In: Ilišin, Vlasta (2007) Political values and attitudes. In: Democratic transition in Croatia: value transformation, education & media. Eugenia and Hugh M. Stewart '26 Series on Eastern Europe . Texas A&M University Press, College Station, pp. 109-136. ISBN 978-1-58544-587-5
The political values and attitudes analyzed in this chapter represent but a segment of the political culture of the Croatian citizens, understood as one of the preconditions of a successful democratic transition and consolidation. The emphasis was placed on those dimensions enabling insights into the acceptance of the proclaimed liberal-democratic values and the democratic potential of the citizens, and their perception of the social reality and political expectations. Such a reduced analysis suffices only to yield empirically verified information on certain elements of the awareness of Croatian citizens, which is why the conclusions of a more general nature might follow only after the in-depth and comparative analysis are over. Thus, this dominantly empirically oriented paper holds on the to the tendencies pointing to possible problems in the process of democratization, which will be present for a long while. The liberal-democratic values are highly accepted at the level of principles, meaning there is one of the necessary preconditions for building a democratic society. In that regard, one can state that there is a consensus over officially proclaimed values. Based on that, we can set a hypothesis that the Croatian society is coming out of the anomaly period, which started in the first years of transition when the all values were abandoned, and the new had not yet been widely accepted. One can also assume that the consensual acceptance of liberal-democratic values is the demonstration of the citizens' latent preparedness for democratic patterns of behavior. However, an insight into their understanding of democratic rules and the attitude toward the institutions of power, relativize the possible conclusion about a solid preparedness for adequate participation in democratic processes. The demonstrated democratic potential is at a relatively high level, but with a permanently present deficit in the understanding of conflicts of interests, manifested as a conspicuous inclination toward a harmonious understanding of politics. These trends suggest that the Croatian citizens are relatively slow in shedding those components of their undemocratic heritage de-stimulating political competition, without which there is no confrontation yielding better political solutions. At the same time, this reduces the chances of the citizens to really choose between different political options or programs and projects. When these failings in the democratic awareness are joined by the widespread distrust of institutions of power, the democratic potential of the citizens becomes even more questionable. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that the participation in elections, the demands for public control over government, the active participation of citizens and the like, will be at a satisfactory level if the citizens have no trust in the representatives they had voted for. This distrust disrupts the respectability of democratic political institutions and creates a base for the rise of authoritarian political options. Croatia has had much experience with that type of political behavior, and recent experiences demonstrate that the political protagonists are too often prepared for undemocratic behavior and for stepping outside of their jurisdiction. One must admit that most such incidents are met by the criticism of at least a part of the public, but it would seen that the political protagonists primarily count on the ability of the silent majority to endure authoritarian patterns of government. The research results on the dissatisfaction of the citizens with the situation in Croatia are concurrent with the statistical data that from year to year testified to the stagnation of the economy and the deterioration of the living standard of the citizens. In the last 3 to 4 years, the economic deterioration has decelerated, but the grave social differences, which had appeared during the 1990s, are not decreasing because today 15% of population possesses 80% of national wealth. Thus, it is not surprising that among the many problems the citizens are feeling, those of the socio-economic nature dominate, which is why the expectations are primarily focused at the economic sphere. Even though the war has ended over a decade ago, the negative trends have not been stopped, so the problems coming out of the unfavorable economic conditions cast a shadow over all other problems. Hence the concentration of political priorities on the area of economy. All that might, but not necessarily, affect the reduction of sensitivity to some other areas and problems key to further democratization. What these areas might be, can be illustrated through the lower validation of political pluralism. The reasons can be versatile: the dissatisfaction of citizens with the existing functioning of political parties, the satiety with the multi-party system (after only 15 years), the disappointment with the fact the parties are not compliant enough to one another (congruent to the found harmonious vision of politics), the discouragement with the insufficient differentiation of parties both on the ideological-program and the practical level, which is why they are nor perceived as valid representatives of the interests of the citizens. Regardless of the reason in question, the consequence of all this is the opinion that the democratic and multi-party system is not necessary for the democratic development of a society. It is redundant to explain the unviability of that attitude, but it is a problem that these doubts even arise, especially given the fact they spread with time. In that context, we may after all state that the danger the democratic process in Croatia might be stopped or usurped is minimal. Indeed, after five electoral cycles and the second change of government in the transitional period without great social unrest, one may state that Croatia has joined the circle of those transitional countries where the process of democratic consolidation has been initiated. This presumes the stability of political institutions and the respect for democratic rules, in spite of the occasional undemocratic incidents done by political protagonists or the confusion of citizens by the constellation of political relationships and the inadequate functioning of political protagonists.
In: Li , J H 2019 , ' Oral histories of newly arrived migrant children's experiences of schooling in Denmark from the 1970s to the 1990s ' , ISCHE 41SPACES AND PLACES OF EDUCATION , Porto , Portugal , 16/07/2019 - 20/07/2019 pp. 514-515 .
Abstract The paper presents a study aiming at historicizing the schooling experiences of migrant children with a non-western background from the 1970s to the 1990s in the Danish education system. The focus is on how the students experienced their reception in the school institution and how school was preparing the students for the transition between elementary school and further education and labor market. The main methodology is oral history interviews with people who arrived in the Danish education system as children with a non-western background. The focus on the immigrant groups from non-western countries is chosen due to the fact that Danish education politics since the 1970s have targeted these groups of students as groups needing extracurricular education efforts for inclusion (Buchardt, 2016). However, there seems to be a knowledge deficit concerning the 'effects' of these policies from a student perspective in the period between the 1970s and the 1990s. Previous research in the field of education and other welfare provisions for migrant children in a historical perspective since the work-immigrant wave begun in the 1960s in Denmark has been on the policy-makers (e.g. Jønsson, 2013), provision providers (e.g. Øland, 2010; Padovan-Özdemir & Ydesen, 2016), the curriculum materials (e.g. Buchardt, 2016) and less from a student perspective. Oral history is a research approach that produces the sources as well as being the method to select and interpret the (oral) sources, and in both senses it engages with experience. Consequently, this project illuminates the students' experience of practiced educational policy in order to capture both the past (history) and the past as it appears in the present (the memory) (Bak, 2016). The intention is to generate new knowledge about how reception- and integration models and preparation to labor market were practiced in a student perspective from the 1970s to the 1990s, but just as importantly to explore how students ascribe meaning to the school experience today (inspired by Grønbæk Jensen, Rasmussen, & Kragh, 2016, p. 113). Historically, education has especially since the emergence of the modern nation-states been linked to the state and the production of its work force and citizenry and thus of belonging to the national space (Popkewitz, 2000). Buchardt (2018) argues that the educational political efforts since the 1970s in Denmark directed toward newly arrived migrants and their children can also be viewed as a means to circumscribe welfare distribution and in Popkewitz' (2007) terms as double registers of inclusion and exclusion, as well as a hierarchy of inclusion. Theoretically, the study thus seeks to illuminate the historical development of the internal bordering of the nation in the context of the Danish welfare-state model (Kettunen, 2011; Suszycki, 2011) through exploring how the historical hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion in education and in relation to the labor market preparation in education are experienced by students under shifting policies from the 1970s to the 1990s. Bibliography Bak, S. L. (2016). Oral History i Danmark. (S. L. Bak, Ed.). Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Buchardt, M. (2016). Kulturforklaring: uddannelseshistorier om muslimskhed. (M. Buchardt, Ed.). Kbh.: Tiderne Skifter. Buchardt, M. (2018). The "Culture" of Migrant Pupils: A Nation- and Welfare-State Historical Perspective on the European Refugee Crisis. European Education, 50(1), 58–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/10564934.2017.1394162 Grønbæk Jensen, S., Rasmussen, J. K., & Kragh, J. V. (2016). "Anbragt i historien". Tidligere anbragte og indlagtes mundtlige fortællinger ["Placed in History". Oral accounts from the formerly placed and admitted]. In S. L. Bak (Ed.), Oral History i Danmark [Oral History in Denmark] (pp. 97–118). Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Jønsson, H. V. (2013). I velfærdsstatens randområde. Socialdemokratiets integrationspolitik 1960'erne til 2000'erne [On the margins of the welfare state. Social Democracy's integration politics 1960s–2000s]. Department of History and Centre for Welfare State Research, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. Kettunen, P. (2011). Welfare nationalism and competitive community. In Welfare citizenship and welfare nationalism (pp. 79–117). NordWel Studies in Historical Welfare State Research, 2. Padovan-Özdemir, M., & Ydesen, C. (2016). Professional encounters with the post-WWII immigrant: A privileged prism for studying the shaping of European welfare nation-states. Paedagogica historica, 52(5), 423-437. Popkewitz, T. S. (2000). Globalization/Regionalization, Knowledge, and the Educational Practices: Some Notes on Comparative Strategies for Educational Research. In Educational Knowledge – changing Relationships between the State, Civil Society, and the Educational Community (pp. 3–27). Ithaca: State University of New York Press. Popkewitz, T. S. (2007). Cosmopolitanism and the age of school reform: Science, education, and making society by making the child. London: Routledge. Suszycki, A. M. (2011). Introduction. In Welfare citizenship and welfare nationalism (Vol. 2, pp. 9–22). NordWel Studies in Historical Welfare State Research. Øland, T. (2010). A state ethnography of progressivism: Danish school pedagogues and their efforts to emancipate the powers of the child, the people and the culture 1929-1960. Praktiske Grunde. Tidsskrift for Kultur- og Samfundsvidenskab (1), 57–89. ; The paper presents a study aiming at historicizing the schooling experiences of migrant children with a nonwestern background from the 1970s to the 1990s in the Danish education system. The focus is on how the students experienced their reception in the school institution and how school was preparing the students for the transition between elementary school and further education and labor market. The main methodology is oral history interviews with people who arrived in the Danish education system as children with a non-western background. The focus on the immigrant groups from non-western countries is chosen due to the fact that Danish education politics since the 1970s have targeted these groups of students as groups needing extracurricular education efforts for inclusion (Buchardt, 2016). However, there seems to be a knowledge deficit concerning the 'effects' of these policies from a student perspective in the period between the 1970s and the 1990s. Previous research in the field of education and other welfare provisions for migrant children in a historical perspective since the work-immigrant wave begun in the 1960s in Denmark has been on the policy-makers (e.g. Jønsson, 2013), provision providers (e.g. Øland, 2010; Padovan-Özdemir & Ydesen, 2016), the curriculum materials (e.g. Buchardt, 2016) and less from a student perspective. Oral history is a research approach that produces the sources as well as being the method to select and interpret the (oral) sources, and in both senses it engages with experience. Consequently, this project illuminates the students' experience of practiced educational policy in order to capture both the past (history) and the past as it appears in the present (the memory) (Bak, 2016). The intention is to generate new knowledge about how reception- and integration models and preparation to labor market were practiced in a student perspective from the 1970s to the 1990s, but just as importantly to explore how students ascribe meaning to the school experience today (inspired by Grønbæk Jensen, Rasmussen, & Kragh, 2016, p. 113). Historically, education has especially since the emergence of the modern nation-states been linked to the state and the production of its work force and citizenry and thus of belonging to the national space (Popkewitz, 2000). Buchardt (2018) argues that the educational political efforts since the 1970s in Denmark directed toward newly arrived migrants and their children can also be viewed as a means to circumscribe welfare distribution and in Popkewitz' (2007) terms as double registers of inclusion and exclusion, as well as a hierarchy of inclusion. Theoretically, the study thus seeks to illuminate the historical development of the internal bordering of the nation in the context of the Danish welfare-state model (Kettunen, 2011; Suszycki, 2011) through exploring how the historical hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion in education and in relation to the labor market preparation in education are experienced by students under shifting policies from the 1970s to the 1990s.
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Ann Tickner on Feminist Philosophy of Science, Engaging the Mainstream, and (still) Remaining Critical in/of IR
Feminist IR is still often side-lined as a particularistic agenda or limited issue area, appearing as one of the last chapters of introductory volumes to the field, despite the limitless efforts of people such as Cynthia Enloe (Theory Talk #48) and J. Ann Tickner. She has laboured to point out and provincialize the parochialism that haunts mainstream IR, without, however, herself retreating and disengaging from some of its core concerns. In this Talk, Tickner elaborates—amongst others—on the specifics of a feminist approach to the philosophical underpinnings of IR; discusses how feminism relates to the distinction between mainstream and critical theory; and addresses the challenges of navigating such divides.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the central challenge or principal debate in International Relations? And what is your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?
I think the biggest challenge for IR is that it is relevant and helps us understand important issues in our globalized world. I realize this is not a conventional answer, but too often we academics get caught up in substantive and methodological debates where we end up talking only to each other or to a very small audience. We tend to get too concerned with the issue of scientific respectability rather than thinking about how to try to understand and remedy the massive problems that exist in the world today. Steve Smith's presidential address to the ISA in 2002 (read it here), shortly after 9/11, reminded us of this. Smith chastised the profession for having nothing to say about such a catastrophic event.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?
I've gone through quite a few transformations in my academic career. My original identity was as an International Political Economy (IPE) scholar; my first academic position was at a small liberal arts college (College of the Holy Cross) where I taught a variety of IPE courses. In graduate school I was interested in what, in the 1970s, we called 'North-South' issues, specifically issues of global justice, which were not the most popular subjects in the field. So I always felt a little out of place in my choice of subject matter. In the 1980s when I started teaching, IR was mostly populated by men. As a woman, one felt somewhat uncomfortable at professional meetings; and there were very few texts by women that I could assign to my students. I also found that many of the female students in my introductory IR classes were somewhat uncomfortable and unmotivated by the emphasis placed on strategic issues and nuclear weapons.
It was at about the time when I first started thinking about these issues, I happened to read Evelyn Fox Keller's book Gender and Science, a book that offers a gendered critique of the natural sciences (read an 'update' of the argument by Keller here, pdf). It struck me that her feminist critique of science could equally be applied to IR theory. My first feminist publication, a feminist critique of Hans Morgenthau's principles of political realism, expanded on this theme (read full text here, pdf).
Teaching at a small liberal arts college where one was judged by the quality of one's work rather than the type of research one was doing was very helpful—because I could follow my own, rather non-conventional, inclinations. So I think my turn to feminism, after ten years in the field, was a combination of my own consciousness-raising and feeling that there was something about IR that didn't speak to me. Later, I was fortunate to be hired by the University of Southern California, a large research institution, with an interdisciplinary School of International Relations, separate from the political science department. When I arrived in 1995, the School had a reputation for teaching a broad array of IR theoretical approaches. The support of these institutional settings and of a network of feminist scholars and students, some of whom I discovered were thinking along similar lines in the late 1980s, were important for getting me to where I am today.
What would a student need (dispositions, skills) to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
It depends on the level of the student: at the undergraduate level, a broad array of courses in global politics including some economics and history. Language training is very important too, and ideally, an overseas experience. We need to encourage our students to be curious and have an open mind about our world.
At the graduate level, this is a more complicated question. The way you phrased the question 'to understand the world in a global way,' can be very different from training to become an IR scholar, especially in the United States. I would emphasize the importance of a broad theoretical and methodological training, including some exposure to the philosophy of science, and to non-Western IR if possible, or at least at a minimum, to try to get beyond the dominance of American IR, which still exists even in places outside the US.
Why should IR scholars incorporate gender in the study of world politics? What are the epistemological and ontological implications of adopting a feminist perspective in IR?
Feminists would argue that incorporating feminist perspectives into IR would fundamentally transform the discipline. Feminists claim that IR is already gendered, and gendered masculine, in the types of questions it asks and the ways it goes about answering them. The questions we ask in our research are never neutral - they are a choice, depending on the researcher's identity and location. Over history, the knowledge that we have accumulated has generally been knowledge about men's lives. It's usually been men who do the asking and consequently, it is often the case that women's lives and women's knowledge are absent from what is deemed 'reliable' knowledge. This historical legacy has had, and continues to have, an effect on the way we build knowledge. Sandra Harding, a feminist philosopher of science, has suggested that if were to build knowledge from women's lives as well, we would broaden the base from which we construct knowledge, and would therefore get a richer and more complex picture of reality.
One IR example of how we limit our research questions and concerns is how we calculate national income, or wealth—the kind of data states choose to collect and on which they base their public policy. We have no way of measuring the vast of amount of non-remunerated reproductive and caring labour, much of which is done by women. Without this labour we would not have a functioning global capitalist economy. To me this is one example as to why putting on our gender lenses helps us gain a more complete picture of global politics and the workings of the global economy.
Feminists have also argued that the epistemological foundations of Western knowledge are gendered. When we use terms such as rationality, objectivity and public, they are paired with terms such as emotional, subjective and private, terms that are seen as carrying less weight. By privileging the first of these terms when we construct knowledge we are valuing knowledge that we typically associate with masculinity and the public sphere, historically associated with men. Rationality and objectivity are not terms that are overtly gendered, but, when asked, women and men alike associate them with masculinity. They are terms we value when we do our research.
In one of the foundational texts of Feminist IR, 'You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR Theorists' (1997, full text here, pdf), you highlighted three particular (gendered) misunderstandings that continue to divide Feminists and mainstream IR theorists. To what extent do these misunderstandings continue to inform mainstream perceptions of Feminist approaches to the study of international politics?
I think probably they still do, although it's always hard to tell, because the mainstream has not engaged much with feminist approaches. I've been one who's always calling for conversations with the mainstream but, apart from the forum responding to the article you mention, there have been very few. In a 2010 article, published in the Australian Feminist Law Journal, I looked back to see if I could find responses to my 1997 article to which you refer. I found that most of the responses had come from other feminists. The lack of engagement, which other feminists have experienced also, makes it hard to know about the misunderstandings that still exist but my guess would be that they remain. However I do think there has been progress in accepting feminism's legitimacy in the field. It is now included in many introductory texts.
The first misunderstanding that I identified is the meaning of gender. I would hope that the introduction of constructivist approaches would help with understanding that gender is social construction - a very important point for feminists. But I think that gender is still largely equated with women. Feminists have tried to stress that gender is also about men and about masculinity, something that seems to be rather hard to accept for those unfamiliar with feminist work. I think it's also hard for the discipline to accept that both international politics as practice and IR as a discipline are not gender neutral. Feminists claim that IR as a discipline is gendered in its concepts, its subject matter, the questions it asks and the way it goes about answering them. This is a radical assertion for those unfamiliar with feminist approaches and it is not very well understood.
Now to answer the second misunderstanding as to whether feminists are doing IR. I think there has been some progress here, because IR has broadened its subject matter. And there has been quite a bit of attention lately to gender issues in the 'real world' - issues such as sexual violence, trafficking, and human rights. Of course these issues relate not only to women but they are issues with which feminists have been concerned. Something I continue to find curious is that the policy and activist communities are generally ahead of the academy in taking up gender issues. Most international organizations, and some national governments are under mandates for gender mainstreaming. Yet, the academy has been slow to catch up and give students the necessary training and skills to go out in the world and deal with such issues.
The third misunderstanding to which I referred in the 1997 article is the question of epistemology. While, as I indicated, there has been some acceptance of the subject matter, with which feminists are concerned, it is a more fundamental and contentious question as to whether feminists are recognized as 'doing IR' in the methodological sense. As the field broadens its concerns, IR may see issues that feminists raise as legitimate, but how we study them still evokes the same responses that I brought up fifteen years ago. Many of the questions that feminists ask are not amenable to being answered using the social scientific methodologies popular in the field, particularly in the US. (I should add that there is a branch of IR feminism that does use quantitative methods and it has gained much wider acceptance by the mainstream.) The feminist assumption that Western knowledge is gendered and based on men's lives is a challenging claim. And feminists often prefer to start knowledge from the lives of people who are on the margins – those who are subordinated or oppressed, and of course, this is very different from IR which tends toward a top-down look at the international system. One of the big problems that have become more evident to me over time is that feminism is fundamentally sociological – it's about people and social relations, whereas much of IR is about structures and states operating in an anarchic, rather than a social, environment. I find that historians and sociologists are more comfortable with gender analysis, perhaps for this reason. I'm not sure that these misunderstanding are ever going to be solved or that they need to be solved.
Although Feminist methodology is often conflated with ethnographic approaches, in 'What Is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations Methodological Questions' (2005, pdf here), you argued that there is no unique Feminist research methodology. Nonetheless, Feminist IR is well known for using an autoethnographic approach. What does this approach add to the study of gender in IR? What might account for the relative dearth of autoethnography in other IR paradigms?
I think it is important to remember that feminists use many different approaches coming out of very different theoretical traditions, such as Marxism, socialism, constructivism, postpositivism, postcolonialism and empiricism. So there are many different kinds of feminisms. If you look specifically at what has been called 'second-generation feminist IR,' the empirical work that followed the so-called 'first generation' that challenged and critiqued the concepts and theoretical foundations of the field, much of it, but not all, (discourse analysis is quite prevalent too), uses ethnographic methods which seem well suited to researching some of the issues I described earlier. Questions about violence against women, domestic servants, women in the military, violent women, women in peace movements– these are the sorts of research questions that demand fieldwork and an ethnographic approach. Because as I stated earlier, IR asks rather different kinds of questions, it does not generally adopt ethnographic methods. Feminists who do this type of ethnographic research tell me that their work is often more readily received and understood by those who do comparative politics, because they are more comfortable with field research. And since women are not usually found in the halls of power – as decision-makers. IR feminists are particularly concerned with issues having to do with marginalized and disempowered peoples' lives. Ethnography is useful for this type of research.
I see autoethnography as a different issue. While the reflexive tradition is not unique to feminists, feminism tends to be reflectivist. As I said earlier, feminists are sensitive to issues about who the creators of knowledge have been and whose knowledge is claimed to be universal. Most feminists believe that there is no such thing as universal knowledge. Consequently, feminists believe that being explicit about one's positionality as a researcher is very important because none of us can achieve objectivity, often called 'the view from nowhere'. So while striving to get as accurate and as useful knowledge as we can, we should be willing to state our own positionality. One's privilege as a researcher must be acknowledged too; one must always be sensitive to the unequal power relations between a researcher and their research subject – something that anthropology recognized some time ago. Feminists who do fieldwork often try to make their research useful to their subjects or do participatory research so that they can give something back to the community. All these concerns lead to autoethnographic disclosures. They demand a reflexive attitude and a willingness to describe and reassess your research journey as you go along. This autoethnographic style is hard for researchers in the positivist tradition to understand. While we all strive to produce accurate and useful knowledge, positivists' striving for objectivity requires keeping subjectivity out of their research.
Robert W. Cox (Theory Talk #37) famously distinguished two approaches to the study of international politics: problem-solving theory and critical theory. How does the emancipatory project of the latter inform your perspective of IR and its normative goals? And is this distinction as valid today as it was when Cox first formulated it, over 3 decades ago?
Yes I think it's still an important distinction. It's still cited very often which suggests it's still valid, although postmodern scholars (and certain feminists) have problems with Western liberal notions of emancipation. I see my own work as being largely compatible with Cox's definition of critical theory. Like many feminists, I view my work as explicitly normative; I say explicitly because I believe all knowledge is normative although not all scholars would admit it. What Cox calls problem-solving theory is also normative in the conservative sense of not aiming to changing the world. A normative goal to which feminists are generally committed is understanding the reasons for women's subordination and seeking ways to end it. It's also important to note that the IR discipline was borne with the intention of serving the interests of the state whereas academic feminism was borne out of social movements for women's emancipation. The normative goals of my work are to demonstrate how the theory and practice of IR is gendered and what might be the implications of this, both for how we construct knowledge and how we go about solving global problems.
Much of your work addresses the parochial scope and neopositivist inclination of International Relations (IR) scholarship, especially in the United States. What distinguishes other 'Western' institutional and political contexts (in the UK, Europe, Canada and Oceania) from the American study of IR? How and why is critical/reflectivist IR marginalized in the American context? What is the status of these 'debates' in non-Western institutional contexts?
With respect to the parochial scope of US IR, I refer you to a recent book, edited by Arlene Tickner and Ole Wæver, International Relations Scholarship Around the World. It contains chapters by authors from around the world, some of whom suggest IR in their country imitates the US and some who see very different IRs. The chapter by Thomas J. Biersteker, ('The Parochialism of Hegemony: Challenges for 'American' International Relations', read it here in pdf) reports on his examination of the required reading lists for IR Ph.D. candidates in the top ten US academic institutions. His findings suggest that constructivism accounts for only about 10% of readings and anything more radical even less. Over 90% of assigned works are written by US scholars. The dominance of quantitative and rational choice approaches in the US may have something to do with IR generally being a subfield of political science. Critical approaches often have different epistemological roots. And I stress 'science' because while IR is also subsumed in certain politics departments in other countries, the commitment to science, in the neopositivist sense, is something that seems to be peculiarly American. Stanley Hoffman's famous observation, made over thirty years ago, that Americans see problems as solvable by the scientific method is still largely correct I believe (read article here, pdf). I find it striking that so many formerly US based and/or educated critical scholars have left the US and are now based elsewhere – in Canada, Australasia, or Europe.
Biersteker sees the hegemony of American IR extending well beyond the US. But there is generally less commitment to quantification elsewhere. This may be due to IR's historical legacy emerging out of different knowledge traditions or being housed in separate departments. In France, IR emerged from sociological and legal traditions and, in the UK, history and political theory, including the Marxist tradition, have been influential in IR. And European IR scholars do not move as freely between the academy and the policy world as in the US. All these factors might encourage more openness to critical approaches. I am afraid I don't know enough about non-Western traditions to make an informed comment. But we must recognize the enormous power differentials that exist with respect to engaging IR's debates. Language barriers are one problem; having access to research funds is an enormous privilege. Scholars in many parts of the world do not have the resources or the time to engage in esoteric academic debates, nor do they have the resources to attend professional meetings or access certain materials. The production of knowledge is a very unequal process, dominated by those with power and resources; hence the hegemonic position of the US that Biersteker and others still see.
As methodological pluralism now retains the status of a norm in the field, John M. Hobson (Theory Talk #71) recently argued that the question facing IR scholars no longer revolves around the debate between positivist and postpositivist approaches. Rather, the primary meta-theoretical question relates to Eurocentrism, that is, 'To be or not to be a Eurocentric, that is the question.' To what extent do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?
Given my answer to the last question, I am not sure that methodological pluralism has reached an accepted status in the US yet. However, John M. Hobson has produced a very thoughtful and engaging book that asks very provocative questions. Unfortunately, I doubt many IR scholars in the US have read it and would be rather puzzled by Hobson's claim. But certainly the Eurocentrism of the discipline is something to which we should be paying attention. I find it curious how little IR has recognized its imperial roots or engaged in any discussion of imperialism. As Brian Schmidt and other historical revisionists have told us, when IR was borne at the beginning of the twentieth century, imperialism was a central preoccupation in the discipline. Race also has been ignored almost entirely by IR scholars.
To Hobson's specific claim that the important question for IR now is about being or not being Eurocentric rather than about being positivist or postpositivist, I do have some problems with this. I am concerned with Hobson's painting positivism and postpostivism with the same Eurocentric brush. Yes, they are both Eurocentric; but postpositivists or critical theorists – to use Cox's term – are at least open to being reflective about how they produce knowledge and where it comes from. If one can be reflective about one's knowledge it does allow space to be aware of one's own biases. Those of us on the critical side of Cox's divide can at least be reflective about the problems of Eurocentrism, whereas positivists don't consider reflexivity to be part of producing good research. Nevertheless, Hobson has made an important statement. He has written a masterful and insightful book and I recommend it all IR scholars.
Last question. Your recent work is part of an emergent collective dialogue that aims to 'provincialize' the Western European heritage of IR. In a recent article entitled 'Dealing with Difference: Problems and Possibilities for Dialogue in International Relations' you highlight the need for non-Eurocentric approach to the study of IR. In IR, what are the prospects for genuine dialogue across methodological and geographical borders? Where do you see this dialogue taking place?
This is a very tough issue. There are scholars like Hobson who talk about a non-Eurocentric approach, but given what I said about resources, about language barriers, and about inequalities in the ability to produce knowledge, this is difficult. As I've said at many times and in many places, the power difference is an inhibitor to any genuine dialogue. So, where is dialogue taking place? Among those, such as Hobson, who advocate a hybrid approach that takes other knowledge traditions seriously and sees them as equally valid as one's own. And mostly on the margins of what we call 'IR', where some very exciting work is being produced. Feminism is one such site. Feminist approaches are dedicated to dialogic knowledge production, or what they call knowledge that emerges through conversation. Feminists believe that theory can emerge from practice, listening to ordinary people and how they make sense of their lives. I also think that projects like the one undertaken by Wæver and Tickner (which is still ongoing) that is publishing contributions from scholars from very different parts of the world is crucial.
J. Ann Tickner is Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American University. She is also a Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California where she taught for fifteen years before coming to American University. Her principle areas of teaching and research include international theory, peace and security, and feminist approaches to international relations. She served as President of the International Studies Association from 2006-2007. Her books include Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era (Columbia University Press, 2001), Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving International Security (Columbia University Press, 1992), and Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics: American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States (Columbia University Press, 1987).
Related links
Faculty Profile at American University Read Tickner's Hans Morgenthau's Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation (Millennium, 1988) here (pdf) Read Tickner's You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR Theorists (1997 International Studies Quarterly) here (pdf) Read Tickner's What Is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations Methodological Questions (2005, International Studies Quarterly) here (pdf)
Since the Industrial Revolution, European societies have evolved through a frantic urban development. This disruption of both spatial and societal European territory has brought about the questioning of the relationship between societies (which have become mainly urban) to space in general, and even more precisely, to the environment. The inter-penetration of the city and the country on large portions of the territory, enhanced by the rapid development of individual mobility, has problematized the relationship between the two spaces, rendering secular divisions obsolete. The useful productivity of the forest disappears as other urban functions of the forest are privileged. These new uses of the forest, which have come about on periurban areas, are inspired by the valorization of nature within society. In this context, periurban forested spaces, symbols of "nature" which have long been considered as empty, are now new sources of interest. The choice to work in this European context stems from an accumulation of global characteristics (which justify a comparative study) and regional specificities (which lead to pertinent conclusions based on the approach used here). However, confronted with the impossibility of conducting an exhaustive study, we have narrowed the focus to a French-English comparison, which within its regional diversity reveals socially dynamic communes. In fact, the focus of the thesis on medium-sized cities stems from a double argument: on one hand, there is little preexisting critical work in this area as most publications treat large metropolises. On the other hand, the spatial and demographic characteristics of these territories imply opportunities and obligations to respond to the renewed socio-environmental stakes. Firstly, we have attempted to understand the reasons for the redefinition of the place of the forest within periurban spaces. Across this analysis of the city-forest relationship, from antiquity to the emergence of recent expectations, we have emphasized the importance of the hygienist current. This current has developed in reaction to the rapid development of a modernity which has been progressively considered as noxious. The consequence of such a turning point is the apparition of new appropriation methods and new approaches to the forest as an object within the perimeter of the city's influence. Following this historical and scientific contextualisation of the subject, our second objective is to analyze in specific geographic contexts how the spatial relationship between the city and the forest can have an effect on the surface evolution of the forests and on the redefinition of the functions attributed to it. In order to do this, we have conducted a diachronic study on different selected sites according to a spatial gradient of integration into the urban. The study was carried out with the help of GIS based on a series of successive aerial photos. This analysis enables us to differentiate the risks and the potentials of the different periurban zones, from the densely urban to the loosely periurban. Finally, the last part of the thesis deals with the results of investigations and interviews which were conducted in order to better understand the ways in which people interpret the role of the periurban forest. The interpretation seems to be effected not only by global constants but also, paradoxically, is strongly conditioned by the local context. The analysis of the uses of the forest and the related discourse show a wide variation in the perception of the space. The testimonies demonstrate clear-cut divisions along sectorial approaches: environmental, social, or economic. This information enables us to define the parameters of the current politics surrounding the periurban forest and the need to put into place, in a truly multifunctional and participative global fashion, new forms of forestry management. ; L'histoire des sociétés européennes depuis la révolution industrielle est celle d'un développement urbain effréné. Ce bouleversement du territoire européen, autant spatial que sociétal, entraîne une remise en cause du rapport de sociétés, devenues majoritairement urbaines, à l'espace en général et plus particulièrement à leur environnement. L'interpénétration entre ville et campagne sur de larges portions du territoire, favorisée par l'essor des mobilités individuelles, entraîne une complexification du rapport entre les deux espaces, rendant les clivages séculaires obsolètes. L'utilité productrice de la forêt s'estompe au profit d'autres fonctions d'inspiration urbaine. Ces nouvelles attentes qui se font jour sur les étendues périurbaines sont inspirées par le placement de la nature comme valeur sociétale forte. Dans ce contexte, les espaces forestiers périurbains, symbole de " nature ", longtemps considérés comme vides, sont de nouveau source d'intérêts. Le choix de travailler dans le contexte spatial européen est la conséquence de la conjugaison de caractéristiques globales proches, autorisant la conduite d'une étude comparative, et de spécificités régionales marquées, permettant de dégager des conclusions pertinentes à partir de la démarche employée. Cependant, devant l'impossibilité de mener une étude exhaustive nous avons plus particulièrement porté notre attention sur un binôme franco-anglais, révélateur de cette diversité régionale face à des dynamiques sociétales communes. Enfin, le centrage de la thèse sur les villes moyennes relève d'un double constat. D'une part, il existe peu de travaux sur la question pour ces objets géographiques, l'essentiel des publications traitant des grandes métropoles. Par ailleurs, les caractéristiques spatiales et démographiques de ces territoires entraînent des opportunités, mais aussi des obligations de répondre à des enjeux socio-environnementaux en pleine recrudescence. Dans un premier temps, nous avons cherché à comprendre les raisons de la redéfinition de la place des forêts dans l'espace périurbain. A travers une analyse de la relation ville/forêt de l'antiquité à l'émergence actuelle de nouvelles attentes, nous soulignons l'importance du courant hygiéniste qui se développe en réaction à l'essor d'une modernité, progressivement considérée comme nocive. La conséquence de ce tournant est l'apparition de nouvelles logiques d'appropriations et de nouvelles approches de l'objet forêt dans le périmètre d'influence de la ville. A la suite de cette contextualisation historique et scientifique du sujet, notre second objectif fut d'analyser dans des contextes géographiques précis comment le rapport spatial entre ville et forêt pouvait influer sur l'évolution surfacique des forêts et sur la redéfinition des fonctions attribuées à celles-ci. Pour ce faire, nous avons mené une démarche diachronique sur différents sites sélectionnés selon un gradient spatial d'intégration dans l'urbain. Celle-ci a été effectuée à l'aide d'un SIG basé sur l'emploi de séries successives de photographies aériennes. Cette analyse nous a permis de différencier les enjeux et les potentialités des différentes zones périurbaines, de l'urbain dense au périurbain lâche. Enfin, la dernière partie de la thèse s'appuie sur les résultats d'enquêtes et d'entretiens des différents acteurs concernés pour expliciter les jeux d'acteurs. Ceux-ci apparaissent à la fois déterminés par des constantes globales mais aussi paradoxalement fortement conditionnés par le contexte local. L'analyse des usages et des discours sur la forêt montre une grande variation de perceptions du milieu. Les logiques qui en résultent témoignent de clivages nets entre des acteurs guidés par des approches sectorielles : environnementales, sociales ou économiques. Ce constat nous permet de pointer les limites des politiques actuelles et la nécessité de mettre en oeuvre de nouvelles formes de gestions des espaces forestiers dans une démarche réellement globale, multifonctionnelle, et participative.
Since the Industrial Revolution, European societies have evolved through a frantic urban development. This disruption of both spatial and societal European territory has brought about the questioning of the relationship between societies (which have become mainly urban) to space in general, and even more precisely, to the environment. The inter-penetration of the city and the country on large portions of the territory, enhanced by the rapid development of individual mobility, has problematized the relationship between the two spaces, rendering secular divisions obsolete. The useful productivity of the forest disappears as other urban functions of the forest are privileged. These new uses of the forest, which have come about on periurban areas, are inspired by the valorization of nature within society. In this context, periurban forested spaces, symbols of "nature" which have long been considered as empty, are now new sources of interest. The choice to work in this European context stems from an accumulation of global characteristics (which justify a comparative study) and regional specificities (which lead to pertinent conclusions based on the approach used here). However, confronted with the impossibility of conducting an exhaustive study, we have narrowed the focus to a French-English comparison, which within its regional diversity reveals socially dynamic communes. In fact, the focus of the thesis on medium-sized cities stems from a double argument: on one hand, there is little preexisting critical work in this area as most publications treat large metropolises. On the other hand, the spatial and demographic characteristics of these territories imply opportunities and obligations to respond to the renewed socio-environmental stakes. Firstly, we have attempted to understand the reasons for the redefinition of the place of the forest within periurban spaces. Across this analysis of the city-forest relationship, from antiquity to the emergence of recent expectations, we have emphasized the importance of the hygienist current. This current has developed in reaction to the rapid development of a modernity which has been progressively considered as noxious. The consequence of such a turning point is the apparition of new appropriation methods and new approaches to the forest as an object within the perimeter of the city's influence. Following this historical and scientific contextualisation of the subject, our second objective is to analyze in specific geographic contexts how the spatial relationship between the city and the forest can have an effect on the surface evolution of the forests and on the redefinition of the functions attributed to it. In order to do this, we have conducted a diachronic study on different selected sites according to a spatial gradient of integration into the urban. The study was carried out with the help of GIS based on a series of successive aerial photos. This analysis enables us to differentiate the risks and the potentials of the different periurban zones, from the densely urban to the loosely periurban. Finally, the last part of the thesis deals with the results of investigations and interviews which were conducted in order to better understand the ways in which people interpret the role of the periurban forest. The interpretation seems to be effected not only by global constants but also, paradoxically, is strongly conditioned by the local context. The analysis of the uses of the forest and the related discourse show a wide variation in the perception of the space. The testimonies demonstrate clear-cut divisions along sectorial approaches: environmental, social, or economic. This information enables us to define the parameters of the current politics surrounding the periurban forest and the need to put into place, in a truly multifunctional and participative global fashion, new forms of forestry management. ; L'histoire des sociétés européennes depuis la révolution industrielle est celle d'un développement urbain effréné. Ce bouleversement du territoire européen, autant spatial que sociétal, entraîne une remise en cause du rapport de sociétés, devenues majoritairement urbaines, à l'espace en général et plus particulièrement à leur environnement. L'interpénétration entre ville et campagne sur de larges portions du territoire, favorisée par l'essor des mobilités individuelles, entraîne une complexification du rapport entre les deux espaces, rendant les clivages séculaires obsolètes. L'utilité productrice de la forêt s'estompe au profit d'autres fonctions d'inspiration urbaine. Ces nouvelles attentes qui se font jour sur les étendues périurbaines sont inspirées par le placement de la nature comme valeur sociétale forte. Dans ce contexte, les espaces forestiers périurbains, symbole de " nature ", longtemps considérés comme vides, sont de nouveau source d'intérêts. Le choix de travailler dans le contexte spatial européen est la conséquence de la conjugaison de caractéristiques globales proches, autorisant la conduite d'une étude comparative, et de spécificités régionales marquées, permettant de dégager des conclusions pertinentes à partir de la démarche employée. Cependant, devant l'impossibilité de mener une étude exhaustive nous avons plus particulièrement porté notre attention sur un binôme franco-anglais, révélateur de cette diversité régionale face à des dynamiques sociétales communes. Enfin, le centrage de la thèse sur les villes moyennes relève d'un double constat. D'une part, il existe peu de travaux sur la question pour ces objets géographiques, l'essentiel des publications traitant des grandes métropoles. Par ailleurs, les caractéristiques spatiales et démographiques de ces territoires entraînent des opportunités, mais aussi des obligations de répondre à des enjeux socio-environnementaux en pleine recrudescence. Dans un premier temps, nous avons cherché à comprendre les raisons de la redéfinition de la place des forêts dans l'espace périurbain. A travers une analyse de la relation ville/forêt de l'antiquité à l'émergence actuelle de nouvelles attentes, nous soulignons l'importance du courant hygiéniste qui se développe en réaction à l'essor d'une modernité, progressivement considérée comme nocive. La conséquence de ce tournant est l'apparition de nouvelles logiques d'appropriations et de nouvelles approches de l'objet forêt dans le périmètre d'influence de la ville. A la suite de cette contextualisation historique et scientifique du sujet, notre second objectif fut d'analyser dans des contextes géographiques précis comment le rapport spatial entre ville et forêt pouvait influer sur l'évolution surfacique des forêts et sur la redéfinition des fonctions attribuées à celles-ci. Pour ce faire, nous avons mené une démarche diachronique sur différents sites sélectionnés selon un gradient spatial d'intégration dans l'urbain. Celle-ci a été effectuée à l'aide d'un SIG basé sur l'emploi de séries successives de photographies aériennes. Cette analyse nous a permis de différencier les enjeux et les potentialités des différentes zones périurbaines, de l'urbain dense au périurbain lâche. Enfin, la dernière partie de la thèse s'appuie sur les résultats d'enquêtes et d'entretiens des différents acteurs concernés pour expliciter les jeux d'acteurs. Ceux-ci apparaissent à la fois déterminés par des constantes globales mais aussi paradoxalement fortement conditionnés par le contexte local. L'analyse des usages et des discours sur la forêt montre une grande variation de perceptions du milieu. Les logiques qui en résultent témoignent de clivages nets entre des acteurs guidés par des approches sectorielles : environnementales, sociales ou économiques. Ce constat nous permet de pointer les limites des politiques actuelles et la nécessité de mettre en oeuvre de nouvelles formes de gestions des espaces forestiers dans une démarche réellement globale, multifonctionnelle, et participative.
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Theory Talk #75: Tarak Barkawi on IR after the West, and why the best work in IR is often found at its marginsIn this Talk, Tarak Barkawi discusses the importance of the archive and real-world experiences, at a time of growing institutional constraints. He reflects on the growing rationalization and "schoolification" of the academy, a disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized within a university audit culture, and the future of IR in a post-COVID world. He also discusses IR's contorted relationship to the archive, and explore future sites of critical innovation and inquiry, including the value of knowledge production outside of the academy. PDF version of this TalkSo what is, or should be, according to you, the biggest challenge, or principal debate in critical social sciences and history?Right now, despite thinking about it, I don't have an answer to that question. Had you asked me five years ago, I would have said, without hesitation, Eurocentrism. There's a line in Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe where he remarks that Europe has already been provincialized by history, but we still needed to provincialize it intellectually in the social sciences. Both sides of this equation have intensified in recent years. Amid a pandemic, in the wreckage of neoliberalism, in the wake of financial crisis, the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the events of the Trump Presidency, and the return of the far right, the West feels fundamentally reduced in stature. The academy, meanwhile, has moved on from the postcolonial to the decolonial with its focus on alternative epistemologies, about which I am more ambivalent intellectually and politically. Western states and societies are powerful and rich, their freedoms attractive, and most of them will rebound. But what does it mean for the social sciences and other Western intellectual traditions which trace their heritage to the European Enlightenments that the West may no longer be 'the West', no longer the metropole of a global order more or less controlled by its leading states? What kind of implications does the disassembling of the West in world history have for social and political inquiry? I don't have an answer to that. Speaking more specifically about IR, we are dealing now with conservative appropriations of Eurocentrism, with the rise of other civilizational IRs (Chinese, European, Indian). These kinds of moves, like the decolonial one, foreground ultimately incommensurable systems of knowing and valuing, at best, and at worst are Eurocentrism with the signs reversed, usually to China. I do not think what we should be doing right now in the academy is having Chinese social sciences, Islamic social sciences, Indian social sciences, and so on. But that's definitely one way in which the collapse of the West is playing out intellectually. How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?By the time you get to my age you have a lot of debt, mostly to students, to old teachers and supervisors, and to colleagues and friends. University scholars tend not to have very exciting lives, so I don't have much to offer in the way of events. But I can give you an experience that I do keep revisiting when I reflect on the directions I've taken and the things I've been interested in. When I was in high school, I took a university course taught by Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers. As many will know, before he became involved in the Vietnam War, and later in opposing it, he worked on game theory and nuclear strategy. I grew up in Southern California, in Orange County, and there was a program that let you take courses at the University of California, Irvine. I took one on the history of the Roman Empire and then a pair of courses on nuclear weapons that culminated with one taught by Ellsberg himself. I actually had no idea who he was but the topic interested me. Nuclear war was in the air in the early 1980s. Activist graduate students taught the preparatory course. They were good teachers and I learned all about the history and politics of nuclear weapons. But I also came to realize that these teachers were trying to shape (what I would now call) my political subjectivity. Sometimes they were ham handed, like the old ball bearings in the tin can trick: turn the lights out in the room, and put one ball bearing in the can for each nuclear warhead in the world, in 1945 this many; in 1955 this many; and so on. In retrospect, that's where I got hooked on the idea of graduate school. I was aware that Ellsberg was regarded as an important personage. He taught in a large lecture hall. At every session, a kind of loyal corps of new and old activists turned out, many in some version of '60s attire. The father of a high school friend was desperate to get Ellsberg's autograph, and sent his son along with me to the lecture one night to get it. It was political instruction of the first order to figure out that this suburban dad had been a physics PhD at Berkley in the late '60s and early '70s, demonstrating against the Vietnam War. But now he worked for a major aerospace defense contractor. He had a hot tub in his backyard. Meanwhile, Ellsberg cancelled class one week because he'd been arrested demonstrating at a major arms fair in Los Angeles. "We stopped the arms race for a few hours," he told the class after. I schooled myself on who Ellsberg was and Vietnam, the Cold War, and much else came into view. Meanwhile, he gave a master class in nuclear weapons and foreign policy, cheekily naming his course after Kissinger's book, I later came to appreciate. I learned about RAND, the utility of madness for making nuclear threats, and how close we'd come to nuclear war since 1945. My high school had actually been built to double as a fallout shelter, at a time when civil defense was taken seriously as an aspect of a credible threat of second strike. It was low slung, stoutly built, with high iron fences that could be closed to create a cantonment. We were not far from Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station and a range of other likely targets. All of this sank in as I progressed in these courses. Then one day at a strip mall bookstore, I discovered Noam Chomsky's US foreign policy books and never looked back. At Cambridge, I caught the tail end of the old Centre of International Studies, originally started by an intelligence historian and explicitly multi-disciplinary. It had, in my time, historians, lawyers, area studies, development studies, political theory and history of thought, and IR scholars and political scientists. Boundaries certainly existed out there in the disciplines. But there weren't substantial institutional obstacles to thinking across them, while interdisciplinary environments gave you lots of local resources (i.e. colleagues and students) for thinking and reading creatively. What would a student need to become a kind of specialist in your kind of area or field or to understand the world in a global way? Lots of history, especially other peoples' histories; to experience what it's like to see the world from a different place than where you grew up, so that the foreign is not an abstraction to you. I think another route that can create very interesting scholars is to have a practitioner career first, in development, the military, a diplomatic corps, NGOs, whatever. Even only five years doing something like that not only teaches people how the world works, it is intellectually fecund, creative. People just out of operational posts are often full of ideas, and can access interesting resources for research, like professional networks. How, in your view, should IR responding to the shifting geopolitical landscape? The fate I think we want to avoid is carrying on with what Stanley Hoffmann called the "American social science": the IR invented out of imperial crisis and world war by Anglo-American officials, foundations and thinkers. Very broadly speaking, and with variations, this was a new world combination of realism and positivism. This discipline was intended as the intellectual counterpart to the American-centered world order, designed, among other things, to disappear the question of race in the century of the global color line. The way it conceived the national/international world obscured how US world power worked in practice. That power operated in and through formally sovereign, independent states—an empire by invitation, in the somewhat rosy view of Geir Lundestad—trialed in Latin America and well suited to a decolonizing world. It was an anti-colonial imperium. Political science divided up this world between IR and comparative politics. This kind of IR is cortically connected to the American-centered world fading away before our eyes. It is a kind of zombie discipline where we teach students about world politics as if we were still sitting with the great power peacemakers of 1919 and 1944-45. It is still studying how to make states cooperate under a hegemon or how to make credible deterrence threats in various circumstances. Interestingly, I think one of the ways the collapse of US power is shaping the discipline was identified by Walt and Mearsheimer in their 2013 article on the decline of theory in IR. In the US especially but not only, IR is increasingly indistinguishable from political science as a universal positivist enterprise mostly interested in applying highly evolved, quantitative or experimental approaches to more or less minor questions. Go too far down this road and IR disappears as a distinct disciplinary space, it becomes just a subject matter, a site of empiricist inquiry. Instead, the best work in IR mostly occurs on the edges of the discipline. IR often serves as cover for diverse and interdisciplinary work on transboundary relations. Those relations fall outside the core objects of analysis of the main social science and humanities disciplines but are IR's distinctive focus. The mainstream, inter-paradigm discipline, for me, has never been a convincing social science of the international and is not something I teach or think much about these days. But the classical inheritances of the discipline help IR retain significant historical, philosophical and normative dimensions. Add in a pluralist disposition towards methodology, and IR can be a unique intellectual space capable of producing scholars and scholarship that operate across disciplines. The new materialism, or political ecology, is one area in which this is really happening right now. IR is also a receptive home for debating the questions thrown up by the decolonial turn. These are two big themes in contemporary intellectual life, in and beyond the academy. IR potentially offers distinct perspectives on them which can push debates forward in unexpected ways, in part because we retain a focus on the political and the state, which too easily drop out of sight in global turns in other disciplines. In exchange, topics like the new materialism and the decolonial offer IR the chance to connect with world politics in these new times, after the American century. In my view, and it is not one that I think is widely shared, IR should become the "studies" discipline that centers on the transboundary. How do we re-imagine IR as the interdisciplinary site for the study of transboundary relations as a distinct social and political space? That's a question of general interest in a global world, but one which few traditions of thought are as well-equipped to reflect on and push forward as we are.That's an interesting and forceful critique which also brings us back to a common thread throughout your work: questions of power and knowledge and specifically the relation between power and knowledge in IR and social science. I'm interested in exploring this point further, because so much of your critique has been centered on how profoundly Eurocentric IR is and as a product of Western power. Well, IR's development as a discipline has been closely tied to Western state power. It would seem that it has to change, given the shifts underway in the world. It's like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons - he's run off the cliff. His legs are still moving, but he hasn't dropped, yet. That said, there's no singularly determinate relation between power and the historical development of intellectual traditions. Who knows what kind of new ideas and re-imagining of IR's concepts we might see? As I say, I think one reflection of these changes is that we're already seeing North American IR start to fade into universal quantitative social science. As Hoffmann observed, part of IR's appeal was that the Americans were running the world, that's why you started a social science concerned with things like bipolarity and deterrence, and with analyzing the foreign policy of a great power and its interests and conflicts around the world. Nowadays the Americans are at a late Roman stage of imperial decline. Thinking from the command posts of US foreign policy doesn't look so attractive or convincing when Emperor Nero is running the show, or something altogether darker is waiting in the wings. IR is supposed to be in command of world politics, analyzing them from on high. But what I've seen over the course of my education and career is the way world politics commands IR. The end of the Cold War torpedoed many careers and projects; the 1990s created corps of scholars concerned with development, civil war and humanitarian intervention; in the 2000s, we produced terrorism experts (and critical terrorism studies) and counterinsurgency specialists and critics, along with many scholars concerned in one way or another with Islam. What I have always found fascinating, and deeply indicative, about IR is the relative absence until relatively recently of serious inquiry into power/knowledge relations or the sociology of knowledge. In 1998 when Ole Waever goes to look at some of these questions, he notes how little there was to work from then, before Oren, Vitalis, Guilhot and others published. It's an astounding observation. In area studies, in anthropology, in the history of science, in development studies, in all of these areas of inquiry so closely entangled with imperial and state power, there are long-running, well developed traditions of inquiry into power/knowledge relations. It's a well-recognized area of inquiry, not some fringe activity, and it's heavily empirical, primary sourced based, as well as interesting conceptually. In recent decades you've seen really significant work come out about the role of the Second World War in the development of game theory, and its continuing entwinement with the nuclear contest of the Cold War. I'm thinking here of S.M. Amadae, Paul Erickson, and Philip Mirowski among others. The knowledge forms the American social science used to study world politics were part and parcel of world politics, they were internal to histories of geopolitics rather than in command of them. Of course, for a social science that models itself on natural science, with methodologies that produce so-called objective knowledge, the idea that scientific knowledge itself is historical and power-ridden, well, you can't really make sense of that. You'd be put in the incoherent position of studying it objectively, as it were, with the same tools. IR arises from the terminal crisis of the British Empire; its political presuppositions and much else were fundamentally shaped by the worldwide anti-communist project of the US Cold War state; and it removed race as a term of inquiry into world politics during the century of the global color line. All this, and but for Hoffmann's essay, IR has no tradition of power/knowledge inquiry into its own house until recently? It's not credible intellectually. Anthropologists should be brought in to teach us how to do this kind of thing. You've been at the forefront of the notion of historical IR, and in investigating the relationship between history and theory – why is history important for IR?Well, I think I'd start with the question of what do we mean when we say history? For mainstream social science, it means facts in the past against which to test theories and explanations. For critical IR scholars, it usually means historicism, as that term is understood in social theory: social phenomena are historical, shaped by time and place. Class, state, race, nation, empire, war, these are all different in different contexts. While I think this is a very significant insight and one that I agree with, on its own it tends to imply that historical knowledge is available, that it can be found by reading historians. In fact, for both empiricism and historicism there is a presumption that you can pretty reliably find out what happened in the past. For me, this ignores a second kind of historicism, the historicism of history writing itself, the historiographical. The questions historians ask, how they inquire into them, the particular archives they use, the ways in which they construct meaning and significance in their narratives, the questions they don't ask, that about which they are silent, all of these, shape history writing, the history that we know about. The upshot is that the past is not stable; it keeps changing as these two meanings of historicism intertwine. We understand the Haitian revolution now, or the indigenous peoples of the Americas, entirely differently than we did just a few decades ago.That raises another twist to this problem. Many IR scholars access history through reading historians or through synthetic accounts; they encounter history by and large through secondary sources. One consequence is that they are often a generation or more behind university historians. Think of how Gaddis, for instance, remains a go to authority on the history of the Cold War in IR. In other disciplines, from the 1980s on, there was a historical turn that took scholars into the archives. Anthropologists and literary scholars used historians' tools to answers their own questions. The result was not just a bunch of history books, but entirely new readings of core questions. The classic example is the historical Shakespeare that Stephen Greenblatt found in the archives, rather than the one whose texts had been read by generations of students in English departments. My point here is that working in archives was conceptually, theoretically significant for these disciplines and the subjects they studied. For example, historical anthropology has given us new perspectives on imperialism. While there is some archival work in IR of course, especially in disciplinary history, it is not central to disciplinary debates and the purpose is usually theory testing in which the past appears as merely a bag of facts. In sum, when I say history and theory, I don't just mean thinking historically. I mean actually doing history, being an historian—which means archives—and in so doing becoming a better theorist. Could you expand on these points by telling us about your recent work on military history? I think that military history is particularly interesting because it is a site where war is reproduced and shaped. Military history participates in that which it purports only to study. Popular military histories shape the identities of publics. Staff college versions are about learning lessons and fighting war better the next time. People who grow up wanting to be soldiers often read about them in history books. So our historical knowledge of war, and war as a social and historical process, are wrapped up together. I hope some sense of the promise of power/knowledge studies for larger questions comes through here. I'm saying that part of what war is as a social phenomenon is history writing about it. It's in this kind of context that the fact that a great deal of military history is actually written by veterans, often of the very campaigns of which they write, becomes interesting. Battle produces its own historians. This is a tradition that goes back to European antiquity, soldiers and commanders returning to write histories, the histories, of the wars they fought in. So this question of veterans' history writing is in constitutive relations with warfare, and with the West and its nations and armies. My shorthand for the particular area of this I want to look into is what I call "White men's military histories". That is, Western military history in the modern era is racialized, not just about enemies but about the White identities constructed in and through it. And I want to look at the way this is done in campaigns against racialized others, particularly situations where defeats and reverses were inflicted on the Westerners. How were such events and experiences made sense of historically? How were they mediated in and through military history? I think defeats are particularly productive, incitements to discourse and sense making. To think about these questions, I want to look at the place of veterans in the production of military histories, as authors, sources, communities of interpretation. My sandbox is the tumultuous first year of the Korean War, where US forces suffered publically-evident reverses and risked being pushed into the sea. In a variety of ways, veterans shape military history, through their questions, their grievances, their struggles over reputation, their memories. This happens at many different sites and scales, including official and popular histories, and the networks of veterans behind them as well as other, independently published works. Over the course of veterans' lives, their war throws up questions and issues that become the subject of sometimes dueling and contradictory accounts. Through their history writing, they connect their war experience to Western traditions of battle historiography. They make their war speak to other wars. This is what military history is, and how it can come to produce and reproduce practices of war-making, at least in Anglo-American context. Of course, much of this history writing, like narrations of experience generally, reflects dominant ideologies, in this case discourses of the US Cold War in Asia. But counter-historians are also to be found among soldiers. The shocks and tragic absurdities of any given war produce research questions of their own. At risk of mixing metaphors, the veterans know where the skeletons are buried. They bear resentments and grievances about how their war was conducted that become research topics, and they often have the networks and wherewithal to produce informed and systematic accounts. So as well as reproducing hegemonic discourses, soldier historians are also interesting as a new critical resource for understanding war.This shouldn't be that surprising. In other areas of inquiry, amateur and practitioner scholars have often been a source of critical innovation. LGBTQ history starts outside the academy, among activists who turned their apartments into archives. Much of what we now call postcolonial scholarship also began outside the academy, among colonized intellectuals involved in anti-imperial struggles. Let me close this off by going back to the archive. There are really rich sources for this kind of project. Military historians of all kinds leave behind papers full of their research materials and correspondence. The commanders and others they wrote about often waged extended epistolary campaigns concerned with correcting and shaping the historical record. But more than this, by situating archival sources alongside what later became researched and published histories, what drops out and what goes in to military history comes into view. What is silenced, and what is given voice? We can then see how the violent and forlorn episodes of war are turned into narrated events with military meaning. What is the process by which war experience becomes military history?Given the interdisciplinary nature of your work, what field you place yourself in? And are there any problems have you encountered when writing and thinking across scholarly boundaries?In my head I live in a kind of idealized interdisciplinary war studies, and my field is the intersection of war and empire. Sort of Michael Howard meets Critical Theory and Frantz Fanon. This has given me a particular voice in critical IR broadly conceived, and a distinctive place from which to engage the discipline. The mostly UK departments I've been in have been broadly hospitable places in practice for interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching, so long as you published rather than perished. Of course, interdisciplinary is a complicated word. It is one thing to be multi-disciplinary, to publish in the core journals of more than one discipline and to be recognized and read by scholars in more than one discipline. But work that falls between disciplinary centers, which takes up questions and offers answers recognized centrally by no discipline, that's something harder to deal with. I thought after Soldiers of Empire won prizes in two disciplines that I'd have an easier time getting funding for the project I described earlier in the interview. But I've gotten nowhere, despite years of applications to a variety of US, UK, and European funders. Of course, this may be because it is a bad project! My point, though, is that disciplines necessarily, and even rightly, privilege work that speaks to central questions; that's the work that naturally takes on significance in disciplinary contexts, as in many grant or scholarship panels. I think another point here is the nature of the times. Understandably, no one is particularly interested right now in White men's military histories. What I think has really empowered disciplines during my time in the UK academy has been the intersection with audit culture and university management. Repeated waves of rationalization have washed over the UK academy, which have emphasized discipline as a unit of measurement and management even as departments themselves were often "schoolified" into more or less odd combinations of disciplines. Schoolification helped to break down old solidarities and identities, while audit culture needed something on which to base its measures. The great victory of neoliberalism over the academy is evident in the way it is just accepted now that performance has to be assessed by various public criteria. This is where top disciplinary journals enter the picture, as unquestionable (and quantifiable) indicators of excellence. Interdisciplinary journals don't have the same recognition, constituency, or obvious significance. To put it in IR terms, Environment and Planning D or Comparative Studies in Society and History, to take two top journals that interdisciplinary IR types publish in, will never have the same weight as, say, ISQ or APSR. That that seems natural is an indicator of change—when I started, RIS—traditionally welcoming of interdisciplinary scholarship—was seen as just as good a place to publish as any US journal. Now RIS is perceived as merely a "national" journal while ISQ and APSR are "international" or world-class. This kind of thing has consequences for careers and the make-up of departments. What I'm drawing attention to is not so much an intellectual or academic debate; scholars always disagree on what good scholarship is, which is how it is supposed to be. It is rather the combination of discipline with the suffocating culture of petty management that pervades so much of British life. Get your disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized in an audit culture environment, and you can really expand. For example, the professionalization of methods training in the UK has worked as a kind of Trojan Horse for quantitative and positivist approaches within disciplines. In IR, in the potted geographic lingo we use, that has meant more US style work. Disappearing is the idea of IR as an "inter-discipline," where departments have multi-disciplinary identities like I described above. The US idea that IR is part of political science is much more the common sense now than it was in the UK. Another dimension of the eclipse of interdisciplinary IR has been the rise of quantitative European political science, boosted by large, multiyear grants from the ERC and national research councils. It's pretty crazy, strategically speaking, for the UK to establish a civilizational scale where you're always behind the US or its European counterparts. You'll never do North American IR as well as the North Americans do, especially given the disparity in resources. You'll always be trending second or third tier. The British do like to beat themselves up. Meanwhile, making US political science journals the practical standard for "international excellence" threatens to make the environment toxic for the very scholarship that has made British IR distinctive and attractive globally. The upshot of that will be another wave of émigré scholars, which the British academy's crises and reform initiatives produce from time to time. Think of the generation of UK IR scholars who decamped to Australia, an academy poised to prosper in the post-covid world (if the government there can get its vaccination program on track) and a major site right now of really innovative IR scholarship. To return to what you mentioned earlier regarding the hesitancy to go to the archives, this is also mirrored in a hesitancy to do serious ethnography, I think as well. Or there's this "doing ethnography" that involves a three-day field trip. This kind of sweet-shop 'pick and mix' has come to characterize some methodologies, because of these constraints that you highlight…A lot of what I'm talking about has happened within universities, it's not externally imposed or a direct consequence of the various government-run assessment exercises. Academics, eagerly assisted by university managers, have done a lot of this to themselves and their students. The implications can be far reaching for the kind of scholarship that departments foster, from PhDs on up. More and more of the UK PhD is taken up with research methods courses, largely oriented around positivism even if they have critical components. Already this gives a directionality to ideas. The advantage of the traditional UK PhD—working on your own with a supervisor to produce a piece of research—has been intellectual freedom, even when the supervisor wasn't doing their job properly. It's not great, but the possibility for creative, innovative, even field changing scholarship was retained. PhD students weren't disciplined, so to speak. What happens now is that PhD students are subject to a very strict four year deadline, often only partially funded, their universities caring mainly about timely completion not placement and preparation for a scholarly career, a classic case of the measurement displacing the substantive value. The formal coursework they get is methods driven. You can supervise interdisciplinary PhD research in this kind of environment, but it's not easy and poses real risks and creates myriad obstacles for the student. A strange consequence of this, as many of my master's students will tell you, is that I often advise them to consider US PhDs, just in other disciplines. That way, they get the benefit of rigorous PhD level coursework beyond methods. They can do so in disciplines like history or anthropology that are currently receptive both to the critical and the transnational/transboundary. That is not a great outcome for UK IR, even if it may be for critically-minded students. Outside of a very few institutions and scattered individuals, US political science, of course, has largely cleansed itself of the critical and alternative approaches that had started to flower in the glasnost era of the 1990s. That is not something we should be seeking to emulate in the UK.So yes, there's much to say here, about how the four year PhD has materially shaped scholarship in the UK. There is generally very little funding for field work. Universities worried about liability have put all kinds of obstacles in the way of students trying to get to field work sites. Requirements like insisting that students be in residence for their fourth year in order to write up and submit on time further limit the possibilities for field work. The upshot is to make the PhD dissertation more a library exercise or to favor the kind of quantitative, data science work that fits more easily into these time constraints and structures. Again, quite obviously, power sculpts knowledge. It becomes simply impossible, within the PhD, to do the kinds of things associated with serious qualitative scholarship, like learn languages, spend long time periods in field sites and to visit them more than once, to develop real networks there. Over time this shapes the academy, often in unintended ways. I think this is one of the reasons that IR in the UK has been so theoretic in character—what else can people do but read books, think and write in this kind of environment? As I say, the other kind of thing they can do is quantitative work, which takes us right back to the fate Walt and Mearsheimer sensed befalling IR as political science. Watch for IR and Data Science joint degrees as the next step in this evolution. Political Science in the US starts teaching methods at the freshman level. They get them young. We have discussed the rather grim state of affairs for the future of critical social science scholarship, at least in the UK and US. To conclude – what prospects for hope in the future are there?Well, if I had a public relations consultant pack, this is the point at which it would advise talking about children and the power of science to save us. I think the environment for universities, political, financial, and otherwise may get considerably more difficult. Little is untouchable in Western public life right now, it is only a question of when and in what ways they will come for us. The nationalist and far-right turns in Western politics feed off transgressing boundaries. There's no reason to suspect universities will be immune from this, and they haven't been. In the UK, as a consequence of Brexit, we are having to nationalise, and de-European-ise our scholarships and admissions processes. We are administratively enacting the surrender of cosmopolitan achievements in world politics and in academic life. This is not a plot but in no small measure the outcome of democratic will, registered in the large majority Boris Johnson's Conservatives won at the last general election. It will have far reaching consequences for UK university life. This is all pretty scary if you think, as I do, that we are nearer the beginning then the end of the rise of the right. Covid will supercharge some of these processes of de-globalization. I can already see an unholy alliance forming of university managers and introvert academics who will want to keep in place various dimensions of the online academic life that has taken shape since spring 2020. Often this will be justified by reference to environmental concerns and by the increased, if degraded, access that online events make possible. We are going to have a serious fight on our hands to retain our travel budgets at anywhere near pre-pandemic levels. I'm hoping that this generation of students, subjected to online education, will become warriors for in-person teaching. All of this said, it's hard to imagine a more interesting time to be teaching, thinking and writing about world politics. Politics quite evidently retains its capacity to turn the world upside down. Had you told US citizens where they would be on January 6th, 2021 in 2016, they would have called you alarmist if not outlandish. I think we're in for more moments like that. Tarak Barkawi is a professor of International Relations at LSE. He uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire. His most recent book, Soldiers of Empire, examined the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War, reconceiving Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms. Currently, he is working on the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior. This new project explores soldiers' history writing as a site for war's constitutive presence in society and politics.PDF version of this Talk
During the sixteenth and seventeenth century large parts of Italy were under Spanish dominion, the consequence of which was a linguistic contact that lasted over 200 years. However, due to the traditionally tight link between Italian language historiography and national historiography, the multilingual communicative space of Spanish Italy has only recently become an object of research. By focusing on four Spanish-dominated areas – the two metropolises of Naples (Regno di Napoli) and Milan (Milanesado), as well as the two islands of Sicily (Regno di Sicilia) and Sardinia (Regno di Sardegna) – the present work therefore presents a fundamental, extensive, and comparative case study of the history of plurilingualism and of letterpress printing in Italia spagnola. For the first time, even methodologically, letterpress printing will be considered as an indicator of plurilingualism, and not simply as a gauge for Tuscanisation, as scholars have previously concluded. The corpus, which has been elaborated on the basis of a specifically developed online title-database consisting of over 3.000 Spanish, bi- and multilingual printed works, is analyzed by combining quantification and qualification methods. The statistical evaluation of book production and distribution of languages and domains associated therewith have been integrated, or rather validated, by qualitative comments on exemplary single works. Herein, the following questions have been examined: How is multilingualism generally, and with regard to the Spanish language in particular, reflected in book production? How often and in which domains of discourse is Spanish used? Which profiles of competence of the producers (authors and printers) and the recipients can be qualitatively traced through single printed works? What evidence of the conventionalization of multilingualism in the form of linguistic teaching material can be provided? Which plurilinguistic practices can be reconstructed on the basis of the prints? Is bilingualism or multilingualism reflected on (and eventually how), and, if so, how is it discussed and assessed? How does the respective communicative space, characterized by the constant presence of the Spanish language, configure itself in the consciousness of the communicants within the field of perceptive linguistics? Thus, the aim was to investigate the degree of Hispanicization of Spanish Italy on the basis of the quantified printed language, and to discuss the practices of multilingualism, the attitudes towards the Spanish language, and how plurilingualism was reflected in selected printed works and their paratexts. The overall segment of the Spanish book production can be defined as a marginal phenomenon with a limited target group, and therefore multilingualism in Spanish Italy, when considered through letterpress printing, assumes an elitist status. However, the respective empirical results of the four partial corpora offer prominent regional differences, with each of the four communicative spaces presenting with their own, specific profile of multilingualism. The contrast of the single cases thus leads to a typology between Spanish Sardinia and the other three areas. The case reconstructions furnish the evidence that Spanish Sardinia, for reasons beyond existing language politics, represents the exception, or rather, the extreme case of problem-focused plurilingualism and Hispanicization. The remaining three areas (Naples, Milan and Sicily) bundle to form a second type – on account of their indifference towards language diversity as well as their pragmatic, mostly implicit, conventionalized handling of multilingualism, they can be classified as normal cases of language contact. - Wie schlägt Mehrsprachigkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit buchstäblich zu Buche? Am Beispiel des spanischen Italien untersucht die Studie im Buchdruck gespiegelte Sprachverhältnisse sowie Formen und Praktiken der Mehrsprachigkeit im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Vier mehrsprachige Kommunikationsräume – die zwei Metropolen Neapel und Mailand sowie die zwei Inseln Sizilien und Sardinien – werden in ihrer Dynamik analysiert, kontrastiert und typologisiert. Die vier Mehrsprachigkeitsprofile werden mittels einer quantifizierenden und qualitativen Methodenkombination rekonstruiert. Dabei ermittelt die Autorin, in welchen Diskursdomänen der gedruckten Schriftlichkeit Spanisch wie häufig verwendet wurde. Welche individuellen sprachlichen Kompetenzen der Produzenten sowie der Rezipienten lassen sich von mehrsprachigen Druckwerken ableiten? Welche zielgerichtete Mehrsprachigkeit in Form von Sprachlehrwerken ist nachzuweisen? (Wie) wird gesellschaftliche Mehrsprachigkeit thematisiert, diskutiert und bewertet? Anhand der Auswertung von 3.000 spanischen, zwei- und mehrsprachigen Druckwerken werden sowohl Erkenntnisse zur Buchproduktion als auch zu wichtigen Einzelwerken und Paratexten gewonnen. Die Analyse der Teilkorpora bringt markante regionale Unterschiede zum Vorschein und zeigt, dass sich das spanische Sardinien als ein Extremfall von Sprachenpluralität darstellt, die anderen drei Territorien (Regno di Napoli, Regno di Sicilia, Milanesado) jedoch aufgrund der Entdramatisierung von Mehrsprachigkeit als faktische Normalfälle von Sprachkontakt zu interpretieren sind. Die Autorin legt damit erstmals eine umfassende Fall- und Vergleichsstudie zur Geschichte der Mehrsprachigkeit und des Buchdrucks der Italia spagnola vor. Tina Ambrosch-Baroua hat als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin für Sprachwissenschaft am Institut für Italienische Philologie der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München promoviert. Ihre Forschungsinteressen betreffen die italienische Sprachgeschichte, die Grammatikographie sowie die historische und aktuelle Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung. Webseite: http://uni-muenchen.academia.edu/TinaAmbroschBaroua"
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A group of faculty at Penn have written A Vision for a New Future of the University of Pennsylvania at https://pennforward.com/. They encourage signatures, even if you're not associated with Penn. I signed. Big picture: Universities stand at a crossroads. Do universities choose pursuit of knowledge, the robust open and uncomfortable debate that requires; excellence and meritocracy, even if as in the past that has meant admitting socially disfavored groups? Or do universities exist to advance, advocate for, and inculcate a particular political agenda? Choose. Returning to the former will require structural changes, and founding documents are an important part of that rebuilding effort. For example, Penn and Stanford are searching for new presidents. A joint statement by board and president that this document will guide rebuilding efforts could be quite useful in guiding that search and the new Presidents' house-cleaning. There is some danger in excerpting such a document, but here are a few tasty morsels: Principles:Penn's sole aim going forward will be to foster excellence in research and education.Specifics:Intellectual diversity and openness of thought. The University of Pennsylvania's core mission is the pursuit, enhancement, and dissemination of knowledge and of the free exchange of ideas that is necessary to that goal.....Civil discourse. The University of Pennsylvania ... acknowledges that no party possesses the moral authority to monopolize the truth or censor opponents and that incorrect hypotheses are rejected only by argument and persuasion, logic and evidence, not suppression or ad-hominen attacks. Political neutrality at the level of administration. ... In their capacity as university representatives, administrators will abstain from commenting on societal and political events...The University must remain neutral to scientific investigation, respect the scientific method, and strive to include many and varied approaches in its research orientation.Admissions, hiring, promotion ... No factor such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, or religious associations shall be considered over merit in any decision related to the appointment, advancement, or reappointment of academic, administrative, or support staff at any level. Excellence in research, teaching, and service shall drive every appointment, advancement, reappointment, or hiring decision.no factor such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, or religious associations shall be considered in any decision related to student admission and aid. Faculty committed to academic excellence must have a supervisory role in the admission process of undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. Admission policies should prioritize the fair treatment of each individual applicant, and criteria must be objective, transparent, and clearly communicated to all community members. Faculty have outsourced admissions to bureaucrats. While the cats are away, the mice play. Faculty complain the students are dumb snowflakes. Well, read some files. And no more "bad personality" scores for asians. Education:A central goal of education is to train students to be critical thinkers, virtuous citizens, and ethical participants in free and open but civilized and respectful debate that produces, refines, and transmits knowledge. Competition:as Penn's competitors struggle to define their mission and lose their focus on this manner of excellence, Penn has a unique opportunity to emerge as a globally leading academic institution in an ever more competitive international landscape....An unconditional commitment to academic excellence will become Penn's key comparative advantage in the decades to come. As many other universities in Europe and the U.S. compromise their hiring decisions by including other non-academic criteria, Penn will be able to hire outstanding talent that otherwise would have been hard to attract. I have been puzzled that the self-immolation of (formerly) elite universities has not led to a dash for quality in the second ranks. There is a lot of great talent for sale cheap. But many second rank schools seem to have bought in to The Agenda even more strongly than the elite. I guess they used to copy the elite desire for research, and now they copy the elite desire for fashionable politics. Or perhaps donors government, alumni or whatever it is that universities compete for also are more interested in the size of the DEI bureaucracy than the research accomplishments and teaching quality of the faculty or the competence of the students. Clearly, the writers of this document think in the long run competition will return to the production and dissemination of knowledge, and that universities that reform first will win.
Constitutional review courts construe constitutions in the light of legal, social, and political disputes. As such, constitutional review has become a key feature of modern-day democracies. However, the court's authority depends on their reputation and support within the public, as they are unable to enforce their decisions and sanction noncompliance. Only if the public is aware of the courts and their actions and lends them their support, elected politicians will more likely comply with court decisions. To create awareness and to enable public scrutiny, courts have several tools. Among others, a proactive strategy to communicate and transmit information on court decisions and, thus, to increase transparency and openness is perceived to be an essential tool that courts have at their disposal. Through communication, court decisions become more accessible, potentially better understood, and the courts and their judges are held accountable to the public. In this dissertation, I study press releases by constitutional courts. Since the news media is the gatekeeper between the government and the public, I also assess how court communication shapes news media coverage of court decisions. I draw on the comparative judicial politics literature, the literature on policy agendas, and communication and journalism studies on the concepts of court reporting and news values. Throughout four empirical chapters, I ask which institutional structures influence the publication of court press releases, when and what kind of information courts communicate, and how these communication efforts shape the news media. I extend the existing literature in two regards. First, I argue that press releases are of central importance for a court's agenda-setting power. Second, I argue that courts actively use the institutional tools at their disposal to create publicity and increase the chances of being reported on in the news. One such instrument is the publication of press releases, and this dissertation found that the strategic use of press releases enables courts to increase media coverage and, therefore, facilitate public scrutiny. I test these arguments empirically by combining inference methods such as logistic regressions with methods from the fields of machine learning and computational text analysis. Throughout all chapters, I test my arguments using data on court decisions and press releases of the German Federal Constitutional Court. The German court is a suitable case as it enjoys a sturdy and robust public support and has a comparatively long history of public relations and issuing press releases. The findings presented in the four chapters present a wide range of empirical evidence. In particular, I show that court decisions shape the policy issued discussed in the press releases through first-level agenda-setting dynamics. Additionally, I find evidence that press releases are published selectively and are more likely to occur when a decision declares a law unconstitutional. Concerning the news media, the results suggest that journalists rarely use court press releases when reporting on court decisions. However, if they use press releases for their reporting, they are more likely to use those that promote decisions that the public is already aware of. Finally, the likelihood of media coverage of FCC decisions is higher for those that were promoted with a press release and had high news value. The findings of my dissertation confirm that press releases help a court to communicate its policy agenda to the public. Moreover, my results suggest that court communication efforts partially serve the media logic, as I found first, that court decisions are more likely promoted with a press release if they entail newsworthy characteristics like conflict, relevance, and familiarity and second, that media coverage is more likely for decisions that entail these particular characteristics. Finally, since the likelihood of media coverage of court decisions is found to be higher when promoted with a press release, courts have considerable leverage to shape public opinion. Therefore, my results have implications for the research on strategic court behavior, court communication, and court reporting. Overall, since this dissertation offers novel perspectives on how courts communicate and how these efforts shape the media, it contributes to the growing discussion on open justice and the accountability of courts in times where judiciaries are under populist pressure. Hence, this dissertation has important implications for the sustainability of liberal democracy and the legitimacy of constitutional review in constitutional states.
This paper brings together ethnography as practice research, and theology as experiential theory, towards a comparative ontological interdisciplinary understanding of relational personhood in the world society. The first part of the paper consists of ethnographic data gathered from two monasteries of Mount Athos during my fieldwork between 2002 and 2004, using the anthropological discourse of the "sacred" in terms of reciprocity to represent and interpret the exceptional, heterogeneous, and distinctive character of Orthodox monastic life in ethnographic descriptive terms. In doing so, the paper focuses on the revival of two Byzantine oppositional movements in the 20th century: Hesychasm and Zealotism. In this context, the material raises questions regarding detraditionalization and re-traditionalization, disenchantment and re-enchantment. The paper places these challenges within the postmodern turn to spirituality and subjectivity, and the wider emergence of global Christianity as a postmodern phenomenon. The second part of the paper focuses on the revival of the Greek neo-patristic theology in the 1960s and the writings of Christos Yannaras, interpreted as a postcolonial critique of the discourse of modernity from the relational ontological perspective of Trinitarian theology. It places the empirical material gathered from Athos within the millennial turn to relational ontology, by following the two fundamental elements of personhood: Freedom and Otherness. The paper argues that the millennial opening of Christianity to the world stage and its increasing engagement in the formation of a world society takes place in terms of how one relates both to the invisible God and the visible material World. The paper argues that the (re) emergence of relational ontology in monasticism gives it a distinctive and economic character in a symbiosis with nature and the Others via God's grace, as it emerges within this moment of history and the creation of Ecumenical Christianity. The paper points out to the grey challenging areas that reveal contestation between different understandings of the same relations, traditions, and practices, sometimes even in opposition to each other. It argues that it is though these series of dialectics that constitute the relational ontology of the monastic persona as heterogeneous and ever-changing experience of being and becoming in the World via God's energies, based on the relational ontological Freedom and Otherness (rather than a sterile theoretical concept or a singular stereotype). In this experiential and relational manner, the paper develops the dialectics of these forces from both social anthropological and theological perspectives, sketching the (re)emergence of millennial relational ontology both as a theory (Yannaras) and in practice (monastic living) beyond the modern categories of "East" and "West," and towards the potential role the monastics could play in this moment of History. The material is based on my own fieldwork on Athos that took place back in 2002 to 2004, as well as subsequent research in both Athonian history and archives, from the interdisciplinary perspective of the sociology of religion and contemporary Greek theology. As part of my research on contemporary monastic life on Athos, I chose to do my fieldwork in two neighbouring but rival monasteries, because they represented two opposite attitudes in how the monk relate to the world. Accordingly, the material for this paper looks at the impact of new technologies and world politics on the vocation of the monasteries revealing the heterogeneity and challenges facing monastic life on Athos today in the prospect of the emergence of a new global Christianity within the world setting. It argues that monastic life offers both a model of an alternative and distinctive way of living in relation to the "self", the Others, as well as, world issues, via God's grace on the relational ontological basis of Freedom and Otherness. The opening of the monastic vocation to the world shows however a diversity of modules of engaging with the world that reveal the heterogeneity of ways of relating to God via God's energies because of the same open principles. As the "field" changes within the world system, the challenge for monastics today is both to open and enlarge their vocation in the world via new technologies, but at the same time, to avoid the homogenization of those voices, to preserve the heterogeneity that freely exists in Christian thought in relation to the Other - beyond rigid categorizations and stereotypes of "Eastern" and "Western" Christianities.
The aim of this dissertation is to examine the influence of the international actors i.e. the OSCE, Council of Europe, EU and Russia, on policy and legislative adaptation in two post-Soviet countries since 1991. These are Estonia and Ukraine. The central concept analysed in the dissertation is stateness. It is defined following Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996) as congruence between the territorial definition and the right of citizenship in the state, which has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force in the territory, and an effective state bureaucracy. For the analysis, certain policy areas are chosen which operationalise the dimensions of stateness: monopoly on the use of force (borders, army and police), state identity (citizenship, national minorities and language), and basic administration (public administration, education and information). In the democratisation and state-building literature, stateness is a neglected concept, as is the international influence on it. Surprisingly so, as it is an important condition for state and regime stability, especially democracy. To address this gap, the dissertation clarifies the definition of the concept of stateness and analyses the international influence on it in the two countries. This dissertation centres on the impact of the international actors as the causal factor in consolidation of stateness. To investigate this, it analyses in a systematic manner the influence of their policy demands and expectations on adaptation (i.e. policy adoption and change) in the policy areas operationalising stateness in Estonia and Ukraine. As part of the analysis, it provides a detailed overview and comparison of the policy- and legislation-making in both countries after their independence in 1991. The method chosen is a cross-case comparison carried out according to a time-periodisation approach. The analysis illustrates the converging yet context-contingent impact of the international actors in the policy areas operationalising stateness. Therefore, the main finding confirms the emerging consensus in the literature that the international actors have an increasing yet differential impact in traditionally domestic policy areas. The dissertation's contribution is twofold. First is the theoretical and conceptual contribution to state-building in comparative European politics by clarifying the definition of the concept of stateness. Second is the empirical contribution by providing an applicable operationalisation of the concept through policy areas, which permits its empirical analysis. ; Avhandlingen undersöker det inflytande som olika internationella aktörer – såsom OSSE, Europarådet, EU och den Ryska Federationen – har utövat på två postsovjetiska stater, Estland och Ukraina. Mer specifikt är det sådant inflytande som rör utformningen av lagstiftning och policybeslut som hamnar i fokus, i relation till politikområden som kan kopplas till begreppet "stateness", det vill säga en stats förmåga att kontrollera sitt eget territorium och population, samt förmågan att fungera som en suverän stat bland andra stater i världen. De politikområden som undersöks i avhandlingen är kontrollen över landets gränser, statens våldsmonopol, politiken kring medborgarskap, minoritetsrättigheter och språkrättigheter, samt offentlig förvaltning, informationsspridning och utbildning. I forskningen om demokratisering och statsbyggande är den internationella aspekten av en stats förmåga till "stateness" underutforskad. Det tas för givet att "stateness" är en central förutsättning för en lyckad demokratisering och för regimstabilitet, men det tas också för givet att denna förmåga i allt väsentligt bestäms av inhemska faktorer. Denna avhandling lämnar ett bidrag till den existerande forskningen på området genom att undersöka vilken betydelse externa aktörer har för en stats förmåga till "stateness". Bidraget handlar både om att förtydliga begreppet "stateness" på ett teoretiskt plan, och om att empiriskt undersöka hur två postsovjetiska stater, i relation till externa aktörer, har kunnat hantera frågan om "stateness" i det egna landet, från 1991 och framåt. Den komparativa undersökningen visar att de externa aktörerna har en märkbar påverkan på Estlands och Ukrainas lagstiftning inom politikområden som rör medborgarskap och minoritetsrättigheter, i synnerhet i Estland, men att de externa aktörernas inflytande är mer blandat när det gäller lagstiftning kring språkfrågor och utbildningsfrågor. Undersökningen visar också att Ryssland, som en extern aktör, har kunnat påverka förmågan till "stateness" negativt när det gäller politikområdena informationsspridning och kontroll över statens gränser. Avhandlingen kan på så vis visa att det finns en påtaglig extern aspekt när det gäller olika länders förmåga att hantera sin "stateness". ; The public defense will also be available via Zoom.
The purpose of this article is to examine and compare how the ethnicity, gender and social class conditions of citizenship influence, and are understood by, teachers and secondary school students in England and Sweden. The intention is also to compare how conditions of citizenship are dealt with in social studies for upper secondary school in England and Sweden. The relationship between students education and real conditions for citizenship is complex and partly differs between, as well as within, the two countries. The present comparative examination and analysis aims to visualize both specific and common conditions of citizenship in England and Sweden. This is to draw attention to how the meaning of frequently used terminology and images in the field of Citizenship Education do not always coincide with teachers' and students' own opinions and perceived meanings. By doing this we hope to contribute some new knowledge regarding one of the most difficult challenges that citizenship education is struggling with, whether the provided knowledge and values prepare todays youth to defend and develop future democratic and just societies. To achieve this, we have conducted a number of interviews with teachers and secondary school students and asked them about their experiences and opinions regarding Citizenship Education and the nature of citizenship. The following main questions were central to the interviews: What knowledge and skills does a citizen need in a democracy and how is the meaning of citizenship connected to gender, class and ethnicity? How are personal liberties affected by the citizen's gender, class and ethnicity according to the respondents? What are teachers' and students' experiences of Citizenship Education and how does school pay attention to citizens´ conditions based on gender, class and ethnicity? In recent years, both public debate and published research have shown that, in order to understand the real meanings of citizenship, it is necessary to understand and interpret formal citizenship rights and responsibilities from individuals' social and cultural conditions as characterised by gender, ethnicity and social class. During the 2000s, the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket) presented recurrent reports that shows how socio-economic background, in combination with foreign background, are crucial for pupils school results. The reports also show how segregation between schools and residential areas has increased on the basis of residents socio-economic and ethnic background. This group of students are a part of tomorrows citizens, which are also likely to remain marginalized even as adults. The links between Swedish school policy, pupils school results and the democratic development of society at large has been observed and analysed in contemporary Swedish research. In England, the picture is slightly different with the 7 per cent of the population who experience private education being over-represented in positions of power and influence. In May 2012, the then Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove provided a list of leaders in the arts, sciences, politics, sports, journalism, entertainment and other fields who had all been to independent schools, concluding that "the sheer scale, the breadth and the depth, of private school dominance of our society points to a deep problem in our country . . . Those who are born poor are more likely to stay poor and those who inherit privilege are more likely to pass on privilege in England than in any comparable county." There is significant evidence that socio-economic background, in combination with ethnic background, continue to be highly influential on pupils school results. Links between national education policy, social class and pupils school results appear to remain entrenched in England. When we identify cultural and social conditions as in any way hindering the status of citizenship, we do so from a perspective which does not seek to blame the less powerful for holding particular cultural perceptions but which recognises the barriers a dominant culture sets against those with less power. The insight that tells us it is necessary to comprehend individuals' social and cultural conditions in order to understand and interpret their formal citizenship rights and responsibilities is not, however, particularly recent. Marx wrote over 160 years ago that, "if you assume a particular civil society . . . you will get particular political conditions", from which it must follow that any society divided on the grounds of class, ethnicity and gender will present political conditions which reflect such divisions. It is also the case that there is likely to be a significant space between what is (the real) and what is perceived (the formal); just because there is inequality it does not follow that everyone is aware of that inequality.
The aim of this paper is to describe the experience of careeroriented activities carried out with students of schools in developed and developing countries. Career Guidance in Russia, despite the vast experience of its implementation, is experiencing serious difficulties. In this regard, it is important to take into account the international experience career-oriented activities, such as in the developed countries of North America and the European Union as well as in several Asian countries with rapidly growing economies and a large demographic potential, taking into account the best variants for the Russian education system. Methods. The experience of career-oriented work undertaken with pupils of the USA, Canada, Israel, France, UK, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Japan, Singapore, China and India is shown on the basis of the comparative analysis of different publications and information sources. The author has made an attempt to generalize the principles of psycho-pedagogical and administrative assistance in professional self-determination of senior pupils abroad. Scientific novelty. The approaches to career-oriented activities in countries with different levels of economic development are compared for the first time. Some principles are revealed. Firstly, the higher the income level per capita in the country, the greater attention is given to vocational guidance. The politics in the developed countries is based on interests of the individual: children's acquaintance with the world of professions begins already at younger school and the moment of definitive selfdetermination is postponed till the end of their senior stage of education; the possibility of direction change of professional preparation in case of detection of discrepancy of qualities of the pupil to originally selected profile is provided. Career-oriented activity in developing countries, on the contrary, is rigidly coordinated to requirements of economy and a labour market; earlier fixing of professional preferences and less flexible relation to an unsuccessful choice of a speciality or profession of the youth is marked there. The most typical characteristics of foreign career-oriented schemes are the following: the organisation of continuous training lasting throughout all school; supervision over students' achievements, propensities and hobbies; portfolio or cumulative files drafting and recording data of all pupil's results while professional consulting and selection of entrants for vocational training continuation in colleges or high schools. The author points out the general characteristic: the economy requirement for high quality experts on the basis of selection of the pupils who are able to master high-end technologies and have an obvious potential of professional growth and personal development. Practical significance. The research materials and implementations can be useful to Russian career-and professional specialists, and the experts who are engaged in education management ; Цель настоящей публикации – описание профориентационной деятельности, осуществляемой в системах школьного образования разных стран. Подобная работа в России, несмотря на огромный опыт ее осуществления в прошлом, сейчас испытывает серьезные сложности. Поэтому важно учитывать имеющиеся положительные результаты зарубежной практики в этой области, проецируя лучшие ее варианты на отечественную почву. Методы и результаты. На основе сравнительного анализа информации из различных источников показана специфика профориентационной работы со школьниками в США, Канаде, Израиле, Франции, Великобритании, Германии, Дании, Швеции, Японии, Сингапуре, Китае и Индии. Автором предпринята попытка обобщить принципы организации психолого-педагогической и административной помощи в профессиональном самоопределении старшеклассников. Научная новизна. Впервые сопоставлены подходы к профориентационной деятельности в странах с различным уровнем экономического развития. Обнаружено несколько закономерностей. Чем выше в государстве уровень дохода на душу населения, тем большее внимания оно уделяет профориентационной работе. В развитых странах политика в данной сфере основана, прежде всего, на интересах индивида; знакомство детей с миром профессий начинается уже в младшей школе, а момент окончательного самоопределения отложен до завершения старшей ступени обучения, причем предусмотрена возможность смены направления профподготовки в случае обнаружения несоответствия качеств учащегося первоначально избранному профилю. В развивающихся странах профориентационная деятельность, напротив, жестко увязана с потребностями экономики и рынка труда; здесь отмечается более ранняя фиксация профессиональных предпочтений и менее гибкое отношение к неудачному выбору специальности молодым человеком. Для всех зарубежных схем профориентационной работы типична организация непрерывного, длящегося на протяжении всего школьного обучения, наблюдения за достижениями, склонностями и увлечениями детей, составление их портфолио и учет всех этих сведений при профконсультировании и отборе абитуриентов для продолжения профессионального обучения в колледжах или вузах. Общей является потребность экономик в высококлассных специалистах на основе отбора учащихся, способных к освоению сложных наукоемких технологий, имеющих явный потенциал профессионального роста и личностного развития. Практическая значимость. Материалы статьи будут полезны отечественным профориентаторам и специалистам, занимающимся управлением образования
Background: The challenges in the utilization of scientific findings in the fields of prevention and mental health are well documented. Scholars have found significant gaps between the knowledge available and the knowledge applied in healthcare. Studies have suggested that about half of the patients receive the recommended care for their medical condition. In order to address this gap, health systems at global, national, regional and local levels have made diverse efforts to facilitate the uptake of research for example through evidence-based health policy processes. In Sweden, government agencies and health policy actors such as the National Board of Health and Welfare support and control the health care system through evidence-based policies amongst other steering tools. The overall aim of this thesis is to explore evidence-based policy processes, and to further understand barriers to implementation of policies in the fields of preventive and mental health services. Methods: A multiple case study approach was used, and data were collected from several sources. Qualitative content analysis methodology was used. Case 1 comprises the development and early implementation of national guidelines for methods of preventing disease managed by the National Board of Health and Welfare during 2007–2014. Case 2 covers the effort to improve health care for the older population that was undertaken through an agreement between the Swedish government and the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions during 2009–2014. Case 3 involves an effort to implement an adapted version of a systematic review from the Swedish agency for health technology assessment and assessment of social services on treatment of depression in primary health care. Data was collected between 2007 and 2010. In Paper 1, the policies from Case 1 and 2 were studied using a longitudinal, comparative case study approach. Data were collected through interviews, documents and observations. A conceptual model was developed based on prior frameworks. The model was used to organize and analyse the data. In Paper 2, the guideline development process (Case 1) was studied through interviews and the collection of documents. A prior framework on guideline quality was used in order to organize the data. Paper 3 investigated decision-making processes during guideline development using a longitudinal approach. Qualitative data were collected from questionnaires, documents and observations and analysed using conventional and summative content analysis. In Paper 4, the barriers to implementation were investigated through interviews and the collection of documents. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis with a conceptual model to structure the analysis. Results: The sources and procedures for policy formulation differed in Case 1 and 2, as did the approaches to promote the implementation of the policies. The policy processes were cyclical, and phases overlapped to a large degree. The policy actors intended to promote implementation, both during and after the policy formulation process. The thesis shows variation in how the key policy actors defined and used research evidence in the policy processes. In addition, other types of knowledge (e.g. politics, context, experience) served as alternative or multiple sources to inform the health policies. The composition of sources that informed the policies changed over time in Cases 1 and B. During the policy formulation and implementation process, efforts to integrate research evidence with clinical experiences and values were associated with tension and recurrent dilemmas. On the local level (i.e. primary health care centres), barriers to implementation were found related to the innovation and among health professionals, patients, in social networks as well as in the organizational, economic and political contexts. Conclusion: The concept of evidence holds a key position in terms of goals and means for knowledge based policymaking in the Swedish health system. Broad definitions of evidence – including research and non-research evidence - were requested and to various extents utilized by the policy actors in the studied cases. An explicit terminology and systematic, transparent methodology to define, identify, and assess also non-research evidence in policy processes would potentially strengthen the clarity and validity of these processes and also enhance policy implementation. Particular determinants to implementation, such as the interventions characteristic, are to a considerable degree established early in the policy process, during agenda setting and policy formulation. This early phase offers unique opportunities to assess and build capacity, initiate and facilitate implementation. Early analysis and considerations of target populations and contexts and other implementation determinants related to the specific policy scope (e.g. disease preventive guidelines) could enhance the forth-coming implementation of the policy.
Цель настоящей публикации описание профориентационной деятельности, осуществляемой в системах школьного образования разных стран. Подобная работа в России, несмотря на огромный опыт ее осуществления в прошлом, сейчас испытывает серьезные сложности. Поэтому важно учитывать имеющиеся положительные результаты зарубежной практики в этой области, проецируя лучшие ее варианты на отечественную почву. Методы и результаты. На основе сравнительного анализа информации из различных источников показана специфика профориентационной работы со школьниками в США, Канаде, Израиле, Франции, Великобритании, Германии, Дании, Швеции, Японии, Сингапуре, Китае и Индии. Автором предпринята попытка обобщить принципы организации психолого-педагогической и административной помощи в профессиональном самоопределении старш еклассников. Научная новизна. Впервые сопоставлены подходы к профориентационной деятельности в странах с различным уровнем экономического развития. Обнаружено несколько закономерностей. Чем выше в государстве уровень дохода на душу населения, тем большее внимания оно уделяет профориентационной работе. В развитых странах политика в данной сфере основана, прежде всего, на интересах индивида; знакомство детей с миром профессий начинается уже в младшей школе, а момент окончательного самоопределения отложен до завершения старшей ступени обучения, причем предусмотрена возможность смены направления профподготовки в случае обнаружения несоответствия качеств учащегося первоначально избранному профилю. В развивающихся странах профориентационная деятельность, напротив, жестко увязана с потребностями экономики и рынка труда; здесь отмечается более ранняя фиксация профессиональных предпочтений и менее гибкое отношение к неудачному выбору специальности молодым человеком. Для всех зарубежных схем профориентационной работы типична организация непрерывного, длящегося на протяжении всего школьного обучения, наблюдения за достижениями, склонностями и увлечениями детей, составление их портфолио и учет всех этих сведений при профконсультировании и отборе абитуриентов для продолжения профессионального обучения в колледжах или вузах. Общей является потребность экономик в высококлассных специалистах на основе отбора учащихся, способных к освоению сложных наукоемких технологий, имеющих явный потенциал профессионального роста и личностного развития. Практическая значимость. Материалы статьи будут полезны отечественным профориентаторам и специалистам, занимающимся управлением образования. ; The aim of this paper is to describe the experience of career-oriented activities carried out with students of schools in developed and developing countries. Career Guidance in Russia, despite the vast experience of its implementation, is experiencing serious difficulties. In this regard, it is important to take into account the international experience career-oriented activities, such as in the developed countries of North America and the European Union as well as in several Asian countries with rapidly growing economies and a large demographic potential, taking into account the best variants for the Russian education system. Methods. The experience of career-oriented work undertaken with pupils of the USA, Canada, Israel, France, UK, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Japan, Singapore, China and India is shown on the basis of the comparative analysis of different publications and information sources. The author has made an attempt to generalize the principles of psycho-pedagogical and administrative assistance in professional self-determination of senior pupils abroad. Scientific novelty. The approaches to career-oriented activities in countries with different levels of economic development are compared for the first time. Some principles are revealed. Firstly, the higher the income level per capita in the country, the greater attention is given to vocational guidance. The politics in the developed countries is based on interests of the individual: children's acquaintance with the world of professions begins already at younger school and the moment of definitive selfdetermination is postponed till the end of their senior stage of education; the possibility of direction change of professional preparation in case of detection of discrepancy of qualities of the pupil to originally selected profile is provided. Career-oriented activity in developing countries, on the contrary, is rigidly coordinated to requirements of economy and a labour market; earlier fixing of professional preferences and less flexible relation to an unsuccessful choice of a speciality or profession of the youth is marked there. The most typical characteristics of foreign career-oriented schemes are the following: the organisation of continuous training lasting throughout all school; supervision over students' achievements, propensities and hobbies; portfolio or cumulative files drafting and recording data of all pupil's results while professional consulting and selection of entrants for vocational training continuation in colleges or high schools. The author points out the general characteristic: the economy requirement for high quality experts on the basis of selection of the pupils who are able to master high-end technologies and have an obvious potential of professional growth and personal development. Practical significance. The research materials and implementations can be useful to Russian career-and professional specialists, and the experts who are engaged in education management.
