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International conference to be held at the Center of Methods in Social Sciences (Qualitative Methods) on 9-10th February 2018, Göttingen This interdisciplinary and international conference offers an opportunity for discussion and exchange between scholars engaged in research on violence and those engaged in biographical research, from their different academic perspectives....
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The Canadian Council for the Americas held a webinar on the political center (sorry, centre!) in Colombia and whether it can unite. There was former Vice President Humberto de Calle (under Ernesto Samper, and he was also the head of the negotiating team with the FARC*) and then a bit later also Colombian journalists and a financier, moderated by Ken Frankel.The quick answer is that it's really tricky.De la Calle's main point was that, unlike Colombian political tradition, the center needed to start with a basic program rather than choosing a person to rally around. He gave various indicators, based on local election results and polls, about an appetite for centrist positions and parties. Centrist policy positions included agrarian reform, tax reform, pension reform, and crop substitution.But that is where the conversation got more difficult. Responses included asking where was the focus on women and youth? If the right dominated non-urban areas, how was this going to function? What are some concrete objectives? Doesn't this seem too top-down? And, fundamentally, what is the "center" anyway?Unless I missed it toward the end, when I had interruptions and missed chunks, the political mechanics of all this was missing. Who gets the ball rolling, which means controlling the message at the beginning? De la Calle advocated for self-exclusion, meaning no one would be rejected as long as they broadly accepted the program. But that depends on who defines the program.I've written before about how the FARC really screwed the democratic left in Colombia, because it's too easy to connect the left to the FARC (and nowadays also to Venezuela, though I don't know how much that actually convinces people). But I hadn't thought as much about the center. This discussion demonstrated to me how tough such a project would be. The essential question "can it unite?" just kind of hung there. Fear has served the right very well, and it's hard to overcome.* His overall political biography is really interesting. Subscribe in a reader
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In my role as political analyst for MTN, I sat down on August 14 with Republican House candidate Ryan Zinke and asked him about releasing his full military records. In case you missed the interview, you can watch it here. I was promised during that interview, and afterwards by Zinke spokesperson Shelby DeMars, that I—along with the AP and Chuck Johnson of Lee Newspapers—would receive the complete set of records. I was also told that this would take some time.
It is now October 22, 2014, and the general election is less than two weeks away. In last night's House debate in Great Falls, John Adams of the Great Falls Tribune specifically asked state senator Zinke about a fitness report in 1999 that one other former Navy Seal suggests indicates some problems with Zinke's performance. Zinke did not provide a clear answer as to what was in that report, and suggested that Adams "was unjust, unfair, and shameless" for asking the question.
Adams' request was not shameless.Watch the exchange here.
I have, thus far, believed that the Zinke campaign would in good faith produce those records in a timely fashion. And I'm hopeful that they will still release those records. And yet, I still have not gotten what was promised. I, like John Adams, am beginning to wonder why.
But, if I may suggest, the problem is bigger than Ryan Zinke and his record as a Navy Seal. The problem hits directly at democratic discourse and accountability in an era when fewer and fewer candidates running for public office have extensive records in elected office. Yet, they ask US to credit them with those experiences as evidence they are suitable for service in higher public office. I believe Ryan Zinke, Steve Daines, John Lewis, and Amanda Curtis all should release as much of their employment records as possible to the press and the public. These experiences, they claim, will make them excellent public servants. If that's the case, then we—the public who choose them—should be able to make the judgment ourselves of those records.
I think there are three very good reasons for why we should expect transparency from our congressional candidates in this regard.
First, such transparency is not unusual for those seeking public employment of any kind. Take, for example, the information I have to generally produce when applying for academic jobs (both public and private). As a job candidate, I have produced the following for employers:
1. Transcripts (Graduate and undergraduate)
2. A copy of my diploma
3. My cv (an academic version of a resume)
4. References and letters of support from those references
5. Student evaluations of my teaching
6. A teaching statement
7. A research statement
8. Publications
Then, if I'm lucky enough to get a campus interview, I often have to give a research presentation and a teaching demonstration. All of this is to demonstrate that my academic credentials are real and that I am competent as a teacher and researcher.
And, I should say, that a request for my transcripts from Wisconsin or Indiana can be filled within 24 hours. Not more than two or three months.
In running for Congress, candidates use their records to bolster the case for why voters should vote for them and that they deserve the trust of voters. Candidates who have served in elected office often have extensive public records that voters can evaluate and pick apart—and even if they do not, the opposition is more than happy to do it for the voters.
Ryan Zinke's House campaign biography begins with the headline: Montana's Proven Leader. He highlights his accomplishments in nine paragraphs. One paragraph details his service in the Montana Senate. Five paragraphs focus on his "distinguished record" of military service. It is clear that this service as a Navy Seal is critical to how he would like voters to evaluate him.
Congressman Daines' campaign slogan is "More Jobs, Less Government" and much of his campaign pitch focuses on his experience in creating jobs—an experience he says begins with cutting government regulation and red tape. In his campaign biography of seven paragraphs, one full paragraph and the portion of another details his business experience. Only one full paragraph, by contrast, details his experience in Congress. Congressman Daines says he's a job creator. How exactly did he create jobs during his time at RightNow and how many of those jobs were created in Montana, in the United States, and in other countries?
Democratic candidates John Lewis and Amanda Curtis are not off the hook here. John Lewis spent his professional career working as a staffer for Senator Baucus, and on his campaign webpage, he notes that "working for Senator Max Baucus and with Montana veterans, John spearheaded legislation giving businesses incentives to hire veterans. What began as John's idea to better serve veterans is now the law of the land." We, as voters, should have access to the memos staffer Lewis wrote which demonstrate how central he was to this veterans legislation. Lewis should also ask that Senator Baucus release his personnel file so we can see the evaluations he received as a part of the Senator's staff in Washington and here in Montana. And Amanda Curtis, who touts her experience as a teacher, should demonstrate to us whether she excelled as a teacher or not.
The main point of all of this is not that Ryan Zinke was a bad Navy Seal, that Steve Daines didn't create jobs as part of an important hi-tech company, that John Lewis wasn't a competent Senate staffer, and Amanda Curtis wasn't a great teacher. The point is the voters deserve to have the ability to evaluate those claims for themselves absent a narrative constructed by the campaign, just as my fellow political scientists have the right to examine my academic record to help them decide—without my own spin—that I am the right person or not for their institution. We should be able to determine how distinguished a military career is, what makes job creator successful, and the whether the influence a Senate staffer has on legislative outcomes is substantial.
A second reason why these records should be made available is the nature of who is running for Congress. In the past, the common path for folks running for higher office was to spend considerable time working their way up through a series of public offices, building a public record that voters could evaluate. As our elected officials are increasingly coming from outside the public sphere or, if they do serve in the public eye, with much shorter tenures in office, we need to be able to assess those experiences. At least with public officials, there is a clear public record for all to see. Without a public track record, voters are left to the rhetoric of the candidates—who are clearly not unbiased—to make sense of those private employment experiences. At the very least, they should give us as much access to private records that we can get from those in public employ.
Finally, in an era of political polarization, it is even more important that voters have access to unbiased sources of information to help them make informed political judgments outside the spin room. Instead of blindly accepting what candidates or their opponents tell you, it is even more important to have metrics with which voters can independently judge the records, temperament, and fitness of their candidates for public office. And, even more important, an independent and free press must have access to these records to do just that.
Transparency helps us make better decisions and to have more trust in the democratic process. One of the most important New Deal reforms, in my judgment, was the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission which required publicly traded companies to release particular information in a timely and regular fashion about the company's operations and budgets. This information allows investors far more confidence when they participate while at the same time providing a somewhat level playing field for investors. This trust has allowed the creation of mutual funds and a retirement system funded largely by investments in the stock market. Shouldn't we demand the same kind of accountability and openness of those who wish to serve in public office? Shouldn't we demand more of and from them as investors in the democratic marketplace?
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I'm a political scientist—with an emphasis on the science. I've viewed my role in the public sphere as inserting into debates what political scientists have learned about political processes and institutions—and to try to keep both sides faithful to the empirics. At heart, I've always been a skeptic and my training as a political scientist makes me even more so. I'm not one to join partisan frays. It's not my style. I just go where data lead.
The election of Donald Trump, someone who had zero political experience, certainly sent my skepticism into high gear given the data. Limited political experience does not often equate with political success. One major exception is Dwight David Eisenhower, but he is the exception who proves the rule. Eisenhower was an exceptional student of leadership and, as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, developed a well-honed ability to convince, negotiate and compromise with many talented, egoistic generals as they fought the Third Reich to rid the world of Nazism.
During the fall campaign, a video of historian David McCullough made the rounds on social media. I've long admired McCullough's accessible and well-written history, especially his biography of Truman.
In the video, McCullough draws our attention to Eisenhower's four qualities of leadership, noting that Trump exhibited none of those qualities. He had neither character, ability, experience, nor responsibility. In short, McCullough did not believe Trump was suited for the presidency. He was especially not suited to articulating a clear moral purpose and acting as the conciliator in chief in times of national sorrow and crisis.
Trump's repeated failure as a leader over the past eight months should not surprise. He was as prepared for the presidency as I am to do any kind of home or car repair.
Yet the president can be a poor leader and the nation can survive: We managed the ineptitude of Hoover and Carter. What is most troubling is that Trump himself, through apparently carefully contrived acts, may be encouraging values antithetical to the Republic itself.
That causes me great alarm and concern, as it should every American regardless of party.
There are certain moral certainties, bright lines in the sand, that are not debated in civilized society. Racism, white supremacy, and support for Nazism are among them. No race, no people, no ethnicity is superior to any other. Advocating violence against someone else because they are different than you is wrong. Killing innocent people is wrong. Full stop.
An easy test of leadership, methinks, is denouncing yesterday's terrible events in Charlottesville with clarity and precision. "Nazism, racism, and violence are acts of terrorism, and have no place in our Republic and receive my strongest condemnation" would've been a good start. Perhaps you might have taken a cue from Vice President Pence, who had no problem naming who was the blame for yesterday's events: "We have no tolerance for hate and violence from white supremacists, neo-Nazis or the KKK," said Pence, calling them "dangerous fringe groups" today in Colombia.
Instead, the President issued a statement that was ambiguous at best, but spoke volumes: Calling out racism, Nazism, and white supremacy wasn't on the table. Best case? He's a coward and inept. I'm less inclined to believe this is the case: He's spoken out clearly concerning acts of terrorism undertaken by Muslims in the past. And Trump certainly has no trouble telling us what he thinks most of the time. That leaves the worst case: He's sympathetic to their cause.
Many Americans voted for Trump because they were angry at what they believe our country had become. Others voted for Trump simply because he was the Republican nominee. Still others voted for him because they couldn't stomach Hillary Clinton. It is not for me to judge a person who voted for Trump. That's their business, and frankly, that's water under the bridge
We've seen Trump can't stomach doing what's right when the path is clear, and may be conspiring with forces seeking to undermine the very foundation of our Republic. It doesn't matter how you voted, but how you answer the question: "What now?"
If you are troubled with what you've seen, at least we have a constitutional system with multiple points of access. Write to the president; tell him how you feel (although I'm skeptical that would matter). Write to your congressional delegation: Remember, ambition counters ambition in our system of separated (but shared) powers. Write to your state parties and tell them to make changes to the primary system that will make it more likely better candidates survive the nomination process (ironically, that may mean a little less democracy in the primaries and more control to party elites who were overwhelmingly opposed to Trump). But do something. Be heard, while you still can.
We have a democracy. That is, as Ben Franklin said, as long as we can keep it. We've kept it for more than 200 years.
Whether we keep it for another 200 depends on the choices you make now.
Just in case you need a refresher course on leadership, here's how great leaders should behave:
1. Responsibility. Eisenhower, on the eve of D-Day, prepared this statement should the landings fail:
"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I
have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."
2. Character. George W. Bush after 9-11.
3. Ability and Experience. LBJ and the Voting Rights Act.
4. Fortitude. Ronald Reagan in Berlin at the Brandenburg Gates.
5. All of the Above. Churchill. 1940, as France fell and Britain stood alone.
Ask our members of Congress to display the leadership our President will not.
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Pınar Bilgin on Non-Western IR, Hybridity, and the One-Toothed Monster called Civilization
Questions of civilization underpin much of IR scholarship—whether explicitly (in terms of the construction of non-Western 'others') or implicitly (in the assumption that provincial institutions from Europe constitute a universal model of how we ought to relate to one another in international politics). While this topic surfaces frequently in debates about postcolonial international politics, few scholars are able to tackle this conundrum with the same sense of acuteness as Pınar Bilgin. In this Talk, she—amongst others—elaborates on not doing Turkish IR, what postsecular IR comprises, and discusses her own position in regards to that one-toothed monster called civilization.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
What I think is the biggest challenge in current IR is not so much a debate, but the difficulty for students of IR to come up with ways of making sense of the world in a way that appreciates different experiences and sensibilities and others' contributions and contestations. International Relations as we know it at the moment and as offered in the standard textbooks, portrays a world that they really don't recognize as the world that they live in. And I should point out that I am not just speaking of Non-Western experiences and sensibilities—there is in any case a growing body of literature on Non-Western IR, and you have spoken to Amitav Acharya (Theory Talk #42), Siba Grovogui (Theory Talk #57) and others—but I am also referring to all those perspectives in which international knowledge are presented and which the textbooks do not usually reflect, including feminist perspectives for instance (such as Ann Tickner, Theory Talk #54), or perspectives from the Global South some of which actually fall into the definition of 'the West'. So when I speak of ways of making sense of the world in a way that appreciates different experiences and sensibilities, I am referring to the agenda of Critical Theory of IR. I do think we have come a long way since the early 1990s when I was a student of IR and Critical Theory was beginning to make its mark then, but we still have a long way to go. For instance, critical approaches to security have come a long way in terms of considering insecurities of specific social groups that mainstream approaches overlook, but it has a long way to go still in terms of actually incorporating insecurities as viewed by those people, instead of just explaining them away.
As for the principal debate in IR, the debate that goes on in my mind is how to study IR in a way that appreciates different experiences and sensibilities and acknowledges other contributions as well as contestations. This is not the principal debate in the field, but the field that comes closest is the one that I try and contribute to, and that is the field of non-Western approaches to IR. It is not exactly a debate, of course, in the sense that the very mainstream Western approaches that it targets are not paying any attention. So it's the critics themselves who have their disagreements, and on the one hand there are those who point to other ways of thinking about the international, Stephen Chan comes to mind as the producer of one of the early examples of that. I can think of Robbie Shilliam's more recent book on the subject, thinking about the international from non-Western perspectives. On the other hand are those who survey IR in different parts of the world, to see how it is done, what their concerns and debates are. Ole Waever, Arlene Tickner and David Blaney's three-volume series 'Worlding Beyond the West' contains materials from both these directions.
My own approach is slightly different in that while acknowledging the limits of our approaches to IR as any critical IR person would, I don't necessarily think that turning to others' 'authentic' perspectives to look for different ways of thinking about the international is the way forward for students of IR. That brings me to back the way I set up the challenge to IR today: it is about incorporating others' perspectives, as well as acknowledging their contributions and contestations. I think I would like to take a more historical approach to this. It's not just about contemporary differences—studies on these are very valuable and I learn a lot from them—but what I've also found very valuable are connections: how much give and take has already taken place over the years, how for instance the roots of human rights can be found in multiple places in our history and in different parts of the world, how the Human Rights Convention was penned by multiple actors, how human rights norms don't go deep enough and how calls for deepening them have in fact emerged from different parts of the world, not just the West. So these contributions can actually point to our history and to different perspectives across the globe, but these are often referred to as non-Western IR, whereas they're actually pointing to our conversations, our communication, the give and take between us. That is what I am mainly interested in at the moment: the multiple authorship of ideas, and pointing to them you actually face the biggest challenge. It builds on Edward Said's legacy, so it's a critical IR project, the way I see it: Said built on multiple beginnings and engaged in contrapuntal reading. I should add that when I am talking about 'sensibilities', I am not necessarily talking about it with reference to other parts of the world, although it may seem this way. The more reflexive approaches to IR have taught us that we are all shaped by and all respond to our contexts—in one way or another.
One interesting result of Arlene Tickner's and Ole Waever's book, International Relations Scholarship around the World, was that IR in different parts of the world is not in fact that different: it is still state-centric, it talks about security in the way that most mainstream textbooks would talk about it, and IR courses are structured in such a way that you would be able to recognize in most parts of the world. Such surveys, therefore, tell us that IR works quite similarly in other parts of the world. Hence the need to look for difference in alternative sources and the need to look beyond IR—towards anthropology, sociology, linguistics, etc.—there is growing interest in conceptions of the international beyond what IR allows us. This is not confined to looking beyond the West, but is equally emerging in Western scholarship: there is now emerging literature on postsecularism and IR, and bringing religion back into the study of IR. However, I am not so much interested in studying differences (without underestimating the significance of such studies) but studying to our conversations, our communication, the give and take between us.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
My journey to this point has been through critical security studies. I studied international relations at Middle East Technical University in Ankara and did a Master's Degree Bilkent University in Ankara where I currently work. I was not entirely comfortable with IR as an undergraduate student, thought I could not quite put my finger on the reason why—though I was able to make sense of during my later studies. At the undergraduate level, I received an interdisciplinary training, not so much by design but rather by accident: I picked courses on political theory, economic history and political anthropology, simply because our curriculum allowed such a design. I was lucky to have interesting people teaching interesting courses. And again by sheer coincidence we had a visiting professor who introduced me to philosophy of science and the work of Thomas Kuhn and I began to question the standard IR training I had been receiving. So then I went on to an MA degree at Bilkent University which became consequential for me in two ways: for one, that University has the best IR library in Turkey, so there are no limits to what you can learn even when you are left to your own devices, and secondly, Hollis and Smith's Explaining and Understanding International Relations (1991) was on our reading list. So when I began reading that against the background of Thomas Kuhn, I began to make sense of IR in a very different way. Mind you, I was still not able to see my future in IR at that time.
Then I began writing my MA dissertation and was also working at Turkey's then very powerful semi-military institution the MGK, the National Security Council, at the General Secretariat: I was hired as a junior researcher and lasted for about four-and-a-half months, and then I went abroad for further studies, but those months were what set me on my path to Critical Security Studies. Working there, I began to appreciate the need for reflexivity, and the difficult role of the researcher, and the relationship between theory and practice. At that point I received a Chevening scholarship from the British Council, and the condition attached was that I could not use it towards PhD studies but had to use it for a one-year degree. I decided to study something that I could not study at home, and came across Ken Booth's work ('Security and Emancipation,' 1991) and knew of course Barry Buzan's oeuvre (Theory Talk #35), and found that Aberystwyth University offered a one-year degree in Strategic Studies, which is what I decided to do. That happened to be the first year they offered an Master's degree in Critical Security Studies, and I became one of the first five students to take that course, taught jointly by Ken Booth, Richard Wyn Jones and Nicholas Wheeler. Together with Steve Smith, who was Head of Department at the time, they were committed to giving us an excellent education, so it was a great place to be and I stayed on to do my PhD there as well. It's a small Welsh town with only 13,000 people and the University has about the same number of students. During that time I read important examples of critical IR scholarship, as well as the newly emerging literature on Security Studies, and it was around that time that Michael Williams (Theory Talk #39) joined the Department and he was a great influence on my work, as was of course my dissertation advisor Ken Booth: I learned a lot from him in terms of substance and style.
After receiving my PhD in the year 2000 I joined the IR department at Bilkent University as the only critical theorist there. Bilkent was at the time one of the few universities in Turkey committed to excellence in research—now there are more—and that allowed me the academic freedom to pursue my research interests in Critical Security Studies: I was able to focus on my work without having to spread out into other fields. It helped that I became part of research networks as well: I've already mentioned Arlene Tickner's and Ole Waever's work, their project on geocultural epistemologies in IR and 'Worlding beyong the West'. Ole Waever invited me to join, thus opening up my second research agenda since my PhD, enriched by workshops and conversations with scholars in the group. It is not far removed from my core work, but it is an added dimension. And this helped me over time to overcome my earlier doubts about IR, for I began to see just how multidisciplinary it was. It was only through Critical IR that I learned how parallel perspectives in other disciplines, and alternative ideas could be brought to bear on IR—something you also find nowadays in international political sociology or different aspects of anthropology in constructivism.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
In terms of skills, I think that studying at different institutions if possible, different settings with different academic traditions helps a lot. Institutions vary widely in their emphasis—Bilkent for instance believes that the best teachers are those who do cutting-edge research. Others may disagree and say that small teaching colleges are the best, because they pass on what they specialise in. I think therefore that studying at different institutions is very good for students, whether it be within formal exchange frameworks or acquiring fellowships for study away, not to mention of course fieldwork, which offers new settings: every new environment is an important learning experience, even if the substance is not so useful and what you learn is not necessarily so significant. Secondly, some would suggest learning a different language is important, along with acquiring a foothold in area studies and comparative studies, and I agree with that. Thirdly, Stefano Guzzini talks about IR theory being what a student needs in terms of disposition and skills: he has this piece in the Journal of International Relations and Development (2001), where he makes the case specifically for would-be diplomats in Central and Eastern European countries that by learning theory, students would be equipped to communicate across cultural boundaries—it's like learning a new language. They would learn to watch out against ethnocentrism, he argues, and this is one of the pieces I use when I teach IR theory. In this spirit, I think it important to use theory as a new language, as one of the tools that every student should have in their toolkit. And finally, I think I'd follow Cynthia Enloe's (Theory Talk #48) recommendation that it's useful to have a foot both in IR theory and in comparative studies. I feel that one without the other is less rewarding, though one will not know what one is missing until one goes to explore.
In my PhD work I focused on the Middle East, since then I have looked more in depth at Europe's relationship with the Euro-Mediterranean relations and Turkey-EU relations as empirical points of reference. This has been enriching and has benefited my research. In sum, it is essential to read as broadly as possible, and I give the same advice to my M.A. and to my PhD students. You can't read everything, and it can happen that the more we read the more confused we get, but in this Theory Talks is doing a great job by allowing students to learn from the experience of others. Learning happens also at conferences: you may find subjects that are of no interest to you, but that is helpful also, and on the other hand new subjects will broaden horizons. The wealth of cultural references in each part of the world can be baffling and may make it difficult to delve deep. The only way we make sense of the unknown through what we know.
What regional or perhaps even global protagonism can you envisage for IR studies emerging from Turkey? Turkey is often perceived to bridge Europe and the Middle East, Europe and Asia, but we have the problem that Asia itself is a Western idea, then a 'bridge' is in danger of belonging to neither.
As I made clear in what I said above, I don't think of IR in terms of contributions emerging from this part of the world or that part of the world. And although I grew up in Turkey and began my academic career there, I don't consider my own work to be in any way a 'Turkish perspective' on IR. What can be said to be Turkish about my perspective is that I have to travel to Aberystwyth and Copenhagen and all those ISA conference locations to discover that I can have (and some say I should) have a Turkish perspective. My undergraduate education was about learning IR as a 'universally undisputed'. I now know the limitations of that universalism, but I cannot offer a specifically located perspective, for it is a complicated picture that emerges in front of us. I am not in favour of replacing one parochialism with another one, in terms of those who speak of X School of IR versus Y School of IR.
Having said that, I consider that my contribution as being comfortable with what Orhan Pamuk has called the 'in-between world', though I prefer to use the term 'hybridity', not in-between-ness. That Turkish policy-makers have always claimed a bridge status for their country, but these ideas are rooted in Turkey's hybridity and belonging to multiple worlds (as opposed to being in between multiple worlds). Policy-makers can talk about being a bridge between Europe and Asia, or Europe and the Middle East, because Turkey in fact belongs to all these worlds. So in some ways being at ease with this hybridity does allow me to have a particular perspective in IR that I may not have had if I had come from a different background. But then again, it's difficult to know. I have taken courses in political anthropology, learning about the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey as an imagined community, but all my introductions to geocultural studies and epistemology came from Critical IR settings, so looking for geographically or culturally specific roots simply doesn't work. As Said put it, it is 'beginnings' that we should be looking for, not 'origins.'
When Europeans and North Americans speak of 'state building' and 'development', Turkey is often taken as a model example of conversion to Western models—largely by its own choice. Should Turkey's path and modern reality be understood differently?
I am not comfortable with the word 'model', but 'example' may be a preferable term. So what is Turkey an example of? That has become a particular research question for me and I have written on this—Turkey's choice to locate itself in the West and what that means. Turkey is interesting for having decided to locate itself in the West, and this is where language and culture come in the picture. More often than not, the literature tends to assume that elites in places like Turkey would make the decision to adopt the 'Western model', and the rationale for adopting that model is not questioned, but instead taken to be 'obvious' from development theory and its teleological outlook: 'it just happened'. It is those that do not adopt the dominant model, those that decide against Westernization, that need explaining. Perhaps I would not have asked myself that question, had I not—and here my biography comes into the picture—been puzzled by references to 'civilization' in Turkish texts. If you look into Turkish literature or historical documents you will find references to 'civilization' everywhere—the national anthem refers to civilization as a 'one-toothed monster called civilization'. As a young student, I just couldn't make sense of this and wondered why is everyone talking about civilization and why is it a good and a difficult thing at the same time?
I began to make sense of this as I was researching Turkey's choices about secularism in the late 19th and early 20th century, and was looking at some of those documents once again, but this time with insights provided by postcolonial IR. The language commonly used was 'joining' the West, and secularisation was a part of the package, but it was not necessarily a question of mere emulation but search for security, being a part of the 'international society'. These were not easy decisions, so here I look at Turkey's choice to locate itself in the West within the security context. There was a notion of a 'standard of civilization' in Europe and the West more broadly which others were expected to 'live up to', and this gives you some sense of the ubiquity of the references to civilization in the discourses of Turkish policy makers at the time. I am not suggesting that this is the whole answer, and I do not reject distinct answers, but I do think it helps understand Turkey's decision to locate itself in the West in the early 20th century. So this is where my security aspects of my work and Critical IR together. My starting point is to identify the ubiquity of one notion and then locate that within critical IR theory. Turkey becomes an example of postcolonial insecurities. Though never having been colonized it nonetheless exhibits those 'postcolonial anxieties' in Sankaran Krishna's words.
I am keenly aware of the reality that even when we as academics are doing our most theoretical and abstract work, we are never removed from the roles of the 'real world', for we are teachers at the same time: by the time we put our ideas to paper we have already disseminated them through our teaching. Some of us are more committed to teaching than others, of course, but some critical theorists see the most important part of their job as being good educators and training the new generation, as opposed to being more public intellectuals and writing op-ed pieces and talking to bigger audiences. We are therefore never far removed from the world of practice and from disseminating our ideas about security and international relations, because we are teachers, and some of our students will go on to work in the real world institutions, like government or the media.
Beyond that, there is a growing vitality in the literature on the privatisation of security: on private armies and how security is being privatised and fielded out to professionals. The new literature that is emerging on this is more and more interesting, I am thinking for instance of Anna Leander's work here: she talks about privatization of security not only in terms of the involvement of private professionals going off to do what government or other actors tell them to do, but also in terms of the setting up of security agendas and shaping security, determining what threats are, and determining what risks are and quite literally how we should be leading our lives. In this sense theory and critical security studies have become very real for all of us, because no one group of people owns the definitions.
Currently I am working on a manuscript that brings together two of my research interests, conceptions of the international beyond the West and Critical Security Studies. I use the case of Turkey for purposes of illustration but also for insight. I am trying to think of ways of studying security that are attentive to the periphery's conceptions of the international as a source of (non-material) insecurity.
Pınar Bilgin is the author of Regional Security in the Middle East: a Critical Perspective (Routledge, 2005) and over 50 papers. She is an Associate Member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences. She received the Young Scientists Incentive Award of the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (TÜBITAK) in 2009 and 'Young Scientist' (GEBIP) award of Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA, 2008). She served as the President of Central and East European International Studies Association (CEEISA), and chair of International Political Sociology Section of ISA. She is a Member of the Steering Committee of Standing Group on International Relations (SGIR) and an Associate Editor of International Political Sociology.
Related links
Faculty Profile at Bilkent University Read Bilgin's Thinking Past 'Western' IR? (2008) here (pdf) Read Bilgin's A Return to 'Civilisational Geopolitics' in the Mediterranean? Changing Geopolitical Images of the European Union and Turkey in the Post-Cold War Era (2004) here (pdf) Read Bilgin's Whose 'Middle East'? Geopolitical Inventions and Practices of Security (2004) here (pdf) Read Bilgin's and A.D. Morton's Historicising representations of 'Failed States': beyong the cold-war annexation of the social sciences? (2002) here (pdf)
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Siddharth Mallavarapu on International Asymmetries, Ethnocentrism, and a View on IR from India
How is the rise of the BRICs in the international political and economic system reflected in our understanding of that system? One key insight is that the discipline of International Relations that has emanated from the northern hemisphere is far less 'international' than is widely thought. Scholars from the 'Global South' increasingly raise important challenges to the provincialism of IR theory with a universal pretense. Siddharth Mallavarapu's work has consistently engaged with such questions. In this Talk, Mallavarapu, amongst others, elaborates on IR's ethnocentrism, the multitude of voices in the Global South, and why he rather speaks of a 'voice from India' rather than an 'Indian IR theory'.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
One of the things I constantly contend with in my work is to think of ways of how we can widen our notion of the international. IR has been too closely linked to the fortunes of the major powers, and this has been to our detriment, because it has impoverished our sense of international. I think the spirit of what I contend with is best captured by what Ngugi wa Thiong'o in his book Globalectics: Theory and Politics of Knowing concerns himself with, namely '…the organization of literary space and the politics of knowing'. My interest is to grapple with the manner in which the discipline of International Relations in its dominant mainstream idiom orchestrates and administers intellectual space and the implications this carries for the broader politics of knowledge. Simply put, the principal challenge is to confront various species of ethnocentrism – particularly Anglo-American accents of parochialism in the mainstream account of International Relations.
I am also keenly sensitive to some disciplinary biases and prejudices, which I think sometimes take on tacit forms and sometimes more explicit forms, and in which provincial experiences are passed off as universal experiences. The whole question of 'benchmarking' is problematic, in that a benchmark is set by one, and others are expected to measure up to that benchmark. Then there is the question of certain theories, for example the idea that hegemony is desirable from the perspective of international stability – think of the Hegemonic Stability Theory in the 1970s, or the Democratic Peace Theory that assumes that liberal democracy is an unsurpassed political form from the perspective of peace. Then there is human rights advocacy of a particular kind, and the whole idea of the 'Long Peace' applied to the Cold War years. In reality, this was far from a 'long peace' for many countries in the Third World during the same era.
I am also interested right now in the issue of the evolution of IR theory, and was really intrigued by the September 2013 issue of the EuropeanJournal of International Relations, with its focus on 'the End of International Relations Theory': I find this fascinating, because just at a time when there are new players or re-emerging and re-surfacing players in the international system, there is a move to delegitimize IR Theory itself. So I am curious about the conjuncture and the set of sociologies of knowledge that inform particular terms and turns in the discipline.
My response to this challenge is to consciously work towards inserting other voices, traditions and sensibilities in the discipline to problematize its straightforward and simplistic understanding of large chunks of the world. My work is informed by what international relations praxis looks like in other places and how it is locally interpreted in those contexts. There are gaps in mainstream narratives and I am interested in finding ways to create space for a more substantive engagement with other perspectives by broadening the disciplinary context. This is not merely a matter of inclusive elegance but a matter of life and death because poor knowledge as evident from the historical record generates disastrous political judgments that have already resulted in considerable loss of human life, often worst impacting the former colonies.
The global south holds a particular attraction for me in this context, especially given its often problematic representations in mainstream IR discourse. The underlying premise here is that the discipline of IR will stand to be enriched by drawing on a much wider repertoire of human experiences than it currently does. The normative imperative is to nudge us all in the direction of being more circumspect before we pronounce or pass quick and often harsh political assessments about sights, sounds, smells and political ecologies we are unfamiliar with. IR as a discipline needs to reflect the considerable diversity.
My doctoral research on the role of the International Court of Justice advisory opinion rendered in July 1996 on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons provided an opportunity to probe this diversity further. While advancing a case for categorical illegality of nuclear use under all circumstances, Judge Christopher Gregory Weeramantry discusses at length the multicultural bases of international humanitarian law. In doing so, he combines knowledge of world religions, postcolonial histories and canonical international law to frame his erudite opinion, which displays a thoughtful engagement with often neglected or obscured sensibilities.
These examples can be exponentially multiplied. Such a sentiment is most succinctly captured by Chinua Achebe in Home and Exile where he argues that '…my hope for the twenty-first [century] is that it will see the first fruits of the balance of stories among the world's peoples'. It most critically calls for '…the process of 're-storying' peoples who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession'. I would treat this as an important charter or intellectual map for anybody embarking on the study of International Relations today. I would also like to add that this storytelling would inevitably encounter the categories and many avatars of race, class, gender and nationality crisscrossing and intersecting in all sorts of possible combinations generating a whole host of political outcomes as well.
The skewed politics of knowledge is most evident when it comes to theory with a big 'T' in particular. Most theories of International Relations emanate from the Anglo-American metropole and little from elsewhere. This is not because of an absence of theoretical reflection in other milieus but due rather to a not so accidental privileging of some parts of experiential reality over others. IR has been too caught up with the major powers. I could think of conscious efforts to theorize both in the past and in the present elements of reality hidden from conventional vantage points. One recent illustration of social and political theorizing from the context I am more familiar with is an account by Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai titled The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. There are on-going theoretical engagements in Africa, the Arab world, Asia and South America reflecting an intellectual ferment both within and outside of these societies. International Relations as a discipline has to find ways of explicitly engaging these texts and relating it to prevailing currents in world politics rather than carry on an elaborate pretence of their non-existence. I am more troubled by claims of an 'end of International Relations theory' just at a moment when the world is opening up to new political possibilities stemming from the projected growth in international influence of parts of Asia, Africa, the Arab world and South America. IR has to move beyond its obsession of focusing on the major powers and seriously democratize its content. The terms 'global' or 'international' cannot be a monopoly or even an oligopoly. Such a view has severely impoverished our understanding of the contemporary world.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
I cannot really claim that this was a neatly planned trajectory. I stumbled upon the discipline by chance not design. My initial curiosity about the world of social cognition emerged from a slice of my medical history. When I was at school in my early teens, I developed a condition referred to as Leucoderma or Vitiligo which involved skin depigmentation. I enjoyed writing from an early stage and recall recording my observations of the world around me in a piece titled Etiology Unknown borrowing language from the doctor's diagnosis. I recall an urgency to comprehend and make sense of what I perceived then as a fast changing world where old certitudes were dissolving on a daily basis. I felt an outsider at some remove from my earlier self and it gave me on retrospect a distinct vantage point to witness the world around me. It was impacting who I thought I was and thereby compelled me to confront issues of identity – individual and social. An extremely supportive family made all the difference during these years.
The turmoil and confusion in those years led me to develop a deeper interest in understanding more loosely why people reacted in particular sorts of ways to what was in medical terms merely a cosmetic change. It also led me to informally forge community whenever I saw anybody else experiencing similar states of being. I also internalized one of the first ingredients of good social science – the capacity to be empathetic and put ourselves in others shoes. I learnt that the discipline of Sociology among the available choices in my milieu came closest to allowing me to pursue these concerns more systematically further. I applied to a Sociology master's programme after my undergraduate years at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, but I had also applied simultaneously to the International Relations programme since in my understanding it after all concerned the wider world – an extension of scale but similar I imagined in terms of the canvas of concerns. The numbers in India are large, the competition is stiff: I made it to the IR programme but did not make it to the Sociology programme.
Having got there, I had some outstanding influences, and I soon realized that one could also think about issues of identity (then cast by me in terms of simple binaries – home and the external world, the relationship of inside and outside, victors and the vanquished) in the discipline of IR. I decided to stick the course and delve into these questions more deeply while keeping up with a broader interest in the social sciences.
I could list a few influences that were critical at various stages of my academic biography: at high school, an economics teacher S. Venkata Lakshmi was very encouraging and positive and confirmed my intuitive sense that I would enjoy the social sciences. Subsequently at college I had in Father Ambrose Pinto a fine teacher of Political Science. He would take us on small field excursions to observe first hand issues such as caste conflicts in a neighbouring village, and all that helped me develop a sharper sense of the political which moved away from the textbook and was strongly anchored in the local context.
At the graduate level of study, Kanti Bajpai who later also became my mentor and advisor in the doctoral programme exercised an enormous influence as a role model. I was convinced that a life of the mind is worth aspiring and working towards once I came into contact with him in the classroom. He also exposed me to all the basic building blocks of an academic life – reading, writing, researching, teaching and publishing, demonstrating at all times both patience and unparalleled generosity. We have collaborated on two edited volumes on International Relations in India and I continue to greatly value an enduring friendship.
For over a decade, I have also had the good fortune of coming into contact with B.S. Chimni who is an exemplary scholar in the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) tradition. It has been a great joy bouncing off ideas and discussing at length various facets of International Relations, International Law and Political Theory together over the years. I have learnt much from this rich and continued association. In 2012 we worked jointly on an edited book titled International Relations: Perspectives for the Global South.
I have also learnt (and continue to do so) from my students both at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and at the South Asian University (SAU). At JNU, I made my beginnings and continue to take some pride in being intellectually home spun at one of the foundational and premier crucibles of International Relations scholarship in India. I have also thoroughly enjoyed my interactions over the years with the students drawn from diverse backgrounds. At SAU, I have in the space of a short period been exposed to some fine students from across the South Asian region. I have often been impressed by their understanding of politics and on occasion have marvelled at their demonstration of a maturity beyond their years. There is much I learn from them particularly from their insider narratives of the unique political experiences and trajectories of their specific countries.
Himadeep Muppidi has also been a remarkable influence in terms of clarifying my thinking about the workings of the global IR episteme. His receptivity to hitherto neglected intellectual inheritances from outside the mainstream and most evidently his capacity to write with soul, passion and character while retaining a deep suspicion of the 'objectivity' fetish in the social sciences has alerted me to a whole new metaphysics and aesthetic of interpreting IR. The thread that runs through all these interests and influences is firstly the issue of context, and secondly the question of agency –what it meant to be marginal in some sense, how could one think about theorizing questions relating to dispossession, relating to a certain degree of marginality– and also the broader issue of the politics of knowledge itself: of how certain attitudes and concepts seem to obscure or deface certain conditions, which seem to be quite prevalent.
I have also found excellent academic conversationalists with sometimes differing perspectives who help sharpen my arguments considerably. I would like to make special mention of Thomas Fues and the fascinating global governance school that he offers intellectual stewardship to in Bonn. In the years to come, I look forward to further intellectual collaborations with scholars from Brazil and South Africa and other parts of South America and Africa as well as the Arab world.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
The key without a doubt is curiosity. I do my best to feed that curiosity as a teacher. I also think Gerardo Munck and Richard Snyder's counsel and interviews in their book, Passion, Craft and Method in Comparative Politics are a useful resource for students wanting to study International Relations. I also feel strongly that classics need to be read and engaged with, by bringing them into play in our contemporary dilemmas. I find that many of the questions we ask today are not necessarily entirely new questions: there is a history to them and there has been some careful thought given to them in the past, so it is important to partake of this inheritance.
Then there is language: it is vital for students to break out of one particular region or one particular set of concerns which flow from a limited context, and in this way to become willing to engage with other contexts. In this sense, language learning potentially opens up other worlds. I also believe that some exposure to quantitative methods is important: you need to be able to both contextualize and interpret data with some degree of confidence and not overlook them when approaching texts. Not everybody may choose it but we need to make the distinction between The Signal and the Noise as Nate Silverreminds us. I have found Marc Trachtenberg's The Craft of International History (chapter 1 in PDF here) a very useful text in providing some very practical advice in fine tuning our research designs to weave the past into our present. D.D. Kosambi's essay on 'combining methods' (PDF here) still provides important clues to thinking creatively about method.
I also think it is important for students to avoid the temptations of insularity and also pose questions in a fashion that allows them to explore the workings of these questions in diverse settings. They should be open to a diversity of methods from different disciplines such as ethnography, and develop a deeper historical sensitivity, all these are crucial to shaping up as a good scholar.
In sum, the importance of classics, fieldwork and language acquisition cannot be emphasized sufficiently. Classics bring us back to refined thought concerning enduring questions, language opens up other worlds, and field work compels one to at least temporarily inhabit the trenches, dirty your hands and acquire an earthy sense of the issues at hand.
Given the importance you attach to the learning of language, among other things, and the linguistic diversity that characterises India, do you often perceive language to be a barrier to understanding?
I think language works in two ways. On the one hand, each language has a specific manner of framing issues and a specific set of sensibilities associated with it which in some respects is quite unique. However, languages also lend themselves to different cross-cultural interpretations and adaptations. Kristina S. Ten in an evocative piece titled 'Vehicles for Story: Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o on Defining African Literature,Preserving Culture and Self' maps some key lines of an enduring debate. Thiong'o has a particularly strong position on this question of language: he says he no longer wants to write in the English language, but instead in his native Gikuyu, as well as Swahili. He argues that language has to do with memory, has to do with what he calls a soul, and he maintains that language hierarchies are very real and that we must contribute to enriching our own pools of language to begin with, if we are to contribute to a much wider, global repertoire of languages. In contrast, Chinua Achebe whom I mentioned earlier, very often wrote in English and held the position that it was important to be accessible to more people and to reach diverse audiences who would not necessarily be from his home country. He said it was possible to use a language like English and permeate it with local texture, wisdom and pulse – something he has exemplified in his own work. I consider his writings a testimony to how well that can be done.
So there is a bit of a divide in terms of how one can look at this question of language, but teaching in India I know that there are students who may be very bright but who are constrained by the fact that they have not had the same access to English schools, and therefore are restricted to the vernacular. These students may have some very good ideas, but they feel disadvantaged by the fact that their command of the English language is not sufficient to guarantee close attention to what they wish to say. Some work hard to overcome these challenges and meet with considerable success. While I think it is wonderful to learn another language, it does not need to entail a diffidence or neglect of one's own native language or any other vernacular language. My impression is that if unimaginatively pursued something is lost in the process and students end up feeling diffident and apologetic about their native language which is entirely undesirable. I believe therefore that while one should enthusiastically embrace new languages, the challenge is to accomplish this without unconsciously obscuring one's native tongue. Having said that, all of us in India are keen to go to English language schools. Vernacular languages have often lost out in the process. So there is something to be said about this concern about language. We have to tread carefully and remain attentive to how language hierarchies are positioned and deployed for advancing particular species of knowledge claims.
From the language issues flow conceptual questions: Asia is a Western construct, and South Asia an extension of that. You reluctantly use this term, South Asia, in what you call shorthand, and similarly terms "nation" and "state". How can we break away from these concepts if we don't have a new vocabulary?
This really flows from the fact that IR is still very much an ethnocentric construct. We are also suggesting in the same breath that there is a particular form in which most concepts and categories tend to be employed. I think IR language is imbued at least partly with the vocabulary of the hegemon or of the dominant powers, so that it shares with the area studies' legacy the political connotations that are still very much with us. One way that I try to break away from this when I introduce students to these concepts and categories is by focusing on the lineage and the broader intellectual history and etymology of concepts which come into play in IR. Students are in any case acutely aware of the fact that there is a strong area studies tradition which has mapped the world in a particular way which was not an innocent discursive formation by any stretch of imagination. They also recognize that this is not the only framing possible. The challenge for us is of course to introduce new concepts and categories. I noticed for instance that South Asia has become 'Southern Asia' for some strategic commentators (StevenA. Hoffmann among others) because 'Southern Asia' also includes China. However, when it is done from the perspective of strategy there are other interests intertwined such as specific geopolitical assessments.
What I try to do, rather, is to draw on the deeper histories within the region itself, in order to arrive at concepts and conceptions which are more germane to our context. I don't think I've succeeded in this project as yet, but one of the reasons why I think it's important to historicise these elements and even categories is to open up the possibility of thinking about different imaginaries and along with that different categories. I don't want to call it an alternative vocabulary, because I think that some sensibilities have been given short shrift in history, and some provincial experiences have more successfully masqueraded as universal experiences. Therefore, part of the challenge is to call that bluff, while another part of the challenge is to reconstruct and offer fresh perspectives. These may even be questions about traditional issues such as order or justice, questions of political authority, political rule or legitimacy. These are questions which are of concern to all societies though individual responses may not echo the language and slants of conventional IR theory. However, they may throw up some sophisticated formulations on these very issues. A part of the challenge for the IR scholar, then, is to recover and bring these ideas into the sinews of the mainstream IR academia.
It is equally important to avoid any sort of nativism, or to suggest that this is necessarily 'the best' approach, but to widen the inventory before moving on to stimulating a real conversation between divergent conceptions. We must avoid falling into the trap of what Ulrich Beck among others has referred to as 'methodological nationalism'. I am by no means suggesting that there is 'an Indian theory' of IR, but what I am curious about is how the world is viewed from this particular location. That is quite different from suggesting that there is a national project or a national school of IR. I think that distinction needs to be made more subtly and needs to come through more clearly, but one of the projects I am currently involved in is the chronicling of a disciplinary history of IR in India and what that tells us about Indians and their readings of the world outside their home. In that process, I ask what the key issues that animated particularly an earlier generation of scholars - how did they present these ideas and why did they avoid using certain forms of presentation and framing? What were some of the conspicuous presences and nonappearances in their work? Exploring these sorts of issues will lead us forward by, firstly, bringing to bear all these pieces of work which I feel have been ignored or have not received their due, and secondly, by showing that there is a fair amount of diversity of thinking even in the earlier generations of IR scholarship. The intent is to avoid a monolithic conception of IR that emerges from India. I will have to make this point much more clearly and emphatically in the future, and hope that my focus on disciplinary history will contribute to some critical ground clearing. Similar inventories of IR scholarship need to be assembled in different locations from Africa, South America, other parts of Asia and the Arab world.
Many of these projects then also link up to very practical questions. One of the issues that is of interest to me in this context is that of South-South cooperation, such as for instance the IBSA Dialogue Forum, or the grouping known as BRICS, or the broader forum of the G-20. There is evidence that the traditional structures and ways of doing things are increasingly suspect and being viewed with suspicion by some actors within the international system. It is therefore more important now to reopen some of these questions and to think afresh about such things as institutional design: what does it mean to be talking about "democratising international relations"? How can we think of more inclusive and legitimate institutions? How can we think about ways in which we can cooperate for the provision of global public goods, but in a manner which is historically more legitimate and fair? How can we address previous asymmetries that are not necessarily going to just disappear? How do we deal with old power structures and their residual influences in terms of the Westphalian state system? What legacy has been enshrined for instance in the Bretton Woods institutions and what has that legacy meant? What happened to non-alignment? Vijay Prashad chronicles vividly the promise and unfulfilled promise of the non-aligned movement in his fascinating account titled The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World. How the past plays out in terms of contemporary global governance questions and arrangements is fundamental to my research interests. I have recently intervened on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine and its practice. I have been rather critical arguing that it cannot be disassociated from a longer history of interventionism by the major powers in the global south however benign its dressing. A thread that runs through my work is to demonstrate how historical asymmetry continues to manifest in terms of how the contemporary international system is structured. And I ask if we are to arrive at a more legitimate, inclusive and effective international system, then what are the mechanisms and steps which we need to work towards?
What do you imagine that process might look like? Do we need to return to a 'world of villages' (the 1300s) before we can reinvent IR, the national and the global? Do we need micro histories before we can reassemble a bigger history or is a subtle shift possible?
There are two levels on which this can happen: on one level the changes that seem to work are incremental changes and not lock-stock-and-barrel fundamental changes. In terms of scale, different scholars do different things. Some scholars are interested in micro histories, others are interested in macro histories and asking the big questions.
I imagine both these projects are important and there should be more scholars from the global south as well who ask the big macro questions. What has happened for too long is that we have relegated this responsibility to the traditional post Second World War major powers and they have treated it as natural to offer us macro-historical narratives and pictures. I think scholars from the global south need now to attend to both tasks: to write good micro histories as well as reframe the larger questions of macro history. I would add that normative concerns such as the content and feasibility of global justice needs also to be an integral part of contemporary international relations scholarship. For instance, it would be fair to ask that in a world of plenty, why do so many people go hungry?
So if you were to ask me about my dreams and my hopes, I still think that the 1955 Bandung Conference and subsequent nonalignment visions remain unfinished business. I hope that within the span of the current generation there is greater egalitarianism accomplished in the international system and ultimately a balance not just in terms of what Achebe called the stories of the world, but also in terms of actual institutional designs and political outcomes. This should translate into much better provision of various public goods to global citizenry with special attention to those who have been historically disadvantaged. For assorted reasons there have been deep asymmetries within the international system which have persisted and resulted in diminishing the life chances and collective self-esteem of various peoples in the global south. There is an urgent need to both acknowledge and remedy the situation in the world we live in.
In your experience, what is the role of the IR scholar in India in relation to the foreign policy establishment and the policy makers?
It is quite hard to find traction of one's ideas in terms of any influence of scholars or groups of scholars on the social or political establishment. Overall I would say that academia has for a long time not been taken seriously by the foreign policy establishment, and that has more to do with the institutional structure where there is a pecking order and the bureaucracy sees itself as being better informed. Even in academic conference settings, one could periodically expect a practitioner of foreign policy to argue that they know best having been present at a particular negotiation or at the outbreak, duration and conclusion of any recent episode in diplomatic history. This does not in reality translate into the best knowledge because there is the possibility that besides the immediate detail, the absence of a larger historical context or even unaccounted variables in terms of the contemporary political forces at work during that moment could be blind spots in the narrative. It is fair to say therefore that the influence of academia on the Indian foreign policy establishment by and large has tended to be minimal. However, one could make the argument today that there are some early stirrings of changes in the offing.
Quite evidently, the Indian Foreign Service is far too miniscule for a country of India's size and desired influence in the international system. There is a perceived need from within the foreign policy establishment to draw on expertise from elsewhere and on occasion they do turn to the academia to invite counsel on specific issues. From the perspective of the IR academic, it is perhaps equally important to be not too close to the corridors of power as it could alter the incentive structure to the detriment of independent opinion making for securing short or long term political patronage.
Siddharth Mallavarapu is currently Associate Professor and Chairperson at the Department of International Relations at the South Asian University in New Delhi. He is on deputation from the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He completed his doctoral thesis on the politics of norm creation in the context of an Advisory Opinion rendered by the International Court of Justice in 1996 on nuclear weapon threat or use. This culminated in his first book, Banning the Bomb: The Politics of Norm Creation. His principal areas of academic focus include international relations theory, intellectual histories of the global south, disciplinary histories of IR, global governance debates and more recently the implications of recent developments in the field of cognition on the social sciences. Mallavarapu retains a special interest in issues related to the politics of knowledge and examines the claims advanced in the discipline of International Relations through this perspective. His immediate teaching commitments include a graduate course on 'Cognition and World Politics' and a doctoral level course on 'Advanced Research Methods'. He has co-edited (with Kanti Bajpai) two books on recent Indian contributions to International Relations theory. In 2012 along with B.S. Chimni, he co-edited International Relations: Perspectives for the Global South.
Read Mallavarapu's Dissent of Judge Weeramantry (2006 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Mallavarapu's Indian Thinking in International Relations here (pdf) Read Mallavarapu's Because of America here (pdf) Read Mallavarapu's Nuclear Detonations: Contemplating Catastrophe here (pdf)
