Suchergebnisse

The release of a scathing House Ethics Committee report may hasten a vote to expel Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y. The committee's report accuses Santos of criminality, ethical violations and a wide range of falsehoods.

In this blog, Chief Constable Andy Marsh QMP, Chief Executive of the National College of Policing, talks about the development of the new statutory Code of Ethics for policing.

From last week's posting by the Florida Bar: The Board Review Committee on Professional Ethics will consider adopting a proposed advisory opinion at the direction of The Florida Bar Board of Governors based on an inquiry by the Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools and Resources, at a meeting to be held on Thursday,…

UPDATE: Sen. Bob Menendez temporarily stepped down from his powerful role as chairman of the Senate Relations Committee late Friday afternoon, according to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Federal prosecutors indicted Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on corruption charges for allegedly taking bribes to help business partners in New Jersey as well as the Egyptian government.The indictment alleges that Menendez accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cash as well as gold bars and a luxury vehicle from three New Jersey businessmen. His wife, Nadine Menendez, was also charged.Wael Hana, a New Jersey businessman, allegedly promised to put the senator's wife on his payroll for a no-show job in exchange for Menendez's promise to facilitate weapons sales to Egypt. The indictment also claims that Hana arranged a meeting between the lawmaker and multiple Egyptian officials in a Senate office in which no staff were present.Menendez also allegedly passed on information about the staffing of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo via his then-girlfriend to Hana, who subsequently gave it to an Egyptian official.Among the most significant allegations is the claim that Menendez personally ghost wrote a 2018 letter for Egyptian officials to use in lobbying efforts "to convince other U.S. Senators to release a hold on $300 million in aid to Egypt."In a statement, Menendez denied the allegations as "baseless" and claimed they are the work of "forces behind the scenes" who have "repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave," an apparent reference to previous corruption charges against the senator that resulted in a mistrial in 2017. (The Senate Ethics Committee, for its part, found that Menendez had broken the law and "severely admonished" him in a rare public censure.)"Those behind the campaign simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. Senator and serve with honor and distinction," Menendez argued. "Even worse, they see me as an obstacle in the way of their broader political goals."Despite the fiery statement, Menendez will reportedly step down from his role as chairman on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to WNBC, NBC's New York affiliate.The allegations come amid growing concerns about the extent of foreign influence peddling in the United States. As Nick Cleveland-Stout reported in RS last year, numerous former officials have gone on to lobby for Egypt, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) former chief of staff. A 2020 report by Ben Freeman of the Quincy Institute found foreign countries had given at least $175 million to U.S. think tanks. Freeman, who recently testified before Congress about Saudi influence campaigns in the United States, described the accusations as "deeply troubling.""If the indictment is accurate, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was selling U.S. foreign policy for cash and gold," he told RS. "This was all allegedly happening at the same time as serious concerns were being raised — including by Menendez's colleagues in the Senate — about continuing to provide U.S. military assistance to Egypt given the regime's abysmal human rights record and its anti-democratic turn."Freeman noted that the allegations go further than most cases of foreign influence, which often center around whether an American citizen failed to register as an agent under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.But the accusations Menendez faces go further, leading government watchdogs like Citizens for Ethics in Washington (CREW) to call for his immediate resignation."With these latest revelations, it's time for Senator Menendez to resign," CREW President Noah Bookbinder said in a statement. "The stain of corruption continuously taints Menendez."The alleged work on behalf of Egypt is noteworthy given the lawmaker's long-standing public stances in favor of promoting democracy abroad and holding autocratic regimes accountable for their excesses. His response to the accusations mentions that he has "stood steadfast against dictators around the world," noting his work on Iran, Cuba, and Turkey but pointedly leaving out Egypt from the list.

 And what a year 2022 was:On 1 January, I published an edited book Political Emotions: Towards a Decent Public Sphere. This was a collection of essays from conferences in Durham and KCL with Martha C. Nussbaum - and includes a major reply to critics from Nussbaum. Published by Palgrave Macmillan.On 13 April, I published my booklet New Arrivals: A Fair Immigration Plan for Labour. This was my vision for a points-based, post-Brexit immigration system from entry to exit for the Labour government spelling out over 60 policy proposals. It was published by the Fabian Society and won the Jenny Jeger Prize for outstanding Fabian publication of 2022. On 29 April, I published my book Reforming the UK's Citizenship Test: Building Bridges, Not Barriers. This is an updated expansion going much further than my 2013 report on the Life in the UK citizenship test revealing new problems with the test's past and in the current test with an analysis of lessons to be learned and recommendations for a new edition. This book played a role in launching a Parliamentary inquiry in 2022 concluded by the House of Lords' Justice and Home Affairs Committee. Published by Bristol University Press.On the same day, I published my book Climate Change Ethics for an Endangered World. This monograph is a significant expansion on my target article "How Not to Save the Planet" showing a new climate change ethics more fitting for our circumstances. Published by Routledge.On 5 May, I published my book The Trust Factor: Essays on the Current Political Crisis and Hope for the Future. This book brings together essays and op-eds published over nearly 20 years for newspapers and magazines with new contributions. Published by Methuen Press.2023 looks set to be productive too with a new revised edition of my The Global Justice Reader and companion Global Justice: An Introduction plus Political Philosophy: The Fundamentals.

This article was co-published with the Guardian.Nine of the 12 members of a high-level congressional committee charged with advising on the U.S.'s nuclear weapons strategy have direct financial ties to contractors that would benefit from the report's recommendations or are employed at think tanks that receive considerable funding from weapons manufacturers, the Guardian and Responsible Statecraft can reveal.While the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States (CCSPUS) purports to recommend steps to avoid nuclear conflict, it does nothing to disclose its own potential conflicts of interest with the weapons industry in its final report or at rollout events at think tanks in Washington.The United States will soon face "a world where two nations [China and Russia] possess nuclear arsenals on par with our own," warned the commission's final report, released in mid-October. "In addition," the report charged, "the risk of conflict with these two nuclear peers is increasing. It is an existential challenge for which the United States is ill-prepared."According to the CCSPUS, this potential doomsday scenario requires the U.S. to make "necessary adjustments to the posture of US nuclear capabilities – in size and/or composition," a policy shift that would steer billions of taxpayer dollars to the Pentagon and nuclear weapons contractors."What we've consistently seen is the nuclear weapons industry buying influence and that means we cannot make serious decisions about our security when the industry is buying influence through think tanks and commissioners they are skewing the debate," said Susi Snyder, program coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons."Instead of having a debate about the tools and materials we need to make ourselves safe," she added, "we're having a debate about which company should get the contracts. And that doesn't make the American people safe or anyone else in the world."The CCSPUS was established two years ago via the annual defense policy bill, and conflicts of interest on the commission were apparent from the beginning. But an analysis by the Guardian and Responsible Statecraft found deep ties between the commission and the weapons industry.The most recognizable member of the CCSPUS is its vice-chair, Jon Kyl, who served as a senator from Arizona from 1995 to 2013 and again in 2018, after the death of John McCain. While this, and more, is included in his biography in the commission's report, what's left out is his more recent employment as a senior adviser with the law firm Covington & Burling, whose lobbying client list includes multiple Pentagon contractors that would benefit from the commission's recommendations.In 2017 Kyl, personally, was registered to lobby for Northrop Grumman, which manufactures the B-21 nuclear bomber that the commission recommends increasing the number the U.S. plans to buy, at a cost to taxpayers of nearly $700 million each.Kyl did not respond to questions about his employment status with Covington & Burling, but the former senator was listed as a "senior adviser" on the firm's website until at least December 1, 2022, nearly 10 months after the commissioner selections for the CCSPUS were announced in March 2022.Another commissioner, Franklin Miller, is a principal at the Scowcroft Group, a business advisory firm that describes Miller as having expertise in "nuclear deterrence," and acknowledges its work in the weapons sector."The Scowcroft Group successfully advised a European defense leader on a strategic acquisition opportunity," says the consulting firm in the "Defense/Aerospace" section of its website. "We have also assisted a major defense firm in pursuing global partnerships and co-production opportunities."Miller did not respond to a request for comment about the identity of the Scowcroft Group's clients.Kyl and Miller are joined on the CCSPUS by retired general John E Hyten, who previously served as the vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the second-highest-ranking member of the U.S. military.While Hyten's biography in the commission's report lauds his extensive military service, in retirement he has worked closely with a number of firms that could benefit immensely from the commission's recommendations.This March he was appointed as special adviser to the CEO of C3 AI, an artificial intelligence company that boasts of working with numerous agencies at the Department of Defense. In June 2022, Hyten was named executive director of the Blue Origins foundation, called the Club for the Future, and as a strategic adviser to Blue Origin's senior leadership. Blue Origin is wholly owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and works directly with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the air force and the space force on space launch-related capabilities.Hyten's ties to these firms are notable given the CCSPUS report's repeated overtures for improving and investing in space and artificial intelligence capabilities. Specifically, the report recommends the United States "urgently deploy a more resilient space architecture" and take steps to ensure it is "at the cutting edge of emerging technologies – such as big data analytics, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence (AI)."Hyten did not respond to a request for comment.The CCSPUS also included think tank scholars whose employers receive significant funding from the arms industry. Two commission members work at the Hudson Institute, which, according to its most recent annual report, received in excess of $500,000 from Pentagon contractors in 2022. This includes six-figure donations from some of the Pentagon's top contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems.On Monday, October 23, the Hudson Institute held an event to highlight the CCSPUS's report that included the two Hudson Institute employees who also served as commissioners. The event unabashedly promoted recommendations from the report that would be a financial windfall for Hudson's funders. The landing page for the event features a photo of a B-21 stealth bomber, the same photo used in the commission report that also recommended that the U.S. strategic nuclear posture be modified to "increase the planned number of B-21 bombers and tankers an expanded force would require."Neither at the event nor in the report is it noted that the plane's manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, is in the Hudson Institute's highest donor tier, contributing in excess of $100,000 in 2022.The Hudson Institute staff who served as commissioners did not respond to requests for comment.Another commissioner, Matthew Kroenig, is a vice-president at the Atlantic Council, a prominent DC think tank which, according to the organization's most recent annual report, is funded by several top Pentagon contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (now RTX), General Atomics, Saab and GM Defense. The Atlantic Council also receives more than $1 million a year directly from the Department of Defense and between $250,000 and $499,999 from the Department of Energy, which helps manage the nation's nuclear arsenal.These seeming conflicts of interest were not mentioned at any point in the CCSPUS's report or at an Atlantic Council event promoting the report and featuring the same photo of the B-21 used by the Hudson Institute and the commission.Kroenig did not respond to a request for comment.Even commissioners whose careers had included positions that were notably critical of nuclear weapons had recently established ties with firms that profit from the nuclear and conventional weapons industry.Commissioner Lisa Gordon-Hagerty worked for years at the pinnacle of nuclear weapons policy in the U.S., including positions on the national security council, the U.S. House of Representatives and the Department of Energy. She was also the director of the Federation of American Scientists, a non-profit organization known for advocating for reductions in nuclear weapons globally. Her last government position prior to joining the commission was serving as the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which is responsible for military applications of nuclear science. She resigned from the post in 2020, allegedly after heated disagreements with the secretary of energy, who tried to cut NNSA funding.While much of her career is mentioned in the commission report, what's left out is that Gordon-Hagerty has also been cashing in on her nuclear expertise. After leaving the NNSA, in 2021 she joined the board and became director of strategic programs at Westinghouse Government Services, a nuclear weapons contractor that has been paid hundreds of millions of dollars for work with the Department of Defense and Department of Energy.Gordon-Hagerty did not respond to a request for comment.Like Gordon-Hagerty, fellow commissioner Leonor Tomero had a distinguished career at the highest levels of nuclear weapons policy. According to her bio in the commission report, she was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy and served for over a decade on the House Armed Services Committee as counsel and strategic forces subcommittee staff lead, where her portfolio included the establishment of the U.S. space force, nuclear weapons, nuclear nonproliferation, nuclear cleanup, arms control and missile defense.Outside government, Tomero was Director of Nuclear non-proliferation at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, an organization that has repeatedly called for reductions in the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. Tomero is also on the board of the Council for a Livable World, which explicitly states that its goal is to eliminate nuclear weapons.Yet, in September, Tomero became a vice president of government Relations at JA Green & Company, a lobbying firm whose client list includes a host of military contractors that could see revenues soar if the CCSPUS's recommendations are adopted. Space X, for example — which pays $50,000 every three months to JA Green for lobbying related to "issues related to national security space launch" — would probably benefit mightily from the commission recommendation that "the United States urgently deploy a more resilient space architecture and adopt a strategy that includes both offensive and defensive elements to ensure US access to and operations in space.""No clients of JA Green & Company sought to influence the work of the Commission or the Commission's recommendations in any way," said Jeffrey A Green, president of JA Green, in an email. "We follow all applicable ethics rules and there are no conflicts of interest."None of the potential conflicts of interest between commissioners' financial interests and the policy proposals laid out in their final report were disclosed by the CCSPUS itself within its final report or at any public event highlighting its findings.While many commissioners did not respond to requests for comment, the commission's executive director, William A Chambers, provided a statement on behalf of the CCSPUS and its members."Members of [the commission] were chosen and appointed by Members of Congress based on their national recognition and significant depth of experience in such professions as governmental service, law enforcement, the Armed Forces, law, public administration, intelligence gathering, commerce, or foreign affairs," wrote Chambers. "Before they began performing their role as Commissioners, they were instructed on the ethics rules that govern congressional entities and were required to comply with rules set forth by the Select Committee on Ethics of the Senate and the Committee on Ethics of the House of Representatives."Chambers did not respond to a request for a copy of the ethics rules.But the opacity about potential conflicts of interest leaves some experts questioning the CCSPUS's recommendations."There's a huge argument raging over what is security, how much does it rely on transparency and, especially when it comes to nuclear weapons, there is a call for greater transparency," said Snyder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. "That light they're asking to shine on China, North Korea and Iran is a light they also need to shine on their own decision-making."

For the increasingly-desperate opponents of
Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry
to keep him from triumphing in the governor's race, it's pinning their hopes on
making a thousand cuts – even if the "wounds" aren't real.

Just over a month prior to the general election,
Landry continues to have a commanding lead in the contest, much to the chagrin
of other candidates and their backers. Party regulars among Democrats behind Democrat
former cabinet member Shawn Wilson and
the party's white populist rump pinning their fading hopes on independent trial
lawyer Hunter Lundy see Landry
as the most dangerous to their agendas, while other Republicans and their
supporters see these candidates' chances of getting into a runoff with Wilson
and therefore an easy win going up the road.

So, to varying degrees, they have formed an unofficial
conspiracy to try to stop Landry. Their problem is his agenda is popular and
his background, often successfully through the powers of his office providing a
conservative foil to Democrats Pres. Joe Biden
and Gov. John Bel
Edwards, has inspired confidence among many voters that he best can start
the process of ejecting liberalism from Louisiana governance.

The strategy rests upon trying to dig up so many
little, if not microscopic, things that can make Landry look bad that his
candidacy dies from a thousand cuts. Within the past month, Landry found
himself subject to an ethics investigation over failure to file a document
about donated travel and struck by a negative
advertisement about a campaign donor in trouble for allegedly deceptive
legal practices.

The timing isn't coincidental. The trip, where
Landry hitched a ride with a longtime friend with no business with the state to
a conference, happened a couple of years ago, but only now came to the
attention of the state's Board of Ethics. That panel
populated with members with antipathy towards conservatives (Edwards
appointees from lists compiled by private college leaders, who as a whole don't
exactly lean to the right of the political spectrum) then voted to file charges
over failure to file the document – Landry essentially to himself – to be heard
in the near future.

It comes now because few would have known about
trip, and the person after not seeing a form filed held onto this until right
before the election – most likely somebody with connections to Republicans not
a fan of Landry's. Of course, the Edwards allies on the Board, given the
information, would run with it.

The ad by the GOP Treas. John Schroder campaign came from sharp
eyes culling the nearly 3,000 donors in the last quarter to Landry's campaign.
But it's no more than a wild attempt to create guilt by association where the campaign
can't control who gives to it and Landry's office has no role in determining
whether the donor violated legal ethics or the law.

The latest
involves a political
action committee of very shadowy origins, but which few records about it
points towards the Republican former gubernatorial appointee Stephen Waguespack, which ran the ad over
the weekend principally on the web. It accused Landry of giving an alleged
donor preferential treatment in prosecution.

Except that this accusation appears entirely fabricated.
So much, in fact, that a state court ordered cessation of its circulation.
Typically, the judiciary allows wide leeway in vetting the contents of campaign
ads over the very narrow grounds for injunctions, so to take this step
indicated a very blatant disregard for truth in the ad's contents.

But that wasn't the point of its creators, who
surely would have known the real facts of the case and that Landry's campaign never
received a penny from the accused given media coverage if it – also two years
ago – and transparency about donors. They likely knew it legally would get shot
down quickly because of its extreme departure from the truth, and they chose a
cheap path to thrust it into public view. Their end goal merely was to have it
discussed that could create an anti-Landry impression.

This all reeks of desperation, but also shows off
the competence behind the Landry team and Landry's campaigning skills. Over the
past two decades, all too often leading conservative candidates have been hit
with negative ads at best circumstantial, at worst ridiculous, where the
campaign belatedly if at all responded either with ads or other communications
countering the narrative or with legal action. The Landry campaign's swift
dismantling of this particular narrative means the incident will have close to
zero, if not zero, impact on the race.

Yet it doesn't mean further attempts won't be
made. That's to be expected as Landry's juggernaut to the state's highest
office seems to continue with few brakes.

Driveby accusations of compromised integrity tend to create smoke
that obscures.  It is easy, but it does not do much to advance the cause
of transparency.  Pugliese is right that the government is not transparent
enough in defence matters.  But spewing random accusations to taint
those in the field does not provide greater transparency, but rather
helps to foster more confusion.  It reminds me of what defence
contractors do if they lose a bid--they raise questions about the
process.  So, we never can tell if the process is decent since the
losers always shit on it.  It may be populist to question the motives of
all elites, but if one listens to these academics and the reporters
they talk to at all, you will find that most just want Canada to do
better.  We may disagree on what better means, but those in journalism
and in academia are not motivated by profit.   There is some irony in David Pugliese regularly calling out his media colleagues for not being sufficiently dogged or pure of heart or whatever.  What is it?  Well, he has set himself up with his Counterspin column in Esprit de Corps as THE defence media critic while being a defence journalist.  That seems to be a conflict of interest, which is his go-to criticism of many other people in this space.Pugliese regularly criticizes his colleagues for not mentioning that some of their interview subjects may receive some funding from the Department of National Defence.  Of course, it is unrealistic that in any quick media hit that the journalist will mention all of the funding their subject receives.  But there is more to this, of course.It is the questioning of everyone's integrity.  That is what is galling to those who find themselves the subject of these quick driveby's in Counterspin.  Yes, folks get $ from DND.  To be clear, each university has a research accounting office that ensures that the money is spent on legitimate expenses, and for DND or SSHRC money, that money is never income for the researcher.* This money never goes into the pocket of academics--it pays for the salaries of research assistants, it pays for travel for conferences and workshops, it pays for hosting events, and the like.  I am not paying for my kitchen renovation from the money I have received from DND.  So, are folks like me going to sell out our views for some research assistant salary?  If one suspects that they answer is yes, then read our stuff.  Critically evaluate our stances.  Just to mention the money is the laziest way to engage in criticism.  Pugs criticizes anyone who is too close to the military.  I get that, but he is very close to the military too.  Not the institution but to those in it.  Where else does he get his leaks?  So, he is very dependent on those folks.  Does that make his reporting problematic?  It kind of depends on the story and the motives of the leakers, doesn't it?  Are they all pure of heart?  Damned if I know.  I wouldn't say that they are all tainted by being military personnel or being upset military personnel.  Likewise, I wouldn't say that anyone who meets with those who aren't leaking are either pure of heart or full of ill intent.  Again, to evaluate, read the stuff. I read Pugliese's stuff, and much of it is excellent, important, and necessary reporting.  Some of it is clearly folks using him to grind their various axes on minor issues that still seem to get on the front page.  I am guessing Pugs would say that we say nice things about the powers that be so that we can get access.  Access for what?  Not to line our pockets because that is not how academia works.  Maybe we want access so that we can learn more, to understand things better, to share those improved understandings with our students, with those that read academic work, and with the public when the media reaches out to us.  Again, are we selling bits of our souls so that we can get this access?  The way, of course, to answer this is: read our stuff.   One of the reasons this is all so very upsetting is that we live in a time of diminished trust in institutions and expertise.  There have been good reasons to distrust government, given how they have handled various crises and have made it hard to access information.  However, there are very few non-government voices in the defence and security community.  We do not have much of a tradition of relatively non-partisan think tanks.  We have various associations that get significant funding from defence contractors.  And we have very few journalists who have expertise on defence (Mercedes Stephenson has an MA from a Strategic Studies program!).  This means that academics here get more attention than they do elsewhere.  It imposes upon us significant responsibility, so we do disclose on our websites where we get funding.  But we do not spend every media hit reporting who funds us.  We do not have the time, and, yes, we don't think our views are bought by whoever funds our research and dissemination efforts.  Indeed, academics would probably be voted most likely to bite the hand that feeds them.  For example, the same year I spent significant effort to get defence $ to fund the Canadian Defence and Security Network, I also spent calling for the Minister of National Defence to be fired.The CDSN does not receive defence contractor funding.  We have had discussions about the perils of funding sources, how to remain independent, and we plan to have future events address the challenges of ethical engagement, building on the work done in the US funded by, gasp, a foundation--Carnegie Corporation of New York.  These are important conversations, and we should be having them.  But starting from the standpoint that only one man in Canadian defence journalism has integrity is not helpful or informative.  But maybe it makes sense if he wants to taint rival sources of information.  Of course, that would be speculating about his integrity, and that would be wrong.    *  For those who are unfamiliar with academia, when it comes to grants, the way it works is:

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Apply to multiple grantsWait.  Tom Petty was right, the waiting is the hardest part.Grant application is approved by funder.  Does not always happen as I keep saying: rejection is inherent in the enterpriseGet research ethics clearance from university committee.  The aim here is largely not to harm our research subjects--the people we interview.  These processes were developed after psychologists did bad things to the people they studied (Stanford Prison Experiment, the Milgram experiment)The university receives moneyFund research assistants, organize events, arrange travel, etc.  Be reimbursed (one can sometimes get advances) for money spent on planes, trains, automobiles, hotels, per diems (usually something like $70/day for meals) with the aforementioned research accounting offices tracking what we spend and rejecting inappropriate expenditures..Report on activities and spending.Publish and engage the public/media.  Sharing our knowledge is one of the essential components of the job. 

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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) 



Print version of this Talk (pdf)