Terrorists aim at influencing audiences beyond their immediate victims, but can only achieve this if an attack receives sufficient public attention. Previous research shows that terrorism can affect public opinion, but these studies are mainly based on emblematic single cases and relate to varying measures of influence, which are difficult to compare. This research focuses on the first-order effect of terrorism: attention. To analyze whether terrorists get attention, we combine a quasi-experimental approach for causal identification with a comparative design. We compile data from Eurobarometer surveys and contrast responses of more than 80,000 individuals surveyed before and after five diverse Islamist attacks in Europe in 2013–2019. Attention to terrorism increases in all targeted countries, regardless of attack size. Yet, while all incidents raise attention to terrorism, only larger attacks exert a meaningful impact across Europe.
Unravelling the dynamics of land-use change is key to assess the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of land-based strategies regarding climate or energy. In this prospect, this paper proposes an analytical decomposition of land-use change resulting from a shock in agricultural demand which takes into account indirect effects from price signals. This analytical equation is numerically estimated using a global model of land-use combining biophysics and economics. While being relatively simple, this model captures the main processes of land-use change: change in the intensive and extensive margins, international trade, change in intermediary demand and possible by-products. At the global scale, our results show that yield losses due to the conversion of marginal land amount approximately to half of yield gains due to fertiliser use. At the regional scale, patterns of yield and area responses are depicted by assessing the potentials for intensification (yield gaps) and extensification (areas of extensive pastures) given the future pathways of agricultural demand.
AmaTerra Environmental, Inc. (AmaTerra) conducted an archeological resource survey on behalf of New Braunfels Utilities (NBU) and their engineering contractor Freese and Nichols, Inc. (FNI) in advance of the Highway 46 West Water System Expansion Project in Comal County, Texas. NBU is proposing building one new pump station (half-acre), expanding capacity at an already existing pump station (half-acre), and installing new and upgrading existing waterlines between the two of them (approximately 3.5 miles) along the south side of State Highway (SH) 46. Because NBU is a political subdivision of the State of Texas, it is subject to the Antiquities Code of Texas (ACT), requiring survey for archeological resources within the project footprint. All work was carried out to conform to 13 TAC 26, which outlines the regulations for implementing the ACT. Fieldwork was conducted on October 18–19th, 2017 by AmaTerra under Antiquities Permit 8195. Fieldwork included a pedestrian survey with 100 percent surface inspection of the proposed construction easements supplemented with shovel testing at 100-meter intervals. Additional tests were placed in the proposed new pump station while the pump station expansion was visually inspected only. The surface was found to be vegetated with grasses and understory foliage with mesquite shrub, cedar and Live Oak trees in the more densely vegetated areas. Ground visibility ranged from 50 to 100 percent across the project area. A single prehistoric site, 41CM411, was newly recorded as part of the survey and consisted of a small, diffuse surficial lithic scatter. Two previously recorded sites (41CM47 and 41CM298) were revisited as part of the investigation as well. Site 41CM47 is a mid- to late nineteenth century historic structural complex known colloquially as the "Walzem Chapel" and 41CM298 consists of several surficial lithic scatters and a quarry site. AmaTerra recommends that no further work is necessary within the project footprint prior to construction, and the portions of the three sites within the proposed construction easements are recommended ineligible for listing as State Antiquities Landmarks (SAL). All notes and forms generated while conducting fieldwork will be curated at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL) in Austin, Texas.
Il lavoro prende in considerazione il problema dei rapporti tra coloni greci e comunità indigene nel territorio di Himera, sulla base dei risultati della prospezione archeologica condotta per tre decenni nelle valli dei fiumi Imera settentrionale, Torto e S. Leonardo. Vengono esaminati gli elementi di cultura materiale che permettono di definire i modi dell'interazione culturale tra coloni e indigeni, nonché di ricostruire i paesaggi politici, socio-economici e il paesaggio del sacro nelle diverse aree indagate e nei diversi comprensori. La ricerca infatti permette di delineare, oltre alle usuali organizzazioni insediative e agricole della chora politiké e della éremos chora, anche articolati comprensori all'interno del territorio che definiamo "imerese", cogliendo anche i caratteri insediativi della campagna accanto alla presenza di insediamenti di altura. Si abbandona, pertanto, l'ottica centro-periferia, per una analisi più articolata che dimostra differenti forme di insediamento e di contatto culturale nelle tre valli fluviali comprese nel territorio di Himera.
Ce rapport a pour objectif de faire un état des lieux des usages des technologies satellitaires dans le développement et l'analyse des agricultures africaines, afin de mieux cerner les difficultés actuelles, identifier les contraintes sur lesquelles la recherche et le partenariat peuvent avoir un effet, et imaginer les actions nécessaires pour lever ces contraintes à court et moyen termes. L'ensemble du continent africain est traité, avec un focus sur l'Afrique de l'Ouest. L'échelle abordée est l'échelle nationale à laquelle se mettent en place les politiques publiques agricoles. Dans une 1èrepartie est dressé le panorama de la télédétection en Afrique pour l'agriculture, avec l'analyse des besoins prioritaires en informations, et les principaux programmes et projets en cours pour le développement de services. La 2ème partie présente l'offre actuelle et future en imagerie satellitaire et en outils logiciels, et les produits globaux descriptifs des états de surface aux échelles globale et régionale. Les principales applications de la télédétection sont illustrées en 3ème partie.
Au cours de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, les oasis maghrébines ont connu des mutations économiques et sociales considérables. En Algérie, ces transformations, couplées à une volonté politique de libéralisation du secteur agricole, ont débouché sur un processus de déverrouillage de l'accès à l'eau et à la terre, en dehors des palmeraies existantes, et ont permis de redynamiser l'agriculture saharienne tout en contribuant à l'émancipation des populations oasiennes. Cet article analyse les processus de déverrouillage de ces ressources et leurs impacts sur les nouvelles dynamiques agricoles et sociétales oasiennes. L'étude s'intéresse à l'émergence de nouvelles formes d'agriculture en lisière de l'ancienne palmeraie de Sidi Okba. Les transformations agricoles apparaissent à première vue en rupture avec l'agriculture oasienne traditionnelle, mais sont le produit conjugué du déverrouillage progressif de l'accès à l'eau et à la terre et d'une ambition sociale des jeunes de la communauté oasienne. Ces jeunes ont colonisé de nouveaux espaces et accédé aux eaux souterraines, ce qui leur a permis de s'installer pour pratiquer de nouvelles formes d'agriculture saharienne. Ces transformations agricoles ont contribué à des mutations sociétales, qui se traduisent par l'ascension sociale des anciens khammès (métayers au cinquième) et de leurs descendantsdans le territoire oasien de Sidi Okba.
Der Beitrag wendet sich der politischen Unzufriedenheit in den Neuen Bundesländern zu. Die Ostdeutschen beklagen einerseits, dass zu viele "Westeliten" in den Osten gekommen sind, andererseits aber wird geklagt, dass die alten "Osteliten" noch in Machtpositionen sind. Es zeigt sich, dass nach der "Wende" viele hohe Positionen von "Westlern" besetzt wurden, wodurch westdeutsche Politiker der zweiten Reihe eine Chance bekamen. Auf unteren Verwaltungsebenen aber konnten sich viele "alte Kader" behaupten. Die Entwicklung der neuen Bundesländer unterschied sich deutlich von der in den anderen osteuropäischen Reformstaaten, da die Ostdeutschen an das bundesrepublikanische System "andocken" konnten. Der Artikel erläutert, dass es im Verlauf der Jahrzehnte zu abgeschlossenen elitären Klassen in der DDR kam, die häufig ihren eigenen Nachwuchs nachzogen und Machtpositionen gegen die "Arbeiterklasse" abschotteten. Auch Frauen wurden aus Machtpositionen üblicherweise ferngehalten: Die sozialistische Ideologie wurde zunehmend unwichtig, die Binnendifferenzierung in der DDR-Gesellschaft ("Ungleichheit") nahm hingegen zu. Die Entwicklung fachlicher Expertise auf mittleren oder unteren Ebenen konnte nun den Erhalt einer Position rechtfertigen. Auf höherer Ebene blieb aber "politische Loyalität" das Entscheidende. Es wird ausgeführt, dass politische Loyalität in unterschiedlichen Feldern und Positionen unterschiedlich bedeutsam war. Beim Militär oder im "Außenhandel" war sie zum Beispiel wichtiger als im "Binnenhandel". Nach der "Wende" musste auf nachgeordneten politischen Machtpositionen häufig auf die "alten Kader" zurückgegriffen werden, da sie Erfahrung hatten. Bürgerrechtler hingegen hatten keine Chance. Der Artikel erläutert die Struktur der "Eliten" in den Neuen Bundesländern und geht auf Ähnlichkeiten in Ost und West ein. In beiden deutschen Staaten gab es auf der Verwaltungsebene eine Mischung von politischer Loyalität und fachlicher Expertise, die zur Erlangung von Führungspositionen beitragen konnte. Abschließend wird noch kurz auf ein neues ostdeutsches Selbstbewusstsein (den "Ostimismus") eingegangen. (ICB)
Erstmals seit vielen Jahren hat sich das Schwergewicht der russischen Sicherheitspolitik ins Landesinnere verlagert. Der Verfasser beschreibt die aus der inneren Krise und Instabilität resultierenden Gefahren und geht vor diesem Hintergrund auf die Voraussetzungen und Grundlagen einer gemeinsamen Sicherheitspolitik der GUS-Staaten ein. In diesem Zusammenhang werden verschiedene Integrationsmodelle und die Perspektiven eines einheitlichen Sicherheitssystems der GUS diskutiert. (BIOst-Mrk)
Der Beitrag widmet sich dem Thema der beruflichen Ziele und Ansprüche von männlichen und weiblichen Jugendlichen in der ehemaligen DDR. Es zeigt sich, dass es sehr deutliche Geschlechtsunterschiede in der Berufswahl gab - die sehr stark am traditionellen Rollenmodell orientiert war. Ganz im Gegensatz zur herrschenden Ideologie, denn Geschlechterdiskriminierung gab es angeblich nur im kapitalistischen Westen. Tatsächlich aber war die Freiheit der Berufswahl massiv eingeschränkt und musste sich an äußeren Maßgaben orientieren: Das rigide Planungssystem basierte bei der Berufsausbildung auf wirtschaftlichen und regionalen Erfordernissen und politischen Interessen. Frauen waren immer auch als "Arbeitskräfteressource" eingeplant. Zwar gab es für alle Jugendlichen einen Ausbildungsplatz, jedoch oft um den Preis persönlichen Verzichts bei der Realisierung individueller Berufswünsche. Insbesondere junge Frauen waren dabei besonders benachteiligt, da sie einerseits konservativen Rollenerwartungen zu genügen hatten - etwa auch in der Frage, welcher Beruf für eine Frau als akzeptabel angesehen wurde. Gleichzeitig sollten sie aber auch den "modernen" Vorstellungen weiblicher Emanzipation gerecht werden - entsprechend der Ideologie des "Arbeiter- und Bauernstaates". Der Artikel führt aus, dass die beeinflussenden Lehrkräfte deutlich stärker noch als ihre Schülerinnen und Schüler am traditionellen Rollenbild orientiert waren. Abschließend weist der Beitrag darauf hin, dass die Einschränkungen des rollenkonservativen, beruflichen Selbstbildes junger Frauen heute zu einer Belastung und Benachteiligung für die Lebensplanung werden - angesichts der realen beruflichen Möglichkeiten, die sich jungen Frauen in der Bundesrepublik bieten. (ICB)
Ce deuxième tome de la Synthèse sur le Développement agricole au Sahel esquisse un bilan des résultats de plus de trente ans de recherche agricole au Sahel: évaluer les acquis en matière d'amélioration variétale, réfléchir à la problématique de l'eau, aborder les enjeux de l'artificialisation des milieux sahéliens, proposer, au vu des acquis techniques, de nouvelles orientations pour raisonner globalement les systèmes d'élevage au plan régional. L'idée généralement répandue est que l'insuffisance des résultats opérationnels expliquerait, en partie, la situation précaire des économies agricoles sahéliennes. Les constats présentés démontrent, au contraire, que les propositions d'innovations de la recherche sont nombreuses et qu'elles peuvent servir de base à l'élaboration d'actions de développement, qui devront cependant tenir compte des évolutions récentes des systèmes de production et de leur environnement économique
Nicholas Onuf on the Evolution of Social Constructivsm, Turns in IR, and a Discipline of Our Making
Can we really go on speaking about International Relations as a 'discipline'? Even if social constructivism is often presented as a robust theoretical cornerstone of the discipline, one of the thinkers that established this theoretical position challenges the existence of IR. Surely, Nicholas Onuf argues, we have a disciplinary machinery—institutions, journals, conferences and so forth—but these form an apparatus built around a substantive void—in his words, 'a discipline without an 'about''. In this Talk, Nicholas Onuf—among others—weaves an appraisal of disciplinary boundaries through a discussion of social constructivism's birth and growth, tells the material turn to get serious and provides a bleak assessment of IR's subservient relation to political order.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is (or should be), according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
In my view, the biggest challenge for IR is making good on claims (I'd say pretensions) that IR is a discipline in its own right. Such claims presume that IR has a reasonably well-bounded subject matter and a body of theory uniquely suited to that subject matter. For 25 years I have been saying that IR fails miserably in meeting this challenge. Much less do we acknowledge the challenge—there is no debate. As it is, we have institutionalized a so-called discipline (journals, conferences, workshops, PhD programs) that reaches far beyond (lower case) international relations. In short: a discipline without an 'about.' Were we to acknowledge the challenge, we might be content to say: Forget disciplines, it's all about 'the social' and social theory belongs to us—too. Or we might say, it's all about 'the political,' and legal, political and social theory also belong to us. I'm not sure there's much difference. I am sure that it's not enough to say our 'about' is 'the international.' And I have said as much publicly, though intemperate terms that I instantly regretted.
Given such a negative assessment of IR, you might wonder why I stuck with it all these years. Why didn't I just call myself a social theorist and (try to) publish in the few journals in which theorists gets a hearing? Actually, I did try a few times, to no avail (just as I put 'social theory' in the subtitle of World of Our Making (1989) to no discernible effect). I think there's a status issue lurking here. Once identified with IR, it's hard to get acknowledged outside IR. Nobody reads or cites us; we 'don't get no respect'; status ordering condemns us to be consumers rather than producers of big ideas. If (just perhaps) the era of big ideas is over, then the next generation in IR may feel a little braver than I was about jumping ship. Not that I'm betting on it, especially since publishing in a host relatively new, expressly interdisciplinary journals, such as Global Constitutionalism, International Political Sociology and International Political Theory, offer a safer alternative.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?
I have to say that events have never inspired me. In my callow youth, Hans Morgenthau's Politics among Nations (1948) inspired me to think about spending a lifetime doing IR, as did my teachers Robert Tucker and George Liska—both realists with a taste respectively for international law and international institutions. Working as Tucker's assistant in revising Hans Kelsen's Principles of International Law (1952) prompted a longstanding interest in legal theory. As a doctoral student, I got hooked on systems theory à la Hoffmann, Kaplan, Rosecrance; the special issue of World Politics (vol. 14, no. 1) on the international system left an indelible mark, as did Waltz's Man, the State and War (1959). Working with Richard Falk a few years later affected me a great deal—he remains one of my very few heroes. So did Fritz Kratochwil, briefly a student of mine and friend ever since.
In the 1980s I got to know a number of mavericks: Hayward Alker, Rick Ashley, Dick Mansbach, John Ruggie and Rob Walker are by no means the only ones on this list. More important, I think, were my feminist doctoral students, who changed my life in a great many ways and were largely responsible for my turn to social theory. It was in that context that I took the so-called linguistic turn to Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin et al. World of Our Making is pretty clear about its many sources of inspiration. The big trick was fitting everything together. Since then (and to keep the story manageable), working with my brother Peter is responsible for my interest in Aristotle and in the making of the modern world; republican theory links these two concerns. I cannot blame Peter for my ongoing fascination with Foucault.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
For me at least, this is a tricky question. As I said earlier, I am not very much interested in events—either as theoretical fodder or as a matter of what's happening in the world at any given moment. Most of my friends and colleagues are fascinated by current events—how often I find them glued to one news source or another. Students are too, and it seems pretty obvious they should be. Most people in the field engage in the skillful assembly of events, whether in 'cases' or as statistically manipulated patterns. Learning the appropriate skills takes a great deal of time and training. At the same time, students also need an exposure to theory—big picture thinking—and, in my view, the philosophical issues that lurk behind any big picture.
Theory is a seductive. I was seduced at the age of 19 and never gotten over it. Shifting metaphors, I always told my doctoral students not to succumb to the theory bug, at least to the exclusion of what I just called 'the skillful assembly of events.' In other words, don't do it my way—I was lucky to get away with it. Disposition is a different matter. Students must love to work hard for extended intervals with little immediate gratification. Machiavelli said that warriors must be disciplined and ardent. I used to tell my doctoral students, you have to be 'warrior nerds.' If you don't fit this profile, find another vocation.
You were immensely influential in constructing the theoretical pillar of social constructivism in IR, starting over 25 years ago. Looking back, has social constructivism delivered on the promise you etched out in World of Our Making?
No way, and for all kinds of reasons. This was all too clear within a decade, as I intimated in a review of Peter Katzenstein's The Culture of National Security (1996, read introduction here) and spelled out in Don Puchala's Visions of International Relations (2003). To simplify unduly and perhaps unjustly, the constructivists who came to prominence in the 1990s made three mistakes. First, they took for granted that a norm (as in 'the norm') is normative without asking whether, to what degree, or how this might be so. I'm pretty sure this mistake came from a mindless appropriation of functional sociology and utter indifference to legal and political theory. Second, they substituted identity ('who am I?' questions) for agency ('who acts for what or whom?' questions) in guessing at the implications of the end of the Cold War. In doing so, they compounded the felony by leaping from personal identity to collective identity and unreflectively imputing agency to imagined collectivities. Third, they treated culture as an aggregate residual and then assigned it enormous causal significance. Had any of them taken the linguistic turn seriously, they might have extricated those elements of 'culture' that (one might guess) are most consequential for social construction.
More generally, I came to see the constructivist surge of the 90s as a liberal-institutionalist renaissance. Standing in for legal rules, formal institutions and corporate personality, norms and identity look like a conceptual breakthrough to a generation of scholars who had been taught to dismiss old-time liberal IR. In the 2000s, a shifting panorama of events (genocide etc.) prompted a straight-on liberal institutionalist revival with lots of help from lawyers. Meanwhile, a much more diverse range of scholarship has come to be styled constructivist for lack a better label. Finally, there has emerged a gang of 'third generation' constructivists who now actively repudiate their predecessors from the 90s. They speak my language, but I'll let them speak for themselves.
How, do you think, do 'turns' in IR relate to the broader context of real-world historical events? If the origins of social constructivism have been located in the end of the Cold War, is there some kind of dialectic whereby social constructivism then impacts on the course of history? For instance, social constructivism is by now so established that a big part of newer generations of practitioners in IR are probably social constructivists. How does that influence international politics? In other words, does social constructivism as an illocutionary theoretical approach hold perlocutionary effect on its object of study?
I have some reservations about the metaphor 'turn.' Do we imagine IR as a colossal ship that turns, however slowly, all of a piece? I've already used the ship metaphor, but in this context it's not appropriate—we're not that put together, and, besides, no one is steering (not even those legendary gate-keepers). Or a herd of wildebeests, in which all the members of the herd turn together by keying off each other once one senses danger and turns? I don't think so, even if we do sometimes see signs of a herd mentality.
Back in the late 60s, Karl Deutsch suggested that the field had even then experienced a succession of waves. I like this metaphor better because it captures both the messiness of what's going on and a sense that perhaps not much is changing in deeper water. You yourself switch metaphors on me when you mention a new generation of constructivists. As it happens, I like this metaphor a lot (and have a piece entitled 'Five Generations of International Relations Theory' forthcoming in a new edition of International Relations Theory Today, which Ken Booth and Toni Erskine are editing). It suggests a dynamic internal to any field of study rather than one prompted by external events. Inasmuch as constructivism got its start before the Cold War ended but afterwards changed its profile significantly tells us the story is actually rather complicated.
The more interesting question is whether constructivism will, as you say, impact the course of history. The quick and dirty answer is, yes, but in ways too subtle to document. We already know how difficult it is to establish any impact from IR as a scholarly pursuit on world affairs. That is, any impact beyond realism and raison d'état. As we become more specialized in what we do and so does everyone else, it seems ever less likely that we'll be able to pin down extended causal chains. But I suspect that you have something more like 'mood' in mind. Once liberal institutionalists adopted a slick kind of constructivism, they were pretty much in sync with the Zeitgeist, at least for a decade or so. So, yes, as a not very helpful generalization, we can surmise that some degree of co-constitution was then at work. Always is.
One last point. I don't have even the slightest sense that my own scholarly work has had anything have much to do with large-scale world-making, or that it will in any near-term. I don't have to be told that my work is too austere and forbidding to reach very many people—though I am told this often enough. Years from now, who knows? Yet my teaching career convinces me that there's more co-constitution going on in the classroom than anywhere else we're likely to find ourselves. Interacting with hundreds of MA and PhD students in Washington DC over 28 years—during which I noodled through what would become World of Our Making—affected me and them in ways beyond measure. Some of those students became scholars, but many more have spent their lives in public service.
What has been, to you, the biggest surprise or exciting move in IR since social constructivism saw the light?
The biggest and most surprising 'move' has been the move offshore. I speak of course as someone raised, trained and employed in the US when IR was 'AnAmerican Social Science.' For the last twenty years, IR has not so much left the US as gained strength everywhere else. Better to say, its center of gravity has moved. In the process, IR has transformed, both as a claimant discipline and as a theory-driven enterprise. As a participant-observer, I see IR as an institutional beneficiary of globalization and, to a lesser degree, those of us in IR as agents in this hugely complicated process.
Globalization has meant, among much else, the extraordinary growth of higher education and its institutional apparatus. The proliferation of universities is an acknowledgment of cosmopolitan imperatives and an accommodation of national needs, exemplified in programs for the grooming of managerial elites. For IR, this large process has been colored by an ostensible rejection of American hegemony. One expression of this anti-hegemonial sentiment is the fashion for post-positivist scholarship and the sort of constructivism that is now conventionally ascribed to Fritz Kratochwil and me. For me personally, it's just wonderful to be taken seriously everywhere but my own country.
You recently have turned attention towards cognitive and evolutionary psychology. This is a pretty underrepresented field, in terms of its being mined in IR. What challenge has this literature to pose, in your view, to dominant IR?
Long ago, I ventured into cognitive studies as a consequence of casting a broad net in social theory. Since then, several disciplines have converged in making cognitive studies just about the most exciting game in town. I cannot imagine anyone not being fascinated (but then I am also fascinated by advances in cosmology, however little I understand the technical stuff). In recent years, I have developed a more specific interest in what cognitive and evolutionary psychology might tell about my mind, any mind, in relation to a world that my mind cannot access directly, the world of appearances. As you can see, I'm a philosophical idealist—with many qualifications, a Kantian idealist. Most people in IR are philosophical realists, for whom such issues are less compelling.
Let me comment briefly on any challenge the cognitive revolution might pose for IR in the philosophical realist mode. IR's substantive concerns are so far removed from the stuff of cognitive science (neurons and such) that I doubt scholars in IR will ever feel obliged take the latter into account. Nor should they. Positivist science is reductive—it always pushes down levels of analysis to explain what's going on at higher levels. But anyone pushing down risks losing touch with what seems to be substantively distinctive about one's starting point, and IR and its event-manifold are a long way up from the synchronized firing of neurons. I would qualify this bald statement somewhat to account for the recent interest of emotions in IR. At least some of the psychological literature on emotions taps into a deep pool of research where the age-old cognition-emotion binary has finally been put to rest.
You have a broad experience in IR. How do you see the evolution of the field? Is it a tragedy of unfolding rationalization and increasing division of labor, or is something else going on?
As I intimated earlier, IR has failed as a disciplinary project. I'm almost inclined to say, there's no hope for IR 'as we know it.' Better to say, IR has lost its self-told coherence. A hundred flowers bloom, but just barely, and there are a lot of weeds. I don't see this as a bad thing (your weeds may well be my flowers), although other disciplines, such as sociology and a resuscitated geography, cast shadows on our scraggly garden. I do think larger societal processes—modern rationalization and modernist functional differentiation—have conjoined to impose a coherence we don't see. Crudely, we are servants to other servants, all of us ultimately minions to run-away capital and victims of its techno-material seductions. I guess you could call this phenomenon a tragedy, though its very impersonality undercuts the sense of the term. I have no doubt, however, that it will eventuate in a catastrophe from we moderns will never recover. I have been saying this ever since the 1970s, when the debate over The Limits to Growth persuaded me that we would never turn the ship around.
A new 'turn' seems to be developing in the social sciences, possibly a swing of the ontological pendulum back to materialism—this time with a more postpositivist undertone. How do you relate to such a turn?
I am skeptical. It looks like a fad to me—people casting about for something new and interesting to say. Moreover, the vitalist, Bergsonian tenor of so much of the new materialism turns me off—I cannot see the case for ascribing agency (and thus purpose) to things when the language of cause suffices. (And I am not among those constructivists who will not speak of cause for fear of positivist contamination.) But there's another issue that troubles me: the continued power of the materialist-idealist binary. In IR, we call realists materialists and liberal institutionalists/soft constructivists idealists when it should be obvious that whatever separates them (in my view, not as much as they think) has nothing to do with idealism and materialism as philosophical stances. Security dilemmas, arms races and terrorist plots are not ideationally informed? Norm diffusion, identity crises and human rights are not materially expressed? Get serious.
I argued in World of Our Making that the material and the social are bound inextricably bound together. Rules do the job. They turn the stuff of the world into resources that we, as social beings, put to use. I think I got it right then. Needless to say, I also think students afflicted with mindlessly linked binaries can only benefit from reading that book.
Nicholas Greenwood Onuf is renowned as one of the founders of constructivism in International Relations. He is also known for his important contributions to International Legal Theory, International History, and Social Theory. Onuf's most famous work is arguably World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (published in 1989), which should be on every IR student's must-read list. His recent publications include Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (2006, co-authored with his brother Peter Onuf) and International Legal Theory: Essays and Engagements, 1966-2006 (2008). Onuf is currently Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Florida International University and is on the editorial boards of International Political Sociology, Cooperation and Conflict, and Contexto Internacional. Professor Onuf received his PhD in International Studies at John Hopkins University, and has also taught at Georgetown University, American University, Princeton, Columbia, University of Southern California, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, and Kyung Hee University in Korea.
Related links
FacultyProfile at the Florida International University Read Onuf's Rule and Rules in International Relations (2014 conference paper) here (pdf) Read Onuf's Fitting Metaphors: the Case of the European Union (New Perspectives, 2010) here (pdf) Read Onuf's Institutions, intentions and international relations (Review of International Studies, 2002) here (pdf) Read Onuf's Levels (European Journal of International Relations 1995) here (pdf)
