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Twenty years ago at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, countries adopted Agenda 21 — a blueprint to rethink economic growth, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection. Marking that anniversary, this year sees Rio+20, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, with aims to get bold agreements to address things like poverty, sustainable development, decent jobs, etc.This page provides coverage of recent events via Inter Press Service's news feed.Read full article: Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development
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This post is co-authored with Robert Gampfer. *** International climate negotiations have become almost unimaginable without the participation of civil society organizations (CSOs). In 2011, 1490 organizations were accredited as observers; most of which were environmental groups, research institutions, and … Continue reading →
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(This post is co-authored by Patrick Kuhn and Stefanie Walter) The second edition of our introductory textbook to political science was just published. In view of the already saturated market for introductory textbooks to political science, several colleagues asked us: … Continue reading →
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This post is co-authored with Fabio Wasserfallen and is cross-posted (with a different title) at the LSE European Politics and Policy Blog. **** The creation of the single market is widely believed to have strengthened tax competition among European countries; … Continue reading →
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NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis. Their analysis shows temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago.
Global temperatures have warmed significantly since 1880, the beginning of what scientists call the "modern record." At this time, the coverage provided by weather stations allowed for essentially global temperature data. As greenhouse gas emissions from energy production, industry and vehicles have increased, temperatures have climbed, most notably since the late 1970s. In this animation of temperature data from 1880-2011, reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average.
Click on the image to see the video:
Read full article: Global Temperature Anomaly, 1880 - 2011
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A recent study found that coral reefs will face severe challenges even if average global warming temperature rise is restricted to 2 degrees Celsius. This is a rise that most countries are struggling to negotiate and meet. But reefs are very sensitive to temperature changes, experts fear the window of opportunity to prevent massive reef loss is very small.
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The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) recently published new preliminary figures for aid in 2011. It showed official development assistance (ODA) aid from wealthy governments had increased to $133.5 billion in 2011 (at constant 2010 prices). This is roughly 0.31% of GNI (Gross National Income) of the donor nations. But this was also a drop of nearly 3% from the previous year. It was to be expected that the effects of the financial crisis would eventually affect aid. In some respects, the decline is not as bad as it could have been given the conditions in many donor countries.
Yet, over 40 years ago nations promised to reach 0.7% of their GNI by the mid-1970s. While each year the amount of aid falls quite short of that 0.7% target (less than half of that target), the quality and effectiveness of that aid is often questionable, sometimes benefiting the donor more than the recipient due to the types of conditions attached to this aid. This update includes a number of new and updated charts and graphs. Read full article: Foreign Aid for Development Assistance
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An overview of the Climate Change Conference (also known as COP 17), held in Durban, South Africa in December 2011.
Predictably and sadly, the same issues have resurfaced: lack of media coverage, West stalling on doing anything trying to blame India and China instead, lack of funding, disagreement on how to address it, etc.
Geopolitical threats (real and imaginary) quickly focus a lot of political will and money is easily found to mobilize military forces when needed.
The economy also takes center stage as the current pressing issue, while climate change is easily deferred, in the hopes that the West can let China and India pick up the burden of addressing emissions even though they have not contributed to the historical build up of emissions that have started the recent changes in the climate.
This page is an overview of the Durban conference.
Read full article: COP17 - Durban Climate Conference
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What does Transnationalisation do with Sovereignty and the State? Normative Implications and Reconfigurations of Politics at ECPR General Conference 2013 in Bordeaux (Deadline for Paper Proposals: 1st February 2013)
Transnationalization has become a buzz word in research on globalization in political science and neighboring disciplines. Legal scholars debate the transnationalization of law and the emergence of legal arrangements alongside and beyond international law. Similarly, sociologists and historians increasingly emphasize the role of transnational processes in the (re-) shaping of social order.
Most of these approaches define the concept of transnationalization in opposition to state-driven international relations. By the concept of transnationalization they refer to and describe an ever-expanding process in which actors other than states generate and become involved in forms of social organization across and beyond territorial boundaries. In view of this process, scholars across the disciplines raise questions about the present and future of the concept of sovereignty and the national territorial state. While some argue that transnationalization amounts to an erosion of the state and of (state or national) sovereignty, others hold that the function and substance of the state and of sovereignty are altered or disaggregated by this process, but not effaced.
In this panel we wish to take up this debate and discuss the complex relation between sovereignty and transnationalization in an interdisciplinary setting. We assume that a better grasp of the "transnational" and its implications necessitates trans-disciplinary engagement. We wish to bring together scholars from different disciplines for the purpose of debating the question of how the interplay between transnationalization and sovereignty can be conceptualized in historical, sociological, legal and political terms and with what results. To what extent are foundations of modern political normativity renegotiated and contested in the process of transnationalization and how are political concepts (trans-) formed and (re-) appraised in the debate on it? How does this reshape the imaginary of politics?
Panel Chair: Christian Volk, University of Trier
Panel Co-Chair: Friederike Kuntz, University of Trier
Panel Discussant: Hauke Brunkhorst, Flensburg/ Oslo University College
Further information on the conference, the call for papers, and submission process on http://new.ecprnet.eu/Conferences/General/2013_Bordeaux/Default.aspx
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For a while now many European governments have resorted to austerity measures to deal with the recession and financial crises affecting them. This may have either been by choice, or pressured from the outside.
However, as has been warned countless times, excessive austerity rarely works. Furthermore, focusing on debts and deficits appears to miss the point that the economic problems were caused by a collapse in markets and banking sector in particular, resulting in less revenues for governments; not necessarily an excessive overspend by governments.
Some of the policies being forced through even when evidence appears to show they do not work lead many to think that austerity and structural adjustment policies are being ideologically pushed for — just as they were on most of the developing countries for almost 2 decades with devastating results.
Indeed, in the US, investigations have found billionaires pouring hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns to fix the debt making it appear as a grassroots movement. Fixing the debt of course happens to leave the elite less affected, so it works to their advantage to push for something like that.
Without more focus on appropriate economic growth, there is a real risk in going backwards, and even undermining democracy.
The global financial crisis page on this web site has been updated with new sections and videos on this issue.
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Timothy Mitchell on Infra-Theory, the State Effect, and the Technopolitics of Oil
This is the first in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
The unrest in the Arab world put the region firmly in the spotlights of IR. Where many scholars focus on the conflicts in relation to democratization as a local or regional dynamic, political events there do not stand in isolation from broader international relations or other—for instance economic—concerns. Among the scholars who has insisted on such broader linkages and associations that co-constitute political dynamics in the region, Timothy Mitchell stands out. The work of Mitchell has largely focused on highly specific aspects of politics and development in Egypt and the broader Middle East, such as the relations between the building of the Aswan Dam and redistribution of expertise, and the way in which the differences between coal and oil condition democratic politics. His consistently nuanced and enticing analyses have gained him a wide readership, and Mitchell's analyses powerfully resonate across qualitative politically oriented social sciences. In this Talk, Timothy Mitchell discusses, amongst others, the birth of 'the economy' as a powerful modern political phenomenon, how we can understand the state as an effect rather than an actor, and the importance of taking technicalities seriously to understand the politics of oil.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current globally oriented studies? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
I'm not myself interested in, or good at, big debates, the kinds of debates that define and drive forward an academic field. The reason for that is partly that once a topic has become a debate, it has tended to have sort of hardened into a field, in which there are two or three positions, and as a scholar you have to take one of those positions. In the days when I was first trained in Political Science and studied International Relations, that was so much my sense of the field and indeed of the whole discipline of political science. This is part of one's initially training in any field: it is laid out as a serious debate. I found this something I just could not deal with; I did not find it intellectually interesting which I think sort of stayed with me all the way through to where I am now. So although big debates are important for a certain defining and sustaining of academic fields and training new generations of students, it is not the kind of way in which I myself have tended to work. I have tended to work by moving away from what the big debates have been in a particular moment. My academic interests always started when I found something curious that interests me and that I try to begin to see in a different way.
However, I suppose with my most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011), in a sense there was a big debate going on, which was the debate about the resource curse and oil democracy. That was an old debate going back to the 70's, but had been reinvigorated by the Iraq war in 2003. But that to me is an example of the problem with big debates, because the terms in which that debate was argued back and forth—and is still argued—did not seem to make sense as a way to understand the role of energy in 20th century democratic politics. Was oil good for democracy or bad for democracy? The existing debate began with those as two different things—as a dependent or independent variable—so you would already determine things in advance that I would have wanted to open up. In general I'm not a good person for figuring out what the big debates are.
But I think, moving from International Relations as a field to 'globally oriented studies', to use your phrase, one of the biggest challenges—just on an academic level, leaving aside challenges that we face as a global community—is to learn to develop ways of seeing even what seem like the most global and most international issues, as things that are very local. Part of the problem with fields such as 'global studies', the term 'globalization', and other terms of that sort, is that they tend to define their objects of study in opposition to the local, in opposition to even national-level modes of analysis. By consequence, they assume that the actors or the forces that they're going to study must themselves be in some sense global, because that is the premise of the field. So whether it is nation states acting as world powers; whether it is capitalism understood as a global system—they have to exist on this plane of the global, on some sort of universal level, to be topics of IR and global studies. And yet, on close inspection, most of the concerns or actors central to those modes of inquiry tend to operate on quite local levels; they tend to be made up of very small agents, very particular arrangements that somehow have managed to put themselves together in ways that allow them take on this appearance and sometimes this effectiveness of things that are global. I'm very interested in taking things apart that are local, on a particular level, to understand what it is that enables such small things, such local and particular agents, to act in a way that creates the appearance of the global or the international world.
Now this relates back to the second part of your question, about substantive concerns that we face as a global community. When I was writing Carbon Democracy there was all this attention on the problem of 'creating a more democratic Middle East', as it was understood at the time of the Iraq war. It struck me that when debating this problem—of oil and democracy, of energy and democracy—we saw it as somehow specific to these countries and to the part of the world where many countries were very large-scale energy producers. We were not thinking about the fact that we are all in a sense caught up in this problem that I call carbon democracy, and that there are issues—whether it is in terms of the increasing difficulty of extracting energy from the earth, or the consequences of having extracted the carbon and put it up in the atmosphere—that we, as democracies, are very, very challenged by. Those issues—and I think in particular the concerns around climate change—when you look at them from the perspective of U.S. politics, and the inability of the U.S. even to take the relatively minor steps that other industrialized democracies have taken: this inaction suggests a larger problem of oil and democracy that needs explaining and understanding and working on and organizing about. I also think there is a whole range of contemporary issues related to energy production and consumption that revolve around the building of more egalitarian and more socially just worlds. And, again, those issues present themselves very powerfully as concerns in American politics, but are experienced in other ways in other parts of the world. I would not single out any one of them as more urgent or important than another, and I do think we still have a long struggle ahead of us here.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your approach to issues?
Well, I had a strange training as a scholar because I kept shifting fields. I actually began as a student of law and then moved into history while I was still an undergraduate, but then became interested in political theory; decided that I liked it better than political science. But by the time I arrived in political science to study for a PhD, I had become interested in politics of the Middle East. This was partly from just travelling there when I was a student growing up in England, but I also suppose in some ways the events of the seventies had really drawn attention to the region. So the first important thing that shaped me was this constant shifting of fields and disciplines, which was not to me a problem—it was rather that there was a kind of intellectual curiosity that drove me from academic field to field. And so if there was one thing that helped me arrive at where I am, it was this constant moving outside of the boundaries of one discipline and trespassing on the next one—trying to do it for long enough that they started to accept me as someone who they could debate with. And I think all along that has been important to the kind of scholarship I do; yet therefore I would say where I currently am in my thinking about my field is difficult in itself to define. But I think it is probably defined by the sense that there are many, many fields—and it is moving across them and trying to do justice to the scholarship in them, but at the same time trying to connect insights from one field with what one can do in another field. I have always tried to draw things together in that sense, a sense that one can call an interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary sensitivity.
I think the other part of what has shaped me intellectually was that, in ways I explained before, I was always drawn into the local and the particular and the specific and I was never very good at thinking at that certain level of large-scale grand theory. So having found myself in the field of Middle Eastern politics in a PhD-program, and being told that it involves studying Arabic which I was very glad to do, I then went off to spend summers in the Arab world, and later over more extended periods of time for field research. But to me, Egypt and other places I've worked—but principally Egypt—became not just a field site, but a place where I have now been going for more than 30 years and where I have developed very close ties and intellectual relationships, friendships, that I think have constantly shaped and reshaped my thinking. And even when I am reading about things that are not specifically related to Egypt—the work I do on the history of economics, or the work I have done on oil politics that are not directly connected with my research on Egypt—I am often thinking in relation to places and people and communities there that have profoundly shaped me as a scholar.
So traveling across different contexts I'd say I have not developed a kind of set of theoretical lenses I take with me. Rather, I would say I have developed a way of seeing—I would not necessarily call it 'meta', I see it as much more as sort of 'infra': much more mundane and everyday. While I have this sort of intellectual history of moving across disciplines and social sciences in an academic way, there is another sort of moving across fields, another sensibility, and that sensibility provides me with a sense of rootedness or grounding. And that is a more traditional way of moving across fields, because whether when one is writing about contemporary politics or more historically about politics, one is dealing constantly with areas of technical concern of one sort or another, with specialist knowledge. Engaging with that expert knowledge has always provided both a political grounding in specific concerns and with a kind of concern with local, real-world, struggles on the ground. So that might have been things like the transformation of irrigation in nineteenth-century Egypt, or the remaking of the system of law; or it might be the history of malaria epidemics in the twentieth century, or the relationship between those epidemics and transformations taking place in the crops that were grown; or, more recently—and more obviously—of oil and the history of energy, and the way different forms of energy are brought out of the ground. And I should mention beside those areas of technical expertise already listed, economics as well: a discipline I was never trained in, but that I realized I had to understand if I was to make sense of contemporary Egyptian politics—just as much as I had to understand agricultural hydraulics or something of the petroleum geology as a form of technical expertise that is shaping the common world.
In sum, what keeps me grounded is the idea that to really make sense of the politics of any of those fields, one has got to do one's best to sort of enter and explore the more technical level—with the closest attention that one can muster to the technical and the material dimensions of what is involved—whether it is in agricultural irrigation, building dams or combating disease. And entering this level of issues does not only mean interviewing experts but arriving at the level of understanding the disease, the parasite, the modes of its movement, the hydraulics of the river, the properties of different kinds of oil... So as you can see it is not really 'meta', it really is 'infra' in the anthropological way of staying close to the ground, staying close to processes and things and materials.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
A couple of things. I think one is precisely the thing I just mentioned in answer to your last question: that is, the kind of interest in going inside technical processes, learning about material objects, not being afraid of taking up an investigation of something that is a body of knowledge totally outside one's area of training and expertise. So, if I was advising someone or looking for a student, I would not say there is a particular skill or expertise, but rather a willingness to really get one's hands dirty with the messy technical details of an area—and that can be an area of specialist knowledge such as economics, but also technical and physical processes of, for instance, mineral extraction. I think to me this is—for the kind of work I am interested in doing—enormously important.
The other thing that I would stress in the area of globally-oriented studies, is that one could think of two ways of approaching a field of study. One is to move around the world and gather together information, often with a notion of improving things, such as development work, human rights work, international security work. This entails gathering from one's own research and from other experts in the field, with a certain notion of best practices and the state of field, and of what works, and therefore what can then be moved from one place to another as a form of expert knowledge. Some people really want that mobile knowledge, which I suppose is often associated with the ability to generalize from a particular case and to establish more universal principles about whatever the topic is. And in this case one's own expertise becomes the carrying or transmission of that expert knowledge. One saw a lot of that around the whole issue of democratization that I mentioned before in the Middle East, around the Iraq war when experts were brought in. They had done democracy elsewhere in the world and then they turned up to do it in Iraq, and again following the Arab Spring.
Against that, to me, there is another mode of learning, which is not to learn about what is happening but to learn from. So to give the example, if there is an uprising and a struggle for democracy going on in the streets of Cairo, one could try and learn about that and then make it fit one's models and classify it within a broader range of series of democratizations across the world, or one could try and learn from it, and say 'how do we rethink what the possibilities of democracy might be on the basis of what is happening?' To me those are two distinct modes of work. They are not completely mutually exclusive, but I think people are more disposed towards one or the other. I have never been disposed, or good at, the first kind and do like the second, so I would mention that as the second skill or attitude that is useful for doing this sort of work.
In which discipline or field would you situate yourself, or would we have to invent a discipline to match your work?
I like disciplines, but I do not always feel that I entirely belong to any of them. That said, I read with enormous profit the works of historians, political theorist, anthropologists, of people in the field of science and technology studies, geographers, political economists and scholars in environmental studies. There are so many different disciplines that are well organized and have their practitioners from which there is a lot to learn! But conversely, I also think, in ways I have described already, there is something to be learnt for some people from working in a much more deliberately post-disciplinary fashion. The Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department to which I have been attached here in Columbia for about five years, represents a deliberate attempt by myself and my colleagues to produce some kind of post-disciplinary space. Not in order to do away with the disciplines, but to have another place for doing theoretical work, one that is able to take advantage of not being bound by disciplinary fields, as even broad disciplines—say history—tend to restrict you with a kind of positive liberty of creating a place where you can do anything you want—as long as you do it in an archive. I quite deliberately situate myself outside of any one discipline, while continuing to learn from and trespass into the fields of many individual disciplines. They range from all of those and others, because I am here among a community of people who are also philologists; people interested in Arabic literature and the history of Islamic science; and all kinds of fields, which I also find fascinating. The first article I ever published was in the field of Arabic grammar! So I have interests that fit in a very sort of trans-disciplinary, post-disciplinary environment and I thrive on that.
Yet doing this kind of post-disciplinary work is in a practical sense actually absolutely impossible. If only for the simple fact that if it is already hardly possible to keep up with 'the literature' if one is firmly situated within one field, then one can never keep up with important developments in all the disciplines one is interested in. There are some people that manage to do this and do it justice. My information about contemporary debates in every imaginable field is so limited; I do not manage to do justice to any field. In the particular piece of research I might be engaged in, I try to get quickly up to pace on what's going on, and I often come back again and again to similar areas of research. I am currently interested in questions around the early history of international development in the 1940's and 1950's, and that is something I have worked on before, but I have come back to it and I found that the World Bank archives are now open and there is a whole new set of literatures. I had not been keeping up with all of that work. It is hard and that is why I am very bad at answering emails and doing many of the other everyday things that one is ought to do; because it always seems to me, in the evening at the computer when one ought to be catching up with emails, there is something you have come across in an article or footnotes and before you know it you are miles away and it has got nothing to do with what you were working on at the moment, but it really connects with a set of issues you have been interested in and has taken you off into contemporary work going on in law or the history of architecture… The internet has made that possible in a completely new way and some of these post-disciplinary research interests are actually a reflection of where we are with the internet and with the accessibility of scholarship in any field only just a few clicks away. Which on the one hand is fascinating, but mostly it is just a complete curse. It is the enemy of writing dissertations and finishing books and articles and everything else!
What role does expertise, which is kind of a central term in underpinning much of the diverse work or topics you do, play in the historical unfolding of modern government?
That is a big question, so let me suggest only a couple of thoughts here. One is that modern government has unfolded—especially if one thinks of government itself as a wider process than just a state—through the development of new forms of expertise, which among other things define problems and issues upon which government can operate. This can concern many things, whether it is problems of public health in the 19th or 20th century; or problems of economic development in the 20th century; or problems of energy, climate change and the environment today. Again and again government itself operates—as Foucault has taught us—simultaneously as fields of knowledge and fields of power. And the objects brought into being in this way—defined in important ways through the development of expert knowledge—become in themselves modes through which political power operates. Thanks to Foucault and many others, that is a way of thinking or field of research that has been widely developed, even though there are vast amounts of work still to do.
But I think there is another relationship between modes of government and expertise, and this goes back to things I have been thinking about ever since I wrote an article about the theory of the state (The Limits of the State, pdf here) that was published in American Political Science Review a long time ago (1991). The point I made then, is that it is interesting to observe how one of the central aspects of modern modes of power is the way that the distinction between what is the state and what is not the state; between what is public and what is private, is constantly elaborated and redefined. So politics itself is happening not so much by some agency called 'state' or 'government' imposing its will on some other preformed object—the social, the population, the people—but rather that it concerns a series of techniques that create what I have called the effect of a state: the very distinction between what appears as a sort of structure or apparatus of power, and the objects on which that power works.
More recently one of the ways I have thought about this, is in terms of the history of the idea of the economy. Most people think of 'the economy' either as something that has always existed (and people may or may not have realized its existence) or as something that came into being with the rise of political economy and commercial society in the European 18th and 19th century. One of the things I discovered when I was doing research on the history of development, is that no economist talked routinely about an object called 'the economy' before the 1940's! I think that is a good example of the history of a mode of expertise that exists not within the operations of an apparatus of government but precisely outside of government.
If you look in detail at how the term 'the economy' was first regularly used, you find that it was in the context of governing the U.S. in the 1940's immediately after the Second World War. In the aftermath of the war there was enormous political pressure for quite a radical restructuring of American society: there were waves of strikes, demands for worker control of industries, or at least a share of management. And of course in Europe, similar demands led to new forms of economy altogether, in the building of postwar Germany and in the forms of democratic socialism that were experimented with in various parts of Western Europe. As we know, the U.S. did not follow that path. And I think part of the way in which it was steered away from that path, was by constructing the economy as the central object of government, coupled with precisely this American cultural fear of things where government did not belong. So this was radically opposed to how the Europeans related government to economy: European governments had become involved in all kinds of ways, deciding how the relation between management and labor should operate in thinking about prices and wages; instituting forms of national health insurance and health care; and the whole state management of health care itself... Now this was threatening to emerge in the U.S., and was emerging in many ways in the wartime with state control of prices and production. In order to prevent the U.S. from following the European path after the war, this object outside of government with its own experts was created: the economy. And the economists were precisely people who are not in government, but who knew the laws and regularities of economic life and could explain them to people. It is interesting to think about expertise both as something that develops within the state, but also as something that happens as a creation of objects that precisely represent what is not the state, or the sphere of government.
Your most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011) focuses on the political structures afforded, or engendered, by modes of extraction of minerals and investigates how oil was constitutes a dominant source of energy on which we depend. Can you give an example of how that works?
Let me take an example from the book even though I might have to give it in very a simplified form in order to make it work. I was interested in what appeared to be the way in which the rise of coal—the dominant source of energy in the 19th century and in the emergence of modern industrialized states—seemed to be very strongly associated with the emergence of mass democracy, whereas the rise of oil in the 20th century seemed to have if anything the opposite set of consequences for states that were highly dependent on the production of oil. I wanted to examine these relations between forms of energy and democratic politics in a way that was not simply some kind of technical- or energy determinism, because it is very easy to point to many cases that simply do not fit that pattern—and, besides, it simply would not be very interesting to begin with. But it did seem to me, that at a particular moment in the history of the emergence of industrialized countries—particularly in the late 19th century—it became possible for the first time in history and really only for a brief period, to take advantage of certain kinds of vulnerabilities and possibilities offered by the dependence on coal to organize a new kind of political agency and forms of mass politics, which successfully struggled for much more representative and egalitarian forms of democracy, roughly between the 1880's and the mid 20th century. In general terms, that story is known; but it had been told without thinking in particular about the energy itself. The energy was just present in these stories as that which made possible industrialization; industrialization made possible urbanization; therefore you had lots of workers and their consciousness must somehow have changed and made them democratic or something.
That story did not make sense to me, and that prompted me to research in detail, and drawing on the work of others who had looked even more in detail at, the history of struggles for a whole set of democratic rights. The accounts of people at the time were clear: what was distinctive was this peculiar ability to shut down an economy because of a specific vulnerability to the supply of energy. Very briefly, when I switched to telling the story in the middle of the 20th with oil, it is different: partly just because oil was a supplementary source of energy—countries and people now had a choice between different energy sources—but also because oil did not create the same points of vulnerability. There are fewer workers involved, it is a liquid, so it can be routed along different channels more easily; there is a whole set of technical properties of oil and its production that are different. That does not mean to say that the energy is determining the outcome of history or of political struggles, and I am careful to introduce examples that do not work easily one way or the other in the history of oil industry in Baku, which is much more similar to the history of coal or the oil industry in California for that matter. But you can pay attention to the technical dimensions in a certain way, and the to the sheer possibilities that arise with this enormous concentration of sources of energy—which reflects both an exponential increase in the amount of energy but also an unprecedented concentration of the sites at which energy is available and through which it flows—that you can tell a new story about democratic politics and about that moment in the history of industrialized countries, but also the subsequent history in oil-producing countries in a different way. That would be an example of how attention for technical expertise translates into a different understanding of the politics of oil.
This leads to my next question, which is how do you speak about materials or technologies without falling into the trap of either radical social reductionism or a kind of Marxist technological determinism? Do you get these accusations sometimes?
Yes, I think so, but more so from people who have not read my work and who just hear some talks about it or some secondary accounts. To me, so much of the literature that already existed on these questions around oil and democracy, or even earlier research on coal, industrialization and democracy, suffered from a kind of technical determinism because they actually did not go into the technical. They said: 'look, you've got all this oil' or 'look, you had all that coal and steam power' and out of that, in a very determinist fashion, emerged social movements or emerged political repression. This was determinist because such accounts had actually jumped over the technical side much too fast: talking about oil in the case of the resource curse literature, it was only interested in the oil once it had already become money. And once it was money, then it of course corrupts, or you buy people off, or you do not have to seek their votes. The whole question of how oil becomes money and how you put together that technical system that turns oil into forms of political power or turns coal into forms of political power, does not get opened up. And that to me makes those arguments—even though there is not much of the technical in them—technically very determinist. Because as soon as you start opening up the technical side of it, you realize there are so many ways things can go and so many different ways things can get built. Energy networks can be built in different ways and there can be different mixes of energy. Of course most of the differences are technical differences, but they are also human differences. It is precisely by being very attentive to the technical aspects of politics—like energy or anything else, it could be in agriculture, it could be in disease, it could be in any area of collective socio-technical life—that one finds the only way to get away from a certain kind of technical determinism that otherwise sort of rules us. In the economics of growth, for instance, there is this great externality of technological change that drives every sort of grand historical explanation. Technology is just something that is kept external to the explanatory model and accounts for everything else that the model cannot explain. That ends up being a terrible kind of technical determinism.
The other half of the question is how this might differ from Marxist approaches to some of these problems. I like to think that if Marx was studying oil, his approach would be very little different. Because if you read Marx himself, there is an extraordinary level of interest in the technical; that is, whether in the technical aspects of political economy as a field of knowledge in the 19th century, or in the factory as a technical space. So, conventional political economy to him was not just an ideological mask that had to be torn away so that you could reveal the true workings of capitalism. Political economy has produced a set of concepts—notions of value, notions of exchange, notions of labor—that actually formed part of the technical workings of capitalism. The factory was organized at a technical level that had very specific consequences. The trouble with a significant part of Marx's theories is that he stopped doing that kind of technical work and Marxism froze itself with a set of categories that may or may not have been relevant to a moment of 19th century capitalism. There is still a lot of interesting Marxist theory going on, and some of the contemporary Italian Marxist theory I find really interesting and profitable to read, for example. Some of the work in Marxist geography continues to be very productive. But at the same time there are aspects of my work that are different from that—such as my drawing on Foucault in understanding expertise and modes of power.
How come so many of the social sciences seem to stick so rigidly to the human or social side of the Cartesian divide? It seems to be constitutive of social science disciplines but on the other hand also radically reduces the scope of what it can actually 'see' and talk about.
I think you are right and it has never made much sense to me. I suppose I have approached it in two kinds of ways in my work. First, this kind of dualism was much more clearly an object of concern in some of the early work I published on the colonial era, including my first book, Colonising Egypt (1988), where I was trying to understand the process by which Europeans had, as it were, come to be Cartesians; had come to see the world as very neatly defined it into mind on the one hand and matter or on the other—or, as they tended to think of it, representations on the one hand and reality on the other. And I actually looked in some detail, at the technical level, at this—beginning with world exhibitions, but moving on to department stores and school systems and modern legal orders—to understand the processes by which our incredibly complicated world was engineered so as to produce the effect of this world divided into the two—of mind or representation or culture on the one hand, and reality, nature, material on the other.
Second, what were the effects, what were the repetitive practices, that made that kind of simple dualism seem so self-evident and taken for granted? All that early work still informs my current work, although I do not necessarily explore this as directly as I did. One of the things I try to do is avoid all the vocabulary that draws you into that kind of dualism. So, nowhere when I write, do I use a term like 'culture', because you are just heading straight down that Cartesian road as soon as you assume that there is some hermetic world of shared meanings—as opposed to what? As opposed to machines that do not involve instructions and all kinds of other things that we would think of as meaningful? So I just work more by avoiding some of the dualistic language; the other kind would be the entire set of debates—in almost every discipline of the social sciences—around the question of 'structure versus agency' which just doesn't seems to me particularly productive. And I have been very lucky, recently, in coming across work in the fields of science and technology studies, because it is a field of people studying machines, studying laboratories and studying people, a field that took nature itself as something to be opened-up and investigated. In taking apart these things, they realized that those kinds of dualisms made absolutely no sense. And they have done away with them in their modes of explanation quite a long time ago. So there was already a lot in my own work before I encountered Science and Technology Studies (STS) that was working in that direction; but the STS people have been at it for a long time and figured out a lot of things that I had only just discovered.
Can you explain why it seems that perhaps implicitly decolonization, or the postcolonial moment—which is understood within political science and in development literature as a radical moment of rupture in which a complete transfer of responsibility has taken place, instituted in sovereignty—is an important theme in your work?
I have actually been coming back to this in recent work, because I am currently looking again at that moment of decolonization in Egypt. The period after World War II, around the 1952 revolution and the debacle around the building and the financing of the Aswan Dam, constitutes a wonderful way to explore questions on how much change decolonization really engendered and to see how remarkably short-lived that sort of optimism about decolonization, meaning a transfer of responsibility and sovereignty, actually was. Of course decolonization did transfer responsibility and sovereignty in all kinds of ways, but then that was exactly the problem for the former colonial regimes: because, from their perspective, then, how were all the people who had profited before from things like colonialism to continue to make profits? The plan to build the High Dam at Aswan—although there has always been Egyptians interested in it—initially got going because of some German engineering firms… For them, there was no opportunity in doing any kind of this large-scale work in Europe at the time because of the dire economic situation there. But they knew that Egypt had rapidly growing revenues from the Suez Canal and so they got together with the British and the French, and said: let's put forward this scheme for a dam so that we can recycle those revenues—particularly the income from the Suez Canal, which was about to revert to Egyptian ownership—back into the pockets of the engineering firms, or of the banks that will make the loans and charge the fees. And that is where the scheme came from. Then the World Bank got involved, because it too had found it had got nothing to do in Europe in the way of development and reconstruction, so it invented this new field of development. And it became a conduit to get the Wall Street banks involved as well. And the whole thing became politicized and led to a rupture, which provided then the excuse for another group, the militarists, the MI6 people, to invade and try to overthrow Nasser. So just in the space of barely four years from that moment of decolonization, Egypt had been reinvaded by the French, the British, working with the Israelis, and had to deal with the consequences and the costs of destroyed cities and military spending. That is an example of how quickly things went wrong; but also of how part of their going wrong was in this desperate attempt by a series of European banks and engineering firms trying to recover the opportunities for a certain profit-making and business that they had enjoyed in the colonial period and now they suddenly were being deprived of.
Last question. Has your work helped you make sense of what is currently going on in Egypt and would you shine your enlightened light on that a bit? Not on the whole general situation but perhaps on parts which are overlooked or which you find particularly relevant.
May be in a couple of aspects. One of them is this kind of very uneasy and disjunctive assemblage relationship between the West and forms of political Islam. It sometimes seemed shocking and disturbing and destabilizing that the political process in Egypt led to the rise and consolidation of power of the Muslim Brotherhood. But of course the U.S. and other Western powers have had a very long relationship going back at least to the 1950's—if not before—with exactly these kinds of political forces or people who were locally in alliance with them, in places like Saudi Arabia. I have a chapter in Carbon Democracy that explores that relationship and its disjunctions. And I think it is important to get away from the notion that is just a sort of electoral politics and uneasy alliances, but it is actually the outcome of a longer problem. Both domestically within the politics in the Arab states, of how to found a form of legitimacy that does not seem to be based on close ideological ties with the West, but at the same time operates in such in a way, that in practical terms, that kind of alliance can work. So that would be one aspect of it, to have a slightly longer-term perspective on those kinds of relationships and how disjunctively they function.
The other thing, drawing it a little more directly on some of the work on democracy in Carbon Democracy, is that so much of the scholarship on democracy is about equipping people with the right mental tools to be democrats; the right levels of trust or interpersonal relations or whatever. There is a very different view in my book, that the opportunities for effective democratic politics require very different sets of skills and kinds of actions—actions that are much more as it were obstructionist, and forms of sabotage, quite literally, in the usage of the term as it comes into being in the early 20th century to describe the role of strikes and stoppages. These are, I attempt to show, the effective tools to leverage demands for representation in more egalitarian democratic politics. I have been very interested in the case of Egypt, in the particular places and points of vulnerability, that gave rise to the possibility of sabotage. For instance, one of the less noted aspects of the Egyptian revolution in general, was the very important role played by the labor movement; this was not just a Twitter or Facebook revolution, but that was important as well. Although the labor movement was very heavily concentrated in industries—in the textile industry—the first group of workers who actually successfully formed an independent union were the property tax collectors. And there is a reason for that: there was a certain kind of fiscal crisis of the state—which had to do with declining oil revenues and other things—and there was the attempt to completely revise the tax system and to revise it not around income tax—because there were too few people making a significant income to raise tax revenues—but around property taxes. And that was a point of vulnerability and contestation that produced not just some of the first large-scale strikes but strikes that were effective enough that the government was forced to recognize a newly independent labor movement. This case is an instance of how the kind of work I did in the book might be useful for thinking about how the revolutionary situation emerged in Egypt.
Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian. His areas of research include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Much of his current work is concerned with ways of thinking about politics that allow material and technical things more weight than they are given in conventional political theory. Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. At Columbia he teaches courses on the history and politics of the Middle East, colonialism, and the politics of technical things.
Related links:
Faculty Profile at Colombia University Read Mitchell's Rethinking Economy (Geoforum 2008) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics (The American Political Science Review 1991) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's McJihad: Islam and the U.S. Global Order (Social Text 2002) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The Stage of Modernity (Chapter from book 'Questions of Modernity', 2000) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The World as Exhibition (Chapter from book 'Colonising Egypt' 1991) here (pdf)
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Lessons from the International Criminal Court and the Special Court for Sierra Leone
Conference 3,4 May 2012 Freetown, Sierra Leone
International criminal justice has become a weapon in political struggles in different African states. International court and tribunals, whilst often portrayed as legal bastions immune from politics, have proven to be inherently political. Depending on the definition of what counts as 'political', the politics of international criminal justice can be found at different levels. For instance, international criminal courts are created by political decisions, adjudicate crimes which are frequently related to politics, and depend on a mysterious and seemingly magical 'political will' for the enforcement of their decisions. Moreover, recent studies have shown how the International Criminal Court has become implicated in political struggles by making a distinction between the friends and enemies of the international community which it purports to represent.
This conference studies the politics of international criminal justice at these different stages. Some of the main questions include: • How should the politics of international criminal justice be conceptualized? What theoretical approaches are helpful in articulating the political aspects of criminal courts and tribunals? • What lessons can be learned from experiences in countries affected by interventions of international criminal courts? What is the political role of international criminal courts in countries such as Sierra Leone, Uganda, Congo, Sudan, Central African Republic or Kenya? • How can we improve the accountability of those engaged in the politics of international criminal justice?
The conference brings together academics from different disciplines, including international law and political science, and practitioners in the field of law and politics (including diplomats, politicians, judges, legal counsels). While its main focus is on the International Criminal Court and the Special Court for Sierra Leone, contributions from other areas of international criminal justice are welcomed as well.
Submissions and selection If you would like to participate in the conference, please send us a 500-750 words abstract of the paper you plan to present before February 1st 2012. We will select a maximum of 10 papers that can be presented at the conference. Early submissions are welcomed. If you are invited to present, we would like to receive a short position paper two weeks before the conference. The position paper should be max. 2500 words, outlining the main argument.
Please send your paper proposal to: Prof. dr. W.G. Werner w.werner@rechten.vu.nl
Conference fee The fee for the conference is 100 Euro. The money from the fees will be used to provide financial support for scholars or practitioners from (West-)African countries coming to the conference. If you would like to receive such support, please let us know before February 15th 2012. Attendees from African countries are entitled to a waiver of the fee.
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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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For a few years now, many of you will have heard us mention the need for a new section at the ISA, one in which there would be a room for historical pieces which engage with international issues in a broad sense. We hereby ask for your support for a new section at the ISA entitled Historical International Relations by signing the online petition at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/hir/, and forwarding this email to colleagues you think will have an interest in supporting the section.
As you may all have noticed, there seems to be an increasing interest in historical scholarship in the discipline, an interest which is largely reflected in papers and panels presented at the conferences. However, these historical engagements appear in general in a host of different guises, sponsored (sometimes halfheartedly) by different existing sections. Some are sponsored by International Security, others by Diplomatic Studies, while more still have found shelter in the English School Section. While some may not see this as a problem, as it forces historical scholarship to engage with other sections of the discipline, we nevertheless think this situation requires a new section at the ISA.
The idea of a new section is not for historical scholarship to colonize the ISA. We do not see such a section becoming one of the leading sections of the ISA. Rather, we see it as carving out a modest space for scholars who engage historically to work together, meet, and engage with each other's work without having to pretend to be talking about something else. This common space would allow for conversations across sub-disciplinary boundaries, conversations which are difficult to carry out within many of the other sections of the ISA, and it should thus also increase the overall cohesiveness of the discipline. Rather than fragmenting the discipline, we think a Historical International Relations Section will contribute to increased intra-disciplinary dialogue.
It is important for us to emphasize too that this is not meant to be a section for international history. What we think we have identified, is that to the extent that IR scholars engage historically, they do so as "merry amateurs" rather than professional historians. It is this spirit of collegial openness and inclusion as well as intellectual curiosity which we would like to foster by creating a new section.
In short, we see the founding of a new Historical International Relations section as a way to create a space for this type of scholarship, but also legitimize efforts to address IR historically, as it would make these topics interesting in their own right, and not because of their potential relevance for the other sections.
Thank you for supporting the new section and for forwarding the email.
We look forward to seeing you at the inaugural section meeting in the near future.
Best wishes,
Benjamin de Carvalho, NUPI
Daniel Green, University of Delaware
Halvard Leira, NUPI
Daniel Nexon, Georgetown University Andrea Paras, University of Guelph
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Ned Lebow on Drivers of War, Cultural Theory, and IR of Foxes and Hedgehogs
Drawing on classical political theories, International Relations is dominated by theories that presuppose interests or fear as dominant drivers for foreign policy. Richard Ned Lebow looks further back into the history of ideas to conjure up a more varied set of drives that underpin political action. In this Talk, Lebow, among others, elaborates on the underpinnings of political action, discusses how war drives innovations in IR theorizing in the 20th century, and likens himself to a fox, rather than a hedgehog.
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?
Well, the big challenge in international politics is always how do we keep from destroying one another and that's the negative question. But it is mirrored by a positive question which is, how do we build community and tolerance and peace? And that's not exactly the flip side, but that's always been the big question in IR. And part of that, I think, is how we learn to manage threatening change. Because in my perspective, that's the driving force of conflict: ultimately, both World Wars can be attributed to modernization and its destabilizing consequences. That is also the reason why it is a falsehood to base theory on that little select slice of history during the World Wars, extrapolate it, and try to think its universal. Yet that is what IR theory does: so many theorists, and so many of the people you recently interviewed, are guilty of doing that. So that's the big question and certainly, that's what drove me to study IR in the hope that I could make some small contribution to figuring out some of the answers or partial answers to these questions.
If we turn to what the central debate should be in International Theory, well, I would frame this in two parts: the first should be 'what are the different ways in which we can conceive of international theory and how, by all of us pursuing it the way we feel comfortable with, we can enrich the field without throwing bric-a-brac at each other and find ways of learning from each other?'
A few years ago, I edited a book with Mark Lichbach (Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics and International Relations) as a rejoinder to King, Keohane and Verba's book, which we found deeply offensive. It has the narrowest framework and then they base their understanding on the Vienna school yet they seem to have forgotten that Hempel and Popper would disavow the positions that King, Keohane and Verba (KKV) are anchoring themselves in as epistemologically primitive. And the very examples they give to illustrate 'good science'—Alvarez and his groupaddressing the problem of dinosaur extinction—they fail to see that what these people did was in fact code on the dependent variable, which is the big no-no for KKV! And the reason why Alvarez et al were taken seriously, was not because they went through the order of research that KKV promoted, but rather because they came up with an explanation for a phenomenon that people have long known about—yet explanations don't figure at all in KKV's take; they had no interest in mechanisms, it was all narrow correlations. It's absurd! So we edited the book, and we invited people who represented different perspectives, but all of whom had evidence and struggled to make sense of the evidence, to talk to one another and to look at the problems they themselves find in their positions and how one could learn broadly from considering this. That's the kind of debate that seems to me is a useful one. Not who is right or wrong, but how can we learn collectively. And secondly, I think maybe we need fewer debates, and more good research.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?
I suppose it's a combination of people, books, and events, and being a dog that constantly gnaws on bones and works it through. Very clearly the Second World War and the Cold War were what brought me to the study of IR. I'm sure in their absence, considering the counterfactual, I would have gone into Astrophysics, which was the other field that really interested me.
I think the first concrete influence was as an undergraduate and then as a graduate, being struck by certain individuals whose minds seemed to sparkle; and I admired them for that and they became role models. And I would make myself, intellectually, a little Hans Morgenthau, a little Karl Deutsch; see the world through their eyes, and play with it. I never really wanted to make myself into them, but rather to benefit by seeing what the world was like when seen through their eyes. So in this sense, let me go back and draw on Boswell, Hughes, and Mill for my answer. They all conceived of identity as something that's a process of self-fashioning in which we mix and match the characteristics that we observe in other people. And the purpose of society is to throw up these role models and provide interaction with them so that we can constantly be engaging in self-fashioning. And ultimately, we create something that's novel that other people want to emulate or reject, as the case may be. And I think that mixing and matching, and ultimately creating a synthesis of my own, I developed my own approach to things.
The second element of this is to pick problems that engage me, and stick with them. My first book in IR was about international crises and I worked on this, it must have been 8, possibly even 9 years. I started out initially convinced that deterrence theory made sense but wouldn't fit the historical evidence. Then one day, while playing around, I realized the theory was wrong and by reversing it, I could understand why it didn't work and see there were very different dynamics at play. So working on a problem constantly and going back and forth between theory and empirical findings, you gradually develop your own sense of the field.
It also helps, over the course of an intellectual lifetime, to work on different kinds of problems: I've just finished a book on the politics and ethics of identity; I finished a manuscript up for review on the nature of causation and different takes on cause; and the previous two books were on counterfactuals and the origins of war. And I learned something theoretically and methodologically by throwing myself into these problems and also, in some cases, by going beyond what one would normally consider the domain of IR to look for answers. I've often done philosophy and literature in the identity book. I also go to musical texts: I have a reading of the Mozart Da Ponte Operas as a deliberate thought experiment to test out ancient regime and enlightenment identities under varying circumstances to expose what's wrong with them and to work toward a better approach of Così fantutte. And I read the music, not only the libretti, to get at an answer. Of course, when you've been doing it a long time, it keeps you alive and alert when you look at something new. I'm just finishing my 46th year of University teaching. It's a long time!
Thirdly, there were a few pivotal books. I read George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in the early 50s. Both of those were very powerful books. I also read in about 1950 - Life Magazine produced a large volume on WWII and it had fabulous photographs and of course Life was famous, Robert Capa's photographs, and the text by John Dos Passos. A big big book that I read and re-read and that was a powerful influence on me. I'd say the Diary of Anne Frank, when it came out, which was not all that dissimilar but had a different ending from my own war experience, and then in high school I read, or struggled to read—I don't think I understood it—Ideology and Utopia (full text here) by Karl Mannheim, and then I read Politics among Nations and the Twenty Year's Crisis. And both those books made enormous sense to me at the time. But I think the book that over the course of my lifetime has had the most influence on me of anything is Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War (read full text here).
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I am tempted to give you a flippant answer that an expert is somebody from out of town; what used to be with slides would now be with a PowerPoint presentation. I think frankly you need to do two things: you need to be analytically sophisticated and original on the one hand, but to do it well, you have to have an empirical base. There has to be some problem or set of problems that you've rolled up your sleeves, looked at the data, talk to the people who are on the ground doing these things, and you need to go back and forth between that empirical knowledge and conceptual one. That's success as a social scientist.
And traditionally, there's always been another key. You must have one foot in society in which you belong and another foot outside so you can do it as an outsider as well as an insider. That's terribly important. I think, in this sense, that Americans are more parochial than other people. They are good insiders but they are not very good outsiders and they just don't understand the rest of the world and when you read what they write about the rest of the world, you wonder what planet they are living on. If you don't see the rest of the world, you can't look at the America from another perspective. It's like people who take hegemony seriously; it's like believing in Santa Claus, except Santa Claus is benign. To gain a deep experience of the world in itself is a pre-requisite. Do a year abroad in some other culture. Learn a language. Have a relationship with someone from a different culture—you begin to learn the languages and all the rest will come. That's the way to start.
You are most famous to most people for your Cultural Theory of International Relations (2008). What does it comprise and can you say something about its classical roots?
I return to classical theory of conflict and cooperation because I find that in modern theory, all drives of human action have been reduced to appetite, and reason to mere instrumentality. The Greeks, by contrast, believed there were several fundamental drives—drives that affected politics—and while these included appetite, they weren't just appetite. Reason was more than instrumentality; it also had the goal of understanding what led to a happy life; then, next to reason and appetite, the third drive was spirit or self-esteem (the Greek thumos), which is very different and often opposed to appetite. It is about winning the approbation of others to feel good about ourselves. The difference between honor and standing—two variants of self-esteem—is that honor is status achieved within a fixed set of rules, while standing is whenever you achieve status by whatever means.
Now most existing IR theories are either only built on appetites—as liberalism and Marxism—or fear. And for the Greeks fear is not a human drive but a powerful emotion which can become a motive. And when reason loses control over either appetite or spirit, people begin to worry about their own ability to satisfy their appetites, their spirit, or even protect themselves physically. That's when fear becomes a powerful motive. Realism is of course the paradigm developed around fear. I differ in that my theory recognizes multiple motives, that are active to varying degrees at different times. They don't blend the way a solution does in chemistry, but they retain their own characteristics, even if jumbled together. So my theory expects to see quite diverse and often conflicting behavior, whereas other theories only pay attention to state behavior that seems to support their theory, and feel the need to explain away other behavior inconsistent with their theory. I revel in these variations. Second, I vary in describing what derives from these motives as (Weberian) ideal types—which means, something you don't encounter in the real world, but rather, an abstraction, a fictional or analytical description, that helps to make sense of the real world but never maps onto it exactly. So, a fear-based world gives you a very nice description of a foundation of anarchy. But of course this is an ideal-type world. Fear is only one motive. You have go to a place where civil order has broken down, like Somalia or the trenches in WWII, to see fear-based models compete.
Starting from these three motives and the emotion of fear, I argue that each of these generates a very different logic of cooperation, conflict and risk-taking; and each is associated with a different kind of hierarchy. And all of them except fear rely on a different principle of justice. Just to give an example: for actors—whether individuals or states—driven by self-esteem, they tend to be risk prone (because honor has to be won by successfully overcoming ordeals and challenges); it leads to a conflictual logic because you are competing with others for honor; and it can be rule-based (although the rules can brake down and move into fear); and the principle is one of fairness, in contrast to interest or appetite which has a principle of equality. The hierarchy is one of clientelism, where people honor those at the top, which, in return, provides practical benefits for those on the bottom. The Greeks called this hegemonia; the Chinese had a similar system.
But because any actual system is not an ideal type, we have to figure out what that mixture is and we can begin to understand foreign policies. And I try to give numerous examples in the book. And the big turning point, I argue, is modernity, where it becomes more difficult to untangle the motives and their discourses. Because in modernity both Rousseau and Adam Smith try to understand why we want material things, so the two become connected. You could argue that even in Egyptian times they were connected, in the pyramids, which are nothing if not erections of self-esteem. But it becomes more difficult and so, rather than saying, using literary texts, artistic works and political speeches as a way of determining the relationship, I approached the problem differently with the examples of the World Wars, the Cold War, and the Anglo-American Invasion of Iraq. I said let's run a test of seeing how carefully we can explain the origins and the dynamics of these conflicts on the basis of interest, on the basis of fear, on the basis of self-esteem. And I think that's methodologically defensible.
Now the interesting point is that the honor or self-esteem explanation is gone completely from modern IR explanations but does at least just a good a job—if not better—at explaining these conflicts I mention above. There is an important sense—and this is my latest book—in which going to war was the dominant way to get recognized as a great power, and I feel that the example of the war in Iraq illustrates that that principle is on the retreat.
I obviously use Greek thinking as a source here of—again, I wouldn't use the word knowledge—but as a source of insight into human nature and the recurring problems regardless of society. Some of the great writers and thinkers cannot be surpassed as sources of knowledge that we as social scientists are shadows on the cave by comparison. And I find the Greeks particularly interesting for several reasons. One, they had a richer understanding of the psyche that moderns who have adduced everything to appetite and reason to a mere instrumentality, this is, to me, an incredibly narrow, crude way of thinking of the human mind. And, for whatever reason, they were gifted with tragedians who pierced to the core of things. So I find them as a source of inspiration but it's by no way limited to the Greeks. You can pick great authors from any culture, in any century, and read them and learn a lot.
How should we understand your cultural theory of international relations in relation to the 'big' paradigms?
My theory is constructivist, at every level. I can go even further and claim that my theory is the only constructivist theory. Alexander Wendt is not a constructivist. If anything, he's a structural liberal. It did have preexisting identities and has a teleology as he believes a Kantian world is inevitable— that's quite a statement to make! And I hope he's right. On the other hand, I define constructivists in a broader way. Most constructivists start with identities and identities are certainly an important feature of my work, but my theory rests on a different premise, and that is the notion of there being certain core values which are germane to politics, and they vary in relative importance from society to society, and they find expression in different ways. So it is constructivist, I think, in the Weberian sense: we have to understand from within the culture what makes things meaningful. And, in that sense, you could bring in the notion of inter-subjective reality, but I go beyond it, because other values are always present in this mix and therefore there's behavior that appears contradictory that is often misunderstood if you apply the wrong lens to it. So there's a lack of interdisciplinary understanding as well: you have to look at both to see how the world works. So cultural theory is constructivist and it allows us to reframe and expand what constructivism means.
If I apply this constructivist thinking to one of the core principles in our approach to world politics: what is a cause? I start by asking, what does 'cause' mean, in physics? Why physics? Because physics is always the field that political scientists look at, we have 'physics envy', so to speak. And interestingly, in physics, there is no consensus about what cause means. Some physicists think that very notion of cause is unhelpful to what they do. Others are happy with regularities and subscribe to causal thinking. Still others thing that you need to have mechanisms to explain anything. Still others, and here statistical mechanics can be taken as a case in point, invoke Kantian understandings of cause. Within physics there's no argument between people adhering to these different understandings of 'cause', because you should do what works! They don't criticize one another. So if they have this diversity, why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we develop understandings of cause that are most appropriate to what we do? So I develop an understanding I call 'inefficient causation' (download full paper here), sort of playing off of Aristotle. And it is a constructivist understanding, but it also incorporates elements that are distinctively non-constructivist. And identities are only a small piece of the puzzle.
Is there any sense to make of the way IR has evolved over the 20th century?
I think if you look at some of the central figures, it's quite easy. There are 2 great cohorts of International Relations theorists. Those born in the early years of the 20th century comprise Hans Morgenthau, John Hertz, E.H. Carr, Harold Lasswell, Nicholas Spykman, Frederick Schuman, and Karl Deutsch—who was on my dissertation committee together with Isaiah Berlin and John Hertz. The second cohort is born between about 1939 and 1945, and it comprises Robert Jervis (Theory Talk #12), Joseph Nye (Theory Talk #7), Robert Keohane (Theory Talk #9), Oren Young, Peter Katzenstein (Theory Talk #15), Stephen Krasner (Theory Talk#21), Janice Steinberg… And I'll tell you what I think the reasons are for these groups to emerge at these particular moments: the first cohort lived through World War I. And did so, fortunately, in at an age where they were too young to be combatants for the most part, but they certainly had to deal intellectually and personally with its consequences and then watch the horrors unfold of the 1930s.
And the second, my own, cohort was born at the outset of the Second World War. I think, in that group, I may be the only one of them born in Europe (France). The rest of them were born in the US. And we came of age during the most acute crisis of the cohort. So I was either in university or graduate school during the Berlin crisis, during the Cuba crisis, and certainly had an interest first in the consequences of WWII and how something like this could happen, and then living through the horrors of the Cold War, not knowing if indeed one would live through them. And that created a very strong incentive and focus for our group of people. Now a surprising number of this second group did their graduate studies at Yale: Janice Stein, I, Oren Young, Bruce Russet, Krasner, later all at Yale with Karl Deutsch. The rest, Jervis, Keohane and Krasner at Harvard with Samuel Huntington. I think you have the odd person who's born somewhere in between – so, Ken Waltz (Theory Talk #40), for instance, is younger. He must be a 1920 person, almost exactly in between these two, just as Ernst Haas.
And I wouldn't be surprised now if there is another cohort emerging, the people of around the age of Stefano Guzinni, Jens Bartelson, Patrick Jackson (Theory Talk #44). What ties this third cohort together is that they all watched the end of the Cold War and are coping with its aftermath. So I believe that it's probably two things: the external environment and the extent to which you're in an intellectually nurturing institution. And of course for our cohort, it certainly helped that there were jobs. That was not true of the earlier cohort. Almost all of them, except E.H. Carr, ended up in the US as refugees. Did you know Morgenthau started as an elevator boy in New York? Then he got a job teaching part-time at Brooklyn College because someone fell ill. His wife cleaned other people's apartments to supplement their income. Then he got a job at the University of Kansas City, which was a hellhole, and finally Harold Lasswell got called to Washington for some war work and got Chicago to hire Morgenthau to replace him.
What is the issue with the discipline today if, as you noted before, we fail to ask the most interesting questions and instead focus on method?
Well, it of course depends on which side of the pond you sit. On the American side of the pond, positivist or game-theoretical behaviorist or rationalist modeling approaches dominate the literature; it's just silly, from my perspective. It's based on assumptions which bear no relationship to the real world. People like it because it's intellectually elegant: they don't have to learn any languages, they don't have to read any history, and they can pretend they're scientists discussing universals. Intellectually, it's ridiculous. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (Theory Talk #31) is a classic case in point. He's made a huge reputation for himself with The War Trap (1981). That book and the corresponding theory are based on a simple assumption, namely, that there's a war trap compelling states into war, because initiators win wars. But just look at the empirical record from 1945 to the present—initiators lose between 80-90% of the wars they start. And that really depends on the definition of victory. If you use the real definition, the Clausewitzian one, you have to ask: do they achieve their political goals through violence? Then the answer is, even fewer "victories". Well, let's cut them some slack, use a more relaxed definition: did they beat the other side militarily? Initiators still lose 78 or 82%—I forget exactly which percentage of their wars. And the profession right now is so ignorant of history that nobody said 'Wait a minute!' the day the book came out. Instead IR scholars all focus on this model and fine-tuning it—it's ridiculous! And well, I don't want to go on with a critique, but this is a serious problem, for it concerns a huge misunderstanding regarding one of the most important problems out there.
But what happens now is this kind of thinking metastasizes throughout the discipline because what students in International Relations or Political Science more generally are taught are calculus, statistics—and I'm not against this, one should learn them; I use them myself when I wear my psychologist hat and do quantitative research and statistical analysis—but they don't learn languages, they don't learn history, they don't learn philosophy. They are so narrow! Much of this of course has to do with the reward structure in the United States. It's clear that the statistical scientists are at the top of the hill. So, economists transform themselves into scientists; but the social scientists copy them because there are clear institutional rewards. If you look at our salaries in comparison to the salaries of anthropologists, historians—then if you sit at the edge of your chair and look over the abyss you might see the humanists down there in terms of what they get. So very clearly, there are strong institutional rewards. Once the positivist crowd got a lock on various foundations and journals, if you want a job, if you want to rise up through the profession, students tell me you have to do this stuff. IR graduate students are bricklayers that get turned out of these universities. That's the tragedy! It's no longer a serious intellectual enterprise. It's not connected to anything terribly meaningful.
And mind you, I must say, while on the other, European, side of the pond there is more diversity (one of the reasons I feel more comfortable here), at the same time there is a strong tendency to go for a certain heavy-handed brand of post-modernism. If you don't start an article with a genuflection to Foucault or De Saussure or Derrida, you don't get published. And by not looking beyond these 20th century thinkers, people in Europe are often given credit for inventing things which were common knowledge for hundreds and hundreds of years. Utterly ridiculous. But in between, there are of course people who are trying to make sense of the world, including many people in the positivist tradition who are doing good quantitative research and trying to address serious problems in the world. The difficulty is that these two extremes are often people who approach IR as a religion and they think that their way of doing research is the only way and they have no respect for others. And that's a kind of arrogance to which, to me, is a violation of what the university is all about.
Ultimately, what is good theory? One approach would be to say that a good theory is one that appears to order a domain in a way that is conceptually rigorous - to the extent that that's even possible - that is original and that raises a series of interesting questions which haven't been asked before, but which are amenable to empirical research and finally it should have normative implications. This is what Hans Morgenthau meant when he said that the purpose of IR theory is not to justify what policymakers did, but to educate them to act in ways that would lead to a better and more peaceful world. And that, I think, is the ultimate goal of IR theory that we should not lose sight of.
You indicated that Isaiah Berlin was on your dissertation committee. He famously tries to explain Tolstoy's philosophy of history (in War and Peace) through the parable of the hedgehog and the fox. If theorists constraining themselves to one drive underpinning policy choices would be hedgehogs, how would you see yourself? A fox or a hedgehog?
I am clearly a fox! I do different things. Whether I do them well is debatable. But I certainly think that I'm a man of many tricks. Of course the distinction also implies not believing in an overarching truth, and indeed, I try hard not to think about truth because I don't think you can get very far when you do. Epistemologically and eclectically, I'm a great believer that we can never really establish a cause, truth, and knowledge. One of the great problems here goes back to Plato who was shocked that craftsmen equated technical ability to produce things with knowledge—Sofia, which is wisdom. And today you have the problem one step up, so another category of knowledge for the Greeks was episteme. Aristotle would describe it as 'conceptual knowledge' or that which might even be represented mathematically. And the people who would be 'expert' in episteme think they have sofia and their claim to being a hedgehog is the same kind of conceit, a form of hubris. Berlin's distinction between hedgehogs and foxes is a very useful and nice concept to play around with.
Yet it's a bit much to reduce Tolstoy to that tension. You could do it as a game but it doesn't do much justice because there is so much else in Tolstoy. He's tilting against the French historians of the 19th century who have erected Napoleon into this strategic genius. And he does a very convincing job of showing that what goes on on the battlefield has nothing whatsoever to do with what Napoleon or anyone else who is wearing a general's ebullience or theorists hat says. And also, and in this sense, one could see him as the beginning of subaltern history of social science, he's telling the story—admittedly about aristocrats, not commoners—but he's telling the story of ordinary people on the battlefield, not the people making the decisions. So the war is in a way a background to the lives of the people, focusing our attention a very humanist way, on people. This, too, is revolutionary for his time.
Professor Richard Ned Lebow Professor of International Political Theory at the Department of War Studies, King's College London and James O. Freedman Presidential Professor Emeritus at Dartmouth College. He is also a Bye-Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. He has taught strategy and the National and Naval War Colleges and served as a scholar-in-residence in the Central Intelligence Agency during the Carter administration. He has authored and edited 28 books and nearly 200 peer reviewed articles.
Related links
Read the first chapter of Lebow's The Tragic Vision of Politics (2003) here (pdf) Read Lebow & Kelly's Thucydides and Hegemony: Athens and the United States (Review of International Studies 2001), here (pdf) Read Lebow's Deterrence and Reassurance: Lessons from the Cold War (Global Dialogue 2001) here (pdf) Read Lebow's The Long Peace, the End of the Cold War, and the Failure of Realism (International Organization, 1994) here (pdf) Read Lebow's The Cuban Missile Crisis: Reading the Lessons Correctly (Political Science Quarterly 1983) here (pdf)