past.Dear RS readers: It has been an extraordinary year and our editing team has been working overtime to make sure that we are covering the current conflicts with quality, fresh analysis that doesn't cleave to the mainstream orthodoxy or take official Washington and the commentariat at face value. Our staff reporters, experts, and outside writers offer top-notch, independent work, daily. Please consider making a tax-exempt, year-end contribution to Responsible Statecraft so that we can continue this quality coverage — which you will find nowhere else — into 2024. Happy Holidays!
Robert Wade on Zombie Ideas, Being inside the World Bank, and the Death of Ethics in Economics after the Marginal Revolution
The global economy is at the core of some of the main issues in contemporary International Relations. But how do we understand the global economy and what impact does that have on how we deal with the power politics around it? A fault line seems to have emerged between those who take economic theory seriously and those who denounce it for being part of the problem. Informed by his training as an anthropologist, Robert H. Wade—professor at the LSE—takes a different tack: he bases his engagement with the way in which Adam Smith has been appropriated to advocate for a dominant view of 'free markets' on real-world economics and in-depth accounts of insiders. In this Talk, Wade—among others—discusses experimentation in international economic regimes, why the International Financial Institutions don't fight economic crises, and the powers and perils of being inside the World Bank.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
If we'd reframe your question as being more broadly about global studies, I think that one of the really fundamental questions is how and why it is that the precepts of neoliberalism have penetrated into every nook and cranny of Western societies, and have penetrated to a very large extent many non-Western countries.
This has happened especially, but not only, through the agency of the IMF and the World bank, which have imbued these neoliberal principles; through the mechanism of graduate education: children of the elites in developing countries go out to American, British, other Western universities, and they learn that this is 'true' economics, or 'true' IPE, or 'true' Political Science, and then they come back and implement these same principles and make them a reality back home. But across the globe, this even holds for the Nordic countries. In Iceland and other Nordic countries, from the 1980s, networks of people sharing a belief in neo-liberal precepts, began to form and sort of place each other in key positions within the state, and in politics, and built a momentum in this direction. These precepts have become understood as just natural, as in Margaret Thatcher's 'there is no alternative'.
I live in the UK, and the great bulk of the British public really does believe that the government is just like a household writ large, and the same rules of budgeting that apply to the household should apply to the state. That when times are tough the household has to tighten its belt, cut back on spending, and it is only fair that the government does the same, and if the government does not, if the government runs a deficit in hard times, then the government is being irresponsible. And this is a completely mistaken and pre-Keynesian idea, but it is a 'zombie idea'—that is, however much arguments and evidence may be mounted against it, it just keeps coming up and up and up, and governments come to power riding on this zombie idea and a flotilla of related ideas.
The persistence of this zombie idea is all the more amazing as we just had a global financial crisis in 2007/8, which would prompt a rethinking of these ideas. But these neoliberal precepts have been, if anything, more strongly reinforced. In previous hard times—and obviously the 1930s depression is the exemplary case—there has been a stronger move towards, what you could call, social democratic precepts. But not this time! Indeed, even after the crisis, the whole of the European Union with 500 million people is even more thoroughly structured on the basis of these ideas. I am thinking of what is popularly known as the Fiscal Compact signed by the EU Member States in 2012, which commits all governments to balance budgets all the time—that is, first, the structural deficit may not rise above 0.5 percent of GDP. Second, the public debt may not rise above 60 percent of GDP. Third, automatic financial sanctions are levied on governments that exceed these two thresholds. Fourth, the whole procedure is supervised by the European Commission, and this is presented as in the name of sound budgeting. This package is presented as justified by the proposition that government is a household writ large. The most elementary principles of Keynesian macroeconomics show why this is not simply mistaken, but a disaster, and will keep generating recessionary pressures. It is sold as a kind of excuse for avoiding to put in place the essential conditions for the monetary union, namely, a common budget and a sizable transfer mechanism to the regions just as exists in the United States. But they do not want to do that, but still they call this agreement 'cooperation', which is all about not cooperation, but about writing these dictates around this zombie idea written into the very basic architecture of the EU. Beyond EU politics, it materializes all the way down to, I don't know, the function of the privatization of the Post Office, it goes all the way down to the sort of capillaries of how universities are run, and the incentive systems that have placed upon academics, and there is very little pushback. The one reason, why I am almost completely delighted about Jeremy Corbyn's election as the leader of the Labour party, is that this is one small case of where there seems to be some concerted pushback against these zombie ideas. The point being that the established Labour party basically bought into this whole set of neo-liberal ideas. It combined maintaining the overall structure of inequality in society with more emphasis on providing some help to the poor, but they had to be hardworking poor.
Yet, one knows that there can be dramatic changes in the prevailing zeitgeist of norms. One knows that there can be big changes in the space of a few decades and the question is can one imagine a scenario in which they might be a big change in norms back to a more kind of social-democratic direction. So where will this take place? Because of technological change in the labor market, there is a real big crisis of employment with many middle-class jobs cut out and polarization in the labor market. This might then induce a political movement to have a much bigger change in income distribution than anybody with power is now talking about. Talk of re-distribution these days is really almost entirely around redistribution through the state, but the point I would make is that if there is to be any significant reduction of inequality, especially inequality at the top, there has to be more attention to changes in market-income distribution.
Let me explain. The share of profits in national income has been going up and the share of labor income has been going down. So we should harness the shareholder structure of the market to affect a more equal income distribution by enabling a much wider section of the population to buy into the profit share. At the moment the profit share goes to senior executives and equity holders, but equity holders are highly concentrating at the top of the income and wealth distribution. If equity earners could be spread much more equally, then a much wider section of the population would get income, while they sleep so to speak. We could institute something like trusts, whose members could be the employees of a company, the customers, the neighbors of the company, and the trust would borrow on capital markets and take out insurance against the repayment of the lending of loan and then it would buy shares, it would use that borrowed money to buy shares in the company, and the company would pay out dividends on the shares and then that dividend income coming out of profits would be distributed to the members of the trust. That would be a way of getting the rising share of profits in national income distributed out to the population at large. I particularly like this metaphor of "earning income while you sleep", since at the moment it is only the rich people, who are earning income while they sleep. Somehow that facility of earning income while you sleep has to be made much more widely and available—by using the market against itself, so to speak.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?
I suppose the starting point was really this; my father was a New Zealand diplomat, so we moved quite often. By that time I was twelve my parents were posted to Colombo, Ceylon as it was called then. After having lived just in Western countries, I suddenly encountered at this very formative age Colombo and Sri Lanka. I was just amazed by that experience; by the color, the taste, the exoticness, but I was also very struck by how the many boys at the same age as me, were walking around with no shoes. I particular remember this boy carrying a baby on his shoulder, the baby looked half-dead and covered in scabs, and I think it was then I got the idea of just how unequal the world was. Then at university I studied economics, but I also visited my parents in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and I got another sense of that great disparity in wealth and living standards. At this time I had come across Adam Smith and the wealth of nations question and that helped to encapsulate or to crystalize my interests. So I wanted to go the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex and got enrolled for a PhD in economics, but en route I spent several weeks in India and during that time I began to dwell upon just how boring and how useless everything I studied under the name of microeconomics. I kept thinking of these dreadfully dry textbooks of marginal cost curves and marginal revenue curves and utility function and difference curves etc., which I had forced myself to sit exams in. By this time I had done a little bit of fieldwork, living on Pitcairn Island in the middle of the Pacific.
When I got back to Sussex after fieldwork I announced that I wished to not do a PhD in economics, but to do one in anthropology thinking all the time, that this would actually be more use for understanding why for example India, where I had been, was so very poor. So that's what I did: a PhD in anthropology… In some ways I regard that as having been a mistake, because the sort of mainstream of anthropology is very far away from the Adam Smith questions. Having done the degree in anthropology, pretty soon I began to change direction and pay much more attention to the state, to the state bureaucracy. I went to India and I studied the Irrigation Department and other related departments. I went to South Korea and I studied state irrigation agencies and I went to Taiwan and I studied the state more broadly. So I was kind of moving up from my Italian village, moving kind of up the scale in terms of state agencies and then the state as a whole.
Then I went to work for the World Bank in the 1980s and my main reason for doing that was not to do the research the World Bank wanted me to do, but rather to study the World Bank from the inside as fieldwork. If in some ways switching to anthropology was a mistake, in other ways it was not, because I approached those kind of Wealth-of-Nations-questions in a way very different from how economists approached them. For example when I went to Taiwan and studied the trade regime, the first thing I did was to go and talk to people who operated through the trade regime, whereas I noticed that the published works by economists celebrating Taiwan's free trade regime was based on what the rules said and what certain government officials told them was the case. They had never actually talked to people who traded through the trade regime. If they would have, they would have learned about all the covert controls that went on such that there was quite a distinction between the liberal face of the trade regime and the reality of the trade regime. The reality was that the government was managing trade in line with industrial policy, but the government absolutely did not want the world to know that. So all this was kept hidden and I was really regarded as rather unwelcome visitor—and in fact to this day my book Governing the Market (1990, read the introduction here) is not well received in Taiwan. It says the government of Taiwan did a good job of managing the market, but they want the world to believe that Taiwan is a free trade country. So that is the kind of intellectual trajectory that I have been on.
So I think that the value of the anthropology PhD was that it really taught me, in practical terms, the meaning of the anthropological maxim, which is 'soaking and poking'. To put it another way—I love this—anthropologists are social scientists, who believe that the plural of anecdote is evidence. And indeed I place a lot of weight on anecdotes, on gossip, on the stories people tell, whereas economists would be much happier reducing, let us say, South Korea's trade regime to one data point in a matrix, and then compare that data point with, let us say, Malaysia's data point to see how the trade regimes are correlated with growth, or something like that, and that is really not my interest.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
Despite what I've just said, I do think that a graduate training in economics is very useful, provided one does not believe it. And that is really difficult, because the socialization pressures are intense: if you do not say the right things—which are neoliberal type things on the whole—then you will likely not get a high grade. But I have noticed that economists tend to know how to think, how to make arguments, they tend to understand the idea of causality, and that may seem an astonishing thing to say on my part, because it implies that students coming from other disciplines are often weak in understanding the very basic ideas of causality, but that is my experience. I had many students coming from, who knows, IR or Political Science or Sociology or Anthropology, who clearly do not have much idea of causality; they can describe things, but they find thinking in terms of cause and effect, in terms of independent and dependent variables, in terms of left and right side, they just find it difficult. So I do think that there is a lot to be said for studying economics, and mastering the maths, provided that the critical facility is not lost. That is point number one.
Point number two is that I think that there is a huge premium on doing fieldwork, and the field work maybe in developing countries, but when I say field work, I don't just mean going out to villages, going out to see poor people 'over there'. I am talking of fieldwork inside bureaucracies: to try and understand the culture, the incentive systems that people are working under—fieldwork at home so to speak, in the countries one comes from. From the students' point of view, it is clearly much easier to sit in the LSE library to do the research. So in my marking I give quite a premium to a student actually doing fieldwork, going out and interviewing, and having the experience of writing up and interpreting the interviews and somehow fitting it back into a larger argument—but really few students actually do that, and I think that that is a real, real big mistake. Mind you, the same risk holds for fieldwork in economics as it does for studying economics: I encourage students to work for (do fieldwork in, experience) the World Bank; and several have—but to the best of my knowledge almost none of them has kept their critical perspective. They really come to buy into it.
The relations between states are settled either through diplomacy or warfare. Why would we have to focus on economics to understand IR?
Because economics—such as for example balances of payment, surpluses and deficits—set the constraints and incentives on countries in terms of their relationships with each other. A great deal of diplomacy is driven by economic pressures: diplomacy to get other countries to for example open their markets, or to cut deals with countries—'if you do this, we will do that'—deals that may relate to areas that are rather different, for instance if you buy more of these of our exports, we will help you fight such and such country, because the manufactures are in my constituency.
So, in a way, the way you framed the question is part of the reason why I react against the discipline of IR: because it tends to treat diplomacy, war, and so on, as somehow rather separate from economic pressures, and I see these economic pressures as very powerful drivers of both of the other two things. As another example, one of the drivers of the Syrian conflict was that there was an acute drought (like Weizman observed in Theory Talk #69, red), which meant that many people were rendered destitute; rural areas flooded into the cities, and the Assad regime just was—understandably—unable to cope; and large numbers of young men, concentrated in cities, rootless and with no jobs, just were recruiting fodder for the Wahhabi sect. I have always thought of economics—not so much as in the making choices in conditions of scarcity, that is sort of Lionel Robin's definition—in the sense of Alfred Marshal, about how people make a living, as a very fundamental driver of a lot of what happens in International Relations.
Pikkety recently published Capital in the 21st Century, causing quite the stir. But why would inequality between people matter for IR?
Let me comment by invoking a very contemporary exhibit—the migration crisis in Europe now. Maybe a decade ago I looked at the figures and if you took the average income of the EU-15 prior to latest extensions and then expressed the average income of countries outside of the EU—including sub-Sahara Africa—as a percentage, then there was a really dramatic falling away of income levels relative to the EU, in countries all around the EU and whether you took market exchange rates or purchasing power parity. If you went round to sub-Sahara Africa and took the average, it was more like two percent in market exchange rates and seven percent in purchasing power parity; and the 'problem' is that there is certainly here a rather thin slither of sea between Africa and the promised land of Europe and to the east there are these great open planes, where armies can go up and down to the speed of light, so to speak, but people can also move pretty quickly across these planes.
So all one has to do—and this might just be only a bit of an exaggeration—if one is on the poor end of this poverty pyramid is hop across the border and you have a chance at least of getting a very appreciable increase in living conditions and income, with which you can then get savings to remit back to home. So the migrations pressures are just huge. So that is one reason for linking inequality to issues in International Relations—really fundamental issues, and very very difficult to dissolve.
You've done anthropological fieldwork inside the World Bank—an institution drawing a lot of criticism from its detractors in IR. Can you shed some kind of light about what kind of 'animal' the World Bank is?
First of all, let me say that at the micro-level—the level of the people you know and the people I know inside the World Bank—I agree that there are people doing a lot of good work. But if you look at the organization more generally—the World Bank and also the IMF—they are clearly instruments mainly of US foreign policy—and any number of US senators, members of the House, have basically said that. When they are defending the International Financial Institutions (they often criticize them), they do so by saying they are important for US foreign policy. And you have to look at the governance structures to see how it is that the US in particular—but Western states more generally—have from the beginning, through the very Articles of Agreement, created a structure which locks in their power, and has made it very difficult for other countries (including Japan) to significantly increase their shareholdings. The US has kept the presidency of the Bank and the much less recognized Number Two position of the IMF, and has used these positions to have a very strong influence.
Just to illustrate what the Bank and the Fund do: at the time of the East-Asian crisis—specifically the Korean crisis in 1997-1998—the IMF mission was in Seoul. The negotiations were in a hotel there. David Lipton from the US Treasury (and a former student of Larry Summers who was by then Deputy Secretary) was just down the corridor of where the negotiations took place, and every so often the IMF people would walk out of the negotiations and consult with David Lipton, then come back in and—as Paul Blustein reports in his book called The Chastening—often said something rather different from what they had been saying before they consulted with David Lipton.
Just to take another example, the US being able to appoint the president of the Bank—to appoint a person known personally to the Treasury Secretary or to the Secretary of the State, or both—is really of great value: when there is a 'trustful relationship'—or a relationship of dependency, the president being dependent on those who appointed him in the Administration—it is possible for those people in the Administration, or people close to them, to just ring up the president of the Bank, and talk in a very informal, confidential, trustful way about what is happening in Latin America, or what is happening in the Middle East, and what the US thinks the Bank should or should not be doing in those places. Larry Summers appointed a protégé of his to one of the regional development banks, and this person—who is very senior in the bank—told me that Larry would frequently ring him, while he is being driven home in the evening from the Treasury, just to have a chat about how things were going in her region, and to pass on suggestions about what the Bank should be doing there, and to get intelligence from her about what was happening in the region, and so on. The point is that, making these personal connections is of immense value, but at the same time, the US Congress, in particular, is very much against having a big Bank against allowing a capital increase for the World Bank—so that the bank could, as it should be doing, increase its lending for infrastructure investment ten times. It is just a complete scandal how little the Bank has been lending for the past 20 years or more for infrastructure, for roads and power stations and so on. The US does not want the Bank providing socialistic competition with the private sector: it says these things are for the private sector to do, and the Bank has to take care of poverty, because the private sector is not interested in poverty.
So the US wants to keep the presidency of the Bank, it wants to keep, secondly, its unique veto right on the big decisions, such as decisions on whether to increase the capital base—but provided those two things are met it does not care that much about the Bank. In the case of the Fund, the US is also very powerful, but of course the Europeans have a bit more relative power. Right now I think the world is in an even more dangerous sort if financial condition than might appear, because the IMF is acutely short of secure or guaranteed lending resources, so if there is to be another round of crisis—as I think is entirely likely within the next five years—the Fund depends upon borrowing short-term from member countries, like on six months terms, but member countries can say 'no', and that means that the Fund's ability to fight crises is quite constrained. The Fund should implement what was agreed in 2010 by all the member countries represented on the board of the IMF: to roughly double the quote of the guaranteed lending resources, that is, resources the countries actually hand over to the Fund, over which they actually give up country control. All the relevant capitals ratified it with one exception—the US—because Congress refused because the individual barons, who are not under that much party discipline, each said to the Treasury: 'look, the question of the IMF is of zero significance to my electorate, so if you want my vote on the IMF, you have to give me things that I want like projects in my constituency and so on'. The Treasury added up the demands of the people, whose vote had to be won, and it considered those demands were just way, way, way over the top. As long as a Democrat is in the presidency, while the House is controlled by Republicans the world is sort of held hostage to this. Beyond this example, this actually entails a structural problem: the US blocking or producing a gridlock in international organizations, because the Congress is hostile to international organizations, because Congress sees it to imply a loss of US sovereignty. The only way to end this gridlock is to end the US veto in the Fund and the Bank, but the problem is that the US can veto any measures.
One response of the big developing countries is to create bypass organizations—such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Banks, such as the new Development Bank, such as the Contingent Reserve arrangement the BRICs have established, and then a growing number of sort of regional development banks. And I think that that is a good thing, but it does raise questions about coordination, about who is looking after, if you will, the global interests, global issues such as climate change. In short, we need a genuine World Bank, rather than the American-Bank-in-the-World we have today.
You engage thoroughly with economics and economic theory. Now there seem to be two kinds of critical approaches to economics in IPE: one criticizes its rationality as flawed, and another buys into its rationality but attempts to point out where actual policy gets it wrong. Where do you stand in this?
If you take the example of how the EU attempted to impose fiscal rules on Greece, you see a notion of rationality which draws upon these very primitive notions that I referred to right at the beginning, where the government is just a household writ large, and the same set of rules that apply to the budgeting of the household must apply to the government as well. Here, the assumption is that any macroeconomic proposition must have microeconomic foundations, that it must be derivable from propositions about microeconomic agents acting in this sort of self-maximizing way, and if you cannot derive macroeconomic propositions from those micro foundations, then there is something unreliable, un-rigorous about your macroeconomics. So what are then the sources of these micro-economic assumptions?
This leads us to one fundamental and almost completely unaddressed weaknesses of economics can be traced back to the Marginal Revolution in the late 19th century. From that moment onwards, there has been an attempt to model economics on physics, and that was very explicit on the part of people like Pareto and Walras, and Jevons, early Marginalist thinkers. They even drew up tables with terms of physics, like velocity, on one side, and then corresponding terms in economics on the other. That had a huge benefit in terms of the 'science' of economics, because it cut economics loose from Adam Smith's and other classical economists' preoccupations with issues of morality and ethics. Adam Smith thought his most important book was not the Wealth of Nations but his Theory of Moral Sentiments, on which he was working, revising yet again, when he died. For Smith, economics and morals were never separate worlds, but intimately related. So for him, the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations were just twins. The point about the marginalist revolution, and the embrace of physics as the model, was that it cut economics free of all that sort of subjective stuff about values. So economics after the marginalist revolution set off with the assumption that not production, but the movement of individuals in markets engaged in trading with each other became the center of gravity of economics. Making the study of exchange rather than the study of production central was analogous to, say, Boyle's Law in physics. Boyle's Law in physics explained the movement of molecules in gasses, as a function of the pressure applied to the gas. So why did they make that analogy?
The point of likening of individuals in microeconomic actions with molecules in gasses was the following. Everybody knows that we do not apply any consideration of ethics or moral sentiments to the movement of the molecules in gas, so neither should we apply any notions of ethics or moral sentiments to the movements of individuals in market exchanges. And that was the way that all considerations of ethics, of morality were just removed from economics. I for instance asked the question to well-known American growth theorist, as we were walking down the street in Providence at Brown University: 'is it moral for people to freeride?' And he said, 'yes of course, provided they do not break the law'. So ethics and questions of morality have been almost completely expunged from economics in a way that would horrify classical economists including Smith; and a particular idea of rationality has been an important part of cleansing economics from those moral considerations. George DeMartino, editor of the Oxford Handbook of Professional Economics Ethics which just appeared has a wonderful phrase to capture this—'econogenic harm': the harm built into the way that economics, professional economists work.
Haven't specific fields, like development economics—a field you engage with yourself—advanced to overcome these weaknesses in economic theory?
Let me root my answer again in observations about the linkages between theory and practice, for it is in practice that economic theory really does its work and its politics becomes visible. It always amazes me we have had a development industry in place for roughly the past 70 years with vast numbers of people, organizations, money all orchestrated underneath this umbrella of development; yet if you go back and read what the early writers about development and economic growth said—I am thinking of people like Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Myrdal, Hirschman, Prebisch, but also Moses Abramovitz. If you go back and look at what they were saying, it seems to me that we have not advanced all that much. Sure, we have advanced a lot in terms of econometric techniques, but in terms of substance we have not. One conclusion I draw from that is that it is really important that international regimes—for example, World Bank and IMF loan conditions, but also WTO regimes—give room for experimentation, because it is really not the case that 'there is no alternative'. This Washington Consensus agenda has clearly not been effective in accelerating production, upgrading it, and production diversification, or export upgrading, or export diversification. So, there should be written into the regimes a lot of room for experimentation. But this isn't there because of the political origin of these regimes; because of what western countries want for the rest world, namely, to open the rest of the world to their markets.
In the 80s there were a lot of experts in industrial development in the World Bank and they did good work, promoting industrial growth and investment in productive infrastructure. But then Anne Krueger came in as chief economist, and brought in a whole lot of people with her—who, like here, were arch-neoliberals. The industrial growth people were invited to find employment elsewhere, or to rebrand themselves as experts in who knows what, environmental assessment, primary education, or good governance. There was no room for them. This also fitted well with some bad experiences the Bank had had with investing in infrastructure. It had gotten into a lot of trouble with large-scale infrastructural interventions such as roads and dams and the like from, especially, US NGOs mobilizing Congress—which then put pressure on the Treasury and so on. My lament throughout this whole conversation has been that we seem to have become just locked into this direction that was set in the 1980s, and it is very difficult to see what kind of economic catastrophe would be necessary to give a sufficient shock to reroute the global system of economic governance.
So after the 1980s, the Bank sort of backed off and began saying that development, economic development, was about poverty reduction—the slogan of the Bank became, 'our dream is a world free of poverty'. You can understand that shift partly in terms of pulling out of the concern with production to get into safe territory, but also because poverty reduction seemed to sort of take care of inequality, because you reduced inequality to poverty—to the poor 'over there', and we can feel good about helping them; but we do not want talk about inequality, which involves us, because then there is the question of justice of our income.
But then the most recent turn is that we're seeing a renewed push for infrastructure in the World Bank and western development agencies. I think that you can link this recent infrastructure push to uncertainty about the sources of economic growth. In the West there is a real question about sustaining economic growth without housing bubbles and stock market bubbles—in other words, without endogenously building financial instability. There may well be a similar sort of issue in terms of the growth of developing countries.
Last question. Adam Smith seems to be constantly present in your work as a critical interlocutor. How come?
I kind of engage in a critical debate with Adam Smith, but especially with people today, who believe his ideas. I often start to frame arguments in terms of his famous 40 word summary of the causes of the relative wealth of nations, which he actually wrote in 1755, which is to say long before the first edition of the Wealth of Nations. I will just tell you what these 40 words say, and then I will tell you the significance of them. He said:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism than peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.'
So I am struck by how today many economists say or imply that this is essentially right; you need some qualifications of course, but essentially that is the nub of it. You might have to translate peace, easy taxes, tolerable administration of justice into more modern terms, but that is the essence of it. For example, Gregory Mankiw—Professor of economics at Harvard, former chair of the National Council of Economic Advisers during the Bush administration, and author of a very popular textbook in economics—said in the Wall Street Journal in 2006: Adam Smith was right to say that – and then he gave the 40 word quote. The renowned economists Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson wrote Pillars of Prosperity, which also begins with Smith's 40 words, and they even see the book as a kind of elaboration, but in that same kind of spirit, of Smith's basic idea. So my point is that these ideas are still current; they are still the sort of front of a lot of neoliberal thinking. I am just astonished these ideas all these centuries later remain so powerful. I have had at the back of my mind the idea of organizing an international competition to provide a contemporary 40 word statement, which is sort of equivalent to Smith's, which would obviously have to be of a more global character, encompassing the globalized world economy.
Robert Hunter Wade worked at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, 1972-95, World Bank, 1984-88, Princeton Woodrow Wilson School 1989/90, MIT Sloan School 1992, Brown University 1996-2000. Fellow of Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 1992/93, Russell Sage Foundation 1997/98, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin 2000/01. Fieldwork in Pitcairn Is., Italy, India, Korea, Taiwan. Research on World Bank 1995-continuing. Author of Irrigation and Politics in South Korea (1982), Village Republics: The Economic Conditions of Collective Action in India (1988, 1994), Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asia's Industrialization (1990, 2003). Latter won American Political Science Association's award of Best Book in Political Economy, 1992.
Related links
Faculty profile at LSE Read Wade's The Piketty phenomenon and the future of inequality (2014, real-world economics review) here (pdf) Read Wade's Capitalism and Democracy at Cross-Purposes (2013, Challenge) here (pdf) Read Wade's Rethinking Industrial Policy for Low Income Countries (2007 ADB Conference paper) here (pdf) Read Wade's Bringing the State Back In (2005, IPG) here (pdf) Read Wade's Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? (2004, World Development) here (pdf) Read Wade's Creating Capitalisms (Introduction to 2003 book 'Governing the Market') here (pdf)
This post is illustrated by some of the promo work I have done for the bookI have commented before, more than once even, that the intersection of Spinoza and Marx is less a position, something like Spinozist Marxism, than a field of intersecting problems and questions. In some sense it is possible to even map out the way in which different Marxists draw from different elements of Marx (and Spinoza) creating different articulations of the relations which intersect with different problems in the critique of capitalism. For Louis Althusser the important parts of Spinoza are the critique of the imagination (found in the Appendix to Part One of the Ethics), the theory of the different types of knowledge (IIP40Schol), as well as "God is the immanent, not the transitive cause of all things" (IIP18). Of course such a list begins to reflect divisions and tensions in Althusser's writing: the imagination is integral to his theory of ideology, immanent causality to his understanding of structure and the mode of production, while the different types of knowledge persists throughout Althusser's writing as a kind of philosophy of philosophical practice. While for Frédéric Lordon the central thesis of Spinoza is less epistemological or ontological than it is anthropological. It is the centrality of desire, "as the very essence of man, insofar as it is determined from any affection, to do something," coupled with the fundamental misrecognition of that desire, the fundamental illusion of a free choice which leads the infant to believe it freely wants milk, and more to the point, the worker to believe that he or she freely wants to work. For Etienne Balibar the central thesis is perhaps Proposition 37 of Part IV of the Ethics, and more importantly its two demonstrations which map out the constitution of a real, or rational, and imagined, or affective basis of sociality. We could also flip this formulation, asking not what aspect, or proposition from Spinoza plays a central role, but what problem from Marx. Ideology can already be seen to be the answer in the case of Althusser (and a different way in Lordon and Balibar), while for Antonio Negri the connection passes through production, through the question of what does it mean to think of history and society as something that is produced and reproduced through our action and lives. A different focus on labor, or praxis can be found in André Tosel, whose work is an attempt to think through what it means to think of praxis as poeisis and poeisis as praxis, making as doing and doing as making. This Marxist problem if fundamentally informed by the Spinozist idea that every finite thing, every mode, acts, or rather operates in and through other modes.The list goes on, and one could map out a whole set of definitions of Spinozist Marxism which would be different intersections of propositions and problems from each. The question I have been thinking about is given this field in which every position has already in some sense been occupied how is it possible to make a new intervention. Or put differently what particular proposition and what particular problem does The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work articulate, or think together. If I had to pick one I would say that it is the famous, or infamous Proposition 7 from Part Two, "The the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." Of course this claim is something that every interpretation of Spinoza must ultimately wrestle with, and one could chart out the various neo-Spinozisms in terms of how they make sense of the identity and difference of things and ideas, bodies and minds. To be more specific I would say that it is a matter of thinking this as a formulation of ideology. As I write in the book, "...Grasped in terms of a post-Spinozist social theory, it is possible to argue that Spinoza's formulation can productively paired with Marx's assertion of the identity of consciousness and life. Ideas and the imagination, like bodies and desires, must be grasped in terms of both of their internal striving, their consistency, and of their finitude, their determination. Contrary to a long-standing bias in the history of philosophy to treat ideas and things as two fundamentally different orders of reality, Spinoza posits a fundamental identity of thought and existence—, an identity that, paradoxically, makes it possible to grasp their points of divergence and intersection. Of course, as I have already argued, the very idea of ideology necessarily presupposes a difference as well as an identity; in order to be the ruling ideas, the concepts and narratives that rule ideas must be different from the experience and conditions they rule over in order to be the ruling ideas, but, at the same time, they must be produced by those conditions. There is a limited efficacy of true ideas insofar as they are true; ideas do not have effects on their own, but require conditions in order to exist and be disseminated. Spinoza's assertion regarding true ideas can be understood as a mirror image of Marx's claim regarding ideology. As Étienne Balibar describes the structure of ideology in The German Ideology,"The ideological mechanism, which can equally be read as a social process, will come to be seen as an astonishing conversion of impotence into domination: the abstraction of consciousness, which is an expression of consciousness's incapacity to act in reality … becomes the source of power precisely because it is "'autonomized." Contrary to his critical contemporaries, such as Feuerbach and Stirner, who believed in the power of ideas, and thus the weapon of criticism, Marx underscores that ideas only have power, only have effects, under particular material conditions that give some no time to think and others the means to spread and disseminate their ideas. Ideas have a causality that is not derived not from them as ideas, but from the social relations that produce and circulate them."First this has to be thought of in terms of identity, ideas are nothing other than the existing relation between things, the different material relations expressed differently. In other words, to quickly allude to something that the book develops over a few pages, the idea that there is ethical and moral worth to work, that have "grind" mindset, are the key to not only material success but spiritual worth as well, is nothing other than the material conditions, precarity, gig economy, and so on, rendered in ideal or conceptual forms. A person who feels that their self value and self worth can be measured in terms of how much they work is nothing other than the consciousness of labor power itself. In other words, the order and connection of ideology is the same as the order and connection of exploitation. Just as Spinoza argues that desire is nothing other than an idea of our appetite, the body's needs in mental form, our ideas about work, which make it the key to worth and self-value, are nothing other than our position within the economy in material form. (This is something central to another Marxist/Spinozist thinker, Franck Fischbach, who has argued that the conditions of intellectual life are the same as that of material life. As Fischbach writes, "If it is true that 'the production of ideas, of ideas, representations and consciousness (...) is the language of real life" then the production of ideologies, of inadequate representations, is the language of life incomplete, inadequate, and mutilated." Mind and body are two different ways of grasping the same thing.
Such a formulation seems crude, deterministic, and in some sense more vulgar than the most vulgar of materialisms; it posits us all as spiritual automatons whose thoughts and ideas do nothing more than express, in a different attribute, what is already given in our material condition, in the relations of bodies. Things are complicated quite a bit by subsequent propositions which assert that only a body can affect or determine a body and only an idea can affect or determine an idea. The assertion of identity, ideas and things, mind and body, as two different ways of looking at the same thing, has as it paradoxical corollary the assertion of difference, mind and body as two fundamentally different ways of acting and reacting, each with their own causal orders and connections that are entirely independent. This is a particular dense metaphysical knot of identity and difference, but I am more interested in how it plays out practically, politically, as a way of thinking about ideas and bodies, base and superstructure Much could be said about the way this plays out in Spinoza's text, especially in Part IV of the Ethics, to underscore the limited efficacy of the true insofar as it is true, of the way in which ideas cannot change the world without becoming lived in bodies. As I argue in the book (following Tosel) Spinoza's formulation makes it possible to think of the particular double determination of ideas and bodies. That each are in some sense determined by being reflections of the same thing, the same relations, but are also determined in a particular manner by other ideas or other bodies. In other words, returning to the problem of the book, as much as the centrality of work as that which give people meaning and value can be understood to be just capitalism rendered into an idea it is also an effect of a long series of transformations within the realm of ideas from the protestant revolution onward. To put it bluntly the response to the long debate between Marx and Weber, between material determination and cultural history, is quite simply, "Why Not Both." Although to be honest I am more interested in the way this makes it possible to understand the present than debates in intellectual history. "via GIPHYTo quote The Double Shift again: "As I have argued, these two aspects are, in some sense, two different ways of looking at the same thing, the same social relation, grasped in terms of bodies and their coordination and minds and their automation. However, they also function in different ways of understanding the orientation of desire. In the first, it is imposed through necessity; as selling one's labor power becomes the only condition of survival, living is aligned with making a living through wage labor. Wage labor appears to be the only way to make a living because all other ways are effaced. The constraints of society appear less as particular institutions, regimes of accumulation, and social relations, but as the way things must be; their historicity and contingency are effaced in the present order. This structural condition is supplemented by an ideological dimension insisting that not only that one must one identify with their job, find their passion in their labor, but that such a condition is also to be actively desired. Having to work, to dedicate oneself entirely to work, is presented twice, as it were—once as a necessary condition for survival and the second time as aspiration integral to one's identity. To frame it according to the division of work and action, we could argue that work is defined as both production and action, both as the constraint of necessity tied to survival and something freely undertaken to identify and distinguish oneself. The particular double determination in capitalist society is one in which work vacillates between a necessary fact of life to an object of desire, from making a living to finding meaning. The often-asked question, "What do you do for a living?" vacillates between these two senses; at once,, it indicates something of necessity, of one's economic situation, and freedom, one's supposedly chosen path in life. It is both what one has to do and who one is. Work as necessity and work as subjectivity, as body and as mind, do not just coexist as two different ways of grasping the same thing, but are subject to their own logic of alternation as material necessity and ideological meaning reinforce and also undermine each other." Double determination makes it possible to think at once of our particular "bondage," to use Spinoza's term, caught both in a set of material relations, namely capitalism, that reduce us to labor power, and intellectual traditions which express the same conditions through the ideological terms of morality, responsibility, and individuality. Transformation entails transforming each. There is a limited efficacy of criticism so long as it just remains criticism (of course the corollary is that there a limited efficacy of practice as practice). It is a matter of linking together the transformation of material conditions and intellectual concepts, or, what people used to call Praxis.
The study of International Relations is founded on a series of assumptions that originate in the monotheistic traditions of the West. For Siba Grovogui, this realization provoked him to question not only IR but to broaden his enquiries into a multidisciplinary endeavor that encompasses law and anthropology, journalism and linguistics, and is informed by stories and lessons from Guinea. In this Talk, he discusses the importance of human encounters and the problem with the Hegelian logic which distorts our understanding of our own intellectual development and the trajectory of the discipline of IR.
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 don't want to be evasive, but I actually don't think that International Relations as a field has an object today. And that is the problem with International Relations since Martin Wight and Stanley Hoffmann and all of those people debated what International Relations was, whether it was an American discipline, etc. I believe you can look at International Relations in multiple ways: if you think of à la Hoffmann, as a tool of dominant power, International Relations is to this empire what anthropology was to the last. This not only has to do with the predicates upon which it was founded initially but with its aspirations, for International Relations shares with Anthropology the ambition to know Man—and I am using here a very antiquated language, but that is what it was then—to know Man in certain capacities. In the last empire, anthropology focused on the cultural dimension and, correspondingly separated culture from civilization in a manner that placed other regions of the world in subsidiarity vis-à-vis Europe and European empires. In the reigning empire, IR has focused on the management and administration of an empire that never spoke its name, reason, or subject.
Now you can believe all the stories about liberalism and all of that stuff, but although it was predicated upon different assumptions, the ambition is still the same: it is actually to know Man, the way in which society is organized, to know how the entities function, etc. If you look at it that way, then International Relations cannot be the extension of any country's foreign policy, however significant. This is not to say that the foreign policies of the big countries do not matter: it would be foolish not to study them and take them into account, because they have greater impact than smaller countries obviously. But International Relations is not—or should not be—the extension of any country's foreign policy, nor should it be seen as the agglomeration of a certain restricted number of foreign policies. International Relations suggests, again, interest in the configurations of material, moral, and symbolic spaces as well as dynamics resulting from the relations of moral and social entities presumed to be of equal moral standings and capacities.
If one sees it that way then we must reimagine what International Relations should be. Foreign policy would be an important dimension of it, but the field of foreign policy must be understood primarily in terms of its explanations and justifications—regardless of whether these are bundled up as realism, liberalism, or other. Today, these fields provide different ways of explaining to the West, for itself, as a rational decision, or a justification to the rest, that what it has done over the past five centuries, from conquest to colonization and slavery and colonialism, is 'natural' and that any political entities similarly situated would have done it in that same manner. It follows therefore that this is how things should be. Those justifications, explanations, and rationalizations of foreign policy decisions and events are important to understand as windows into the manners in which certain regions and political entities have construed value, interest, and ethics. But they still belong, in some significant way, to a different domain than what is implied by the concept of IR.
I am therefore curious about the so-called debates about the nature of politics and the proper applicable science or approach to historical foreign policy realms and domains, particularly those of the West: I don't consider those debates to be 'big debates' in International Relations, because they are really about how the West sees itself and justifies itself and how it wants to be seen, and thus as rational. For the West (as assumed by so-called Western scholars), these debates extend the tradition of exculpating the West and seeing the West as the regenerative, redemptive, and progressive force in the world. All of that language is about that. So when you say to me, what are the debates, I don't know what they are, so far, really, in International Relations. The constitution of the 'international', the contours and effects of the imaginaries of its constituents, and the actualized and attainable material and symbolic spaces within it to realize justice, peace, and a sustainable order have thus far eluded the authoritative disciplinary traditions.
Consider the question of China today, as it is posed in the West. The China question, too, emerges from a particular foreign policy rationale, which may be important and particular ways to some people or constituencies in the West but not in the same way to others, for instance in Africa. The narrowness of the framing of the China question is why in the West many are baffled about how Africa has been receiving China, and China's entry into Latin America, etc. In relation to aid, for instance, if you are an African of a certain age, or you know some history, you will know that China formulated its foreign aid policy in 1964 and that nothing has changed. And there are other elements, such as foreign intervention and responsibility to self and others where China has had a distinct trajectory in Africa.
In some regard, China may even be closer in outlook to postcolonial African states than the former colonial powers. For instance, neither China nor African states consider the responsibility to protect, to be essentially Western. In this regard, it is worth bearing in mind for instance that Tanzania intervened in Uganda to depose Idi Amin in 1979; Vietnam ended the Khmer Rouge tyranny in Cambodia in 1979; India intervened in Bangladesh in 1971—it wasn't the West. So those kinds of understandings of responsibility, in the way they are framed today in the post-Cold War period, superimposes ideas of responsibility that were already there and were formulated in Bandung in 1955: differences between intervention and interference, the latter of which today comes coded as regime change, were actually hardly debated. So our imaginaries of the world and how it works, of responsibility, of ethics, etc., have always had to compete with those that were formulated since the seventeenth century in Europe, as "international ethics", "international law", "international theory". And in fact that long history full of sliding concepts and similar meanings may be one of the problems for understanding how the world came into being as we know it today. And this is why actually my classes here always begin with a semester-long discussion of hermeneutics, of historiography, and of ethnography in IR and how they have been incorporated.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
I came to where I am now essentially because of a sense of frustration, that we have a discipline that calls itself "international" and yet seemed to be speaking either univocally or unidirectionally: univocally in imagining the world and unidirectionally in the way it addresses the rest of the world, and a lot of problems result from that.
I had trained as a lawyer in Guinea, and when I came to the US I imagined that International Relations would be taught at law school, which is the case in France, most of the time, and also in some places in Germany in the past, because it is considered a normative science there. But when I came here I was shocked to discover that it was going to be in a field called Political Science, but I went along with it anyway. In the end I did a double major: in law, at the law school in Madison, Wisconsin, and in political science. When I came to America and went the University of Wisconsin, I first took a class called "Nuclear Weapons and World Politics" or something of the sort, it was more theology and less science. It was basically articulated around chosen people and non-chosen people, those who deserve to have weapons and those who don't. There was no rationale, no discussion of which countries respected the Non-Proliferation Treaty, no reasoning in terms of which countries had been wiser than others in using weapons of mass destruction, etc.: there was nothing to it except the underlying, intuitive belief that if something has to be done, we do it and other people don't. I'm being crass here, but let's face it: this was a course I took in the 1980s and it is still the same today! So I began to feel that this is really more theology and less science. Yes, it was all neatly wrapped in rationalism, in game theory, all of these things. So I began to ask myself deeper questions, outside of the ones they were asking, so my Nuclear Weapons and World Politics class was really what bothered me, or you could say it was some kind of trigger.
This way of seeing IR is related to the fact that I don't share the implicit monotheist underpinnings of the discipline. That translates into my perhaps unorthodox teaching style, unorthodox within American academia anyway. Teaching all too often tends to be less about understanding the world and more about proselytizing. In order to try to explore this understanding I like to bring my students to consider the world that has existed, to imagine that sovereignty and politics can be structured differently, especially outside of monotheism with its likening of the sovereign to god, the hierarchy modeled on the church, Saint Peter, Jesus, God, uniformity and the power of life (to kill or let live), and to understand that there have always been places where the sovereign was not in fact that revered. Think of India, for example, where people have multiple gods, and some are mischievous, some are promiscuous, some are happy and some are mean, so there are lots of conceptions and some of these don't translate well into different cultural contexts. The same, incidentally, goes for the Greek gods. Of course, we had to make the Greeks Christians first, before we drew our lineage to them. You see what I mean? Christianity left a very deep impact on Western traditions. Whether you think of political parties and a parallel to the Catholic orders: if you are a Jesuit, the Jesuits are always right; if you are a Franciscan, the Franciscans are always right. The Franciscans for instance think they have the monopoly on Christian social teaching. In a similar way, it doesn't matter what your political party does, you follow whatever your party says. The same thing happens when you study: are you a realist, are you liberalist, etc. You are replicating the Jesuits, the Franciscans, those monks and their orders. But we are all caught within that logic, of tying ourselves into one school of thought and going along with one "truth" over another, instead of permitting multiple takes on reality..
For me, as a non-monotheist myself, everything revolves around this question of truth: whether truth is given or has to be found and how we find it. Truth has to be found, discovered, revealed—we have to continuously search. The significant point is that we never find it absolutely. Truth is always provisional, circumstantial, and pertinent to a context or situation. We all want truth and it is always evading us, but we must look for it. But I don't think that truth is given. It is in the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah. And I am comfortable with that but I am not in the realm of theology. I dwell on human truths and humans are imperfect and not omniscient, at least not so individually.
If I had the truth, then I might be one of those dictators governing in Africa today. I was raised a Catholic by the way, I almost went to the seminary. If you just think through the story of the Revelation in profane terms, you come to the realization that ours are multiple revelations. Again in theology, one truth is given at a time—the Temple Mount, the Tablets, and all that stuff—but that is not in our province. I leave that to a different province and that is unattainable to me. The kind of revelation I want is the one that goes through observing, through looking, through deliberating, through inquiry—that I am comfortable with. There can be a revelation in terms of meeting the unexpected, for example: when I went to the New World, to Latin America for the first time, I said, 'wow, this is interesting'. That was through my own senses, but it had a lot to do with the way I prepared myself in order to receive the world and to interact with the world. That kind of revelation I believe in. The other one is beyond me and I'm not interested in that. When I want to be very blasphemous, even though I was raised a Catholic, I tell my students: the problem with the Temple Mount is that God did not have a Twitter account, so the rest of us didn't hear it—we were not informed. I don't have the truth, and I don't really don't want to have it.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I am not sure I want to make a canonical recommendation, if that's what you are asking me for. Let me tell you this: I have trained about eleven PhD students, and none of them has ever done what I do. I am not interested in having clones, I don't want to recreate theology, and in fact I feel this question to betray a very Western disposition, by implying the need to create canons and theology. I don't want that. What I want is to understand the world, and understanding can be done in multiple ways: people do it through music, through art, through multiple things. The problem for me, however, is actually the elements, assumptions, predicates of studies and languages that we use in IR, the question to whom they make sense—I am talking about the types of ethnographies, the ways in which we talk about diplomatic history, and all of those things. The graduate courses that I was talking about have multiple dimensions, but there are times in my seminars here where I just take a look at events like what happened in the New World from 1492 to 1600. This allows me to talk about human encounters. The ones we have recorded, of people who are mutually unintelligible, are the ones that took place on this continent, the so-called New World. And what this does is that it allows me to talk about encounters, to talk about all of the possibilities—you know the ones most people talk about in cultural studies like creolization, hybridization, and all those things—and all of the others things that happened also which are not so helpful, such as violence, usurpation, and so forth.
What that allows me to do is to cut through all this nonsense—yes I am going to call it nonsense—that projects the image that what we do today goes back to Thucydides and has been handed down to us through history to today. There are many strands of thought like that. If you think about thought, and Western thought in general, all of those historically rooted and contingent strands of thought have something to do with how we construct social scientific fields of analysis today—realism, liberalism, etc.—so I'm not dispensing with that. What I'm saying is that history itself has very little to do with those strands of thought, and that people who came here—obviously you had scientists who came to the New World—but the policies on the ground had nothing to do with Thucydides, nothing to do with Machiavelli, etc. Their practices actually had more to do with the violence that propelled those Europeans from their own countries in seeking refuge, and how that violence shaped them, the kind of attachments they had. But it also had to do with the kind of cultural disposition here, and the manner in which people were able to cope, or not. Because that's where we are today in the post-Cold War era, the age of globalization, we must provide analyses that are germane to how the constituents (or constitutive elements) of the historically constituted 'international' are coping with our collective inheritance. For me, this approach is actually much more instructive. This has nothing to do with the Melian Dialogue and the like.
All of the stuff projected today as canonical is interesting to me but only in limited ways. I actually read the classics and have had my students read them, but try to get my students to read them as a resource for understanding where we are today and how we were led there, rather than as a resource for justifying or legitimating the manner in which European conducted their 'foreign' policies or their actions in the New World. No. I know enough to know that no action in the New World or elsewhere was pre-ordained, unavoidable, or inevitable. The resulting political entities in the West must assume the manners in which they acted. It is history, literally. And of course we know through Voltaire, we know through Montaigne, we know even through Roger Bacon, that even in those times people realized that in fact the world had not been made and hence had not been before as it would become later; that other ways were (and still) are possible; and that the pathologies of the violence of religious and civil wars in Europe conditioned some the behaviours displayed in the New World and Africa during conquest and enslavement.
For the same reason I recommend students to read Kant: I tell them to read Kant as a resource for understanding how we might think about the world today, but I am compelled to say often to my students that before Kant, hospitality, and such cultural intermediaries as theDragomans in the Ottoman Empire, the Wangara in West Africa, the Chinese Diaspora in East and Southeast Asia, and so forth, enabled commerce across continents for centuries before Europe was included into the existing trading networks. This is not to dismiss Kant, it is simply to force students to put Kant in conversation with a different trajectory of the development of commercial societies, cross-regional networks, and the movements to envisage laws, rules, and ethics to enable communications among populations and individual groups.
This approach causes many people to ask whether the IR programme at Johns Hopkins really concerns IR theory or something else. I actually often get those kinds of questions, and they are wedded to particular conceptions of IR. I am never able to give a fixed and quick answer but I often illustrate points that I wish to make. Consider how scholars and policymakers relate the question of sovereignty to Africa. Many see African sovereignty as problem, either because they think it is abused or stands in the way of humanitarian or development actions by supposed well-meaning Westerners. I attempt to have my students think twice when sovereignty is evoked in that way: 'sovereignty is a problem; the extents to which sovereignty is a problem in Africa; and why sovereignty is unproblematic in Europe or America'. This questioning and bracketing is not simply a 'postmodernist' evasion of the question.
Rather, I invite my students to reconsider the issue: if sovereignty is your problem, how do you think about the problem? For me, this is a much more interesting question; not what the problem is. For instance, if you start basing everything around a certain mythology of the Westphalia model, particularly when you begin to see everything as either conforming to it (the good) or deviating from it (the bad), then you have lost me. Because before Westphalia there were actually many ways in which sovereigns understood themselves, and therefore organized their realms, and how sovereignty was experienced and appreciated by its subjects. Westphalia is a crucial moment in Europe in these regards—I grant you that. If you want to say what is wrong with Westphalia, that's fine too. But if Westphalia is your starting point, the discussion is unlikely to be productive to me. Seriously!
In your work on political identity in Africa, such as your contribution to the 2012 volume edited by Arlene Tickner and David Blaney, the terms periphery, margin, lack of historicity recur frequently. What regional or perhaps even global representational protagonism can you envisage for IR studies emerging from Africa and its spokespeople?
The subjects of 'periphery' and 'marginalization' come into my own thinking from multiple directions. One of them has to do with the African state and the kind of subsidiarity it has assumed from the colonization onward. That's a critique of the state of affairs and a commentary on how Africa is organized and is governed. But I do also use it sometimes as a direct challenge to people who think they know the world. And my second book, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy (2006), was actually about that, and that book was triggered by an account of an event in Africa, that everybody in African Studies has repeated and still continues to repeat, which is this: in June 1960, Africans went to defend France, because France asked them to. This is to say that nobody could imagine that Africans—and I am being careful here in terms of how people describe Africans—understood that they had a stake in the 'world' under assault during World War II. And so the book actually begins with a simple question: in 1940, which France would have asked Africans to defend it: Vichy France which was under German control, or the Germans who occupied half of France? But the decision to defend France actually came partly from a discussion between French colonial officers in Chad and African veterans of World War I, who decided that the world had to be restructured for Africa to find its place in it. They didn't do it for France, because it's a colonial power, they did it for the world. That's the thing. And Pétain, to his credit, is the only French official who asked the pertinent question about that, in a letter to his minister of justice (which is an irony, because justice under Pétain was a different question) he said: 'I am puzzled, that in 1918 when we were victorious, Africans rebelled; in 1940, we are defeated, and they come to our aid. Could you explain that to me?' The titular head of Vichy had the decency to ask that. By contrast, every scholar of Africa just repeated, 'Oh, the French asked Africans to go fight, and the Africans showed up'.
Our inability to understand that Africa actually sees itself as a part of the world, as a manager of the world, has so escaped us today that in the case of Libya for instance, when people were debating, you saw in every single newspaper in the world, including my beloved Guardian, that the African Union decided this, but the International Community decided that, as if Africans had surrendered their position in the international society to somebody: to the International Community. People actually said that! The AU, for all its 'wretchedness', after all represents about a quarter of the member states of the UN. And yet it was said the AU decided this and the International Community decided that. The implication is that the International Community is still the West plus Japan and maybe somebody else, and in this case it was Qatar and Saudi Arabia: "good citizens of the world", very "good democracies" etc. That's how deeply-set that is, that people don't even check themselves. Every time they talk they chuck Africa out of the World. Nobody says, America did this and the International Community decided that. All I am saying is that our mindscapes are so deeply structured that nothing about Africa can be studied on its own, can be studied as something that has universal consequence, as something that has universal value, as something that might be universalizing—that institutions in Africa might actually have some good use to think about anything. Otherwise, people would have asked them how did colonial populations—people who were colonized—overcome colonial attempts to strip them of their humanity and extend an act of humanity, of human solidarity, to go fight to defend them? And what was that about? Even many Africans fail to ask that question today!
And it could be argued that this thinking is, to some degree, down to widespread ignorance about Africa. We all are guilty of this. And oddly, especially intellectuals are guilty of this, and worse. Let me give you an example: recently I was in Tübingen in Germany, and I went into a store to buy some shoes—a very fine store, wonderful people—and I can tell you I ended up having a much more rewarding conversation with the people working in the shoe shop than I had at Tübingen University. Because there was a real curiosity. You would like to think that it is not so unusual in this day and age that a person from Guinea teaches in America, but you cannot blame them for being curious and asking many questions. At the university, in contrast, they actually are making claims, and for me that is no longer ignorance, that is hubris.
Your work presents an original take on the role of language in International Relations. How is language tied up with IR theory?
The language problem has many, many layers. The first of these is, simply, the issue of translation. If I were, for instance, to talk to someone in my father's language about Great Power Responsibility, they would look totally lost. Because in Guinea we have been what white people call stateless or acephalous societies, the notion that one power should have responsibility for another is a very difficult concept to translate, because you are running up against imaginaries of power, of authority, etc. that simply don't exist. So when you talk about such social scientific categories to those people, you have to be aware of all the colonial era enlightenment inheritances in them. When we talk about International Relations in Africa, we thus bump into a whole set of problems: the primary problem of translating ideas from here into those languages; another in capturing what kind of institutions exist in those languages; and a third issue has to do with how you translate across those languages. Consider for instance the difference between Loma stateless societies in the rain forest in Guinea, and Malinke who are very hierarchical, especially since SundiataKeita came to power in the 13th century. But the one problem most people don't talk about is the very one that is obsessing me now, is the question how I, as an African, am able to communicate with you through Kant, without you assuming that I am a bad reader of Kant.
The difference that I am trying to make here is actually what in linguistics is called vehicular language which is distinct from vernacular language. Because a lot of you assume that vehicular language is vernacular—that there is Latin and the rest is vernacular; that there is a proper reading of Kant and everything else is vernacular; or you have cosmopolitan and perhaps afropolitan and everything else is the vernacular of it. But this is not in fact always the case. The most difficult thing for linguists to understand, and for people in the social sciences to understand, is that Kant, Hegel and other thinkers can avail themselves as resources that one uses to try to convey imaginaries that are not always available to others—or to Kant himself for that matter. And it is not analogical—it is not 'this is the African Machiavelli'. It is easy to talk about power using Machiavelli, but to smuggle into Machiavelli different kind of imaginaries is more difficult. Nonetheless, I use Machiavelli because there is no other language available to me to convey that to you, because you don't speak my father's language.
Moreover, there is a danger for instance when I speak with my students that they may hear Machiavelli even when I am not speaking of him, and I warn them to be very careful. Machiavelli is a way to bring in a different stream of understanding of Realpolitik, but it's not entirely Machiavelli. If you spoke my father's language, I would tell you in my father's language, but that is not available to me here, so Machiavelli is a vehicle to talk about something else. Sometimes people might say to me 'what you are saying sounds to me like Kant but it's not really Kant' then I remind them that before Kant there were actually a lot of people who talked about the sublime, the moral, the categorical imperative, etc. in different languages; and if you are patient with me then we will get to the point when Kant belongs to a genealogy of people who talked about certain problems differently, and in that context Kant is no longer a European: I place Kant in the context of people who talk about politics, morality, etc. differently and I want to offer you a bunch of resources and please, please don't package me, because you don't own the interpretation of Kant, because even in your own context in Europe today Kant is not your contemporary, so you are making a lot of translations and I am making a lot of translations to get to something else: it is not that I am not a bad reader.
At an ISA conference I once was attacked by a senior colleague in IR for being a bad reader of Hegel, and I had to explain to him that while my using Hegel might be an act of imposition, and a result of having been colonized and given Hegel, but at this particular moment he should consider my gesture as an act of generosity, in the sense that I was reading Hegel generously to find resources that would allow him to understand things that he had no idea exist out there, and Hegel is the only tool available to me at this moment. But because all of you believe in one theology or another, he insisted that if I spoke Hegelian then I was Hegelian, and I retorted that I was not, but that deploying Hegel was merely an instance of vehicular language, allowing me to explore certain predicates, certain precepts and assumptions, and that is all. In this way, I can use Kant, or Hegel, or Hobbes, or Locke, and my problem when I do this is not with those thinkers—I can ignore the limitations of their thinking which was conditioned by the realities of their time—my problem is with those people who think they own traditions originating from long dead European thinkers. Thus, my problem today is less with Kant than with Kantians.
Or take Hobbes: Hobbes talked about the body in the way that it was understood in his time, and about human faculties in the way that they were understood at that time. Anybody who quotes Hobbes today about the faculties of human nature, I have to ask: when was the last time you read biology? I am not saying that Hobbes wasn't a very smart man; he was an erudite, and I am not joking. It is not his problem that people are still trivializing human faculties and finding issue with his view of how the body works—of course he was wrong on permeability, on cohabitation, on what organs live in us, etc.—he was giving his account of politics through metaphors and analogies that he understood at that time. When I think about it this way, my problem is not that Hobbes didn't have a modern understanding of the body, the distribution of the faculties and the extent of human capacities. Nor is my problem that Hobbes is Western. My problem is not with Hobbes himself. My problem is with all these realists who based their understanding of sovereignty or borders strictly on Hobbes' illustrations but have not opened a current book on the body that speaks of the faculties. If they did, even their own analogies may begin to resonate differently. There is new research coming out all the time on how we can understand the body, and this should have repercussions on how we read Hobbes today.
The absence of contextualization and historicization has proved a great liability for IR. Historicity allows one to receive Hobbes and all those other writers without indulging in mindless simplicities. It helps get away from simplistic divisions of the world—for instance, the West here and Africa there—from the assumptions that when I speak about postcolonialism in Africa I must be anti-Western. I am in fact growing very tired of those kinds of categories. As a parenthesis, I must ask if some of those guys in IR who speak so univocally and unidirectionally to others are even capable of opening themselves up to hearing other voices. I must also reveal that Adlai Stevenson, not some postcolonialist, alerted me to the problem of univocality when he stated in 1954 during one UN forum that 'Everybody needed aid, the West surely needs a hearing aid'. Hearing is indeed the one faculty that the West is most in need of cultivating. The same, incidentally, could be said of China nowadays.
One of the things I would like to deny Western canonist is their inclination to think of the likes of Diderot as Westerners. In his Supplément au Voyage a Bougainville (1772), Diderot presents a dialogue between himself and Orou, a native Tahitian. Voltaire wrote dialogues, some real, some imaginary, about and with China. The authors' people were reflecting on the world. It is hubris and an act of usurpation in the West today to want to lay claim to everything that is perceived to be good for the West. By the same token that which is bad must come from somewhere else. This act of usurpation has led to the appropriation—or rather internal colonization—of Diderot and Voltaire and like-minded philosophers and publicists who very much engaged the world beyond their locales. I have quarrels with this act of colonization, of the incipit parochialization of authors who ought not to be. I have quarrels with Voltaire's characterization of non-Europeans at times; but I have a greater quarrel with how he has been colonized today as distinctly European. Voltaire rejected European orthodoxies of his day and opted explicitly to enter into dialogue with Chinese and Africans as he understood them. Diderot, too, was often in dialogue with Tahitians and other non-Europeans. In fact, the relationship between Diderot and the Tahitian was exactly the same as the relationship between Socrates and Plato, in that you have an older person talking and a younger person and less wise person listening. A lot of Western philosophy and political theory was actually generated—at least in the modern period—after contact with the non-West. So how that is Western I don't know. I encounter the same problem when I am in Africa where I am accused of being Western just because I make the same literary references. It is a paradox today that even literature is assigned an identity for the purpose of hegemony and/or exclusion. Francis Galton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton) travelled widely and wrote dialogues from this expedition in Africa, so how can we say to what extent the substance of such dialogues was Western or British?
So in sum you are not trying to counter Western thought, but do you feel that the African political experience and your own perspective can bring something new to IR studies?
I am going to try and express something very carefully here, because the theory of the state in Africa brought about untold horrors—in Sierra Leone, in Liberia, and so on—so I am not saying this lightly. But I have said to many people, Africans and non-Africans, that I am glad that the postcolonial African state failed, and I wish many more of them failed, and I'm sure a lot more will fail, because they correspond to nothing on the ground. The idea of constitutions and constitutionalism came with making arrangements with a lot of social elements that were generated by certain entities that aspired to go in certain directions. What happened in Africa is that somebody came and said: 'this worked there, it should work here'—and it doesn't. I'll give you three short stories to illustrate this.
One of the presidents of postcolonial Guinea, the one I despise the most, Lansana Conté (in office 1984-2008), also gave me one of my inspirational moments. Students rebelled against him and destroyed everything in town and so he went on national TV that day and said: 'You know I'm very disheartened. I am disheartened about children who have become Europeans.' Obviously the blame would be on Europe. He continued, 'They are rude, they don't respect people or property. I understand that they may have quarrels with me, but I also understand that we are Africans. And though we may no longer live in the village', and it is important for me that he said that, 'though we may no longer live in the village, when we move in the big city, the council of elders is what parliament does for us now. We don't have the council of elders, instead we have parliament. They, the students, can go to parliament and complain about their father. I am their father, my children are older than all of them. So in the village, they would have gone to the council of elders, and they could have done this and I would have given them my explanation'. And the next morning, the whole country turned against the students, because what he had succeeded in doing was to touch and move people. They went to the head of the student government, who said: 'The president was right. We had failed to understand that our ways cannot be European ways, and we can think about our modern institutions as iterations of what we had in the past, suited to our circumstances, and so we should not do politics in the same way. I agree with him, and in that spirit I want to say that among the Koranko ethnic group, fathers let their children eat meat first, because they have growing needs, and if the father doesn't take care of his children, then they take the children away from the father and give them to the uncle. Our problem at the university is that our stipends are not being paid, and father has all his mansions in France, in Spain, and elsewhere, so we want the uncle.' He was in effect asking for political transition: he was saying they were now going to the council of elders, the parliament, and demand the uncle, for father no longer merits being the father. He was able to articulate political transition and rotation in that language. It was a very clever move.
The second one was my mother who was completely unsympathetic to me when I came home one day and was upset that one of my friends who was a journalist had been arrested. She said, 'if you wish you can go back to your town but don't come here and bother me and be grumpy'. So I started an exchange with her and explained to her why it is important that we have journalists and why they should be free, until our discussion turned to the subject of speaking truth to power. At that moment she said, 'now you are talking sense' and she started to tell me how the griot functioned in West Africa for the past eight hundred years, and why truth to power is part of our institutional heritage. But that truth is not a personal truth, for there is an organic connection between reporter and the community, there is a group in which they collect information, communicate and criticize, and we began to talk about that. And since then I have stopped teaching Jefferson in my constitutional classes in Africa, as a way of talking about the free press, instead I talk about speaking truth to power. But it allows me not only to talk about the necessity of speaking truth to power, but also to criticize the organization of the media, which is so individualised, so oriented toward the people who give the money: think of the National Democratic Institute in Washington, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Germany, they have no organic connection to the people. And my mother told me, 'as long as it's a battle between those who have the guns and those who have the pen, then nobody is speaking to my problems, then I have no dog in that fight'. And journalists really make a big mistake by not updating their trade and redressing it. Because speaking truth to power is not absent in our tradition, we have had it for eight hundred years, six centuries before Jefferson, but we don't think about it that way. I have to remind my friends in Guinea: 'you are vulnerable precisely because you have not understood what the profession of journalism might look like in this community, to make your message more relevant and effective'. You see the smart young guys tweeting away and how they have been replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, because we have not made the message relevant to the community. We are communicating on media and in idioms that have no real bearing on people's lives, so we are easily dismissed. That is in fact the tragedy of what happened in Tunisia: the smart, young protesters have so easily been brushed aside for this reason.
The third story is about how we had a constitutional debate in Guinea before multipartism, and people were talking about the separation of powers. And I went to the university to talk to a group of people and I put it to them: why do you waste your time studying the American Constitution and the separation of powers in America? I grant you, it is a wonderful experiment and it has lasted two hundred years, but that would not lead you anywhere with these people. The theocratic Futa Jallon in Guinea (in the 18th and 19th centuries) had one of the most advanced systems of separation of powers: the king was in Labé, the constitution was in Dalaba, the people who interpreted the constitution were in yet another city, the army was based in Tougué. It was the most decentralised organization of government you can imagine, and all predicated on the idea that none of the nine diwés, or provinces, should actually have the monopoly of power. So those that kept the constitution were not allowed to interpret it, because the readers were somewhere else. But to make sure that what they were reading was the right document, they gave it to a different province. So the separation of powers is not new to us.
In sum, the West is a wonderful political experiment, and it has worked for them. We can actualize some of what they have instituted, but we have sources here that are more suited to the circumstances of the people in that region, without undermining the modern ideas of democratic self-governance, without undermining the idea of a republic. Without dispensing with all of those, we must not be tempted to imagine constitution in the same way, to imagine separation of powers in the same way, even to imagine and practice journalism in the same way, in this very different environment. It is going to fail. That is my third story.
Siba N. Grovogui has been teaching at Johns Hopkins University after holding the DuBois-Mandela postdoctoral fellowship of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1989-90 and teaching at Eastern Michigan University from 1993 to 1995. He is currently professor of international relations theory and law at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-determination in International Law (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Institutions and Order (Palgrave, April 2006). He has recently completed a ten-year long study partly funded by the National Science Foundation of the rule of law in Chad as enacted under the Chad Oil and Pipeline Project.
Related links
Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins University Read Grovogui's Postcolonial Criticism: International Reality and Modes of Inquiry (2002 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's The Secret Lives of Sovereignty (2009 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Counterpoints and the Imaginaries Behind Them: Thinking Beyond North American and European Traditions (2009 contribution to International Political Sociology) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Postcolonialism (2010 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Sovereignty in Africa: Quasi-statehood and Other Myths (2001 book chapter in a volume edited by Tim Shaw and Kevin Dunn) here (pdf)
